Ziggy hits upon the idea of structuring his jam-packed memories in the form of a secular saints day book.
It's a conventional enough premise for a novel and the only time that Randall relies on convention to tell this panoramic story.Ĭonsider the baroque form of this narrative: Like many of us who were raised Catholic back in the day, Ziggy is familiar with Saints Day books, a kind of devotional manual in which each day of the year is designated a saint's feast day. Knowing the end is near, Ziggy decides to set down his memories.
Except here, Randall is our emcee and not all the featured guests in this novel are headliners.īlack Bottom Saints opens in 1968 where Ziggy Johnson lies dying in a room in Kirwood Hospital - a Black-owned, Black-staffed historic institution in Detroit. I can't think of a more sparkling way to get some education about the history of Black Detroit beyond Motown than to read Randall's novel.Īs its short chapters whiz by, you get a taste of what it might have been like to have sat in the audience of one of those nightclub shows that Ziggy emceed where, maybe, Moms Mabley was waiting in the wings while rumors were flying that Dinah Washington, along with her husband, the NFL superstar Dick "Night Train" Lane, might be stopping by. Ziggy Johnson is just one of the over 50 mostly real life African American artists, doctors, sports figures, activists and behind-the-scenes movers and shakers who populate this novel - many of whom I've never heard of and most of whom I now want to know more about. And, he founded Ziggy Johnson's School of Theatre to lift up the children of the city's Black breadwinners - the workers, most of them men, on the assembly lines of Detroit's automobile plants, which ran 24/7, seven days a week.Īs Ziggy tells us in Alice Randall's buoyant and innovative new novel, Black Bottom Saints: " was the opportunity that created caramel Camelot." Johnson was a gossip columnist for the African American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle he also was a legendary nightclub emcee at two of the swankiest hotspots in town: The Flame and The Driftwood Lodge. Back in the heyday of Detroit - from the Great Depression through the 1950s - Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson knew just about everybody who was worth knowing in the shops, bars, churches, theaters and nightclubs that lined the streets of that city's celebrated Black neighborhood, called "Black Bottom."