Welcome to Braggsville

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers in 2015

Copyright © T. Geronimo Johnson 2015

T. Geronimo Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Adapted from artwork by Amanda Kain. Cover images © dra_schwartz/Getty Images (tree); Gordana Simic/Shutterstock (feathers); American Spirit/Shutterstock (lawn jockey)

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Source ISBN: 9780008101299

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007548019

Version 2015-12-08

More Outstanding Early Praise for

WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE

“Welcome to Braggsville is that rare book so highly charged with both comedy and tragedy, and so nimble in its storytelling, that it seems to understand the world of its characters down to the smallest particle. This is one of the most invigorating and least predictable novels of the year.”

—Kevin Brockmeier, award-winning

author of The Brief History of the Dead

“In exuberant prose, Johnson takes aim at a host of issues, gleefully satirizing political opportunists, social media, and cultural mores … a provocative exploration of contemporary America that is likely to be a hit with adventurous readers.”

—Booklist

“DeLillo-esque for its orgiastic pop-culture roiling, Welcome to Braggsville deconstructs race, class, and gender, leaving the human heart wholly intact. This is a virtuoso performance by one of our strongest new voices.”

—Richard Katrovas, award-winning

poet and author of Scorpio Rising

“Geronimo Johnson’s powerful second novel combines the intellectual urgency of a satire with the emotional resonance of a tragedy. Welcome to Braggsville is as smart as it is subversive, and as bleakly hilarious as it is deeply necessary.”

—Jennifer duBois, award-winning

author of A Partial History of Lost Causes

“In Geronimo Johnson’s brilliant, wildly satirical, and also deeply sobering book, we move between Berkeley, California, and Braggsville, Georgia, looking to decode no less than the deepest secrets of how race is lived in America. The story looms larger than life. At every turn, the impasses Johnson shows us are our own.”

—Tess Taylor, award-winning

poet and author of The Forage House

“Inventive, provocative, troubling, hilarious: It’s hard to sum up Welcome to Braggsville in any other way but to add the word ‘wildly’ in front of each of these words.”

—Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over!

“A riotous tour de force.”

—Andrew Lam, award-winning author of Birds of Paradise Lost

“A stylish satire about the worst that can happen when four idealistic friends try to bring Berkeley activism back to Braggsville—a time warp of a small Southern town. A painful, funny novel.”

—Bennett Sims, author of A Questionable Shape

“The evidence you need that a reexamination of the past can be a prescient warning for all our future days is magnificently in your hands.”

—CAConrad, poet and author of ECODEVIANCE

Dedication

For all the Louis Changs, from my parents

Meet the New World, same as the Old World.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Sexicon (The Glossary for the Rest of Us)

Appendix 2: Works Cited

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by T. Geronimo Johnson

About the Publisher

To be likened? The moon’ll tell. Might not a listen, might not a like it, but it’ll tell if you can. Give yourself in a jar. Cleave a tomato. Pick the seeds clean. With your mouth, now. Leave it sit for three days behind that rank of elfinwood yon. A palm of milk and enough honey to feel right and rub it back up in there real good. Sleep on your left side. The moon’ll tell you, in sooth, but you might not like it, even if you be likened. You can bathe at the river, can’t you? But dam it? Tell me, now, what good be a pond with no fish? You seen Bragg. Recollect.

—Nanny Tag

Chapter One

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because your daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed Battlestar Galactica, Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Ding-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of WALL-E, Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called What’s Happening!!, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes, ma’am, Daron it is. What about this apostrophe, this light-headed comma? Feel free to correct me. Oh no, ma’am. Ignore that. It’s all one word, ma’am. No need to call me ma’am. Yes, ma’am.

AS WAS EXPECTED OF VALEDICTORIANS, he had spoken of choices, though not his personal choices. His desk was stuffed tighter than a turducken with acceptance letters, but to list those would have been smug and boastful when most classmates were going to State or to stay. He instead pontificated on abstract opportunities to be grabbed, snatched out of the air like so many feathers, of the choices life extended to those who dared dream, of new worlds awaiting, of hopes to be fulfilled and expectations met, of how they would go forth and put B-ville, GA, squarely on the map. Never mind that it was ninety-two degrees, never mind that they could drink the air, never mind that, as Nana used to say, it was so greatly humid a cat wouldn’t stretch its neck to lick its own juniors, he carried on about wishing over dandelions, and their delicate floating spores, and how they multiplied, superstitions taking seed even without belief—where he had heard that he couldn’t recall—and explained that our eyes move when we dream, and, lastly, with a smile, advised the audience to, Always use sunscreen. His parting blow: an open invitation to visit him at My future alma mater, until then unknown to his father. Teachers applauded vigorously; peers clapped listlessly, more with relief than appreciation, but they didn’t understand, and that was why he was glad to be leaving. He stepped from the podium a free man, at long last deaf to their tongues, and later thanked with aplomb the classmate who sidled up to the smoking steel drum and congratulated him on his engagement.

