In an essay for the Gale Research Inc. Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 1995, Charles Johnson describes at length the various strands of influence -- from his parents, to his passion for cartooning and the martial arts, to his first efforts to produce a novel -- that led to the publication of Middle Passage, winner of the 1990 National Book Award for Fiction. Thanks to the generosity of Charles Johnson and his publisher, we are pleased to present these excerpts from his essay.

The son of Benny Lee Johnson, "a proud man, responsible but shy -- a person who measured himself by the quality and quantity of his labor," and Ruby Elizabeth Jackson, a "church girl -- with a wide interest in everything novel -- and an artist's eye for the beautiful, the unusual, the eccentric," Charles Johnson came early to an appreciation of literature. The books he explored first were the cast-offs of sorority girls at Northwestern University, in his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, where his mother sometimes worked as a cleaning woman.

Along with those books from Northwestern University, my mother filled first the aged apartment we lived in before 1960, then my parents' first home, with books that reflected her eclectic tastes in yoga, dieting, Christian mysticism, Victorian poetry, interior decorating, costume design, and flower arrangement. On boiling hot midwestern afternoons in late July, when I was tired of drawing (my dream was to be a cartoonist), I would pause before one of her many bookcases and pull down a volume on religion, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, poetry by Rilke, The Swiss Family Robinson, Richard Wright's Black Boy, an 1897 edition of classic Christian paintings (now in my library), or Daniel Blum's Pictorial History of the American Theatre 1900-1956, which fascinated me for hours.

As an only child, books became my replacement for siblings. This early exposure to so many realms of the imagination can only be the reason why I came up with the idea of making myself read at least one book a week after I started at Evanstown Township High School. My self-imposed schedule saw me start with all of the James Bond novels and end with Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians. It became easy to make it three a week, and I did think -- but only once -- that someday it might be nice to have my name on the spine of some volume I'd written.

We'd read the same books together sometimes, Mother and me, and discuss them (I think she relied on me for this, even raised me to do it, since my father had little time for books), and when I was twelve she placed the most unusual book of all in front of me. A blank book. A diary. "Some people write down what happens to them every day in books like these," she said. "You might enjoy this." Once I started writing on those pages, about my feelings, about my friends and relatives, and once I saw how I was free to say any thing that came into my head about them, I was addicted. Since that day I've filled up probably a hundred diaries, journals, and writer's notebooks.

By the time he was in high school, Johnson had become fascinated by cartooning, and earned his first paycheck as a professional by creating six illustrations for a company that published magic tricks. He also published three short stories before entering Southern Illinois University as a journalism major in 1966, where he created cartoons for the school's newspaper as well as the town paper. It was here that he developed his enduring interest in philosophy, and embarked on a new professional goal, thanks to a public reading by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones).

He appeared onstage in a dashiki flanked by two scowling attendants who watched the crowd as closely as if they were members of the Secret Service. For nearly an hour Baraka read poetry and lectured. He took no questions from whites in the audience, and he repeated a message that hit me as forcefully as John Howie's lectures had two years earlier. He said, "Take your talent back to the black community." At that moment I thought he was talking to me.

I had been publishing as a cartoonist/illustrator for three years, but in late 1968 I was starting to feel that my work was growing stale. I wondered: What if I directed my drawing and everything I knew about comic art to exploring the history and culture of black America? I walked home from Baraka's lecture in a daze. I sat down before my drawing board, my inkwell, my pens. I started to sketch. I worked for a solid week, cutting my classes. The more I drew and took notes for gag-lines, the faster the ideas came. After seven days I had a book, Black Humor.

