Poignant mash-up examines gender, race
Welcome to Braggsville T. Geronimo Johnson William Morrow
The basic storyline of T. Geronimo Johnson’s novel Welcome to Braggsville is straightforward and intriguing: Take four young, liberal-minded students at the University of California at Berkeley. Then send them on a class project that includes a fake lynching to be sprung during a Civil War reenactment in a small Georgia town. What possibly could go wrong? In Johnson’s telling, a lot can go wrong — both funny and frightful — as this cross-country mash-up of cultures provides a potent learning experience for the novel’s central figure, D’aron Davenport.
D’aron is a bright, gentle white student who grew up in Braggsville but fled to the more intellectually challenging environs of Berkeley. There he becomes fast friends with three classmates — Charlie, a black athlete; Louis, a Malaysian with plans to be a standup comic; and Candice, a blond from Iowa whom D’aron would like to know as more than a friend.
While this may be the basic plot and cast of main characters, Johnson does not follow convention when it comes to structure and style. The narrative, for example, opens with a single sentence that runs on for more than a page of hip-hop-infused lingo that introduces D’aron through his youthful years — “D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses …” — all leading up to his first day at Cal.
Over the course of the novel, scenes and events generally unfold in a more customary form, but the chronology is purposely choppy and the dialogue at times encourages a second, closer reading. These narrative diversions and jazzy prose riffs will frustrate some readers but thrill others.
Racial and gender issues are spun around by Johnson as D’aron is filled with dread over the mock lynching and its aftermath. But as 21st-century U.S. culture crisscrosses with the nation’s history, Johnson’s story evokes more than satirical humour.