BACKSTORY

Johnson confronts childhood trauma in this debut memoir.

“I am a survivor of long-term sexual and physical abuse,” states the author in the opening lines of this book. As the victim of a “family sex ring” in which, Johnson writes, his own relatives used “the family bond to their own perverse ends,” the author describes his abuse in explicit, graphic detail. Compounding Johnson’s childhood trauma was the systemic racism that constricted the lives of young Black boys like the author, who grew up in Chicago’s West Side in the 1950s and ’60s. While violence, illness, and institutional apathy play a significant role in the narrative, Johnson still finds ways to highlight moments of joy and the power of love, particularly when discussing his mother, Ines Andrea. Due to the author’s repeated childhood traumas, combined with a brain injury incurred during his service in the war in Vietnam, Johnson approaches this memoir with a genre-defying writing style to accommodate the lapses in his own memory; the book is written like a novel, with third-person omniscient narration that both describes the experiences of the author and includes the perspectives of his abusers as Johnson grapples with understanding how members of his own family could betray their most vulnerable relatives. This approach also gives him a space to explore societal misconceptions about the rape of young boys by older women, dispelling the myths of “subtle seduction” that reduce such assaults to a benign (or, even worse, enviable) “coming-of-age experience.” Johnson is a poet and a musician, and his most powerful passages are almost lyrical. Reflecting on the untimely death of his father while his mother was still pregnant, Johnson writes, “We met in Mom’s womb…Dad’s spirit cradled and cuddled his only living legacy.” This powerful, poetic language, combined with the intensity and detail of the traumatic descriptions of Johnson’s horrific sexual abuse, form a powerful book that effectively tells a story of “how the seeds of abuse are planted, fed, and grown over time.”

A tour de force debut that will haunt readers long after they turn the last page.