Oxherding Tale

by Charles R. Johnson

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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, African American, Literature, Classics, Novels, Race

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1982

About the author

Charles R. Johnson is an American scholar and author of novels, short stories, and essays. Johnson, an African-American, has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Middle Passage and Dreamer. Johnson first came to prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist, at which time he was also involved in radical politics. In 1970, he published a collection of cartoons, and this led to a television series about cartooning on PBS.

1990 National Book Award Winner.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much made of the beginning of this book - that the master and slave-butler swap beds and wives, after a night of drunken card-playing. This incident is only a device to bring the hero into existence in a particular way, it becomes less and less relevant to the story as it is told.

It is a picaresque slave-narrative told with a strongly Buddhist point of view and whereas this sort of book expounding the author's philosophy generally bores me rigid - as in the execrable 'The Island' (Aldous Huxley), this time it works. The series of events, almost complete stories in themselves are very visual, which adds to the enjoyment, and I can see a film of the book, although I don't think the philosophy would survive.

Perhaps what is different in this book from so many slave-narratives, real or fiction, is that the Whites, Masters and Mistresses, are not generally cruel in a day-to-day manner. No, they are self-indulgent. They are cruel only when displeased in a large or small way. They pretend to themselves that all's right with their world and so therefore all must be right with the world and if it isn't, well then, its probably the slaves' fault as they are supposed to be doing all the work in it. Punish them, sell them, what does it matter? They are only ciphers or farm animals, and only attain a humanity of sorts - like the slave butler - when it suits the Master or Mistress.

What did I learn from the book? That it actually does matter what you look like, for some people, a lot of people, nothing but nothing is that important no matter that they pretend otherwise.

When reading the book, forget the protagonist's slave status and substitute 'not free' or 'owned' instead because that is how he thinks of himself and how the author has written the book.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a terrific, inventive novel. I'm hard-pressed to think of a time I was more dazzled by a book at the sentence level. Structured in the tradition of a slave narrative, it chronicles the flight to freedom of Andrew, his sexual adventures, not to mention his origin story, which caused a few ripples of controversy when this was first published in the 1980s. The story takes place in an area I know well--Upstate South Carolina--during the years before the Civil War, so it had my attention from the first page. It moves from Abbeville, to Greenville and concludes in Spartanburg, though I'm not sure what connection, if any, Johnson has to the Palmetto State.

Johnson has written at length about philosophy and he works in a multitude of references to Kant and other great thinkers. The flights of fancy--I'm reluctant to call them examples of magical realism--come rapidly and aren't always successful. Johnson is a master of the simile and I grinned when he broke the fourth wall. But an appearance by Karl Marx in the middle-third took me out of the novel. There aren't an abundance of characters, but Johnson uses multiple names for each and at times it was a challenge to keep up with who he was referring to, especially after they returned from a 50-plus page absence.

I think this would be interesting to pair with Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad or maybe even Beloved by Toni Morrison. On its own, Oxherding Tale is a rewarding and accomplished piece of work.

[Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good example of why novels exist.

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique. This takes the form of a slave narrative but has
characteristics of the weird, experimental, and often shameless fiction of the 70s/80s. On top of that Buddhist philosophy is sort of shoehorned in. It’s very good, and very readable, but I don’t really know what the novel trying to do. I was also a bit put off by this statement in Johnson’s introduction:

My agent, Anne Borchardt, tells me finding a home for this this novel was one of the triumphs of her career. And little wonder: the 1980s began as a decade when the work of black male writers was systematically downplayed and ignored in commercial, New York publishing. For example, Oxherding Tale appeared the same year as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I leave it to readers to decide which book pushes harder at the boundaries of invention, and inhabits most confidently the space where fiction and philosophy meet.

Why the specific comparison to Walker? (Not that I’m a fan). And why should fiction and philosophy so forcefully and purposefully meet, as they do in Johnson’s novel? Can fiction, on its own, be a pure and innovative form of philosophy?

