The Geography of the Apocalypse: Incest, Mythology, and the Fall of Washington Cityin Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie

The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a “metaphorical” or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: “a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.”—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

There are, in the district of Columbia, several slave prisons, or “Negro pens,” as they are termed. . . . By order of her master, Clotel was removed from Richmond and placed in one of these prisons, to await the sailing of a vessel for New Orleans. The prison in which she was put stands midway between the capitol at Washington and the President’s house.—William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President’s Daughter

Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of Carolivia Herron’s 1991 novel Thereafter Johnnie are the eroticized incestuous relationships between a middle-class black father and daughter in the present and a white slavemaster, his son, and their black daughter/sister in the past. John Christopher Snowdon, a black surgeon in present-day Washington, D.C., sexually molests one of his three daughters, Patricia, when she is about two years old. The novel connects this molestation to Patricia’s adult sexual obsession with her father; the two have seemingly consensual sex when Patricia is seventeen, and Patricia gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Johnnie. John Christopher’s sexual abuse of his daughter is linked to a history of incestuous sexual abuse in slavery. One of the primary questions that Thereafter Johnnie poses is, What is the connection between the incestuous sexual abuse of black girls/women by their black fathers and the incestuous sexual abuse of enslaved black girls/women by their white father-masters? The novel posits answers to this question in a number of ways. This essay will elucidate some of the intimate associations it explores among geography, gender, mythology, race, power, and sexuality as Herron considers the problem of historical influence and continuity.

Through realist narration, myth, fairy tale, prophecy, classical and biblical allusions, and allusions to African American literature and culture, Thereafter Johnnie tells the tale of the Snowdon family’s development, crisis, and disintegration in a dizzying, layered, epic structure of twenty-four books (like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hebrew Bible). The novel employs virtually all of its characters as narrators: John Christopher Snowdon, the family patriarch; Camille, John Christopher’s wife and the mother of their three daughters; Cynthia Jane, the oldest daughter, who leaves home to become a nun as the family is being destroyed by incest; Patricia, the daughter whose name indicates her special attachment to the father; Eva, the woman-identified sister who is raped on the same night John Christopher and Patricia consummate their incestuous passion; Diotima, the Afro-Mexican woman who becomes Patricia’s companion and Johnnie’s caretaker; and Johnnie herself, a messianic figure who is simultaneously John Christopher’s daughter and granddaughter, Patricia’s daughter and sister. Most of the novel takes place over the course of about thirty-five years, from the time of Camille and John Christopher’s courtship and marriage to the family’s demise at the end of the twentieth century. The final chapter flashes back to the slave past, introducing Laetitia and Rowena, an enslaved mother and daughter who are ancestors of the twentieth-century Snowdon women and whose story is a near-pornographic retelling of scenes from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Iola Leroy, and Clotel, or The President’s Daughter. The last few pages of the novel flash forward to the new millennium, in which Washington, D.C., and the United States have been destroyed. The reader finally learns that the narrator...