Isadora at sea: misogyny as comic capital in Charles Johnson's 'Middle Passage.' (fictional character Isadora Bailey)

When Rutherford Calhoun goes, Ishmael-like, to the waterfront early in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, he ponders the "heavy, liquescent air" and finds in it some promise of purification from the vanities of urban culture - "self-interest," "mediocrity," and "selfishness" - and from his own excesses. He also finds a compulsion in the atmosphere. Staring out to sea, he feels the allure of the journey out, through the "erotic mist," and wonders if there is some place apart, a "far-flung port, a foreign country or island far away at the earth's rim" (4), that could be a place of escape.

Meanwhile, the sea itself provides an analogue for his deepest philosophical meditations, all of which he withholds from Isadora, his fictional counterpart, the female protagonist of Johnson's novel. When she comes to the pier, too - and this is where he first meets her and initially sees her as a potential easy hit for his thievery - he denies her that sea vision utterly. She is a blank to him. He admits, ". . . her expression on the pier was unreadable . . .," but he affirms as if he knew positively that she is "a woman grounded, physically and metaphysically, in the land" (5). It remains for Isadora to act, albeit outside of the frame of his apprehension, to reverse these prescriptions. She will, it turns out, be the agent whose positive, if desperate, acts will propel the action of the story.

Much recent critical attention has been focused on Johnson's extraordinary African Ur-tribe, the fictional Allmuseri, whose intersubjective powers in Middle Passage allow Rutherford Calhoun to reshape his world view and his sense of self.(1) Very little has been said about Isadora Bailey, whose actions precipitate Calhoun's journey of self-discovery, and who meets him upon his return ready to engender a future with him.(2) One of the reasons for this neglect is that Isadora is a singularly unlikeable character. Johnson creates her under a consistent mask of misogyny, though it is arguably Calhoun's and not his own. And Isadora appears in the action only in the frame story of the novel - the first and ninth chapters - and even here is treated with contemptuous humor.

Isadora's offstage adventuring, however, is at the center of Johnson's purposes in Middle Passage. Crises of gender, of family and destiny, drive the plot of Johnson's novel and provide a key to reading its parodic representations of classic male quest adventures. The stock quality of Isadora's character - she is a composite of misogynistic stereotypes - conceals the strength of her embedded rival story.(3) He goes to sea, and she stays home, but her story is a critical locus of resistance in the novel. Parody is overt and instrumental in Johnson's novel. Through the interstices of intertextual play, Isadora Bailey's story acts against the coercions of the parodied texts: their complicity in the gendered sacrifice of women to the violence of male denial of the feminine in themselves.

Claudia Tate locates in African American modernist fiction - or "allegories of desire" - a recurrent trope of black male flight from the entanglements of marriage. This trope is doubled, in her account, in black female narratives that equate marriage with compromised individual freedom and suppressed female subjectivity.(4) "We tend to applaud," she writes, "the discourse on freedom unconditionally, while the discourse on marriage is, for us, at best problematic" (100). Charles Johnson's two postmodern novels of slavery - Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990) - both present marriage, what Tate calls "a metonym for female desire" (101), as fundamentally entangled with slavery.(5) Johnson literalizes the problem of marriage as the antithesis of freedom by placing his male protagonists into situations where they are either married, or pushed to the brink of marriage, under the pressure of blackmail. Andrew Hawkins in Oxherding Tale becomes the prey of the slave owner, Flo Hatfield, who has serially seduced and murdered his predecessors in her service; Hawkins ultimately escapes and finds a more appealing mate, but he is coerced into marrying her by her father. In Middle Passage, Isadora Bailey enlists the help of an underworld financier in a plot to ensnare Calhoun, newly freed from slavery, into matrimony.

