Black Bottom saints A novel

The heyday of twentieth-century Black culture is usually associated with New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville. But Detroit's Black Bottom surpassed the larger cities. So declares Ziggy Johnson, renowned dance teacher, club emcee, and entertainment columnist. On his deathbed, Ziggy recalls the splendor of a career spent in the company of entertainment luminaries and the striving Black middle and working classes. Ziggy drops and weaves names, including Dinah Washington, Bobby Short, Count Basie, Joe Louis, Josephine Baker, and Bricktop, with a nod towards a famed bartender, Thomas Bullock. Ziggy closes each entry with the recipe for a Bullock libation. Interwoven with Ziggy's accounts is the story of Colored Girl, one of Ziggy's most promising students. Colored Girl is tending to a dying and embittered mother who holds many secrets to her daughter's cherished memories of Detroit. Randall, author of the acclaimed Wind Done Gone (2001) and Ada's Rules (2012), draws on a real-life Ziggy Johnson, using his charisma and connections to reveal untold stories of Detroit and to celebrate an incredible network of artists and influences and the many ways of building community through church and club work but also through entertainment venues. This is an exuberant celebration of the arts, including the arts of living well and caring for others.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Each of Randall's books is a literary event, and readers will embrace this radiant celebration of African American art and culture.

Randall returns to adult fiction (after The Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess) with a sprawling and intimate genre-bending chronicle of the adventures and tribulations of the extraordinary real-life Detroit emcee and theater director Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson (1913--1968). Through a narrative shaped as a book of saints's biographies, from poet Robert Hayden to singer Ethel Waters, Ziggy records his encounters with 16 famous and lesser-known characters who made Black Bottom, the commercial and residential heart of Detroit's black community in the early 20th century, into a destination for "breadwinners" fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of a better life. As Ziggy reflects on his life from his deathbed, the reader learns about the family he made from strangers and students--most notably the tennis player Althea Gibson, referred to throughout as "Colored Girl." Randall's portrait of black America sheds light on cultural history through startlingly personal moments, such as Ziggy dropping his Women's Club aunt Sadye Pryor's name for social currency. Whether chronicling famous historical figures or local characters, Randall makes Ziggy's saints worthy of his reflection. This works as a memorable love letter to Detroit, as well as a remarkable tableau. Agent: Marie Dutton Brown, Marie Brown Assoc. (Aug.)

An accomplished songwriter (e.g., "XXX's and OOO's"), NAACP award winner for Soul Food Love, and Phillis Wheatley Award winner for her YA literature, Randall also writes adult fiction, including the myth-challenging The Wind Done Gone. Here, as erstwhile nightclub emcee and gossip columnist Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson lies dying, he decides to compile a book of 52 saints (e.g., Dinah Washington, Joe Louis) he knew from Detroit's Black Bottom during the Great Depression to post-World War II years.

The last testament of an African American showbiz insider is here rendered as an impassioned, richly detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking evocation of black culture in 20th century Detroit and beyond. Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson (1913-1968) was a real-life nightclub impresario, dance studio instructor, and entertainment columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper based in Detroit. As this book begins, Ziggy is near death and also near completion of what he characterizes as a "book of saints," a collection of profiles and reminiscences of more than 50 personalities, famous, obscure, and in-between, who "whispered encouragement and clapped…forward" him and generations of those soul-nourished and otherwise entertained in the book's legendary "Black Bottom" neighborhood during the ascendant and boom years of the city's auto industry. At its outset, this hybrid of portrait gallery, cultural history, and dramatized biography seems to resemble a grand literary equivalent of a "Youth Colossal," one of Ziggy's annual Father's Day nightclub recitals that one of his saints, the poet Robert Hayden, likens to "a W.E.B. DuBois pageant." But as the portraits accumulate and grow in depth and breadth, they make up an absorbing and poignant account of a glittering age in the life of a once-thriving metropolis. The portraits are punctuated by celebratory "libations," some of which have so much hard liquor and sugar cubes as to make one fear diabetic shock. Included among Ziggy's saints: heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; funeral parlor tycoon and political leader Charles Diggs Sr.; NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Dick "Night Train" Lane, who had "come up all kinds of hard, but [whose] ambition was green and vibrant"; UAW negotiator Marc Stepp; actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom Ziggy describes as "the lady who knows no color"); theater director Lloyd George Richards; dancer Lucille Ellis; Sammy Davis Jr., who pops up throughout the narrative, characterized by Ziggy at one point as a "little genius"; Maxine Powell, who taught Motown Records' stable of emerging stars how to comport themselves on- and offstage; and, at the tail end, Ziggy himself, whose narrative voice is seasoned with such idiosyncrasies as referring to black folks in general as "sepians" and characterizing black factory workers who made up his readers and audiences as "breadwinners." This last tribute is likely the work of the unofficial collaborator whose own story and embellishments enhance this tapestry. She is referred to throughout as "Colored Girl," but one suspects she is a surrogate for Randall, a Detroit native whose experiences writing country music likely account for the lyricism, pathos, and down-home humor in her narrative. If Randall's book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.