Tom Feelings and The Middle Passage

have walked on Goree Island, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, marveling at the way the tranquil beauty of the island belies its painful history, and yet is a vital part of it. I have visited the Slave House, peered into the ground-floor dungeon cells designed for holding captives, and toured the luxurious upstairs living quarters reserved for their captors. I have stood at the “Door of No Return” and imagined what it would feel like to walk through that arched passageway, and be rowed, in shackles, to a winged monster waiting to swallow me into its bowels and carry me away — forever — from the only life, the only family, the only language, and the only place that I had known. The experience was profoundly moving.

That was more than ten years ago, but now Tom Feelings, in The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (Dial), evokes some of the same emotions by taking up the story of what happened when our African ancestors passed through that door and the doors of other slave forts along the coast of West Africa and were packed in ships bound for the Americas. The European slave trade to which they fell prey was triangular in form. Ships sailed from Europe to Africa to procure captives, then on to the Americas to deposit their human cargo and pick up rum and other exports, and back to Europe. The leg of the triangle that led from Africa to the Americas was known as the middle passage, and its story is one of the most horrific tales of human history. In his introduction to the Feelings book, historian John Henrik Clarke estimates that between thirty and sixty million Africans were captured and put on ships headed to the Americas, but only about one third of them survived. That so many perished is testament to the intolerable conditions of the journey.

This book was twenty years in the making, and it is intimately tied to the personal history and philosophy of Tom-Feelings-as-artist. His art has always been uncompromisingly devoted to reflecting the story(ies) of black people. All of his book illustrations (indeed all of his art works — he is also a sculptor) have been on African or African-American themes. His pictures reflect black life experiences, and he has tried to reflect back to black people — children, especially — the beauty he sees in us. He calls himself a storyteller, and regards his picture-book illustration as an extension of the African oral tradition, the tradition of the griot and of the storyteller for whom story serves to instruct as well as to entertain; and in that sense, his book illustration has always been functional as well as beautiful.

Feelings grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. After a stint in the Air Force, he attended art school in the late 1950s to study painting and illustration. It was not long before he discovered that black subject matter was thought to have limited appeal, and African art was considered “primitive” and therefore not valued as highly as “high art.” He left art school, since there was no space there for him and the kind of work he wanted to do. His first major project was a comic strip, “Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History,” which he sold to a Harlem newspaper. In the early sixties, he did a great deal of drawing from life, recording and interpreting black life as he saw it on the streets and in the bars, school, and homes of Bed-Stuy, and during a stint in the American South. In 1964, motivated by a desire to work for the benefit of a recently independent African country, Feelings moved to Ghana, where he worked as a staff illustrator for the Ghana Government Publishing House for two years. It was a Ghanaian friend who asked the question that became the seed for The Middle Passage: “What happened to all of you when you were taken away from here?” This book is his answer.

In this powerful and dramatic pictorial narrative, Feelings relates the detailed story of that dreadful journey, beginning with a panoramic painting representing idyllic African life before the introduction of the European slave trade, and ending with the landing of the slave ship and its human cargo somewhere in the Americas. On the dust jacket the reader is placed inside one of the small boats rowing from a “door of no return” out to a sailing ship. We become witness to it all — the unevenly matched battles in the villages, the tribal chiefs selling other Africans into slavery in return for European weapons and goods, the forced march to the sea, the loading of the ship. Once on the ship, we witness the brandings and the beatings, the rats and the rapes, the suffering and the suicides, the expiring of the weak and the executing of the rebellious. We watch the crew dumping bodies overboard and the sharks waiting to feast on their remains. And yet, these captives cannot be defined merely by labeling them slaves or victims. Feelings conveys a sense of the strength, the resilience, the very humaneness of the Africans who made the journey to the New World. The penultimate painting, showing the final landing, celebrates in some sense the survival of the black cargo of the title. A black figure looks symbolically toward the future, head high, the misery of the long passage stretched out behind him, but a still a part of him. All about him, even though the shackles remain, are signs of survival, signs of hope, signs of life — a woman holding a baby, the head of a child, a pregnant woman, a man sifting soil through his hand. The final painting shows three faces, suffused with strength, facing right, looking forward, a coffle of captive Africans behind them, the sun before them, and the light of the sun reflected in their faces — a triumph of survival.

The black-and-white paintings, combining abstraction and realism, were created using white tempera paint, black ink, and wet tissue paper. In our recent telephone conversation, Feelings explained that he started using tissue paper when he was in art school and did not have money to buy more expensive materials. For this book, he thought it was a particularly apt choice because it is a reminder of the way the enslaved Africans in this country also made creative use of the materials that were at hand, “doing more with less.” Feelings begins with design and abstract shapes, and through many sketches and drawings, eventually produces a final drawing, which he transfers to a rough, textured board. He goes over this drawing with pen and ink, and then paints white tempera, which is water-based, over the areas that are to remain light or highlighted. On top of this he places wet tissue paper, which causes the ink and the tempera to run together. He continues to work with the wet tissue paper, ink, tempera, and the line art until he achieves the depth he wants. Because the tissue paper is so delicate, and because the ink and paper run when wet, this process keeps him “on the edge,” as he expresses it — exercising some control and allowing some things to just happen, not knowing exactly what will result, risking the possibility that he may have to discard the whole painting and start again. That improvisational process, he believes, is vital to his work. He refers to it as “improvising within a restricted form,” and compares it to black music, such as jazz and blues.

