... buoyant and innovative ... I can't think of a more sparkling way to get some education about the history of Black Detroit beyond Motown than to read Randall's novel ... As its short chapters whiz by, you get a taste of what it might have been like to have sat in the audience of one of those nightclub shows that Ziggy emceed where, maybe, Moms Mabley was waiting in the wings while rumors were flying that Dinah Washington, along with her husband, the NFL superstar Dick 'Night Train' Lane, might be stopping by. Except here, Randall is our emcee and not all the featured guests in this novel are headliners ... a conventional enough premise for a novel and the only time that Randall relies on convention to tell this panoramic story ... Sepian, is a word that Ziggy uses a lot to refer to Black people: It's his opinionated, distinctive voice that rescues Black Bottom Saints from being the static series of tweaked Wikipedia entries it might have been. His anecdotes about real-life famous folks like the Mills Brothers, Bricktop, and Butterbeans and Susie, may be, like that Blue Blazer cocktail, part straight whiskey; part flaming invention, but they take readers deep into the world of mid-20th century Black entertainers who traveled the country by train ... a gorgeous swirl of fiction, history and motor oil; there are also plenty of cocktail recipes here to make the rougher stories go down a little smoother.
Randall draws on a real-life Ziggy Johnson, using his charisma and connections to reveal untold stories of Detroit and to celebrate an incredible network of artists and influences and the many ways of building community through church and club work but also through entertainment venues. This is an exuberant celebration of the arts, including the arts of living well and caring for others.
... a genre-bending series of profiles of the dazzling residents of Black Bottom, the commercial and residential heart of Detroit’s Black community in the era spanning from the Great Depression to the early 1960s ... an intriguing and beguiling look at the storied city at the height of its pomp. Randall shows us a warm, thriving, tightly woven community ... This is a book to read at your leisure, as you might a collection of short stories. Each profile offers fascinating insight into the characters that made Black Bottom a hub for glamour, culture and creativity.
no book has ever brought Detroit’s Black Camelot as radiantly to life as Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, though often its illuminations emerge more through prism than lens. In a dazzling trick of literary ventriloquism, Randall adopts the voice of her childhood dance teacher ... It’s Ziggy ’s voice rendered through the prism of Randall’s shimmering and inventive prose that makes Black Bottom Saints so luminous and affecting, and such a powerful evocation of the community’s golden age ... Rounding out the book’s assorted delights is a cocktail recipe to accompany (and complement, thematically) each saint’s story, supplying a recurring reminder that Black Bottom Saints serves to toast and celebrate its subjects rather than mourn them ... a wonderfully realized portrait of a vanished city ... Black Bottom Saints, like the legendary impresario at its center, makes plentiful Motown magic.
...a rambunctious pastiche ... Weaving in and out of these portraits are the reminiscences of one of Ziggy’s favorite students. This young woman’s story is engaging, but she’s smart enough to let Ziggy’s voice prevail ... always lively and often wise.
This novel is also Randall’s articulate and soul-elevating witness, a song of gratitude to the man whose 'citizenship school' gave her the tools to channel her own suffering into the radical joy of writing. And in an inspired creative twist, Randall writes a proxy of herself into the narrative: 'Colored Girl' (C.G.), a former Ziggy protégée whose aloof and abusive mother spirited her away to D.C. as a child, has been entrusted with the task of finishing his manuscript. C.G.’s biography seeps into Ziggy’s saints’ book in the form of a parallel third-person narrative — set apart in italics as a prelude to each saint’s chapter — chronicling her coming of age and her discovery and curation of this nearly lost fictional manuscript. It’s an initially confusing device that unfolds slowly to reveal a deeper layer of story ... This feels, to me, like the book Randall’s whole life has prepared her to write, her own origin story folded into an elegiac, literary time capsule of the Detroit That Was — a cultural artifact that might one day serve as a blueprint for that lost world’s reinvention.
The last testament of an African American showbiz insider is here rendered as an impassioned, richly detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking evocation of Black culture in 20th century Detroit and beyond ... At its outset, this hybrid of portrait gallery, cultural history, and dramatized biography seems to resemble a grand literary equivalent of a 'Youth Colossal,' one of Ziggy’s annual Father’s Day nightclub recitals that one of his saints, the poet Robert Hayden, likens to 'a W.E.B. DuBois pageant.' But as the portraits accumulate and grow in depth and breadth, they make up an absorbing and poignant account of a glittering age in the life of a once-thriving metropolis ... If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.
... a sprawling and intimate genre-bending chronicle ... Randall’s portrait of black America sheds light on cultural history through startlingly personal moments, such as Ziggy dropping his Women’s Club aunt Sadye Pryor’s name for social currency. Whether chronicling famous historical figures or local characters, Randall makes Ziggy’s saints worthy of his reflection. This works as a memorable love letter to Detroit, as well as a remarkable tableau.
