What I’m Reading Next
Last night at our KM Dharma Book Group, we started talking about what we’d like to read next. One of the titles I mentioned is Oxherding Tale, by Charles Johnson, which is (as he describes in the introduction) “a slave narrative that in its progress parallels the Ten Oxherding Pictures depicting a young man who believes he has lost his ox (a Chinese symbol for the self), searches for and finds it, then–in the final, startling panels–the ox (self) disappears, leaving only the young man who returns to the village ‘with bliss-bestowing hands.'”
Wow.
The book begins begins like this:
Long ago my father and I were servants at Cripplegate, a cotton plantation in South Carolina. That distant place, the world of my childhood, is ruin now, mere parable, but what history I have begins there in an unrecorded accident before the Civil War, late one evening when my father, George Hawkins, still worked in the Big House, watched over his owner’s interests, and often drank with his Master–that was Jonathan Polkinghorne–on the front porch after a heavy meal. It was a warm night. An autumn night of fine-spun moonlight blurred first by Madeira, then home-brewed beer as they played Rummy, their feet propped on the knife-whittled porch rail, the dark two-story house behind them, creaking sometimes in the wind. My father had finished his chores early, for he was (he says) the best butler in the country, and took great pride in his position, but he wasn’t eager to go home. He stayed clear of his cabin when my stepmother played host for the Ladies Prayer Circle. They were strange, George thought. Those women were harmless enough by themselves, when sewing or cleaning, but together their collective prayers has a mysterious power that filled his whitewashed cabin with presences–Shades, he called them, because they moved furniture in the cabin, destroyed the laws of physics, which George swore by, and drove him outside to sleep in the shed. (Not that my father knew a whole lot about physics, being a slave, but George knew sorcery when he saw it, and he kept his distance.)
***
I’m not sure this is the right book for the KM group. But I’m going for it!
[…] week I posted that I was starting to read Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson. I had been reluctant to read it at […]