A novel, a summoning of the spirits, an invigorating memorial and a book-length jubilee, Alice Randall's Black Bottom Saints blends a raucous fictionalized autobiography of Detroit's real-life Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson with reminiscences of 52 "saints" from his hometown's Black Bottom neighborhood. Ziggy was a storied Black emcee, educator and raconteur who died in 1968, and here he celebrates the life and culture of one of 20th-century America's most prosperous Black communities. Randall (and Ziggy) take inspiration from Catholic Saints Day Books, calendar tracts that pair each week of the year with a saint. Here, those saints are friends and sources of inspiration to Ziggy and Black Bottom. Some are internationally celebrated, like Ethel Waters and Dinah Washington. Some are too-little known, like the frustrated playwright Elsie Roxborough, who left Detroit for New York and changed her name to pass as white before her tragic early death. And some are everyday folks, like Billy D. Parker, one of Black Bottom's "breadwinners," whose work in Detroit's auto industry funded community, culture and vacations in Idlewild.
Ziggy's devotionals are touched with grace but far from sober--each of his inspiring evocations of 20th-century Black life ends with a recipe for a cocktail named for that particular saint. Randall (The Wind Done Gone) also threads through her sprawling novel an account of Ziggy's last days, in Detroit's Kirwood Hospital, and glimpses of Ziggy's impact on generations of young people, notably the tennis star Althea Gibson. 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. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor