Black Bottom Saints
In Detroit in 1968, choreographer and emcee Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson lies dying in a hospital. He knows he doesn’t have long to live and decides to write down his memories as a “Saints’ Book,” inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Book he read as a child. Each short chapter tells the story of one of fifty-two “Saints” of the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit during its heydays of the 1930s to 1960s. Inspired by his first Saint, Tom Bullock, the first African American to write a cocktail recipe book, Ziggy ends each chapter with a cocktail recipe to celebrate that chapter’s Saint.
Introducing each chapter is a brief vignette about a girl called “Colored Girl”—one of Ziggy’s students from his days as a dance teacher to the children of Black Bottom. Ziggy hopes Colored Girl will finish his work after his death, but Colored Girl must overcome a lifetime of lies and abuse at the hands of her mother to take up the mantle.
Black Bottom Saints would be an important contribution to literature in any year, but especially so in 2020. Through the tales of the Saints, Randall, through Johnson, illuminates how inventive and important to culture the Black community of Detroit was. So many of the real-life Saints (and nearly all of them are historical figures) created art that was appropriated by whites who ultimately were given the credit for these innovations. Randall cuts through the racism and places the credit back where it belongs.
Randall leaves readers hungry to know more about these Saints and appreciative of how each of us is a sum of the people who have influenced and loved us. Hopefully, this novel will create a space for future authors to shine even more light on these “fifty-two paths from trauma to transcendence.”