Isadora is a type of the predatory female who would bind the male protagonist to bourgeois happy endings. She explains her marital proposition: "'. . . someday when we are very old, have grandchildren, and you look back upon this rackety free-lance life you've led from the advantage of comfortable home and family we've built together, you will thank me.' "He replies," 'I will . . . hic . . . despise you! Is that what you want?'" (16). Rutherford's "rackety free-lance life" is modeled on independent male quest/adventure stories, hybridized with the picaresque mobility of the classic slave narrative.(6) What makes Johnson's African American male hero different from his prototypes in Canonized quest fiction is his bondage to slave history. The love story between Isadora and Rutherford, when read across these intertextual spaces, comes to seem an act of historical commentary on the Middle Passage, the Atlantic transportation of slaves. Far from remaining a static feminine icon of shore-grounded conservatism, Isadora becomes a partner with Rutherford in treacherous refigurations of identity and relationship across historical reaches.(7)

Misogyny is comic capital in Middle Passage. But Calhoun's comic dismissiveness of Isadora seems a signal of male inadequacy, a rote performance, doubling other ritualized male acts of evasion of responsibility. Calhoun's early representations of Isadora are marked by eruptions of anxiety in the caricaturesque. She is debased from the beginning of his account: Her nose looks like a doorknob, and she lives with dozens of maimed animals she has taken in as strays. She is mapped against the "already read," the caricatured female who seeks to confine her mate to the strictures of conventional existence - of propriety and settledness, which translate into marriage. At sea, Calhoun encounters a crew full of misbegotten sailors whose stories replicate his in their escapism and protestations against women left on shore.

Isadora does not appear at the center of the story. For much of the action, we see her only in flashes of memory or images in cameo, the hypothesis or fiction the seafaring narrator holds to at moments about having someone to go home to. But she resides in the plot first as the narrator's prime motivator. In a novel of self-conscious anachronism and hybridization, Isadora occupies the place of Rutherford's appropriate mate. She is the "ought-to-be" relationship, his hypothetical counterpart there on shore, the measure of his wanderings. The narrator uses her as a moral compass of sorts, the object female, though he both loves her in theory and finds her intolerable.

The marriage plot begins as a barroom encounter - set up by Isadora - between a kingpin of the black New Orleans underworld, Papa Zeringue, and Calhoun over the question of Calhoun's indebtedness. The corruption of New Orleans, the fictive place of the ex-slave's dream of freedom, is embodied in the nightmare of the black capitalist who in fact owns all of Calhoun's creditors. Calhoun's mistake in imagining that his freedom is identical with the pursuit of pleasures comes back to threaten him with a binary set of choices either of which represents reenslavement. One is prison, romanticized after the fact as "a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo" (1). The other choice, more repellent to him than the first, is marriage to Isadora - a marriage she has arranged by blackmail to be enforced by Zeringue. She will pay his debts and he will marry her under such coercion, or Zeringue will reclaim him for his debts:" 'Suppose you have to get married, Rutherford Calhoun!' Now her eyes burned. 'What about that?'" (10).

These are the terms that precipitate his flight. Her grotesque body, as he renders it in justifying his escapades, carries all the marks of the cultural wounding she has suffered and he has compounded: not the marks of the whip, not the scars of slavery per se, but the wounds of maternal loss. Myths of gentility conceal her grief and alienation. Her speech, arguing for the pleasures of sedate - or what she would call "stable" - marital love, is undermined by her own distortions of her personal past. She recommends her parents as a model of family life, claiming that her father, a type of Calhoun in his double pursuit of" 'rum and loose women,' "had been reformed by her mother, "'a woman of character . . . who brought out his better instincts'" (8). We later learn that her father murdered her mother in an act of domestic violence.

Isadora reads Calhoun's rejection of her as a mark of her failure to be marketable in the coin of skin tone: "'It's because I'm not . . . not pretty. No, don't say it! That is why. Because I'm dark. You'd rather have a beautiful, glamorous, light-skinned wife like the women in the theaters and magazines'" (17). Despite these anxieties - or perhaps because of them - she presents to him the mask of propriety. Her desire to enact the prescripted terms of the heterosexual marriage plot represents to him an oblivion of days of imitative respectability - and multiple thousands of cups of sassafras tea. What she offers him - or, rather, what she stands for to him - is a blank composite of officially appealing virtues and a classist vision of culture, derived from and obedient to her Bostonian background. She is, in his account, "a frugal, quiet, devoutly Christian girl, . . . the fourth daughter of a large Boston family free since the Revolutionary War, and positively ill with eastern culture" (5).

