Description:
Charles Johnson's stories about the African American experience of slavery had an interesting genesis. TV producer Orlando Bagwell asked the author to write 12 original short stories based on the PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery. Johnson found the request daunting but irresistible. As he writes in his preface: "Rarely is a writer given the opportunity (like an actor) to climb into the skin of both Frederick Douglass and Martha Washington, to descend into the fetid hold of a slave ship and join a nineteenth century slave revolt, to play Jefferson's consul to Haiti and inhabit the psyche of both a runaway slave and his pursuer." Accordingly, the dozen stories run a gamut of styles, each ingeniously appropriate to its subject. In "The Transmission," Johnson uses straightforward narrative to tell the story of a young slave's arrival in America. On the epistolary front, "A Report from St. Dominique" is a letter to Thomas Jefferson from his consul in Haiti. And in "Martha's Dilemma," Martha Washington describes her fear of her own slaves after her husband's death. This tale is based on a historical footnote: George Washington, privately opposed to slavery, added a codicil to his will that freed the slaves after his wife's death. "Oh, George, you were not a thinker," laments Martha. "Had you been, you would not out of Christian kindness to the blacks unwittingly consigned me to a hellish house, where in the face of each of our formerly loving attendants I now see my possible executioner." In "Confession," the runaway Tiberius describes his awakening to the injustice of slavery: "We was all like folks in one of them madhouses, black and white, thinkin' the way we lived and died was the nat'ral way of things when, from top to bottom, it was crazy as can be." Johnson shows every face of that madness. At a mere 110 pages, Soulcatcher makes a giant impact. --Claire Dederer
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