Chapter Two

Of course there were the Bulldogs or the Yellow Jackets or the Panthers, or even the Tigers. And after a week as a Golden Bear, he wondered if one of those might have been a better choice. Long accustomed to the teacher calling on him after his classmates proffered their feeble responses, D’aron sat in the front row but never raised his hand. He was not called on to moderate disputes, to weigh in on disagreements, to sagely settle debates. He was not called on at all, even when the subject in American History turned to the South, a topic on which he considered himself an expert, being the only Southerner in the class. (Not even when D’aron resorted to what the prof called a Horshack show.) The professor rationalized his reluctance to call on D’aron on such occasions as a resistance to essentializing. Said resistance D’aron found puzzling, and said affliction he apparently had developed no resistance to, constantly provoking the professor to ask, Am I the only Jew? Mika the only black? You the only Southerner? If the professor said he was Jewish, well, D’aron would take his word for it. Mika, though, was obviously the only black in class, and D’aron the only Southerner. Wasn’t he essentially Southern? Wasn’t that the core of his being, his essence, as it were? At least that was how he felt now that he was in California.

He held doors for the tender gender and all elders. Thank you and Please and May I adorned every conversation. Ma’am was an escape artist extraordinaire, often slipping out midsentence. Professors wagged their fingers, but even the one who claimed it aged her, Only slightly less subtly but just as permanently as gravity, appeared at moments to relish this memento of a bygone era, this sole American who, like foreign students and athletes, recognized the instructors as ultimate authorities, approaching their bunkers as shrines bearing cookies and other gifts in outstretched hands, like a farmer leaving a peck of apples or a pair of just-plucked broilers at his lawyer’s back door. Sir he could utter without censure.

Yet this inbred politeness was not what set him apart. Every student at Berkeley—all 36,142, he believed—played an instrument or a sport or volunteered for a social justice venture or possessed some obscure and rare talent. Or all four. Students raised in tents in Zimbabwe by field anthropologists and twin sisters who earned pilot’s licenses at age fifteen and Olympians from as far afield as Norway. One student athlete, a track star, upon being asked, Are you considered fast in your country? smiled charitably, I am the fastest.

And the Asian students, he’d once confessed awe-stricken during a phone conversation with his mother, Some of the Asians, well, I shouldn’t say some when they are a majority, but some of the Asian students speak multiple languages—more than a Holy Roller—languages I didn’t even know existed. Kaya, in Calc Two, for example, is half-Korean but raised in Malaysia. She speaks Korean like her mom, Chinese like her dad, Malay like her cousins at home, and is already in French Two and Spanish Three. Does she even speak English? He sighed. Don’t fret, honey. You earned the right to be there and you’ll do fine DD baby. Don’t fret. He murmured his thanks, reluctant to admit, let alone explain, that his distressed aspiration bespoke not lamentation but yearning. Kaya! Kaya mesmerized him, sitting in the basement commons study sessions twirling her hair around her pen as she wrote notes in Korean and IMed in English and tweeted in Malay, all while conjugating the subjonctif, her bare knees pressed together to balance a laptop surely hot to the touch.

DON’T FRET, HIS MOM WOULD REPEAT after his long silences. He didn’t.

He didn’t fret. Nor did he reckon. Or figure. Or git. Or study. Having followed his favorite cousin Quint’s advice and picked a school more than a day’s drive from home, he found the freedom intoxicating. If his parents could see him Monday mornings: tongue a rabbit’s tail, stiff and bristly, D’aron not knowing whether to feel pride or shame. They guessed at it, though, after reading his midterm report. His mother, Are you sick, honey? His father, in the background, With alcohol poisoning maybe. (Following that call, D’aron changed his mailing address to the dorm.) But he didn’t yet regret his decision to go westward-ho!

