Afro-Diasporic Mutiny in Charles Johnson’s The Middle Passage and in Modern America
Until two years ago, my answer to the horrifying question– Where is your family from?,
was Mississippi and Arkansas. There aren’t many cultures around the world that have a
communal lack of knowledge about their ancestry, yet the vast physical and cultural distance
between Black Americans with historical roots in slavery and the places from which their
ancestors were stolen, forever occupies the subconscious. In Charles Johnson’s 1990 novel,
Middle Passage, freed slave Rutherford Calhoun closes that physical and cultural distance when
he sails aboard The Republic alongside a white captain and crew tasked with illegally
transporting African slaves to American shores. While on this journey, Rutherford engages in a
number of physical and mental mutinies that has him questioning his alliance to Whiteness and
Africanness. By analyzing the etymology and implications of the term mutiny in Johnson’s novel
and in the context of modern America, this paper will seek to clarify how a lack of cultural,
physical and ancestral proximity to genealogical origination, may predetermine alliance to
Whiteness.
Mutiny
When one thinks of the word “mutiny” in a modern context, it is often relegated to a
violent, sea-based event that is reminiscent of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, however, the noun “mutiny” dates back to 1567. The analysis of
the term in this essay will be of its verb form which didn’t officially occur (according to the
OED) until 1584. The currently relevant definition asserts that the act of mutiny is “to revolt
against constituted authority; to refuse to obey the orders of a superior, esp. In the armed forces”
(OED 1.a.). However, the “obsolete” definition that affirms the word means “to contend or strive
with; to quarrel” (OED 2.) is still relevant in an analysis of Middle Passage as this specific
meaning of the word was used between 1597 and 1616, when the Transatlantic Slave Trade was
legally ongoing. The Oxford Dictionary’s definitions of “mutiny” are helpful when dissecting the
physical mutinies that take place in the novel as there are clear physical and mental intentions to
revolt against numerous tangible and archetypal structures within the novel.
When considering the specificity of slave rebellions and mutinies aboard slave ships
during the legal transport of Africans across the sea, there are more culturally complex
definitions of “mutiny” to be considered. In 1944, African American author, Lorenzo Greene,
published the article, Mutiny on the Slave Ships, where he detailed the occurrence of
insurrections aboard slave ships and the conditions that lead to retaliatory violence, describing
the numerous methods of “mutiny” available to slaves. Greene asserts that slaves, “Driven to
desperation by their wretchedness…seized every opportunity to escape enslavement or to end
their suffering,” (348). In his analysis of mutiny, slaves would physically fight with bars of iron,
their chains and their fists, or opt for a less aggressive form of rebellion. Slaves refused to eat
until they were forced by having their teeth broken or lips burned with hot coals and many
infamously committed suicide by jumping from the deck of ships and into the shark-infested sea
(Greene 348). This enslaved African framework of the word “mutiny” shifts the understanding of
the word from a strictly physical, violent and authority-based form of rebellion into one that
opens the door to considering “mutiny” a type of self-determined action of soul preservation.
The cultural and historical implications of the term “mutiny” in an oceanic, and more
specifically, oceanic slave trade context allows for texts like Middle Passage to be dissected in a
way that stretches modern understanding of what it means and looks like, historically and
contemporarily, to rebel against a forced “authority”.
Mutiny in Middle Passage
In Johson’s novel, there are a number of physical and mental mutinies that take place
aboard The Republic. Rutherford Calhoun introduces himself as a newly freed slave living in
New Orleans who has taken up the occupation of being a thief and morally gray drifter. When
both the woman who desires a relationship with Calhoun and a local mob boss blackmail him
into an engagement, he stows away on a ship bound for Africa. Rutherford, lacking cultural
understanding and acceptance from both the white crew and African slaves, wrestles with the
implications of cultural mutinies against the Western idea of a “respectable Black gentleman”,
Falcon, the White crew and their archetypal representation of whiteness, and the Allmuseri
Africans and their archetypal representation of ancestral origination. All of these personal
mutinies are occurring against the backdrop of very real and very violent uprisings by the white
sailors against Falcon and by the Allmuseri against the crew of The Republic.
Captain Falcon and sailors
In his first conversation with Captain Falcon, Calhoun embodies the type of Black man
that can be seen as sympathetic to white men stating, “we all know it anyway: namely, that a
crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he’s
smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hard-luck story” (Johnson 29). By
pandering the hardships of his life, Calhoun is actively trying to be pitied by Falcon. His
“freedom” from land is contingent on his need for acceptance and compassion from a white man,
and Falcon immediately falls into the archetype of a superior White man patronizing the inferior
Black man saying, “‘It’s one of the things I learned about Negroes…You don’t think too well, or
too often” (31). Before the ship leaves the dock, Calhoun has aligned himself with Whiteness by
submitting himself to the stature of “idiotic Negro” that White men of the era held.