Isadora is, of course, herself doubly bound by this heritage - and by Calhoun's inability to understand that she, too, is under the constraints of the dominant social order. This is a novel of the early national moment - and also, profoundly, of the present. As African American subjects, both she and Calhoun have been defrauded by the terms of the American Revolution and the founding social contracts of the new nation. Their story cannot begin successfully, therefore, with that founding moment. They must redefine themselves, and their critical resistance to mainstream culture, through an encounter with the horrors of the Middle Passage. Or rather, since it cannot be comprehended - it exceeds what is really "knowable" - they must go through it. They must have its mark inscribed upon them, and live through it and beyond it, to be remade in a different ideological relationship to the nation.

On shore, Isadora stands in a body that she has made a fortress against him. She loves him, but she does not love the way he uses women and abuses his own body. She fortifies herself in an assumed ugliness - pudginess - that protects her, according to Calhoun (whose word is "unreliable"), against propositions and other unwanted male attentions. She takes herself, in his account, out of the marketplace of commodified sexuality: "She let herself get fat, for example, to end the pressure women feel from being endlessly ogled and propositioned. Men hardly noticed her, pudgy as she was, and this suited Isadora just fine" (6). He senses in her an "inner brilliance, an intelligence and clarity of spirit" (7) that he says overwhelm him. But he lets us see little of that through the conceit of his own narrative.

Calhoun's early posturing, which is different in tone from the frenzied slapstick of the novel's closing frame, seems gratuitous, excessive, and sensationalizing. He aligns himself with the wrong stories - and embarks on his writing career with a horrifying lack of self-consciousness about what it means to write a glib sea-story, with all the affected misogyny of the genre, in the log of a slave ship as an ex-slave on a return trip to Africa. Isadora is caught up in the web of that obliviousness - that forgetting or never-having-known - of the particular history that was the Middle Passage. The very defects of their relationship, in fact, seem attributable to that falseness in voicing: the treacherous comedy of a misplaced story. Calhoun attempts to take on the long history of men's stories of seafaring and to identify with historical women-haters or women-escapers who took to the sea: "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women" (1). Everything in the story they live belies the appropriateness of that identification, and of the smug tone of male self-satisfaction that accompanies it.

Calhoun's own self-hatred is mirrored in his imaginings of Isadora. He needs her to stand as a chaste alternative to the women he buys in the sincapital of New Orleans. He describes himself as "a lecher for perception and the nerve-knocking thrill" (3). His manumission leaves him with nothing closer to freedom than a lust for raw experience. He has no positive sense of what freedom might be, as potential to define experience, to make choices for the good. Most critically absent is the power to shape a relationship, to see Isadora as she is. The double cost of this deficiency is that he can only see Isadora through inherited stories even as he desires whatever avenue of escape is available to get him away from himself. He denies her the space to be part of the freedom he is envisioning for himself, because his concept of freedom is an after-image of desire. And yet that self-contempt - his bondage to his own desiring - makes his own adventuring a parody of escape.

In his drunken calculations about whether to accept the terms of Isadora's marriage proposal by blackmail, Calhoun knows ahead of time that the Republic - the vessel he chooses for his flight - is a slaver. Perversely, he notes that the Republic, which looks "strikingly beautiful" off shore, "would up-anchor and sail eastward against the prevailing winds to the barracoon, or slave factory, at Bangalang on the Guinea coast, take on a cargo of Africans, and then, God willing, return in three months" (20). He is psychically drawn back to the condition of his enslavement and defines himself in terms of it. In pondering the theft of a crew member's papers, which he imagines will gain him passage on board, he reflects: "I thought, Naw, Calhoun, you can't do that; but at that selfsame instant I remembered what awaited me at the altar, and I decided most definitely, Yes, I can" (20).

The Isadora story could seem to function simply as a plot mechanism - which is what he tries to pretend it to propel him into the action, into the all-male universe of the Republic. a place of rank smells and corrupt, leering humor. He, the representative African American character in that script, becomes one of the motley assemblage of American male types aboard the ship of the republic (named, the Republic) - the "fantastic, floating Black Maria" (21) - he boards in New Orleans. The ship most obviously stands for an awkward composite of masculine dreams and evasions, purposes, and default options, just barely holding together: the ship of the state of the new republic, barely sea-worthy with its tiered compartments and galleys, "like a crazy-quilt house built by a hundred carpenters, each with a different plan" (21).