Black Humor was accepted for publication in 1970, to be followed soon thereafter by Half-Past Nation Time. Johnson had written six apprentice novels while still at Southern Illinois University, but it wasn't until he had found his mentor in novelist John Gardner that he was able to write his first "philosophical novel," Faith and the Good Thing

I was also planning a seventh novel, which I knew I wanted to be different from the first six, which were in the style of naturalistic black authors I admired: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John A. Williams, and also influenced by black cultural nationalism. From the start, the "philosophical novel" interested me more than any other literary tradition. My personal taste ran toward Sartre, Malraux, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Ralph Ellison, Voltaire, and Herman Melville -- the world -- class authors who understood instinctively that fiction and philosophy were sister disciplines. Yes, there were the existential stories of Wright, the Freudian adventure of Ellison, and the beautifully transcendental fiction and poetry of Jean Toomer, but beyond these three I found little I was willing to call genuine philosophical black literature. Filling that void was what I decided to devote myself to as a writer: I had no interest in just "publishing books" because as a cartoonist with so much work in print I'd exhausted my interest in merely seeing my name on things.

By the time Faith and the Good Thing was published in 1974 I began wrestling with early drafts of Oxherding Tale, the book I sometimes refer to as my "platform novel." I wanted it to be a reply to Hesse's Siddhartha, which I loved, and to realize my plans to thematize Eastern thought vis-a-vis the black experience, which I had not successfully done in my first "apprentice" novel.

Although I had realized all I'd hoped for in this book, New York publishers simply could not understand it. The notion of what a "black" novel was in the early 1980's was very limited indeed. Protest fiction, the overtly "political-novel," or all too familiar "up from the ghetto," naturalistic fiction was in vogue and defined a narrow range of acceptable -- and commercial -- black fiction. To this day, my agent says that selling this difficult book -- it appeared in 1982 -- was one of the triumphs of her career.

The next summer, 1983, I began work on Middle Passage, reaching back to my second "apprentice" novel with the intention of doing it right this time. Over the years I'd accumulated all the research I needed on slavery. What was missing was knowledge of the sea and its literature. As I wrote the first draft over the next nine months I read everything I could find related to the subject -- Homer, The Voyage of Argo, the Sindbad stories, all of Melville and Conrad, ships' logs from the nineteenth century, slave narrations composed by Africans who'd come to the New World on those boats, nautical dictionaries, and even one study of Cockney slang in order to individuate the voices of the sailors on board ship.

Come summertime of 1989 Middle Passage was finally completed. While in Evanston visiting my father, I made a trip to my mother's grave and placed fresh flowers there. There at Sunset Cemetery where many of my relations were buried, I decided to commune with them for a little while: my Uncle Will, who died at age ninety-seven, my mother, and her parents. I asked their blessing for this third, difficult, philosophical novel IÕd produced. I genuinely believe my ancestors heard this prayer. The following year Middle Passage was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strange to say, there was only the slightest suspense for me that evening. It seemed the ceremony had barely started, and all the nominees had walked to the stage to receive their plaques, when Fiction chairman Catharine Stimpson announced, "The winner is Middle Passage." For an instant I was tearful and choked up while reciting the names of people I knew I had to acknowledge. Then I settled back into my teacher's mode and read the Ralph Ellison tribute. There was no way I could stand before the world after receiving a prize like the National Book Award, and as only the second black male in thirty-seven years to be so honored, and simply talk about myself. The tribute to Ellison, as I saw it, then (and now), was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate one of the greatest authors of this century.

It is now three years since that ceremony. For a long time I was busier than any human being has a right to be. So many people have asked me, "Has your life changed?" When I reply, "Not really," they're usually disappointed, though that is the truth. Quantitatively life changed, for my workload increased about tenfold. Qualitatively, though, it is the same life and labor -- that of devoting myself to a genuinely philosophical black American fiction -- it was two decades before.

Books by Charles Johnson:
Black Humor 1970
Half-Past Nation Time 1972
Faith and the Good Thing 1974
Oxherding Tale 1982
The Sorcerer's Apprentice 1986
Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970 1988
Middle Passage 1990

The National Book Foundation gratefully acknowledges Gale Research, Inc. for consenting to use of material from Charles Johnson's autobiographical essay in Volume 18 of CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES. Copyright c 1994 by Gale Research, Inc. and Charles Johnson.