The Johnson Four

The Johnson Four

Chapter One

1968

I am the pickaninny prodigy Christmas Jones the Third. I was alive for approximately eight years, although it’s been so long, I’m not quite sure that’s right anymore. There is a good chance that I am ten, and forgetful. In North Carolina, in the year 1923, I was born to a fourteen-year-old in a field. She squatted deep in cotton, her thin dress in brambles, and out I came covered in the stuff of life. I think maybe there is a chance I remember this moment, my head landing in the dirt by my mother’s small brown feet as a haughty earthworm scooched by. I say haughty because the earthworm had no respect for personal boundary, or space. He crawled right up to my baby eyeball, completely unaware of his place in the food chain and entirely unafraid. I could feel his gaze upon me, and so for the first time, I opened my eyes to stare right back. We had a brief moment, and then, having been born, I began to cry.

Christmas is not the name my mother gave me, but I have forgotten both her name and my own. If I close my eyes and think really hard, I believe it was Edward, or perhaps Tobias. Tobias is a very nice name and I should like to have been called it, however briefly. Mr. Farraday gave me the name Christmas Jones, that day he took me from the orphanage and I was born again. Later, we decided together that I should affix “the Third.” It has a great weight behind it, as though my name has been passed down through the generations, from my father’s father to him, and then on to me. Mr. Farraday thought it was a name befitting his extraordinary baby nigger. This is how I was billed, “Christmas Jones the Third, the Pickaninny Prodigy.” Mr. Farraday was never very good at naming his acts.

Anyway, I was born, I was a brief sensation, and then I died. But this story is not about my short life, fame, or brutal death, or even the many years I spent wandering the woods near where I was hanged; it’s about how I came to live with the Johnsons, and thus how I came to find myself loved for two (almost three!) glorious years, before I destroyed it all.

You must believe me when I say that I didn’t mean to do what I did to the Johnsons. To pull them apart like a cruel little boy plucking the legs from an unassuming spider. Sometimes, I still hear Rocco screaming in horror as bone slammed against metal. Other times, I see the sheer joy in River and his friend’s faces unaware of what lay ahead. When I allow myself to think of it, I feel myself slipping somewhere very, very dark indeed, where my heart is torn asunder in my chest, and the very hairs stand at sinister attention on the back of my neck. Except of course that, being dead, I can’t feel anything at all.

—

But before that, there was this. This is how I was found:

Before Detroit was broken, when people still offered it their dreams, Odysseus Johnson packed up his three sons and drove them several hundred miles to audition for the Man under the group name the Johnson Three. It wasn’t a very original name.

For months they practiced. Odysseus choreographed a routine like the ones the kids did on TV, a little shimmy here and a doo-bop there, finger pops and snaps to accent it all. I should interject here that I was not yet familiar with television, but I have since come to love it. The Johnsons have a box big enough to sit on, wooden and warm, and at the flip of a switch the world turns on. On comes The Flintstones! On comes Walter Cronkite! If you sit very close and press your nose to the screen, they are all little itty-bitty dots, like life but fuzzy, and everybody looks to be in a dream. It is not a good thing to be neither here nor there in the world, neither in heaven with the baby angels, nor a real boy of flesh and blood, but goddammit if I ain’t glad that I got to stick around to watch television.

The boys were not much more than a year apart with the biggest gap being the eighteen months between Roman and Rocco. Roman was the oldest. River, the youngest and the cutest and . . . well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know who River was. Rocco was my best friend.

Anyway, Roman, Rocco, and River killed it at that audition. Everyone in the room clapped for almost a full minute when they were done. There was just one problem. Rocco wasn’t quite right in the head. He could sing like a dream, and he hit every last one of Odysseus’s dance moves, but when he stood still, when the man, Black and shiny like his wingtips, was just talking to them, sizing them up, he and everybody else could tell that Rocco was special.

“Is your boy Rocco a retard?” the gentleman said to Odysseus.

“I am not re—” Rocco began to interject angrily before Odysseus interrupted him.

“No sir,” Odysseus said.

“He ain’t all here though, right?”

“Rocco just a dreamer, is all,” Odysseus said. “Sing for the man won’t you, Rocco?”

Rocco sang. His voice was tonally perfect, sweet and innocent and pretty as a bluebird’s. He stared at the wall behind the man as he sang.

“You can stop now, son,” the gentleman said. “Beautiful voice you’ve got.”

He smiled kindly at Rocco, who kept singing. Roman elbowed his brother in the side, hard.

“You’re a fine family. A mighty fine family,” the gentleman continued. He was right too. All the Johnson boys were handsome and well behaved, all of them good boys. Odysseus looked at his work and was satisfied.

“I’d like you to audition for the boss man himself,” he said. The boys began to jump around.

“Except I think maybe the group would work better with just Roman and River. We could bring in another boy, I think. . . . Yeah. That would work,” he said, as if to himself.

River, Roman, and Odysseus looked at one another. Rocco stared out the window at a butterfly as it passed by. The butterfly was orange with white and black polka dots, a Painted Lady, which is Rocco’s favorite type of butterfly. Rocco can tell you all about different kinds of butterflies if you let him. Everybody calls him a retard, but ain’t no retards I know of that have thousands of butterflies floating around their heads so that at any old time they can pick one from another and say, “That right there’s a Sad Dusky Wing. Isn’t it a beaut?!”

“The boys . . . it’s the Johnson Three,” Odysseus said. “They’re a package deal, you dig?”

“Of course. Of course,” the gentleman said. “Is that how you boys feel?”

Sixteen-year-old Roman and thirteen-year-old River looked at each other, then over at Rocco, then up at their father.

Roman stepped up to the gentleman with the wingtips. “We the Three Musketeers, man. One for all and all for one.” He had just read the book in school and it had appealed to his youthful sense of honor and adventure. Plus, Dumas was Black, and he could dig that.

River walked up next to his brother. “We ain’t doing nothing without Rocco, sir.” River was always the most straightforward of the bunch.

“It was a pleasure to meet you boys,” the gentleman said. “If you ever change your minds, you know where to find me.”

Odysseus and the boys piled into the car, with Odysseus up front and all the brothers in the back. They sat quietly as Odysseus drove them around the city, under the lights, past the shiny ice-cream shop, beyond the movie theater with its fancy marquee. Rocco lifted a hand to the window and touched Canada in the distance.

Roman threw the first punch. River followed. The two boys both punched Rocco while he wailed, tears dripping down all of their faces. Odysseus looked at them in the rearview mirror and didn’t say a word until they reached the Wonder Bread sign. There, he rolled down the window and the entire car smelled of fresh bread.

“That’s enough, now,” Odysseus said, and because they were good boys, they stopped.