Calhoun is also seen aligning himself with Whiteness when he accepts a gun from Falcon
and, though he is tempted to shoot the captain- even raising the pistol to Falcon’s head when the
captain is changing clothes, refrains from doing so. The magnetized rings that Falcon and
Calhoun wear to keep their pistols connected to them are likened to wedding rings (Johnson 58).
The soul tie that Calhoun feels to this man who is buying, abusing, and selling Africans is a very
transparent reflection of the cultural landscape in which Black Americans were forced to live in
during and post-slavery. In order to succeed, Black men and women had to serve White
employers in conditions incredibly adjacent to slavery– killing for them, breeding for them,
raising children for them, the list goes on and on. In the novel, Calhoun, who has lived the
majority of his life under the rule of a White slave owner, has found himself a new master in
Falcon, being appointed the captain’s spy. And instead of trying to brazenly oppose the
conceptions of Black men that Falcon and many of the sailors hold, Calhoun, as an act of
self-preservation, aligns himself with Whiteness and what Whiteness claims about Blackness.
The excessive abuse and tyranny of Captain Falcon, not only disturbs Calhoun, but the
other sailors aboard The Republic. The White sailors, no longer trusting Falcon, decide to stage a
mutiny against the captain and enlist Calhoun for his thieving skills. When discussing whether
mutinies are warranted aboard the ship, first mate, Cringle, claims, “Mutiny doesn’t bother me
either. God knows, to be a Yank is to be mutinous. The goddamn country was born out of
rebellion” (88). Cringle’s perception of mutiny is political, patriotic. Opposing tyrannical rule is
why the “American” (British) colonists warred against King George III and it is why Cringle and
the sailors planned to war against Falcon. Calhoun, however, is now being grouped in with
“Yanks” which he certainly would not be in 1830 as Blacks wouldn’t be considered American
citizens for 30 more years. In this battle between Falcon and the sailors, Calhoun was being
compelled to fight for two sides of Whiteness. Moments after declaring his loyalty to the sailors,
Calhoun spills the entire plan to Falcon. Falcon, unphased by the threat against his authority, then
asks Calhoun a series of questions that seem to solidify Rutherford’s devotion to Whiteness:
“D’you still plan to help the rebels set me adrift?”
“No.”
“That means you submit, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so.” (Johnson 97).
Calhoun explicitly submits himself to Falcon, and in doing so, submits himself to Whiteness.
However, Calhoun’s split loyalties lead him to infiltrate the captain’s cabin under the sailor’s
orders where he begins to feel wrong if he obeyed the first mate and wrong if he aligned himself
with Falcon (Johnson 124). While this two-fold mutiny of cultural and physical violence by
White men loomed over Calhoun, an active mutiny was occurring on deck between the entirety
of the White population on The Republic and the African Allmuseri tribe on their way to be sold
into American slavery.
Jackson Calhoun / Allmuseri
In the novel, Calhoun’s mutiny, or lack thereof, against Whiteness is fairly binary. He
questions whether or not to side himself with Captain Falcon or the sailors in the oncoming
mutiny. However, when it comes to his mutiny against Blackness, there are three archetypes he is
culturally striving against.
In the first pages of the novel, Johnson characterizes Rutherford Calhoun as a belligerent
man who is purposefully living out a lifestyle in opposition to his brother writing that the White
slave owner they worked for, “wanted [Rutherford] to become a Negro preacher, perhaps even a
black saint like the South American priest Martín de Porres–or, for that matter, [his] brother
Jackson” (5). Calhoun, a thief and fairly promiscuous man, didn’t want to be categorized into the
“gentleman of color” archetype his brother occupied. He goes so far as to claim his brother was
“shackled to subservience” (Johson 11). And though this judgement is fairly ironic as he very
quickly shackles himself to the subservience of Captain Falcon and the White sailors, he is
actively trying to mutiny against this archetype of a good Christian Black man that could be seen
as acceptable to certain types of White people.
