Charles Johnson was a successful cartoonist and in 1971 even hosted a show on PBS (Charlie's Pad) before embarking on his career as a short story writer and novelist. His best-known novel, Middle Passage, won a National Book Award in 1990. He is also a well-known critic, anthologist and essayist whose most recent collection is Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. He will be a participant in the Las Vegas Book Festival.
Have you always been a Buddhist or did you convert?
All of my adult life, since about the age of 19. I always wanted to write about that thing that is very, very close to me. It is in my work. It is in all the novels and all the stories. It is there. But I never wrote directly about Buddhism until a few years ago. I would say that in all my work and in all my life, the spirit has been of primary importance to me, especially in fiction.
Has Buddhism's belief in reincarnation had anything to do with your interest in historical fiction?
I have never thought about those two things together. There is a Buddhist abbot I had a good long conversation with. He emphasized that with reincarnation, you should not even think about it. He didn't just say don't talk about it, but don't even think about it. It isn't really important. What is mainly important to Buddhism—which I really think is a philosophy, the Buddha was a great philosopher and teacher—is the practice called meditation. At the center of that practice is being right here, right now, and open to the present moment. This is the most important in the Eightfold Path. We can't live in the past.
With your interest in being in the present, why have you written so much set in the past, like in Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage?
I actually have written in the present quite a lot in short stories. Oxherding Tale was set in the era of slavery, and there was a reason for that. If I could have set it in the present, I would have. But if you look at the 300-year period of slavery, you find everything that is essential for understanding race relations in black America is forged in that experience. And the slave narrative is a native literary form in that it rises from this soil. And it was a form I found interesting because its movement is from slavery to freedom, and that is a movement we can trace all the way back to St. Augustine's Confessions or even the Puritan narratives which precede the slave narratives. So I wanted to really address a different issue by writing about the slave era. The book is not just about physical bondage but psychological bondage. The slave narrative allowed me to open up to all kinds of interesting sublayers of philosophy. If I could have set it in the present, I would have. Same thing with Middle Passage. That story, obviously, because it was a slave ship, had to happen before the current century.
Yes, well, we all pick the stories we write, and you chose that story to tell.
Oh, yeah. Why? Because it had not been dramatized in American literature. I am only drawn to the subjects that have not been explored. The whole purpose of a work of art, to me, if it is going to be successful, is that it should be about the process of discovery for both the writer and the reader, and it should change our perception. When I was going to school, my teachers never put a book by a black author in front of me. I could fault them for that, but the fact is that no one had probably put such a book in front of them, either. They didn't know this material. So they couldn't educate me. A lot of us who grew up in the '60s were involved in the formation of black-studies programs, because we basically had to educate ourselves.
Something like Middle Passage could really be shoved into the background. You could have many stories about what happened to the slaves in the hulls of those ships different from mine, because so many ships made that journey. There is an early draft from just around when I was an undergraduate. It was my earliest apprentice novel. It didn't succeed. I came back to it 17 years later and had done a lot of research. Then I spent six more years composing that particular manuscript.