(Raised in the steamy bayous of New Orleans in the early 1...)
Raised in the steamy bayous of New Orleans in the early 1900s, LeRoi "King" Tremain, caught up in his family's ongoing feud with the rival DuMont family, learns to fight.
Guy Johnson is an American writer. Johnson's poetry has appeared in Essence magazine as well as in My Brother’s Keeper, an anthology of black male poets.
Background
Guy Johnson was born as Clyde Johnson in 1945, in San Francisco, California, the United States, to an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou. Angelou gave birth to her son three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17. She wrote in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that she became pregnant after having sex with a boy to prove she wasn’t a lesbian. After giving birth, she worked a number of jobs to support herself and her child, so Guy and his mother often moved all over the world.
Education
Johnson graduated from a college in Ghana.
Career
Johnson worked for the government of Oakland, California, for more than twenty years and nowadays he has taken a medical leave. Previously he worked as a bartender in Spain, operated a photo-safari service in the Sahara, and worked on oil rigs in Kuwait.
First-time novelist Guy Johnson took inspiration from his family in writing Standing at the Scratch Line (1998). He based his protagonist LeRoi “King” Tremain on memories of his grandfather and family stories. He learned from his mother, the writer Maya Angelou, the kind of work and discipline writing requires. Having worked for many years as a municipal administrator, Johnson told a Random House interviewer he was excited to be beginning his career as a writer. He also commented that he greatly valued the exposure to all kinds of artists that were part of his childhood, as well as having a mother who cherished creativity and reading.
Standing at the Scratch Line is an epic action-adventure novel. Following the life of LeRoi Tremain over the course of thirty years, it begins when a teenage Tremain kills two white deputies during a violent episode in a family feud. Rather than face the Southern justice system, the boy leaves Louisiana to become part of U.S. troops fighting in World War I. In France he shows a cold-blooded talent for killing and is nicknamed le Roi du Mort (the king of death) by the French. When Tremain returns to the United States, he uses the name King and becomes a strongman for Harlem nightclubs, protecting them against the Mob. He later takes on the Ku Klux Klan, when he moves to New Orleans. Here he marries Serena Baddeaux and begins to recreate the kind of clan he was part of as a child. It is family troubles, including two illegitimate children, that prove to be most trouble in King’s life.
This story was created as part of Johnson’s background for another novel, Echoes of a Distant Summer. King Tremain’s life was first conceptualized as flashbacks in a book about his grandson, who looks on his grandfather as evil.
Achievements
Guy Johnson is an outstanding author. His works were highly praised and were included in the anthology My Brother’s Keeper.
Despite his mother’s international fame and the respect of civil rights icons, heads of state and media personalities, Johnson says he didn’t really appreciate his mother until he was 30 years old.
“You spend so much time trying to get your own feet on the ground, trying to find out who you really are that it’s hard to tell that your parents are more than just the regular parents,” Johnson says. “I spent a lot of time rebelling against my mother. Many of the things were things she said to me countless times. In the 1950s, when I was in elementary school, my mother would come to school in an African dress with her hair natural. And tell the truth, there were like eight Black women in the United States under 100 years old who wore their hair natural at that time and my mother knew all of them.”
