Johnson, Charles

Bloomington. 1982. Indiana University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0253166071. 176 pages. hardcover. Jacket drawing by Sharon Sklar. keywords: Literature America Black. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Andrew Hawkins' birth is the result of a huge misunderstanding. His story begins on an evening in 1837. Jonathan Polkinghorne, master of the Cripplegate plantation, and his dutiful butler, George Hawkins, drink a bit too much and decide they can't go home to their own wives - so they go home to each others'. Disaster ensues. Their wives never quite recover, George is banished to the fields, and nine months later Anna Polkinghorne gives birth to the fated narrator of OXHERDING TALE. As a youth, Andrew is caught in the perpetual battle of the sexes; as he matures, he becomes a social chameleon, who tastes life fully in both the white and the black worlds, never truly belonging to either. Charles Johnson's comic philosophical novel takes the form of a picaresque, first-person narrative. It is the story of Andrew's desperate flight from slavery, but in OXHERDING TALE bondage is spiritual as well as physical, sexual as well as racial. Andrew's adventures cover not only the landscape of the antebellum South - the horrors of the ‘peculiar institution,' black suicide, and death in the mines - but also timeless questions of identity and the nature of the self. Like John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Barth in The Sotweed Factor, and E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, Charles Johnson has created a narrative voice that bridges present-day and past sensibilities. The form of OXHERDING TALE - at once a celebration and an exploration of a traditional genre - underscores its meaning: a fiction that fully treats slavery and liberation on every level of experience. inventory #34308 ISBN: 0253166071.