When he’d left home back in August to start school, Quint warned, Don’t go ABBA or Tiny Dancer! Huh? Don’t get gay. Don’t get roofied and get made gay, either. Or, ho-mo-sex-u-al.

When he returned home for Thanksgiving, Quint squinted, You got AIDS? D’aron gave a lick and checked his reflection in his spoon, as if he hadn’t only hours before, and every morning for that matter, paraded at length before the bathroom mirror in his skivvies. I can see your fucking ribs. You need a one-eight-hundred number. D’aron smiled. Without grits and waffles and hash browns and toast all at the same breakfast, and with walking everywhere, the famous freshman fifteen had gone the other way, but it looked and felt like fifty. Without the extra weight, he could finally confirm that his relatives weren’t lying when they insisted he’d inherited his father’s shoulders and forehead, and his mother’s eyes and nose, and from them both a decent height.

And when he went home for Christmas, his aunt Boo teased, So you do have cheekbones. What are they feeding you, grass? You spent that money I sent you on crack?

Hey, hey, c’mon Auntie B.! Don’t essentialize. All crackheads aren’t skinny.

Is that a joke, Dookie? I got one for you. Hay is for horses!

He loved his family, but God was he glad they now lived so far away. Quint was at least right about that.

During those three years in special ed, I only missed the food. Quint paused. And tits. And of course my mom, she’s mom, you know. And you, number one cuz. Exclamation point by way of a punch. But sure didn’t miss all the yappity yip-yappity yap. And hunting. I missed hunting.

At least Jo-Jo, D’aron’s best friend from high school, was happy for him. Jo-Jo patted his belly, I oughta go to college. That was a lot from him.

CHRISTMAS BREAK DIDN’T END SOON ENOUGH. The morning the dorms opened, D’aron was on the ground in Cali three time zones away. It wasn’t even the same country. By then he understood the geo-lingo. San Francisco was The City, Oakland was O-town, to be avoided at night—that was where the blacks lived—and the city of Berkeley was Berzerkeley, while Berkeley the school was Cal. The East Bay, where Berzerkeley was located, supposedly suburban, felt plenty busy. Collectively, it was the Bay Area, a megalopolis—oh how that word polished his tongue—where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity.

Across the bay, The City convened in costume to race from bay to breakers. Happy meal toys and plastic bags were long outlawed and voters threatened circumcision and goldfish with the same fate. They’d once had a mayoral candidate named Jello. A roving band of Rollerbladers performed the Thriller zombie dance—that pop nativity—Friday nights in Union Square. And fuck, it was China in the airport. Yet The City thought Berzerkeley was weird. D’aron thought it beautiful, never mind the nag champa, never mind the crusty hippies and gutter punks in greasy jackets stiff as shells lined up on Telegraph Ave hawking tie-dye and patchouli and palming for change. On clear days, a pageantry of wind and water under sun, the bay a sea of gently wriggling silver ribbons, and the Golden Gate hovering in the distance like a mystical portal. East of campus lazed tawny hills. On foggy days blinding bales of cotton candy strolled the avenues dandy while in the distance the tips of the bridge towers peeked through the mist like shy, gossamered nipples. The Bay Area was a beautiful woman who looked good in everything she wore.

What had intimidated him those early weeks of his freshman fall semester felt like home during his second semester—freshman spring. The clock tower known as the Campanile rose from the center of campus with the confidence of the Washington Monument, marking time in style, and on the hour, music students sounded melodies on the carillon. He often lunched alone at the base of that monolith, on the cool stone steps, facing the water due west, attention drifting with the lazing waves and the steady stream of Asian students moving—no, migrating—between the library and the engineering buildings. As he worked up the courage to wander farther from Sather Gate, the symbolic campus border, he discovered Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai: tastes luring him deeper and deeper into a town of Priuses and pedalers, both of which yielded patiently to pedestrians. Laid back, liberal, loose. The locals’ mantra, No worries; the transplants’ motto, It looks like a peninsula but feels like an island.

Chapter Three

His second semester, freshman spring, also brought a life-altering move to a new dorm. His first-semester six-man suite had been too rowdy, excepting D’aron, of course, so the RA dispersed them across campus like parolees. D’aron’s new roommate wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian. Asked who the first one was, he answered, See?

