Oxherding Tale was published by Indiana University Press in 1982. Andrew Hawkins is born on a South Carolina plantation — the result of a drunken wife-swap between Jonathan Polkinghorne, the plantation master, and George Hawkins, his butler and slave. Andrew grows up in an unusual position: educated by his father’s tutor (a transcendentalist who introduces him to Eastern philosophy), but legally a slave, the property of a man who may be his biological father.
The novel follows Andrew’s escape from the plantation, his education in both Western and Eastern thought, and his pursuit by Horace Bannon, the Soulcatcher — a bounty hunter of almost supernatural ability who tracks escaped slaves by sensing their inner turmoil. The structure parallels the ten Zen oxherding pictures, a traditional Buddhist sequence depicting the stages of enlightenment: the search for the ox (the true self), the discovery, the taming, the return to the world.
Johnson’s fusion of the slave narrative with Buddhist philosophy is not a gimmick but a genuine philosophical argument: the condition of slavery, he suggests, is not only a political and physical condition but a metaphysical one — the identification of the self with the body and its social position. Liberation, therefore, requires not just physical escape but a transformation of consciousness. The novel’s picaresque structure allows Johnson to explore this argument through a series of encounters — with transcendentalists, with freeborn Blacks, with abolitionists, with the Soulcatcher — each of which tests Andrew’s evolving understanding of freedom.
Collecting Oxherding Tale
First edition (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80
- Signed: $100–$300