On board ship, however, Calhoun is of a double mind about Isadora. He carries a small portrait of her with him, but he has little understanding of her strength or agency, what she has to accomplish and defend for the collective good while he is at sea. She becomes an internal voice, warning, counseling, consoling him: She is a point of psychic refuge, but is trivialized in the placeholding function she serves. In a hierarchy of things he feels deprived of at sea, she figures unflatteringly after the most basic physical comforts: "I wished in vain for dry breeches, floorboards that didn't move, a bowl of warm milk at bedtime, and sometimes - aye - for Isadora" (45).

Isadora's mobility - her machinations on shore, stepping into his world of crime and intrigue with the marriage plot, and at sea, for she ends up at sea, queasy, but in control - lies beyond the reach of his imaginings. She travels, as far as he is concerned, by circulating. He carries her portrait with him in his purse. She is, in that sense, woman made use of, negotiated as inert symbolic coin. He uses her picture for its exchange value within a masculine economy of boastful and repetitive stories of women who are literally exchangeable for one another. The five or six wives of Squibb, the ship's cook - he can't remember how many he has had - are all stand-ins in his search for his first wife, "Stinky": "'It's sorta like I keep lookin' for Stinky when she was seventeen so I kin do right by her this time'" (39).

The Allmuserian leader Ngonyama cannot read the shadows, the shading under Isadora's chin and eyes on the portrait, a measure of his philosophical remove from Western tricks of representation: "'Why is her face splotched with smudges?'" (75), he asks. And yet even here, Calhoun and Ngonyama, male spectators from antithetical cultural frames, meet in a moment of misogynistic comic repetition. Perceptions about the shape of Isadora's nose transcend even immense cultural divides: "He also asked why her nose looked like a conch, if maybe this was a trick of vision too, then saw my anger and dropped the question" (75).

Fantasizing that he has escaped from Isadora, Calhoun finds himself once on board the feminized "Republic" wedded in effect to the ship's imperious captain, Ebenezer Falcon. Falcon gives him one of his guns, a 45-percussion Kentucky pistol, that features a magnet that prevents anyone not wearing a special ring from firing it. After arming him, Falcon completes the covenant by unscrewing one such ring from off his third finger (right hand) and placing it on Calhoun's finger. Falcon needs him, he claims: "a colored mate to be my eyes and ears" (50). Significantly, he wants Calhoun to be a spy for him both among the Africans and the crew - and to betray both. That doubleness and his availability - the lust for experience that draws him to Falcon - are both critical. The doubleness reflects his Americanness: He is the sole black member of a band of divided, disinherited males who are of the new republic. His availability derives from the nature of his freedom, which is defined only by absence of constraint. There is no bar to his pursuit of experience, but he is sated and demoralized. It is a freedom that is at once directionless, and at the same time greedy - the stuff of imperial desiring, of rapacious Americanness. Hence his wedding with Falcon: They are one in desire.

He is also bound with Falcon in a voyage away from the world of male-female relations. Falcon's own landlocked wife, as described by the first mate, Cringle, is a grotesque type of Isadora: overweight, fastidious, uninterested to an extreme in sex. This shadow couple, eclipsed by the subsequent pairing of Falcon and Calhoun, is a disturbing prefiguration of what Rutherford and Isadora might become under the terms of the traditional marriage plot. Unlike stories of male adventuring that might allow the possibility of a radical critique of marital norms, restrictive sexual roles, and imbalances of power (Boone 228-30), Falcon and his crew enforce women's invisibility in patriarchy - and support a bipolar world view. Not only is the ring that Falcon gives Calhoun the key to masculinist violence - it literally unlocks the gun - but it is also the instrument Falcon will use to commit suicide once his financial promises to his owner/investors have gone bad with the mutiny of the Allmuseri. Far from allowing a plunge into the mystery of sexual identity through the "erotic mist," Calhoun's outward voyage leads him into a space of enforced gender polarities and conflict. He feels revulsion over his symbolic union with Falcon: His "escape" has led to a second coerced marriage, this time to a child molester and a dealer in slaves.

After the double mutiny and rebellion - of crew and slaves - Calhoun goes back to Falcon's cabin. There, the critically injured captain, the empire builder who now sees the dissolution of the world occurring in the destruction of his own nervous system, commissions Calhoun to finish the ship's log, having secured first Calhoun's own word that he has not betrayed him. (Whether or not he has in fact betrayed him remains an open question.) What Falcon asks is that Calhoun remain his "eyes and ears" and keep the log, with Falcon's truth, so that others will know what happened. Calhoun reluctantly consents: "I took his logbook from the ruins" (146). But the ex-slave vows to tell the story as he sees it. Hence, the book. The novel we hold - up to and beyond the hours when he furiously scribbles on board the rescue ship, the Juno - in fictional pretext is Falcon's log from the Republic.

