paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass, The

College Literature, Fall 2003 by Lock, Helen

When, in Johnson's Middle Passage, the newly emancipated slave protagonist Rutherford Calhoun goes to sea to escape pressing problems on shore, he embarks with conventional associations of the shore with death, "each day landside [was] a kind of living death" (199Ob, 4) and of the sea with life, "the analogue for life was water, the formless, omnific sea" (4). Before the Republic has even set sail, however, he comes to identify the shipboard world as deathin-life, rigid confinement in the midst of the boundless: "I'd boarded not a ship but a kind of fantastic, floating Black Maria, a wooden sepulcher" (21). Compounding the paradoxical environment in which he finds himself is the fact that this death-in-life is also life-in-death, as the ship is constantly evolving, falling apart and being rebuilt: "she was, from stem to stern, a process" (36). (In all this, the ship is reminiscent of Queequeg's life-saving floating coffin in Moby-Dick.) It is an environment that reflects Calhoun's own contradictory position, as a former slave who knowingly stows away aboard a ship engaged in the slave trade.

There are in fact two sets of mutineers aboard the Republic: the white crew, who plan mutiny against the autocratic Captain Falcon, and the slaves, the Allmuseri, who ultimately take control of the ship. Calhoun, whose loyalties have been successively recruited by captain, crew, and slaves, occupies the opposite position to Melville's Delano in terms of race and class and thus lacks Delano's assumptions but trusts his own intuition. he recognizes early on that "[cjlearly, nothing on the Republic was as it should be" (Johnson 199Ob, 66), and when the mutiny takes place he sees what Delano could not: "I sensed then that not Falcon's loyalists but the Africans had overcome the crew" (129). His fear about the coming insurrection(s) had been that the result would be "something unforeseen that no one willed or wanted. A change not in the roles on ship but a revolution in its very premises" (126)a notion that Delano's imagination does not admit. When the cargo takes control of the ship this is clearly a fundamental redefinition of the very meaning and constitution of "roles," but its implications are indeed not willed or wanted, since the revolution in the Republic's premises merely describes a half circle and achieves only an inverted image of the status quo.

Ironically, it seemed that Falcon had broken them after all; by their very triumph he had defeated them. From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made Ngonyama and his tribesmen as bloodthirsty as himself. . . . The problem was how to win without defeating the other person. And they had failed. (Johnson 199Ob, 140)

The Allmuseri, a tribe whose life philosophy is premised on the unity of being, experience their triumph on the Republic as a fall, into "the world of multiplicity, of me versus thee" (140). More specifically, the fall is from a former African world perceived in terms of connection and unity into an American New World determined by opposing binaries. The Allmuseri's god, now confined in the Republic's hold, "is everything, so the very knowing situation we mortals rely on-a separation between knower and known-never rises in its experience" (101). For Falcon, however, ruling god of the Republic, "[s]ubject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other-these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman" indicating "a deep crack in consciousness" of which "slavery . . . is the social correlate" (98). Survival in a new world built on these premises depends for the Allmuseri on the recognition and manipulation of these boundaries, between the two poles of which they find themselves reluctantly trapped.