SOURCE: Wills, Gary. “The Long Voyage Home.” New York Review of Books 38, nos. 1/2 (17 January 1991): 3.

In the following review, Wills argues that Johnson's prose style in The Middle Passage transcends traditional ideological formulas about the African-American experience.

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 [in The Middle Passage,] he sounds like a stand-up comic wandered back into the 1820s:

You have seen, perhaps, sketches of Piltdown man? Cover him with coal dust, add deerskin leggings and a cut-away coat tight as wet leather, and you shall have...