Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
The Long Voyage Home
By Garry Wills
Middle Passage
by Charles Johnson
Atheneum, 209 pp., $17.95
Rutherford Calhoun is a naive wiseacre, a freed slave brought up on a remote Illinois farm, where an abolitionist stuffed his head with learning to arm him against a hostile white world, then set him loose on the streets of New Orleans where, at age twenty-two, he whores and steals, gambles and runs up debts, and tries to control danger with a distancing ridicule. As Charles Johnson presents him, he sounds like a stand-up comic wandered back into the 1820s:
Review, 1331 words
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