 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson, narrated by Dion Graham. The book begins with the following quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. Homo est quo de modo omnia. And from Robert Hayden's Middle Passage, What port awaits us, Davy Joneses, or home? I've heard of slavers drifting, drifting, play things of wind and storm and chance. Their crews gone blind, the jungle hatred crawling up on deck. And from the Upanishad, who sees variety and not the unity, wanders on from death to death. And now Middle Passage. Lord Dale, Journal of a Voyage Intended by God's Permission in the Republic, African from New Orleans to the Winwood Coast of Africa. Entry, the first, June 14th, 1830. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster I've come to learn is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston school teacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oobliette of the Spanish Calabazo, or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi, or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment. Especially if you knew Isadora. So I went to sea, sailing from Louisiana on April 14th, 1830. Hoping a quarter year aboard a slave clipper would give this relentless woman time to reconsider, and my bill collectors, time to forget they'd ever heard the name Rutherford Calhoun. But what lay ahead in Africa, then later on the open, endless sea, was, as I shall tell you, far worse than the fortune I'd fled in New Orleans. New Orleans, you should know, was a city tailored to my taste for the excessive exotic fringes of life. A world poured of such extravagance in 1829, when I arrived from Southern Illinois, a newly freed barnman, my papers in an old portmanteau, a gift from my master in Wakanda, that I dropped my bags, and a shock of recognition shot up my spine to my throat, rolling off my tongue in a whispered, here, Rutherford is home. So it seemed those first few months to the country boy with cotton in his hair, a great whore of a city in her glory, a kind of glandular golden age. She was, if not a town devoted to an almost religious pursuit of sin, then at least to a steamy sexuality. To the newcomer, she was an assault of smells, molasses co-mingled with mangoes in the centrally damp air, the stench of slop in a muddy street, and, from the labyrinthine warehouses on the docks, the odor of Brazilian coffee and Mexican oils. And also this, the most exquisitely beautiful women in the world, thoroughbreds of pleasure created two centuries before by the French for their enjoyment, molados colored like magnolia petals, quadrunes with breasts big as melons, women who smelled like roses all year round. Home, brother, for a Randy Illinois boy of two and twenty, accustomed to cornfields, cow plops and handjobs in his master's hayloft, knew Orleans wasn't home, it was heaven. But even paradise must have its backside too, and it is here, alas, that the newcomer comes to rest. Upstream, there were waterfront saloons and dives, a black underworld of thieves, gamblers and ne'er-do-wells who, unlike the Creoles downstream, they sniffed down their long continental noses at poor purebred negroes like myself, didn't give a tinker's damn about my family tree, and welcomed me as the world downstream would not. In plain English, I was a petty thief. How I fell into this life of living off others, of being a social parasite, is a long-sworded story, much shortened for those who, like the Greeks, prefer to keep their violence offstage. Naturally, I looked for honest work, but arriving in the city, checking the saloons and negro bars, I found nothing, so I stole. It came a second nature to me. My master, Reverend Peleg Chandler, had noticed this stickiness of my fingers when I was a child, and I... Sample complete. Ready to continue?