A review of Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing
by Hazel Kight Witham
I first heard Toni Ann Johnson bring voice to a character onstage at a reading in the MFA program we shared. I barely knew Toni Ann, but I was swept into the world of her fiction by the characters she illuminated with her humor, vivid dialogue, intriguing conflict, and acting chops.
I didn’t know she had a significant history as an actress, both on stage and in film, and experience giving characters voice through her work as an award-winning screenwriter: she won the Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Ruby Bridges,” another one for “Crown Heights,” a true story about two teens who connect in the wake of the Crown Heights unrest of 1991.
Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing, winner of Accent Publishing’s Novella contest in 2021, explores vital questions we all need to reckon with. The book opens in New York City, the winter of 2006. At the outset, Maddie, a singer, has just suffered her second miscarriage and her husband, who reminds her he “wasn’t ready” for a baby anyway, is bailing back to Los Angeles.
She is twisted with grief and the shock of betrayal, “curled up like a fist on the floor.” A phone call with her mother, Velma, reveals that she is more interested in who from their mostly white neighborhood in the New York suburbs has ended up on the obituary pages. Her mother’s inability to listen or empathize with Maddie, or even allow space for her to share the news of her miscarriage, is breathtaking.
Hollowed by these twin losses: her baby, Nina, and her partner of ten years, Rolando, Maddie is further leveled by the inability to voice her grief. Her mother doesn’t know how to listen, and neither does her father. She spends a week invisible, bedridden, underwater. She can’t go to her job as a singer in a piano bar, she is cut off from her voice. A visit from her mother gets her up and moving but she is still heavy with sorrow that no one seems to want to let her express.
On the TV all the channels begin covering Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s racist meltdown on the stage of the Laugh Factory in LA, the place Maddie’s husband is headed without her. Richards’s vitriolic performance of this country’s deep-seated racism, compounded by her mother’s mourning of a white neighbor, brings Maddie’s childhood rushing back. She grew up the only Black child in a white, conservative town in the wealthy New York suburbs, where kids who are her friends in kindergarten “realize she’s Black” by third grade. They perform the racist behaviors they inherit from their elders, and no one seems to think there’s anything wrong with that.
The performance of overt racism becomes a through line. While the comedian is publicly called out, Maddie reckons with the trouble of returning home to that mostly white, conservative town as the holidays descend. A neighbor’s death brings her back to her hometown on New Year’s Eve to both mourn one more loss and contend with the harms of the past. The kids who filled her childhood are all grown up now, and Maddie, raw with grief and the loneliness it brings, asks some of them to account for their childhood transgressions and their cowardly silence.
The responses range, and reveal the complexity of reckoning: her own mother dismisses Maddie’s memories, the bully acknowledges and apologies, her friend Tobias, “breaker of her young heart,” just wants to move on.
But the story is not, of course, only about grief and racial reckoning. Johnson’s humor is a through line too. It comes in memorable scenes, like when Velma’s spiteful Dachshund seems the embodiment of microaggressions—a snapping, snarling, unapologetic creature that Velma defends unconditionally. It comes in the dialogue that renders each character vivid and compelling.
Humor and reckoning collide too when Velma once again offers her daughter up to this community with all its blind spots, racism, and privilege. The novella rises to a crescendo in the scene where Maddie’s mother Velma has volunteered Maddie to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the deceased. Maddie learns she will be performing just moments before when she sees her name on the program, and has no time to prepare for this sudden call. She is furious with her mother, but takes the stage anyway, standing before the mostly white community, the handful of people of color, performing a beloved anthem in this display of public grief.
Johnson reminds us of the complexity of this song, an ode to awakening, to being lost and then finding redemption, a song written by a slave trader who made his fortune trafficking in African lives. As Maddie sings before the crowd she asks herself, “What am I doing standing in this white church in this white town that crushed my spirit, singing the words of a white supremacist who wrote it for his own forgiveness? Why should I forgive?”
Maddie’s grief—for her lost child, her broken marriage, her challenging parents, and the betrayals of this childhood home, make for a tricky performance. “Singing magnified every feeling,” and when she falters, her childhood friend, daughter of the deceased steps up, calls for the community to step up, and they begin to sing together, offering this complicated, beautiful song back to Maddie. The moment is riveting, but also another kind of performance: what is it to sing of being lost then found, blind, then seeing, when so much has still been unaccounted for? What grace is this community asking without having done the work to earn it?
It is a moving moment, but Johnson quickly reminds us of how far we still must go. When that childhood friend Tobias is bitten by her mother’s vicious Dachshund, he offers a trade: the harm and disregard he perpetrated in the past for present forgiveness of canine transgression, as if the two could be comparable: “Maddie, how ’bout, I let this go, and you let your stuff go?”
She responds: “Let it go where? Where do I send it?”
Shortly after, a neighbor with Alzheimer’s unleashes a racist diatribe against Maddie, lunging at her as he hollers the n-word and rails that she doesn’t belong in the house. It is a scene that brings the Laugh Factory moment directly to Maddie, highlighting all the vicious ignorance of our shared past.
When the beleaguered wife of the man apologizes for his behavior, Maddie thanks her, but doesn’t let her off the hook: “I’m surprised though…Because you called me the same thing when I was a kid. You hated ‘us people’.” Now the woman is friendly with Maddie’s mother, and Maddie wants to know: “What’s changed?”
By the end, Johnson’s character understands the impact of this place of her childhood better. “The voice of this place had been loud and she’d carried it with her all her life. Now she saw that the voice was nothing but a beat-down, demented, old fossil clinging to the need to be better because its own image was so fragile.”
“What’s changed?” is a question that Homegoing asks of all of us. What does healing look like? How can we reckon with the past if we do not listen to those hurt by it, and make authentic amends? How do we hold each other accountable for harm? How do we reconcile with each other in this country where so much brutality was baked into the beginning, and the legacy of it lives on in our language, in our actions and inactions? How do we make amends, instead of dismissing old wounds, or hiding behind excuses?
What truth and reconciliation might be possible in this country if we could do that? If we could hold space for the grief and trauma our history has brought, and that our present perpetuates, but work toward better for one another as we move together into something new?
Toni Ann Johnson’s Homegoing invites us through the story of Maddie and the vibrant scenes she inhabits, to consider how we listen, how we honor, and how we make amends—authentically, not performatively—so that we may move toward collective grace together.
Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, slam poetry coach, and writer who was made in Los Angeles and still calls it home. She has published work in The Sun, Bellevue Literary Review, Integrated Schools, Mutha Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Rising Phoenix Review and other journals. She is a proud public school teacher in LAUSD and was a 2020 finalist for California Teacher of the Year. She is a member of Women Who Submit, and gathering with them throughout the high seas of pandemic kept her afloat as a writer. Find her work here: www.hazelkightwitham.com.