But sometimes the big sisters leave and, with her
parents, the narrator becomes one of three in the
story she is telling. This particular story, like many
of her other works, highlights Johnson’s celebra-
tory tone that reflects the rich cultural traditions
of African-American oral heritage.
The First Part Last is a companion novel to
Johnson’s Heaven (1998), the story of a young
girl, Marley, discovering her true family identity.
Johnson narrates just how Bobby, the single father
for whom Marley babysits in Heaven, landed in
that small Ohio town. Beginning his story when
his daughter, Feather, is just 11 days old, 16-year-
old Bobby tells his story in chapters that alternate
between the present and the bittersweet past that
has brought him to the point of single parent-
hood. This father-daughter tale skillfully relates
the need for hope in the midst of pain. Johnson
continually addresses themes that traverse gen-
der barriers, age, and ethnic differences while
maintaining an understanding and reflection of
African-American heritage.
Reviewers have praised Johnson for her engag-
ing, first-person narration and simple texts while
commending the emotional depth and sensitivity
of her stories. She has received numerous awards,
including the Coretta Scott King Award for her
book When I Am Old with You and the 2004
Coretta Scott King Award in Writing and the 2004
Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young
Adult Literature for The First Part Last. Johnson
lives and writes in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dewind, Anna. “Angela Johnson.” African Ameri-
can Literature Book Club. Available online. URL:
http://aalbc.com/authors/angela.htm. Accessed
October 17, 2006.
Kindra Briggs
Johnson, Charles (1948– )
Charles Richard Johnson was born at the all-black
Community Hospital of Evanston, Illinois, to
Benny Lee and Ruby Elizabeth Johnson. Johnson
attended Southern Illinois University at Carbon-
dale, where he began a literary apprenticeship
with the novelist John Gardner. During a summer
in which Johnson worked in Chicago, he met his
future wife Joan New, to whom Johnson has been
married since 1970; they have two children. While
at Southern Illinois, Johnson began the intensely
productive working schedule that has character-
ized his whole writing life. Working as a satirical
cartoonist, Johnson produced his first two books,
Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time
(1972). Before Gardner taught him to slow down,
and while he was working toward a Ph.D. at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook’s phi-
losophy department, Johnson rapidly composed
six novels and numerous short stories. His gradu-
ate training and research focused on Marxism
and phenomenology. Johnson left Stony Brook
before submitting his thesis, and in 1998 he was
awarded a Ph.D. for the publication of Being and
Race (1988).
Johnson has published four novels, begin-
ning with Faith and the Good Thing (1974). The
comically rendered spiritual quest of the epony-
mous heroine Faith was well reviewed, but it was
Johnson’s second novel, Oxherding Tale (1982),
that really captured the attention of readers and
received glowing reviews. As a result, Grove Press
republished the novel, and Johnson became an es-
tablished writer. Oxherding Tale is, like Johnson’s
first novel and like MIDDLE PASSAGE (1990), a pi-
caresque quest for freedom. The journey of pro-
tagonist Andrew Hawkins is explicitly modeled on
the life of FREDERICK DOUGLASS, though Johnson’s
neo–slave narrative is a (sometimes shockingly)
postmodern variation of well-known themes.
This playful treatment of even the direst situa-
tions, like Brecht’s alienation effect, aims at “lib-
eration of perception.” Johnson won the National
Book Award for Middle Passage before turning his
attention to MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., in his next
novel, Dreamer (1997). Arguing in essays such as
“The King We Left Behind” that Americans have
settled for a hagiographic version of King in place
of the political volatility of the actual King, John-
son refreshes this perception through a fictional
reimagination of King as he took his antipoverty
campaign into Chicago in the last months of his278 Johnson, Charles