Thereafter Johnnie

The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters—Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva—to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim.

Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher’s granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America’s original sin. What begins as a search for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin.

By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.

“Carolivia Herron’s fascinating and highly original first novel belongs in the distinguished company of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gloria Naylor’s wickedly satirical Linden Hills. Profoundly human yet larger than life, [it] . . . balance[s] the unspeakable and the spiritual, adding a mythic dimension to the experiences of African-Americans . . . With its broad sweep, its complex imagery drawn from Old and New World cultures and its pervasive tone of universality, it is more than a saga of black revitalization. Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.”

—John Bierhorst, The New York Times Book Review

“This book is fated to be a groundbreaking work in the Afro-American and American literary tradition . . . I think it ironic that critics at large have been bemoaning the fact that American literature has produced no counterpart to James Joyce in vision and structure and that such a person has now appeared within the ranks of Afro-American literature. This is a book for the ages.”

—Gloria Naylor

“A remarkable achievement.”

—Henry Louis Gates

“Carolivia Herron has written a swirling and terrifying epic. It works out a vision of national damnation rising, as inevitably as the damnation of the House of Atreus, from America’s original sin of slavery . . . The book’s theme and its fundamental strength [is] enhanced by luminous and visionary writing . . . Herron’s vision is as harsh and fulminating as a prophet’s.”

—Rechard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“Carolivia Herron adds family and religion to the tragic conscience of American society. But she does it in a splendid way, by creating the origins of the Black communities of the New World, their epic resilience, their clear-sighted disenchantment, their prayer for a time to heal, a time to transform experience into knowledge. Let me salute Herron’s achievement: the creation of the origins in order to have a future—even if it be a tragic one.”

—Carlos Fuentes

“Bold and brilliant, this lyrical first novel is a compelling modern epic, an allegory of civilization revealed in the pain and passions of an educated African-American family.”

—Publishers Weekly

“I am dazzled, literally, by the intense light of Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie . . . Herron writes [of] sexual intercourse in a language so erotic it approaches the divine.”

—Barbara Christian, Women’s Review of Books

“This intricate and fascinating first novel tells the story of several generations of an African American family in Washington, D.C. . . . The unusual combination of classical epic structure and riveting, sometimes shockingly frank language is particularly striking and makes for an intense reading experience.”

—Jessica Grim, Library Journal

Carolivia Herron is an African American Jewish author, educator, and publisher living in Washington, DC. Recently she was a Lecturer and Scholar Coach in Classics at Howard University as well as an emeritus Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Project Humanities at Arizona State University.

Thereafter Johnnie • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341616

Sep 9, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 44

5" x 8.5" • 272 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341623