When Sandra Jackson-Opoku was on a book tour for her first novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, she heard from her readers–whether she wanted to or not. “There always seems to be one brother in the bookstore who is interested in how black female writers treat black male characters,” she says. “I’ll admit I was sometimes put off by those questions. ‘When are you going to write a book about the man, what about the male character?’ And often I would respond out of annoyance–‘Maybe that’s the story you need to write, brother.’
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At the time she was struggling with a novel about a womanizer burdened with a terrible secret. “I wanted to explore that kind of character and see what makes him tick–how he became that way,” says Jackson-Opoku. But her third-person narrative wasn’t working. “It just felt kind of distant,” she says. “I wanted to find a way to get into this character in a different way.”
Her new novel, Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him), is told in reverse chronological order from the point of view of women–family members, girlfriends, and acquaintances–who knew Johnny on his journey from Chicago gang member to devoted husband and father. The story veers from North Carolina, where he’s settled into family life, backward to Mexico, home of his great-grandmother; Africa, where he’s stationed by the military; Urbana-Champaign, where he attends college on a basketball scholarship; and the mean streets of Chicago. Along the way he meets some memorable women–most notably in Somalia, which Jackson-Opoku populates with nomadic African and Euro-African sophisticates. “The style influenced the content of the story,” she says. “When I started revising, different voices and different stories started bubbling to the surface.”
–Cara Jepsen
