Welcome to Braggsville
‘The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year’ The Washington PostA dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactment – a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writerLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2015LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2015Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D’aron Davenport is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond of UC Berkeley. Everything changes in his American History class, when D’aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War re-enactment. His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires a ‘performative intervention’. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal and their own misguided ideas about the South, D’aron and his three idiosyncratic best friends descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences.A literary coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with keen wit, tremendous social insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible portrait of contemporary America.
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Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
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)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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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.
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