[Liz Sutter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most clever book I’ve EVER read. Obsessed with the manifestations of Daoism and other philosophies.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start by saying how much I love this book. By turns a picaresque novel, a slave narrative, and a philosophical treatise, it is also none of these, but a clever and erudite literary game with form and genre. Johnson's long introduction in the edition I read (Plume, Penguinputnam) carries a scent of bitterness over the exhausting genesis and subsequent life of the book. It is true that he came onto the scene just when brilliant and talented women writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were emerging. For better or worse the African-American narrative has been told in their women's voices for the last generation. Johnson, along with other male writers, has been obscured, though not invisible.
He did win the National Book Award for Middle Passage, a book I found frustrating, as if it had had all the best parts edited out.
Oxherding Tale, though, delivers on so many levels. The language is delightful, the humor perfectly timed (except for the odd bad joke stuck in), and the insight into Everymans journey from slavery to freedom, a journey that might not exist at all, is profound.
The title is revealing and apt if you are familiar with the famous Buddhist story/paintings. Do read this book and enjoy discovering a depth and perspective that you might not have expected to find.

[Frank Jude · Rating 4 out of 5]

This if a wonderful book, from a brilliant writer, thinker, and Buddhist practitioner that manages to work in Dharmic themes into a "slave narrative" unlike any other! The 'voice' at times is incredibly funny and poignant, sometimes at the same time. There's something of a Tristram Shandy flavor at times.
What is perhaps most strikingly original, is that Prof. Johnson has been able to investigate the nature of race and racial identity in a semi-comic, slave narrative that kept me on the edge of my seat, wondering what would befall our protagonist next. And the characters!
Read this book!

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unconventional slave narrative, following the protagonist from his life at Cripplegate, sexual escapades at Leviathan and other such follies. A brilliant young man born of an accidental drunken folly. The names of places are obviously imbued with metaphor. This was written by and from the perspective of a Buddhist. Hard to do justice by review, but a wonderful, engaging, thought provoking novel of the sort one doesn't come upon often. I love this book.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, writes a slave narrative that is a gruesomely funny retelling of a Taoist parable. I'm not familiar enough with the philosophical underpinnings to comment, but the resulting novel reads like a sort of Pilgrim's Progress version of up from slavery. I may have to read some Buddhist background material and take a second run at this, but that's not all bad. I really enjoyed the book.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book which I read years ago, late 80s. The voice is of an educated slave who knows philosophy (as does Johnson). I'm a sucker for educated voices which now philosophy. The narration is strong, the characters unique. READ IT. It's a better book than Johnson's Dreamer, although that is a failed miracle.

[Ian Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was actually really good. Im not sure if i had a hard time with the beginning because i was falling asleep or if i was falling asleep because i wasnt that into it. Once i was in it moved at a really great pace. I will say that there were weird ebbs and flows in the story so it kind of meandered at parts.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

... basically what would happen if Kafka was black and liked zen buddhist parables. I was, quite honestly, overwhelmed by this book, which doesn't really happen all too often any more. Full review to follow.

[Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

My absolute favorite book. If you want to understand the essence of the jouney one must take, read this book.

[Lagobond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like your standard case of domestic violence, in that it follows a predictable pattern of intoxicating highs and punishing lows. It's messy and sometimes downright toilsome to read. With depressing regularity, I'd decide to leave the relationship stop reading. But every time I did, just like flowers and solicitous displays of affection from an abuser, something rewarding came along that kept me wanting more.

Oh yes, Charles R. Johnson can write, but he can painfully ramble too. (I will say I'm curious to see what he wrote later in life.) There are fascinating, grotesquely comical scenes that had me shaking my head in horrified amusement. (The opening scene; the veterinarian's life assurance list.) There's some information about the slavery-era South that I was not familiar with; lots of interesting vocabulary too. There were brilliantly written bits of insight which would have worked well had there been more prelude, but which felt random and meta because they came at the wrong point in the story. There were promising avenues of storytelling that the writer promised to let me wander, only to immediately pull me down some dark, dead-end alley instead.

The entire character of Ezekiel didn't work for me at all. He plainly just served as a vehicle to introduce Buddhist thinking into the story, and to give Andrew Hawkins access to education; however he felt pasted-on and wooden, and frankly was a total bore. The main thing to be said for Ezekiel is that the overly dramatic/romantic descriptions of him, all the way to the end, would have fit into any novel actually written in the 19th century. Hard to believe he wasn't created until around 1980.

