Faith and the Good Thing was published by Viking Press in 1974, Johnson’s first novel, written while he was a graduate student in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook under the mentorship of John Gardner. Faith Cross grows up in rural Georgia, raised by her mother and the local conjure woman, the Swamp Woman, who sends her on a quest to find “the Good Thing” — a concept that is never precisely defined but encompasses meaning, truth, purpose, and spiritual fulfillment.
Faith’s journey takes her from the mythic landscape of the rural South to the harsh realities of Chicago’s South Side, where she works as a prostitute, marries a failed artist, and encounters a series of characters — a mad philosopher, a con man, a holy fool — each of whom offers a different answer to the question of what the Good Thing is. The novel moves fluidly between registers: the folk-tale sections are told in the cadences of oral narrative, the Chicago sections in the gritty naturalism of Richard Wright and Ann Petry, and the philosophical interludes in the language of Western and Eastern metaphysics.
The novel announced Johnson’s ambition to create a new form of African American fiction — one that engaged with the full range of world philosophy rather than being confined to the sociological and protest traditions that had dominated Black American writing. That ambition would find its fullest expression in Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, but the seeds are present here.
Collecting Faith and the Good Thing
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80