Carolivia Herron
Thereafter Johnnie
carolivia@carolivia.org
Carolivia Herron’s first novel, Thereafter Johnnie (Random House, 1991) describes the fall of an African American family in Washington, DC, through the turmoil of incest and selfishness.
The novel has been praised for its poetic language and crafted epic vision by such publications as The New York Times and The London Sunday Times.
The novel is currently out of stock at Random House. While it is out of stock, you may purchase copies directly from the author by contacting her at carolivia@carolivia.org.
From the first chapter, Vesperus
Now she is a light flitting through the halls of the Old Carnegie Library. They closed it down, then gave it to the University of the District of Columbia. They stopped having classes there. The black folk left, went up into the Allegheny Mountains when the war started. She gets brighter as evening comes on.
Excerpts from reviews
Extraordinary . . . At once descriptive and meditative; a blues lament, a rap . . . Herron's novel explores the politics of race and gender in an uncompromising light. Thereafter Johnnie is true to life in the way that dreams - or nightmares- can be.
Newsweek
Uncompromising . . . dazzling, groundbreaking and important . . . a mythological narration of incest and national identity. Herron employs idioms borrowed from epic poetry, fairy tales, scripture, street vernacular, and rhythms and blues lyrics. And she gets away with it all. Carolivia Herron has captured the soul of our nation. She has become a light.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Powerful, poetic . . . openly erotic . . . it has some of the grandeur of purpose of Ulysses, reaching as it does, back to stories of early slavery and forward to an abandoned Washington . . . impressive.
Washington Post
Rich and troubling in the classical sense, brilliant in its bones and technically adventurous. The truths within are not polished truths - they are coarse, shocking and battered at the edges . . . . Comparisons to Joyce are inevitable; the author's sense of epic is evident, and her prose — and point of view — know no charted course. For weeks after reading Thereafter Johnnie, one is still a captive of her sparse and startling language.
Houston Post
Like myth itself . . . profoundly human yet larger than life. With its broad sweep, its complex imagery drawn from Old and New World cultures and its pervasive tone of universality, it is more than a saga of black revitalization. Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.
The New York Times
Carolivia Herron adds family and religion to the tragic conscience of American society. But she does it in a splendid way, by creating the origins of the Black communities of the New World, their epic resilience, their clear-sighted disenchantment, their prayer for a time to heal, a time to transform experience into knowledge. Let me salute Herron's achievement: the creation of the origins in order to have a future - even if it be a tragic one.
Carlos Fuentes
