In 1830 New Orleans, Rutherford Calhoun, a recently freed, educated, and thoroughly irresponsible young man, is being pressed by his creditor into marriage with the schoolteacher Isadora Bailey. To escape, he stows away on the Republic โ only to discover she is an illegal slave ship bound for West Africa to buy captives from the Allmuseri people. Put to work as a crewman, Calhoun keeps a log of the tyrannical Captain Falcon's regime, the crew's plotting, the horrors inflicted on the captured Allmuseri, and the strange, revered object stolen from them and hidden aboard. Rebellion by the captives, mutiny, storm, and disease remake everyone on the voyage, and Calhoun is changed by his proximity to both the enslaved and their enslavers. Blending sea adventure, picaresque comedy, and philosophical inquiry, the novel โ winner of the 1990 National Book Award for Fiction โ turns a flight from responsibility into an education in freedom and obligation.
Author: Charles Johnson ยท Original publisher: Atheneum Publishers (New York), 1990