The Allmuseri, on the other hand, are a representation of Blackness that stems from
origination and ancestry. Rutherford, born and raised in a White American system of cultural,
social and political subordination, had very little connection to the people whose skin was similar
to his, but had a culture all their own. His mutiny against this archetype of
Blackness/Africanness is physical and mental in nature. When Rutherford reaches the shore of
the African country Falcon purchased the Allmuseri from, his first observations of his
genealogical kin are a mix of Euro-Western/American and personal views. He had been told that
the Allmuseri have two brains and no capability of abstraction, but what he felt was, “the
presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had
created” (Johnson 62). There was an immediate cultural and physical separation between this
Black-American man and the people from the continent which he descends from. Even after the
slaves had been on board for a while, Calhoun declared that the Allmuseri can’t be considered
Negroes. What he is and what they are, are two completely different representations of “Black”.
Despite his feelings of physical and cultural curiosity and pity for the Almmuseri, he
continues to mutiny against them and his cultural origination by existing with White privileges
onboard The Republic. When describing the conditions the Allmuseri were forced to live in,
Rutherford recalls, “the slaves still lay in a foot of salt water in a hold blacker than the belly of
Jonah’s whale…Some rested on the laps of others, down there in a scummy darkness foul with
defecation, slithering with water snakes” (Johnson 73-4). Calhoun witnessed slaves being
branded, paraded naked on the deck, raped, and humiliated day in and out, and said nothing. The
lack of proximity to African culture and ancestry not only gave him benefits as a crew member,
but also quieted him from standing up against the tortures the Allmuseri were being forced to
endure, though the abuse made him sick. In one of the most devastating and nauseating scenes of
the novel, Rutherford is instructed to help Ngonyama, an Allmuseri tribesman he grew close to,
throw a dead Allmuseri boy overboard. After detailing the abhorrent conditions of the body,
Calhoun observes, “His open eyes were unalive…though I still found myself poised
vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes…as if his spirit had flown and mine
was being sucked there in its place” (Johnson 121-22). In this moment of intercultural and
metaphysical connection, Calhoun experiences a new understanding of the evil he is helping
Falcon and his crew perpetrate against these innocent humans. By intentionally trying to separate
himself from the practices, beliefs and culture of the Allmuseri, Calhoun sought to reprieve
himself from the crimes he was committing against his brethren. His lack of understanding of
their behaviors and cultures, and lack of proximity to Africa as a continent, isolated him from the
Allmuseri. After the Africans mutiny against Falcon and the sailors and take control of the ship,
numerous members of the tribe consider Calhoun a threat or an ally. When bringing Calhoun to
the part of the ship the Allmuseri were holding prisoners, Nhonyama assures him, “No one will
hurt you here, Rutherford. These men are your brothers” (130). Another Allmuseri, Diamelo,
calls Calhoun a “Yankee”, classifying him as evil as any of the White sailors.
This push and pull of acceptance by both the White population on board and the African
population, is a reflection of the larger theme of what it means to rebel against culturally
designated norms and behavior within the novel. Rutherford is both a slaver and a slave. In her
essay, The Paradox of Slave Mutiny, which examines the role of slave mutinies in a number of
fictional texts, Helen Lock believes that Charles Johnson “illustrate[s] how when the
master/slave, ruler/ruled roles are inverted, each side reveals characteristics of the other, for
better and worse, until…there is no discernible distinction. Slaves whose lives have been
regulated by violence perpetuate that violence when in command” (59). Falcon and the White
sailors go from a position of master/ruler to a position of slave/ruled– the Allmuseri do the
opposite. In these now culturally and socially switched positions, Calhoun’s position as a Black
American remains the same. He still has to choose whether to align himself with the drive for
revenge from the Allmuseri or with the survival of his White crewmates. He is not fully accepted
or tolerated by either group and his capacity to mutiny against either one is like a mutiny of his
soul.
Rutherford Calhoun as Whiteness and Africanness
Once the Allmuseri officially take over The Republic, Rutherford is in a new position of
influence with both the Allmuseri and the White sailors. Though he still has refused to wholly
align himself with either, he begins to understand how the interactions between the White sailors
and Africans have changed them both. The sailors are living in conditions similar to the slaves
before their escape, forced to eat one another and live in sickness. The change for the Allmuseri
is also physical, but Johnson highlights the internal shift in the Africans. Rutherford observes,
“Ngonyama and maybe all the Africans, I realized, were not wholly Allmmuseri anymore. We
had changed them…subtly reshaping their souls” (Johnson 123). By saying we changed them,
Calhoun once again orients himself with the American population that destroys the ethics and
culture of Africans. However, as The Republic slips into chaos under Allmuseri control, a
seemingly biologic aversion to Whiteness arises in Rutherford. After Calhoun’s encounter with
the Allmuseri god where he meets his father and visualizes the kind of Black man he likely
would have become had he stayed in New Orleans, he faints and is unconscious for three days.