The writing of Calhoun's log, therefore, begins after the death of Falcon. Calhoun has already witnessed - though his body is not an adequate vessel with which to comprehend it without being rent itself - the theft of lives. The Allmuseri have been severed from kin, and their flesh forcibly installed in the body of the Republic. the nation taking on slaves. His writing is overshadowed by that prior knowledge, and yet he still tries to make the log his own. He begins with "Entry, the First / JUNE 14, 1830" and he sees the starting point of his story as being his "escape" from New Orleans, from Isadora, exactly two months earlier. Even after what he has witnessed, he goes back to the "beginning" - the love story - that personal rupture, the failure of recognition and of love, and his flight from Isadora. The frenetic comedy of the opening, then, arguably comes from a moment of writing which is informed with too much knowledge, with unmediated knowledge, where the record of experience cannot bear the pressure of what has been witnessed. That knowledge erupts in the creation of a fictive self who cannot quite believe the terms of his own story and who offers it therefore with a parodic doubleness, glibness and unease.

The frame story - the Isadora story - therefore becomes not a trite and redundant reechoing of seafaring misogyny, but a deeply grounded response to Calhoun's own incomplete personal liberation from slavery. It reflects his own continued psychic bondage to and identification with the corruptions of the slave nation, even in his legal "freedom." Isadora's actions to secure him at all costs, through illicit means, take on a different meaning in that light as well. She uses illegitimate, corrupt means, but she seems to be acting out of an authentic desperation. There are in fact no legitimate means by which he could be won. Calhoun is beyond claiming. He could be seduced, and she protects herself from his sexual adventuring, but he is constitutionally ill-fit for marriage - for the engendering of a future. In the comic perverse scaffolding of Johnson's fiction, Calhoun is the only appropriate male in Isadora's universe. He is the protagonist and the official object of her desire. They both share an intelligent remove - a conscious, critical distance - from the received terms of their social experiences. And yet they are doomed in the early going to relate to each other only through the bondage of their social subject positions. He is acting through a conception of freedom that doubles as license: the right to do whatever he wants, including actions that are self-destructive, as well as actions of criminal intent. His stylized acts of theft, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy has argued, represent rebellion - outright sedition - against the power hierarchy, the sociopolitical order of the New World ("Properties" 77-80). And yet his lust for experience, unmediated and unanswerable, makes him the stepchild of the Republic, freed from slavery only to find himself without any positive conception of what his freedom is good for, of what it could be.

Calhoun's plunge, then, into what he ultimately calls the "dizzying entrapment" of the oceanscape follows precisely from the moment of his failed relationship with Isadora. The frame story, far from being a glib structural device, in fact inscribes motive and ground for the grim adventuring that comprises the body of the narrative. Paul Gilroy argues in Black Atlantic that love stories and narratives of love and loss in black popular culture "systematically transcode other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histories of dispersal and exile and the remembrance of unspeakable terror" (201). Calhoun's going out, his revisitation of the scene of the erasure of historical memory, of the severance of cultural continuity and kinship, is in fact precipitated by his encounter with the reality of Isadora's needs and desires as a black female subject - if enacted criminally. As she enters actively his world of crime and deception, she moves out of her own alienation and embodied fear. Hers is a desire that would engender a future; she perceives rightly that he is owned by his own imitative and self-annihilating sense of freedom. He stands in the novel for the potential father of her children. She see that and acts, attempting in her corrupt complicity with Zeringue to accomplish what he would deny.

Calhoun flees in fact into the very history that has disabled their relationship and finds himself in the nowhere, the suspended and dislocated atemporal spaces of what Gilroy calls the black Atlantic - the place of the culturally "unmade." Isadora calls into her employ two caricaturesque villains of the black underworld (and sells herself unintentionally into their hands): Zeringue, a financier who is later revealed to be dealing in slaves; and Santos, his comic, and ultimately redeemable, gargantuan bodyguard. Isadora's desperate acts of blackmail and manipulation mirror Calhoun's own precipitous flight into the past. Neither he nor she can imagine strategies for generational survival - for engendering creative personal relations - without finding themselves literally entrapped by the conditions of slave history. The frame story moves the action of the novel out into the thalassic vortex of the Middle Passage.

