SOURCE: Hayward, Jennifer. “Something to Serve: Constructs of the Feminine in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature 25, no. 4 (winter 1991): 689-703.

In the following essay, Hayward discusses Johnson's representation of women and the feminine in Oxherding Tale.

In the seventh chapter of Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, Andrew Hawkins, a fugitive slave, watches a family's morning routine from his hiding place in the loft of their barn. While carrying a bucket of fresh milk up to the house, the father spills some “in an accident so suggestive of casual abundance and unconscious prosperity, of surplus and generosity, that I cannot now, with pen or tongue, make you feel the wretchedness and envy that descended upon me, the fugitive, as I watched this white family dine. Beyond this, I thought, there was nothing of lasting value” (107).

This scene seems to me to condense the novel's most urgent themes: the slave...