Thereafter Johnnie
A Black family’s traumas are the focus of Carolivia Herron’s rending novel Thereafter Johnnie, in which a bereaved daughter examines her origins.
At first, Johnnie is a solitary “light,” condemned to haunt a former Carnegie library. She recalls being an infant and feeling her mother Patricia’s pain. Patricia was abused by Johnnie’s father, John Christopher, a prominent Washington, DC, heart surgeon. She was paid to disappear, in part because Johnnie’s birth was visible proof of his sins. But in her fractured soul, Patricia still loved John.
Narrated with feverish urgency, the novel explores the family’s secrets. Johnnie’s early revelation that Patricia drowned herself in the Potomac results in suspense. And Johnnie is incisive, omitting nothing during her quest to understand her mother’s suicide. She conjures the sea and imagines her birth city in epic terms.
John’s manipulative eroticism and pride complicates his characterization. His wife, Camille, sets aside her suffocating anguish to aid Patricia’s exit from their neighborhood. The plot is further fueled by questions surrounding how Johnnie bore her grief.
The prophetic narration circles through Johnnie’s memories and spirals toward events beyond her purview, with the blanks filled in by Patricia’s sisters. Experimental chapters from John’s perspective—one concerning surgery, the other portraying his daughters as enchanted witches—reveal his malformed ego alongside his sharp assessments of others. People’s resilience glimmers, too, even when they must fabricate myths to understand their circumstances. From casting Patricia as a seductress to placing blame elsewhere, the tragedy is amplified through unsettling considerations of other angles. Stark coverage of Johnnie’s lineage, which is marked by enslavement and rape, concludes the novel, hinting that the intimate crimes began long ago.
A dazzling novel about generational harm, Thereafter Johnnie portrays a family’s visceral downfall.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
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