Middle Passage

Middle Passage is a 1990 historical novel by Charles R. Johnson about the final voyage of an illegal American slave ship. Set in 1830, the novel presents a personal and historical perspective of the illegal slave trade in the United States, telling the story of Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave who unknowingly boards a slave ship bound for Africa in order to escape a forced marriage. The novel won the National Book Award in 1990. The protagonist is Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave, who flees from New Orleans on a ship called the Republic to escape being blackmailed into marriage by Isadora Bailey, a schoolteacher who convinces Calhoun's creditor, Papa, to demand Calhoun pays him all he owes if he will not consent to marry Isadora....