FICTION
‘Welcome to Braggsville’
by T. Geronimo Johnson
William Morrow/Harper Collins Publishers
384 pages, $25.99
T. Geronimo Johnson rolls out “Welcome to Braggsville” as an amusing post-hip varsity novel set on the University of California’s Berkeley campus rife with fanciful academic jargon, where radical theoreticians probe the reality underlying reality: Could it be that “race,” like “gender,” is nothing more than a “performance?”
For a working-class Southern boy like D’aron Davenport, the Left Coast presents a daunting intellectual landscape, but his three new friends help the former high school valedictorian absorb the tectonic shocks. There’s Charlie, “a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin”; Louis Chang, “a Malaysian who looked Chinese and (wanted to be) the next Lenny Bruce Lee”; and Candice, D’aron’s love interest, “a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American.”
An unpredictable storyteller, Johnson abruptly swerves the action from Berkeley to the sticks. The “4 Little Indians,” as they call themselves, arrange a cross-country mission to the Pride Week Patriot Days Festival, an annual Civil War reenactment held in D’aron’s hometown in Braggsville, Ga., population 712.
The author sums up the potential for animosity: “Bezerkeley and Braggsville were two worlds always on opposite sides of the sun.”
Surprisingly, things go well at D’aron’s homecoming barbecue, thanks to the hospitality of his parents. D’aron’s roommate, Louis Chang, a talented comedian, steps forward with a winning stand up routine: “Hello, Braggsville! You don’t know me. I’m Chinese, but I had a typical American upbringing. I was also beaten by the Vietnamese.”
For the following day’s reenactment, the Berkeley squad has covertly organized a “performative intervention.” It’s a political art statement, kind of a neo-Yippie stunt they intend to document for a class project. As the Yankee/Rebel drama plays out in the background, one of the students, in the role of “Master,” orders his three “Slaves” to engage in a series of absurd tasks. Unfortunately the harebrained prank is designed to end with a fake lynching, which backfires in a lethal misadventure for one of D’aron’s chums.
In the aftermath, there’s ongoing mystery regarding the involvement of certain re-enactors in the death. Of course, D’aron is cast as the mastermind behind the debacle, since he’s from Braggsville. His surviving pals are whisked away to safer harbors, and he is left alone to grieve. Reflecting on the schoolboy condescension he has picked up in Berkeley, his mother explains, “College makes you smart, it doesn’t make other people stupid.”
A judicial hearing becomes a media spectacle that attracts both Klansmen and the Nubian Fellowship (“a three-legged jackass black separatist cult”). A hovering FBI agent warns D’aron about the possibility of militia activity in Braggsville, but it’s up to him to identify, if only for himself, the source of racist control that’s layered within the community’s old-time social structures.
To the world, Braggsville is promoted as “The City That Love Built in the Heart of Georgia.” Youngsters who live there call it “Draggsville,” a place where “every wrong turn was a dead end.” For decades, the local economy has been centered on the Kenny Hot Air Factory. But most townspeople are oblivious to the subterranean worlds hidden in plain sight: the Gully and the Holler.
The Gully is an “unincorporated” African-American village that has survived for almost two centuries with its rich symbological traditions intact. Despite the boondoggle of the Patriot Days event, residents here admire the principles behind the performative intervention, and D’aron is made to feel welcome.
Not so in the Holler; an “inexplicable depression” in the landscape with a haunted legacy — people have been rumored to get lost there for years. In better days, people in the Holler shared root remedies with folks in the Gully, but its quaint evangelical church has been replaced by a sinister “hunting lodge,” scattered with racist tracts and framed photographs of Braggsville founders. It is there that D’aron is brought up on “treason” charges at a mock “Sovereign” trial presided over by hooded judges.
“We’re not a militia,” D’aron is informed, “We’re a collective. The world is changing [and] we’re fixing to be a minority-majority country.” He recognizes former classmates and members of his father’s generation. The gavel falls in a weird climax that makes for a white power version of “Rosemary’s Baby.”
T. Geronimo Johnson lived in Atlanta for 20 years. “Welcome to Braggsville” is his second novel. It’s an ambitious book, and he handles with aplomb the complexities of growing-up, with its cumbrous transitions. Despite the story’s dark turn, there’s humor in the wonder of oracular pronouncements (“Only twice-cut trees stay down,” says D’aron’s Nana. “Beavers build dams with the bones of fallen men”).
Having taught at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Johnson is sympathetic to abstruse philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, he holds colleagues responsible — at least in this work of imagination — for their encouragement of the “performative” lynching debacle: “Uprooted from the soil of lived truth, none of their theories, French philosophers, or social justice creeds amounted to a hill of beans, and would not grow a beanstalk if they did.”
“Welcome to Braggsville” offers some consolation in its celebration of white and black folkways; racial differences in the small town are reconciled on a more cosmic terrain. Still, the old hatred dies hard, and T. Geronimo Johnson is obliged inevitably to set aside his nuanced (and magical) perspectives, sending forth a starburst of judgment: “Racism is the white man’s problem. He started it, and he needs to fix it.”
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