When he awakes, the cook, Squibb, informs Calhoun that the ship ran out of food and he was fed
Cringle. Almost immediately, Calhoun gets incredibly ill and almost dies. The mixing of his
body with a White body almost kills him. The only peace he receives while slowly dying is from
Ngoyanma and the Allmuseri child he’d been looking over, Baleka.
Rutherford Calhoun is actively caught between two cultures vying for his identity. What
we discover is that Calhoun, like many Black Americans then and now, is a mix of the Whiteness
he can’t escape and the Africanness he longs to understand. In his essay, Interrogating Identity:
Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage, Daniel Scott interrogates both the author
of the novel and the main character when he affirms, “For Johnson and for Middle Passage’s
protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, that identity is the precarious “middle” experience of the
African-American: offspring of the middle passage, refugee from an uncertain origin, subject to
the marginalization of his experience, searcher for meaning” (645). The very venture of Calhoun
writing this story of African slaves rising up against White slavers in a slave ship log is
reiterating his lack of ability to fully mutinize against both his White and African counterparts,
instead, choosing to combine them.
By the end of the novel, The Republic has sunk with Calhoun, Squibb and a couple
Allmuseri children being the only survivors. The group is picked up by the Juno which was
hosting the marriage between Isadora, the woman whose cunning engagement sent Calhoun on
this journey, and Papa Zeringue, the mob boss who blackmailed Calhoun into marrying Isadora
in exchange for erasing his debts. When Isadora and Papa meet Calhoun again, he is darker,
thinner, bald, speaks at a higher register (reflective of the Allmuseri), and has wooden teeth. He
wears a wig and walks with a cane. The final descriptions of Calhoun, having been forever
changed on The Republic, is almost George Washinton-like. And while dressed like George
Washington, he uses a dance-fighting maneuver he learned from the Allmuseri to corner Papa
Zeringue and rescue Isadora.
When Calhoun began reminiscing about his childhood after coming face to face with the
Allmuseri god in the shape of his father, he recalls Riley Calhoun boasting, “‘We was kings
once,’ he would say, scrawling with one finger on the dusty porch a cruse map of an African
village he remembered vaguely” (Johsnon 168). Calhoun’s family seems to be less than a
generation removed from their African ancestors, and yet, they matured in a White culture that
sought to dominate their bodies and identities. By the end of the novel, Calhoun is a mix of both
the father of the United States and the kings of his ancestral home.
Mutiny in Modern America
Analyzing Rutherford Calhoun’s capacity to mutinize against Whiteness in Middle
Passage alongside the themes of “cultural dizziness” articulated by Johnson in the novel, opens a
door to understanding how modern Black Americans may be able to reconcile their position in a
White America with a continent, countries, and cultures they have zero connection to.
When I was eighteen years old, I was fortunate enough to sit in on a journalism panel
where journalists from over 20 countries around the world came together to discuss democracy,
climate change, political violence, and the global threat against journalism. At the end of the
event, the few students lucky enough to be in the room were offered an opportunity to network
with the journalists. The only journalist I wound up speaking to was from Zimbabwe. As I
approached him, he smiled and extended his hand. He introduced himself to me and I to him,
then he asked me a question that caused more trouble than I believe he intended. “Where are you
from?” I told him I was from Chicago, but currently in my first year at this college in St.
Petersburg, Florida. He shook his head with a smile and said, “No, no. Where are you from?” I
assumed he wanted my whole life story, so I clarified, “I was born in Memphis, Tennessee.
That’s in the South. But my family moved to Chicago when I turned three.” That was not the
answer he was looking for either. His smile faded ever so slightly as he asked another question
about my ancestry. “Mm. But where are your parents from?” I was confused. Was he trying to
stalk me? Were these cities just strangely named places he couldn’t comprehend? I obliged. “My
mother’s family is from Mississippi and my father’s family is from Arkansas. Those states are
pretty close to Florida actually!” Again, not what he was looking for. He then asked me a
question that strangely embarrassed me. “Where in Africa are you from?” I stared at him like he
was crazy and he stared at me the same way. “Oh. I’m not sure.” He was completely
flabbergasted. He didn’t understand how I couldn’t identify the place that granted me this brown
hue, and I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t understand the Transatlantic Slave Trade and
lack of care that went into documenting where my ancestors came from– whoever they are.