There is finally a perverse equivalency between male and female subjects here. Both Calhoun and Isadora finally are drawn to the same reenactment: She attempts to secure him, body and soul, in the enslavement of marriage; he, in counterstatement, intentionally stows away on a slave ship. This rupture - and revisitation of slave history - is central to the design of the novel and becomes its defining term. The ocean becomes a mirror for Calhoun's psychic disorientation and rootlessness: "At my post I was for a time hypnotized by tumbling, opaline blades of ocean, by its vortices that were mirrored in me since we were mainly made of Main . . ." (79). Hortense Spillers suggests that "those African persons in 'Middle Passage' were literally suspended in the 'oceanic,' if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet 'American' either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all" (466). Both Isadora and Calhoun reenter the narrative of exile and displacement as American subjects returning to that catastrophic place of cultural grieving and loss. The rupture of the Middle Passage marks the site of the cultural dislocation that makes impossible any simple recognition between them.

"Laud Deo" begins the dedication of Calhoun's inherited log: "Journal of a Voyage intended / by God's permission / in the Republic, African / from New Orleans to the Windward / Coast of Africa" (xi). The inscription is Falcon's, but is not original to Falcon; it prefaces a type of writing - a log of commercial enterprise - here ordained by God, in the service of the devil, as Calhoun comes to understand Falcon to be. And yet finally the enterprise is owned and orchestrated, not by that empire builder who represents "the entire twisted will of Puritanism" (51), but by his owners, a capitalist confederacy on shore, twisted in partnership in the brokering of flesh. One of them is Calhoun's own "owner," the same Philippe Zeringue, a black seller of slaves, to whom unknowingly Isadora had appealed for aid. Isadora's story is therefore doubly embedded in Calhoun's. In attempting either to entrap or to escape from each other by illegitimate means, Isadora and Rutherford find themselves in bondage to the black slave dealer. And both find themselves - in their equivalent stories - virtually married to, or in danger of marrying, the agents in that horrific enterprise: If Calhoun was to be bride to Falcon, Isadora is to be bride to Zeringue.

Isadora, indeed, almost ends up caught in her own game. Her resistance weakened finally, she finds herself about to be sacrificed at the altar - to be bound in wedlock to the master demon. The scene is Calhoun's rescue ship, the Juno, a gin palace on a return journey from the West Indies to New Orleans. Calhoun, along with the Republic's cook, Squibb, and three of the Allmuseri children - and notably, the ship's log - have been miraculously plucked out of the ocean after the sinking of the Republic. Calhoun retreats into a writer's oblivion in his berth, writing furiously, at first without direction - and then with the passion of remembrance: "Then as our days aboard the Juno wore on, I came to it with a different, stranger compulsion - a need to transcribe and thereby transfigure all we had experienced, and somehow through all this I found a way to make peace with the recent past by turning it into Word" (189-90). His writing a psychic necessity, Rutherford almost fails to emerge in time to realize that Isadora is on board ship, about to bind her future to Zeringue's.

But there is to be another ending to the story. Bald with a headpiece, toothless, with creaking joints and Biblical-length beard, Calhoun emerges from his writer's retreat to intervene in the marital drama. Once Rutherford has completed the ship's log, Johnson moves the intensity level of the parodic comedy up several registers. Isadora, Penelope-like, it turns out, has been about the serious work of holding Zeringue at bay, by knitting and unraveling booties and sweaters for her menagerie of stray cats and dogs. She has in the months since Rutherford fled lost fifty pounds and turned into a striking beauty: "In the messroom's hushed light, which created soft overtones on her lips and a warm cast to her skin, her beauty was heart-stabbing" (192). Calhoun ultimately will win her back, using his logbook, which contains evidence of Zeringue's slave-dealing, in an act of retaliatory blackmail against Zeringue.

Johnson's evasions of closure, performed at the highest comic tilt, do an important kind of resistance work at the end of the novel. At face value, Isadora's weight loss would seem to represent a crass materialization of her preparation for a conventional ending - her full commodification as marriage-marketable capital. Johnson uses an arch and parodic double voicing here both to signal his resistance to the return of that unqualified bourgeois marriage plot and to leave open the meaning of Isadora and Rutherford's reconcilation.

