Charles Johnson Books In Order

Faith and the Good Thing

Charles Johnson, the National Book Award winning author of the bestselling ‘Middle Passage,’ published his stunning first novel, ‘Faith and the Good Thing,’ in 1974. At its release, ‘Black World’ called it ‘one of the great American novels of this century…
unqualifiedly good and extraordinarily beautiful.”Faith and the Good Thing‘ is the haunting fable of Faith Cross, a black Southern girl whose quest for the good in life comes to represent our shared human adventure from innocence to identity. Faith is told by her dying mother, ‘Girl, you get yourself a good thing,’ although she has no idea what that is. As we follow her journey from the traditional Southern Baptist world of her mother’s funeral to a swamp witch’s lair to a life of prostitution and loveless marriage in Chicago, we relive the history of twentieth century black America, annotated with philosophic insight into the nature of identity, justice, and our common place in the universe along the way. Told in the style of black folklore and replete with voodoo werewitches, hypocritical Pentecostal preachers, wise street bums, and philosophy from the ancient Nubian lore to Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, ‘Faith and the Good Thing‘ burgeons with riches. Like Voltaire’s Candide with a touch of de Sade’s Justine, or the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood,’ Johnson’s Faith is an innocent who searches through the horrors of this world to terrible knowledge and vital understanding. ‘Publishers Weekly’ hailed this novel as ‘so original, so imaginative, and so exciting in what it has to say about the black woman’s experience in America that it is a reading experience unlike anything else in a longtime.’ It will dazzle Johnson’s new and loyal fans who are discovering his early work for the first time.

Oxherding Tale

One night in the antebellum South, a slave owner and his African American butler stay up to all hours until, too drunk to face their wives, they switch places in each other’s beds. The result is a hilarious imbroglio and an offspring Andrew Hawkins, whose life becomes Oxherding Tale.

Through sexual escapades, picaresque adventures, and philosophical inquiry, Hawkins navigates white and black worlds and comments wryly on human nature along the way. Told with pure genius, Oxherding Tale is a deliciously funny, bitterly ironic account of slavery, racism, and the human spirit; and it reveals the author as a great talent with even greater humanity.

Middle Passage

‘A novel in the honorable tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dick…
heroic in proportion…
engrossing.’ The New York Times Book Review. Middle Passage is an astonishing work of historical fiction about the slave trade which combines elements of classic 19th century sea going novels with the existential angst of a 20th century philosopher. The result is a resonant work that is completely original and truly unforgettable.

Dreamer

Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country’s most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.

Another River to Cross

Charles Johnson gives this firsthand account of a young black boy struggling in the cotton fields of Texas with a passionate love of music burning in his heart. How does he make his God given dream come true in the face of racial, bitter hatred and discrimination?

Retelling how his grandmother who came to America on a slave ship at the age of ten, was brutally torn from her twin sister on the auction block. How she kept alive the faith that she would one day be reunited with that long lost sister. More than 100 years later her dim eyes would once more look upon that beloved face.

Charles Johnson is a much loved, successful gospel musician who has shared the stage with such famous performers as Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, and groups such as The Cathedrals. In Another River to Cross, he delivers pure gold in telling his family’s story, the good as well as the not so good, honestly and without rancor.

Soulcatcher and Other Stories

Twelve stories about the African experience of slavery in America, by the National Book Award winning novelist.

Nothing has had as profound an effect on American life as slavery. For blacks and whites alike, the experience has left us with a conflicted and contradictory history. Now, famed novelist Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award, presents a dozen tales of the effects and experience of slavery, each based on historical fact, and each about those Africans who arrived on our shores in shackles. From Martha Washington’s management of her slaves, bequeathed to her at the death of the first president, to a boy chained in the bowels of a ship plying the infamous passage from Africa to the South laden with human cargo, from a lynching in Indiana to a hunter of escaped slaves searching the Boston market for his quarry, from an early Quaker meeting exploring resettlement in Africa to the day after Emancipation the voices, terrors, and savagery of slavery come vividly and unforgettably to life.

These stories, told by a master storyteller, transcend history even as they present it, and retell the mythic proportions of a historical period with astounding realism and beauty, power, and emotion.

Dr. King’s Refrigerator

Charles Johnson’s innovative and richly imagined collection is full of stories sly, witty, and insightful that bring the world into focus. Each is a vivid cultural and philosophical portrait that deftly explores issues of identity and race. ‘Kwoon’ follows the spiritual journey of a martial arts teacher on Chicago’s South Side. ‘Sweet Dreams’ is a Kafkaesque tale set in a world where dreams are taxed and a man and his dreamlife are being audited. ‘The Gift of the Osuo’ is a fable about the dangers of getting what you wish for. In ‘Cultural Relativity,’ a young woman falls in love with the son of the president of an African nation but is forbidden to ever kiss him. The title story is an illuminating and deeply human tale about pre Montgomery Martin Luther King Jr. and a revelation he had when he looked into his refrigerator late one night.

Provocative, engaging, and compassionate, Dr. King’s Refrigerator is a superb and important collection from a major American voice.

I Was Born a Slave

Between 1760 and 1902, more than 200 book length autobiographies of ex slaves were published; together they form the basis for all subsequent African American literature. I Was Born a Slave collects the 20 most significant slave narratives. They describe whippings, torture, starvation, resistance, and hairbreadth escapes; slave auctions, kidnappings, and murders; sexual abuse, religious confusion, the struggle of learning to read and write; and the triumphs and difficulties of life as free men and women. Many of the narratives such as those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs have achieved reputations as masterpieces; but some of the lesser known narratives are equally brilliant. This unprecedented anthology presents them unabridged, providing each one with helpful introductions and annotations, to form the most comprehensive volume ever assembled on the lives and writings of the slaves. Volume one 1770 1849 includes the narratives of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano Gustavus Vassa, William Grimes, Nat Turner, Charles Ball, Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass, Lewis and Milton Clarke, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson.