The novel is at once descriptive and meditative; a blues lament, a rap. It is experimental and extraordinary, and the author is no less exceptional: now a professor at Mt. Holyoke and a fellow at Yale, Herron, 43, is grappling with the recently unleashed memories of untold childhood rapes. She did not remember the abuse when she started her novel in 1972. It was only as the book neared publication two years ago, and Herron entered therapy, that she saw a link to her life.
Herron’s accusations are relentless in their horror; they are also flatly denied by many family members, including the male relative she claims first raped her in her infancy. But it was a now deceased aunt, Herron says, who orchestrated the most hideous abuse. “Two or three times a week I was taken from nursery school to a house of prostitution on 14th Street,” she begins softly, “where I became the partner of a man I called Big White Daddy. I can remember [the first time] he lowered me onto him,” Herron claims. “I thought it was an accident, but instead of lifting me off, he just jumps on the bed with me. You can imagine the scream: I was 4 years old.
“Whenever he became too brutal with [other partners], I would offer myself up sexually,” she continues. “One time, with another man, Big White Daddy was raping a little girl, and she was collapsed between them and couldn’t move. So, I distracted him. Many of the rapes occurred when I was trying to help other people.”
Herron’s currently at work on a nonfiction account of the alleged abuse, “An Instance of Holocaust,” and it promises to be as iconoclastic as her novel: Herron will not compromise her difficult yet rewarding prose. When the original publisher of “Thereafter Johnnie” demanded revisions, Herron balked. “They thought it was too abstract, they didn’t think black women write like that,” she says. “They thought I should either eliminate the black speech or put more in. You had to be ‘The Color Purple’ or you had to be ‘Ulysses’.”
Herron’s writing is not without fault: sometimes the words are too opaque to let meaning shine through. But though it may have its flaws, her novel explores the politics of race and gender in an uncompromising light. Its embattled author, on a quest for self-healing, is not afraid to shine that light on herself.
