The Song and the Silence

Starred review from March 13, 2017
Johnson’s memoir (inspired by her 2012 documentary film, Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story) recounts the complicated life of her uncle, Booker Wright, and his hometown of Greenwood, a racially divided town in the Mississippi Delta. During the height of the civil rights movement, Wright worked as a waiter at Lusco’s, an upscale restaurant with a white clientele, and was the owner of Booker’s Place, a thriving restaurant serving the black community. In a short segment for a TV documentary on Greenwood, produced in the 1960s, Wright described with stark honesty the racism of Greenwood that terrorized his family and community, causing shock among his white customers at Lusco’s, who thought he was happy to serve them. The footage inspired Johnson to look deep into her family’s history. With profound insight and unwavering compassion, Johnson weaves an unforgettable story of her family and a nation distressed by racism. Her quest leads her deep into the lives of both black and white Americans who have suffered from racism’s isolating effects. She interviews the former leader of Greenwood’s White Citizens’ Council, whom she describes as “a tortured man.” Johnson brilliantly constructs a complex and empathetic look at racism in the South.

April 1, 2017
"The only thing I felt certain about was how little progress I was making in understanding my grandfather"--a searching quest for roots in the African-American heartland.Raised in Southern California, marked by "proper English and love of Phil Collins," film producer Johnson was deemed "too white" by her black schoolmates and decidedly black by her white ones. She admits to a certain discomfort with other black people, a sense that at least some of her kin were "trying to make life sound harder than it really was in order to justify their own complacency." Much of that sense of privilege melts away in the face of her on-the-ground experiences in her family's old hometown of Greenwood, Mississippi, where her grandfather Booker was murdered in 1973. The circumstances of his death, at the hands of a black patron of his restaurant, speak to untold complexities of race and class. As Johnson writes, Booker was "a difficult man to know." Though he was reserved, he was blessed with a business acumen that had a "Midas touch" element to it but that also brought him into conflict with members of both the white and black communities; he was generous with some, stingy with others, and "so indecipherable that even those who worked by his side for years could only describe him from a relative distance, as if he weren't a real person but rather a well-crafted representation of one." At ground zero of the civil rights movement in the South, Greenwood proved a difficult place for one seeking to be left alone, resented by poor whites and blacks alike for his success; Booker apparently returned the favor, winning enemies as well as admirers. Johnson's story is highly personal, but it folds easily into the larger story of African-Americans striving for economic and political betterment. A timely story of fragmentation and division and of picking one's way through the minefield that was--and is--the racially riven South.

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July 1, 2015
In the 1966 NBC documentary "Mississippi: A Self-Portrait", Booker Wright, a waiter in a whites-only restaurant and a local business owner, explained what life was really like for African Americans in his segregated state. Thereafter, he was murdered. Johnson, his granddaughter, who was born a year after his death and raised in comfort in San Diego, eventually traveled to her grandfather's hometown to understand why he died, what the South was like at the time, and what race, faith, and forgiveness mean today. Aside from this book, Johnson coproduced the documentary "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" ("LJ" 5/1/13), which premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

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