Black Bottom Saints: A Novel

by Alice Randall Narrated by Prentice Onayemi, Imani Parks

Overview

An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James' Man Booker Award-winning masterpiece, A Brief History of Seven Killings.

From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit's famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city's African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he's rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.

As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it.

Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom's venerable ""52 Saints."" Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life ""Saints"" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City's Harlem.

Accompanying these “tributes” are thoughtfully paired cocktails-special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy's saints-libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall's wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Black Bottom Saints offers Randall's multihued genius -- as author of country music compositions, historical fiction, magazine profiles, essays, editorials, children's books, and screenplays -- a splendid venue to shine as she creates a magical world worthy of her magnificent gifts." - Michael Eric Dyson
“an exuberant celebration of the arts…”  - Booklist
"Rave."
- Literary Hub
“Randall writes this genre-bending story of black achievement with all the zing and fizz of the cocktail recipes sprinkled among the prose profiles of the community’s 'saint' figures – all of whom, including the narrator, are fictionalised versions of real people.” - Monocle Magazine
“The novel's considerable power lies in Randall's vivid conjuring of 20th-century Black lives, Black genius and unforgettable dish. This joyous novel is an act of collective memory.”  - Shelf Awareness
"I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and really love this book. So many stories, our stories, Mom's, Bricktop Valda Grey...so many of us NEED to know these stories. Brava, Bravo!" - Whoopi Goldberg
"This is the way it was."  - Artis Lane
“A rambunctious portrait of the “caramel Camelot” that was Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood from the late 1930s to the late 1960s." - New York Times
“Alluring cocktail of a novel."  - O, the Oprah Magazine
“…no book has ever brought Detroit’s Black Camelot as radiantly to life as Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints." - New York Journal of Books
“Intriguing and beguiling." - BookPage
“…a gorgeous swirl of fiction." - NPR's Fresh Air
“This works as a memorable love letter to Detroit, as well as a remarkable tableau.” - Publishers Weekly
"Black Bottom Saints is a tour-de-force; a toast to a mystical, gritty place; a tableau of Black arts and culture centering on Detroit City. Within these finely crafted and luminous pages that readers will never want to leave, Randall has resurrected a lost glitter world. Here, Detroit’s original and best Black neighborhood, with its brilliant, yearning, brave, maddening, and ultimately mortal residents, bursts to colorful life in a flash of incomparable style. This is a ritual calling forth of the blazing spirits of bygone breadwinners, reminding  Detroiters, and all Black Americans, that 'Once upon a time, we did it.'" - Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit and Professor of History, Harvard University
"Black Bottom Saints is easily the most inventive and musical novel I've read in a decade. Alice Randall has rewritten and re-energized the rules of the American novel!" - Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy, Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Mississippi
"Alice Randall has done it again! Black Bottom Saints sneaks up on you--telling you the rich story of Black Michigan and Black Detroit in a way that has never been told before. Detroit is not just Motown. Detroit is a stronghold of black America and black culture.  This book tells the story. The characters, so rich, the story so strong, so complex.  This book is instantly an American classic.  Randall is at the top of her form." - Randall Kenan, author of A Visitation of Spirits, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina
"Lively, engaging, and often wise." - New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

2020-06-03
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172895548
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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