The story here is outlandish and yet I am willing to suspend disbelief, because as we know, slavery defies logic and people do strange things, and who am I to say that a journey like Andrew Hakwins' could not have happened. And it's fiction, yes? But it's fiction aspiring to tell a true story of sorts, fiction aiming to show a deeply human experience of the kind which should horrify and disgust any normal person. And certainly there are aspects of it that feel true, but somehow the whole thing is (if we can believe the main character) horrifying and disgusting only in theory. I just can't connect with this narrator!

Johnson shows glimpses of people's lives that let us see things we don't normally see. He draws enlightened parallels between the oppression of black people and women. He tells a story that made me want to know what happens next, and he tells it well when he sticks with the events. He creates truly memorable characters and conversations. This is good stuff, but then he gets lost in endless philosophical ruminations, told in tortured sentences that don't really ring true, and don't serve a purpose, and made me want to a) go to sleep or b) stab my eyeballs with a fork. There are detours in the story that should have been cut (what's up with the Marx/Althea chapter?). Bits of the story are told out of order, and not in a planned way. Did the editor fall asleep, too?!

This book wants to be everything at once, and in the end it's neither here or there. It's a mix of slavery fiction and nonfiction, adventure story, Bildungsroman, seemingly drug-fueled philosophical/moral/religious treatise which oscillates between astuteness and youthful navel-gazing, social commentary (both historical and modern), with a little harlequin romance, a sprinkling of breathtaking sex and a few very quotable bits thrown in. But the parts don't make a whole. The characters are flat and their actions not credible. How is Andrew so very detached the entire time? He's an observer more than a protagonist; he watches and explains and theorizes, but even in the worst depths of his young life, his emotions remain written and read rather than felt. And by the way, some of the information is factually wrong and should have been researched properly, like the pellagra stuff.

3 stars only because I did finish the entire thing, even though I had to jump from page 87 to page 154, finish the end, and then go back to the part I had skipped. It was the only way I could keep myself from giving up at a point when my reading seemed as pointless as Ezekiel's existence.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Hawkins, born of a joke between a white slave owner and his Black servant, can pass for white in antebellum South Carolina if he chooses to. He'll always be on the lookout for slave catchers, including a mysterious "Soul Catcher" who seems to take on the qualities of those he captures or kills, but he'll also evade the racism of his time if he successfully passes. It is a delicate balancing act, and one that could end in his ultimate unmasking.

"Oxherding Tale" by Charles R. Johnson is a pretty good, if not great, fictional slave narrative, clever and never predictable but not quite up to some of the works that came before or after it. Having read "The Good Lord Bird" and "The Underground Railroad," I think I can see traces of Johnson's story in those works by James McBride and Colson Whitehead, respectively. Bur "Oxherding Tale" doesn't quite do as much as those works, and on its own it satisfies in places while not quite working overall.

All this is not to say that it's bad or not entertaining; many of the scenes work as philosophical or comical evocations of an era with real menace for people of color who were enslaved, and the lengths to which they had to go to simply survive. And Andrew is a fantastic narrative voice, a guide to the sort of South that could war with itself over the contradictions of Black/white life amidst slavery as much as it could war with the North to preserve those contradictions. I might change my mind over time about it, but for now I consider "Oxherding Tale" a good but not a great novel that takes a look at life in the antebellum South with more than a few twists and turns for its protagonist, with some real moments of wit and humor spread throughout. Definitely check it out, if you've read actual slave narratives or "The Good Lord Bird."

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a very weird novel, sort of a cross between a slave narrative and Tristram Shandy, with metaphysics thrown in. A white plantation owner and his black butler get drunk, switch places with each other's wives, and the result is Andrew Hawkins, the son of the black George Hawkins and his master's wife. Andrew is a light-skinned person who receives a sound, if somewhat Transcendentalist and Marxist education from a tutor, courtesy of Master Jonathan Polkinghorne, then is sent to a neighboring plantation to work for his freedom and that of his beloved, Minty. Instead he becomes her "boy toy," escapes when he displeases her, and then passes as white, taking Reb, the Coffinmaker, with him. He becomes a teacher, marries a white woman, buys Minty, who is near death, and escapes from the Soulcatcher, a very successful slave catcher, who said he would give up his murderous business if there was one slave whom he couldn't get into his mind. A lot going on in less than 200 pages!