As the two navigate toward each other through the comic excesses of the conclusion, Calhoun is full of anxiety about whether she will know him or not:

My hands trembled. I felt precariously balanced between my old life in New Orleans and the first rung of another with Isadora, if she would still have an old, broken-down sea dog like me. But why should she, I wondered. She did not know me, as I was now. What was worse, I could not explain myself in a single day. (205)

What he does not ask himself is whether he will know who she is. Will he understand her real transformation, beyond the dazzlements of her beautification and the seductions of romantic closure? He can tell that Zeringue is diminished, weakened by her work of resistance - and yet it is not clear that he sees her insurgency, her entry into the world of experience. He still condescends to her as she explains her Penelopean feats of knitting:

". . . it was working until last month when Santos . . . saw me unraveling booties I'd made for one of the puppies. You remember Poopsie, don't you?" I nodded, the memory of dog fur on my clothing unpleasant, but I made myself smile, which prompted Isadora to lean into me so firmly I felt our bodies had been fitted at the factory. (197)

The novel encodes a countertext, an anxiety that their parallel stories will not fit so well together.

The new world, signaled in the reconciliation of Isadora and Rutherford, is not to be made according to the received fictions. And yet love may thrive. The narrative trajectory predicts that it will. But the anti-consummation scripted for their final scene suggests a refusal of closure. In the moments of their reunion, their sexual timing is comically skewed. Elbows in eyeballs, things do not go as planned: ". . . just now, I wanted our futures blended, not our limbs, our histories perfectly twined for all time, not our flesh" (208). After the Middle Passage comes the hope of a healing reordering. But it remains hypothetical and fragile for now - to be lived in a future beyond what could be recorded in Falcon's log, beyond the reach of his mark, or of his inheritance.

Notes

1. See especially Rushdy ("Phenomenology" and "Properties"), Goudie, Scott, Walby, and Travis.

2. Even Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's fascinating article "The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage," about Rutherford Calhoun's three careers - the third being his career as a lover - has little to say about Isadora herself. "Part of Rutherford's 'middle passage,' then," Rushdy writes, "is learning to commit himself to his beloved - once he realizes that Isadora is just that" (74). Isadora remains, however, primarily the target toward which Rutherford moves. Rushdy offers a valuable discussion of Isadora's class affiliations in a lengthy footnote to this article (105n).

3. I would like to thank Beth Blunt for her insights about Isadora's agency.

4. Tare reads these allegories of unblissful matrimony as informing contemporary critical readings of nineteenth-century black women's sentimental fiction - and asks for more appropriately historicized responses to the marriage plots of black women's novels of that period.

5. Johnson's two short stories about slavery - "The Education of Mingo" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" - are striking for their focus on bonds between male characters. The only female character in "Sorcerer's Apprentice," the protagonist's mother, has already died by eating rat poison before the action begins. Her one act in life notable enough to warrant recording was to be cheated out of $600 - the equivalent of seven years of her husband's labor - while attempting to deposit it in the bank.

6. Joseph Allen Boone's chapter on "Male Independence and the American Quest Romance as Counter-Traditional Genre" (226-77) could provide a provocative starting point for considerations of black male questers in relation to the marriage tradition.

7. Ann duCille uses the term coupling convention to signal the subversive ways in which black women writers in particular have worked with the "marriage plot" - coded "white, female, and European" - and have appropriated and revised its forms for emancipatory purposes.

Works Cited

Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Goudie, S. X. "'Leavin' a Mark on the Wor(l)d': Marksmen and Marked Men in Middle Passage." African American Review 29 (1995): 109-22.

Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery." African American Review 26 (1992): 373-94.

-----. "The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage." Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (1994): 73-108.

Scott, Daniel M., III. "Interrogating Identity: Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage." African American Review 29 (1995): 645-55.

Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 454-81.

Tate, Claudia. "Allegories of Black Female Desire; or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority." Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 98-126.

Travis, Molly Abel. "Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic's Essentialism." Narrative 2.3 (1994): 179-200.

Walby, Celestin. "The African Sacrificial Kingship Ritual and Johnson's Middle Passage." African American Review 29 (1995): 657-69.

Elizabeth Muther is Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is currently writing a book on African American modernism and co-editing a collection of essays on Michael S. Harper.