Two years ago, I bought a DNA test to finally ascertain an idea of where my ancestry is
rooted. It wasn’t surprising, but after five or six generations of slavery, my DNA reflected
origination from three different continents. This revelation is quite difficult to grapple with when
considering how modern Black Americans may or may not have the capacity to mutinize against
archetypes like Falcon and Whiteness in general. Rutherford’s cultural and biological ancestry
was fairly binary. His father could recall their African village of origin, but he had only existed
in a White environment where his identity was determined by those with cultural, social and
political authority. Unlike Rutherford, modern Black Americans with historical roots in slavery
likely have an amalgamation of ancestry. We are no longer simply mutinying Whiteness to
connect to “Africa” alone. In my case, I would need to mutinize American Whiteness and seek
cultural connection to Nigeria, Benin & Togo, England, The Netherlands, Senegal, Ghana,
Cornwall, the Yucatàn Peninsula, and a plethora of other nations.
Our lack of cultural proximity to origination is evident in our development of an
“African-American/Black” culture that is completely separate from Africa and other places of
ancestry. The lack of physical proximity will never be closed for most Black Americans as the
majority will never have the ability to trace where exactly they are from, in Africa or otherwise,
cross the vast ocean, and visit the places where their ancestors existed once upon a time. Our
varying biologic proximity to Africanness has now been expanded to include White, Indigenous,
Asian and other genealogies.
Corina Crisu articulates this in her article, ‘A Cultural Mongrel’: Transatlantic
Connections in Charles Johnson’ s Middle Passage, where she states, “Rutherford Calhoun, is the
perfect illustration of a polytropic individual: a porous, versatile, and itinerant nature, always
ready to change masks and to adapt by adopting ideas…At a textual level, Rutherford’s
existential travels are reflected by his mongrelized fiction, which points to the dislocation of the
homogeneous spatial and temporal dimensions of a single culture” (266-67). Rutherford had no
“home” in either homogeneous culture, represented by Falcon/the sailors and the Allmuseri, so
he was forced to create his own. Unlike Rutherford, however, Black Americans of today are
mongrels who have been able to generate their own culture outside the structure of slavery.
Mutinying modern Whiteness, or the cultural system of America, looks different as a new
Black identity, separate from those represented by the Allmuseri and Rutherford, has been
created out of and distinct from that White system. Organizations like Diving With A Purpose
are a great example of a modern take on Rutherford’s mutinies. People from minoritized groups
are offered the opportunity to learn to scuba dive and study elements under the surface of the
ocean, including sunken slave ships. They are able to find a connection to African ancestors that
wasn’t available to African Americans before. By bridging that physical and cultural gap,
modern Black Americans are able to better align themselves with origination.
The journey Rutherford Calhoun embarks on not only makes him question what kind of
Black man he wants to be in a White social construct, it also forces him to reconcile the parts of
his identity that are separated by hundreds of years of cultural abuse and conflict. And though the
mental and physical mutinies Calhoun is exposed to aboard The Republic are very different to
what twenty-first century Black Americans face, his declaration of identifying himself as both
the product of his environment and the product of his ancestry is something that still deeply
resonates.
Mutiny in Blue Humanities
Oceanic scholarship, both literary and otherwise, has widened its breadth, especially as it
relates to human narratives. In Steve Mentz’ essay, A poetics of planetary water: The blue
humanities after John Gillis, he claims, “The aims of watery criticism, to adapt a phrase, include
both describing the complex workings of water in our environment and also imagining ways to
change our relationships to it” (138). Many novels use the ocean as a framework, setting and
catalyst for telling nuanced stories, but the field of blue humanities has a significant gap when it
comes to Black mutiny in the ocean. Jonathan Howard, in his powerful article, Swim your
ground: Towards a black and blue humanities, writes about aqueous genealogy stating, “Beyond
the universal oceanic genesis in which we all share, history has caused the African Diaspora to
double back and begin again. How to forget humanity’s blue ancestry when you are created by
and in the dramatic reminder of Middle Passage, what Frank Wilderson…dubbed the ‘dawning
of blackness’ (311). The biological and historical connection diasporic Blacks around the world
have to the ocean is rooted in the sea. Howard talks about the estimated 1,818,681 thousand
Africans who jumped from slave ships in mutiny– depriving poachers of their paychecks,
depriving plantation owners of free labour, and freeing themselves from a lifetime of torture and
pain. Howard ponders how much the sea might have risen with an additional two million bodies
laying on the ocean floor (311).
The word mutiny is relevant in blue humanities in obvious ways when it comes to
mutinies on battle and pirate ships when studying the history of human behavior on the water,
but the word has an incredibly salient interpretation when aligning it with the treachery of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade. The very act of transporting Africans across the sea created the
modern understanding of “Black” people. Our modern cultural foundation is rooted in the sea
and in mutiny.