[Alfia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quirky take on the slave narrative written in the 1980s by a Buddhist philosophy nerd. Reminded me of a more imaginative Siddhartha - both earthier and more ethereal - at turns full of pathos, geekiness, humor, and horror. Often beautiful and imaginative use of language. In the author's introduction (which does not include spoilers) he lets us know that this was his passion project, and publishers resisted it for a long time. You can see why, with all the philosophical references and the outsize use of obscure and neologistic language; it doesn't fall into an easily marketable niche. There is some snapping at the publishing industry in the book too. Would definitely read more by him.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I debated between 4 and 5 and wound up on 5. A simple, and in some ways typical, escaped slave story, but there's so much more. There's a humor running through the whole book that often took me by surprise. A lot of philosophy, particularly Eastern, but it doesn't ignore the West. It's a good read, denser than you might think at first, and one where I kept realizing bits here and there as I went. Would recommend.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This grew on me. I found the beginning gratingly implausible - but came to accept that it was a conceit and had needed to be handled allegorically rather than naturalistically. Once I had overcome that hesitancy, the roiling language and the sly humour took hold. The Soulcatcher reminded me of McCarthy's Judge in Blood Meridian, a similarly apocalyptic fever dream. The final fifty pages are truly compelling.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is maybe too smart for its own good. Haven't looked up this many words in I don't know how long. So it's something like a parable or a philosophical rambling or what have you, and as such, there's no getting emotionally involved in the story or characters. Everything represents something else, and it's all very clever, and even witty at times, but in the end one is left saying, "Well, wasn't that interesting," rather than being at all moved.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel fine in gallows humor, by turns bawdy and buttoned up, Oxherding Tale rides on its conceptual brilliance -- the brilliant concept to parody Frederick Douglass' Narrative at the same time as Johnson comments on the contemporary spoils of African American cultural centering. It parodies Douglass the way Melville's Pierre parodies the sentimental novel of the period contemporaneous of Oxherding Tale's action. It critiques Melville's Young America from within the puzzle that was Young America's indifference to slavery. You can't believe Johnson's audacity; but then, it's a very difficult novel, and I couldn't always make out if it achieved all the implication in its concept. Andrew Hawkins grows up from slavery to freedom in the South Carolina of the 1840s. The concept goes something like this: Just as Douglass finds that he must learn not one but two systems of belief -- the lore of Sandy and the Christianity to which Sandy's lore occults itself -- in order to emancipate himself, Johnson's Andrew Hawkins (the mulatto son of a white mother and a black father) learns both a black world and a white world, and frees himself by learning how captive he is. I will add this: Stanley Crouch was absolutely right to remark on the extraordinary event of the University of Indiana being this book's original publisher. A gamble on a fascinating novel.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but not light. Andrew’s journey through the antebellum south is littered with mythical characters made to feel ordinary. Humor, sex and vice cut through the interrogations of philosophy, love, and race. The story takes unexpected turns all the way up until the end.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alternating silly and moving, I the story is more of a parable than I was tracking at first. It's strange and I'd like to revisit it some day. Johnson's a lively and intelligent writer whose work tends to linger long after I'm through.

[Mr. Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m still not fully ready to understand it, but I finished it on my second attempt. I’ll plan read it again in another year — Johnson’s foreword convinces me of the beauty and brilliance of his plan.

[Chris Timmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Johnson is a terrific writer. A true pleasure to read: wildly funny, insightful, rueful, wise.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting! Read it. It’s worth every bits of your attention.

[Wendy Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the first half difficult as it seemed to wander a bit. Very interesting read.

[Michael Kitchen · Rating 1 out of 5]

After forty pages or so I had to abandon this. Wasn't working for me. Maybe I'll try again another time.

[Darla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. No words. Just stunning.

[Diana Eberhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, mysterious, philosophical, beautifully written.