Black music was, in fact, an important part of the process. Feelings says that all during the time he was working on these paintings, he listened to music. The music energized him: “It revved me up. When you listen to black music, you don't hear just one thing. For example, when James Brown screams/shouts, 'I feel good!', you hear an intense mixture of joy and pain. In black culture, joy and pain don't just sit side by side, they interact, and build on each other.” This interaction of the opposing forces of joy and pain is, in Feelings's view, a characteristic of black life and culture in America, and it is basic to all of his work with African-American themes. Movement and rhythm are also important elements in Feelings's work, and what he calls a “dance-consciousness,” all of which he sees as reflective of an African cultural heritage.

These qualities in Feelings's work have been evident since his first picture book illustrations. Many of the early picture books — for example, the Caldecott Honor books ]ambo Means Hello and Moja Means One (both Dial), with texts by Muriel Feelings — were set in Africa. These books were illustrated after he had spent time in both West and East Africa, where he had “learned to reflect into the pictures the light and warmth” he had seen there. Using the white tempera paint, he had been able to create the impression of warm light both surrounding and glowing within from dark skin.

But in this book, the way the tempera was applied gives a different impression. When I commented on the ghost-like quality of the Europeans pictured in The Middle Passage, Feelings explained, “There is a difference between light and white. One has a luminous quality, the other is the absence of color. In European languages there are so many negative connotations for the word black, and mainly positive ones for white. I wanted to turn things around so that you have to look at them another way. Instead of seeing white as open and pure, I wanted to make it seem enclosed and negative.” He further explained that, in order to create these paintings, “I had to go back to that time and try to see the world as the Africans were seeing it; seeing people I had never seen before, looking just the opposite from me.” Having learned to reflect light and warmth in dark faces, he now had to portray the European faces as the Africans must have seen them, where “white became the absence of color.” These spectral, seemingly inhuman, images are reminders, as well, that the crews of the slave ships could not have remained unaffected by the evil in which they participated.

This “oppositeness” of black and white is at the very core of our history as a nation, and was the catalyst for one of the most significant social forces operating today. In All Times, All Peoples: A World History of Slavery (Harper), Milton Meltzer reminds us that, “White, black, brown, yellow, red — no matter what your color, it's likely that someone in your family, way back, was once a slave.” According to Meltzer, slavery has been a part of human history since the development of farming made it profitable to use captured enemies to do the work of the victors. Prior to that time, defeated enemies were killed because there was not enough food to feed the extra mouths. What distinguished the European/American brand of bondage was the link that was forged between slavery and race. Meltzer writes: “Up until 300 years ago, there seems to have been no connection between race and slavery. But just about 300 years ago arose the mistaken belief that whites were superior to people of any other color, and that this superior race had the right to rule others. That racist belief — shared by many of the Founding Fathers — justified the enslavement of Blacks.” Because we are still living with the consequences of the widespread acceptance of that rationale, it is important for all of us to confront this painful history, just as it is important for all of us to confront the history of the Jewish Holocaust and the accounts of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. In these days, when armed hate groups are appearing more and more frequently on the landscape, we need to remember how easy it is for ordinary people, by simply refusing to see evil, to help it thrive.

In telling this story from the perspective of the African captives, Tom Feelings wants us to remember the evils of slavery, but, more important, to see and remember and affirm the humanity, the strength, the vital life energy of those captives and their descendants. In a prepared statement, Feelings quotes writer Paule Marshall: “We are a people who transform humiliating experiences into creative ones.” The creative, life-affirming responses to slavery, according to Feelings, were derived in part from traditional African celebratory rites and are “evident in Black music. Black dance, and the world of athletics — wherever there is a level playing field.” In such arenas, he states, “we innovate, improvise within that restricted form, and transcend it, raising the level of excellence.” Feelings sees himself as responsible for carrying on this tradition through his art. “As a storyteller in picture form, as an African who was born in America, how could I do anything else but try and live up to that legacy and become a vehicle for this profound dramatic history to pass through?”

As an instrument of transmission. Feelings has been fine-tuned. This long-awaited response to the question of what happened to the captives who were taken away from the African continent is a singular achievement. It deserves a place among the major texts of American history.

Rudine Sims Bishop is Professor of Education at Ohio State University and author of Presenting Walter Dean Myers (Twayne). Her column on books from parallel cultures appears frequently in the Horn Book.