Chang, aka Louis Chang, aka Loose Chang, was none too pleased to have a D’aron Davenport aboard. After Louis’s former roommate dropped out midway through the first semester, he’d grown accustomed to living single in a double. The room was barely fifteen by fifteen, with a bed, desk, and chair on each side, and on the wall opposite the door a window overlooking the courtyard. The day D’aron arrived clothes smothered both beds and books tottered on both chairs: chemistry, botany, zoology on one side; George Carlin, Steve Martin, Paul Mooney on the other; and atop each pile several well-worn National Geographics. Had Res Life double-booked the room?

Chang crossed his arms, Which side do you want?

He was slight, dark-skinned, narrow of eye, and like so many other California Asians, he spoke with no accent, a phenomenon to which D’aron was still growing accustomed. At home, all the Chinese people (seven) had thick, nearly impenetrable accents, incomprehensible unless pronouncing dinner items; numbers and directions were plain fudruckers. Shrimp-fry-rice. Yes. Fie-dolrah-fitty. Huh?

Well? Chang repeated his question.

The right side?

Chang nodded, Good, we’ll get along.

They did. Not only because Louis was possibly the only Asian male who hadn’t mastered that damned twirling trick—pen mawashi—and not only because they had, surprisingly, so many common interests—porn, the Premier League, Arcade Fire, Tyler the Creator, Kanye, Kreayshawn—but because Louis was hilarious and possessed of an enviable irreverence. Strolling along Telegraph Ave, Chang responded to the gutter punks’ outstretched palms with, No, it’s Chang … Chang. And once to a black bum in People’s Park he shrugged, You got Obama, what more do you want? Then he gave him a dollar.

Louis also didn’t flinch when D’aron slept with his head to the window the night before tests so that he would wake up on the right side of the bed. Pointing at the little mirrors—which D’aron hadn’t before noticed—Louis admitted, Mom’s feng shui–zee crazy.

Loose Chang was a refreshing antidote to the somber, tense mood sweeping campus. Old folks gathered year-round at the West Gate hoisting nuclear disarmament signs with surprising gusto, and young folks huddled on Sproul Plaza extolling the virtues of the tree people—Ewoks, according to Chang—who had lived like monkeys for more than a year, occupying old oaks to prevent the university from cutting the trees down, all of which D’aron found odd, being from a town where they flew flags high, carried guns with pride (no matter how much they cost, they’re cheaper than dirt), and everyone worked for the same hot air factory (though they called it a mill). As of late, though, there were also rumors about tuition hikes and budget cuts and the threat that the school would accept more out-of-state fart sniffers to collect more out-of-state tuition. Those out-of-staters who protested that they’d earned their scholarships, as D’aron felt he surely had, were eyed with even greater disdain. By the middle of his freshman spring semester, helicopters were hovering over campus more days than not, buildings were regularly occupied by designer-sneaker Zapatistas—rappers for some—and students were on hunger strikes. Five days couldn’t get together without his mother calling to remind him that he was there to learn, not cause disorder, and that he was to study and be respectful and mindful of the professors. And always say please and thank you, and sir and ma’am. You’ll be amazed.

Louis routinely received the same directives in person. His family lived in the Richmond district of The City and thought nothing of showing up unannounced and en masse—parents, twin little brothers, and two great-uncles—to deliver healthy snacks, inspect living quarters, and shoot D’aron the hairy eyeball. We were in the neighborhood, they’d say, though according to Chang, before his acceptance to Cal his parents hadn’t driven farther east than the downtown San Francisco Embarcadero for fifteen years. Sometimes they’d offer no greeting, just sit on D’aron’s bed and wag their mysterious tongue. (Was this what Prof. Kensmith meant by cultural relativity? Louis’s grandmother insisting that D’aron sample her homemade candied fruit under her watchful cloudy eye, tapping the bottom of his chin with two fingers to assist mastication. He knew a hex when he tasted one, and packed the sour green resin away with the deft touch of one long accustomed to surreptitiously enjoying Bandits only feet from the chalkboard. Later, he would slip into the bathroom and send the waxy balls to the bay, but not before his tongue grew numb and resentful.) After his family left, Chang would apologize for the stares. They’re just old-fashioned, just old-fashioned, just old-fashioned, he chanted for weeks before admitting that his parents thought the messy half of the room was D’aron’s.