SOURCE: Parrish, Timothy L. “Imagining Slavery: Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson.” Studies in American Fiction 25, no. 1 (spring 1997): 81-100.

In the following essay, Parrish compares Johnson's Oxherding Tale with Toni Morrison's Beloved in terms of the slave narrative genre and issues of African-American identity.

The odyssey of the African-American throughout the twentieth century has been one of loss and reclamation. It's about reclaiming those things which were lost during slavery.

—August Wilson

The slave narrative, as Hazel V. Carby points out, differs from the historical novel of slavery in that the prior form is concerned exclusively with how “the ex-slaves ‘wrote [their selves] into being’ through an account of the condition of being a slave.”¹ The contemporary writer, in contrast, can only re-imagine the conditions of slavery, and therefore writes in order to connect the receding past to the living present. This distinction underscores the difference between recalling slavery...