Welcome to Braggsville

Welcome to Braggsville (2015) by T. Geronimo Johnson is a literary satirical novel that follows four young college students as their idealism clashes with life outside campus. It was critically praised for its social satire and views on race in America, as well as its unique writing style that includes realism, poetry, and sci-fi. It was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

Its themes include social hypocrisy, the ridiculousness of strict social identities, and unconscious slavery to dogma.

The novel begins with an omniscient, stream-of-conscious narrator giving the background of D'aron Little May Davenport, a kind, bright, but clueless teenager. He’s young, white, and belongs to the blue-collar class. In Braggsville, Georgia, everyone spells his name with the first letter capital, an apostrophe, then the rest of the name, e.g. D’aron. Unlike everyone else in town, D’aron is very sensitive and astute and is commonly teased.



D’aron receives a scholarship to UC Berkeley in Northern California. He received acceptance letters from every school he applied to, but he chooses Berkeley for its liberal environment (he’s a vegetarian), for the full-ride, and to escape his entire family. He’s the first in his family to attend college.

In a six-person dorm, D’aron bonds with several farcical images of Berkeley students. There’s Candice from Iowa who tries to fit into the politically correct atmosphere by claiming to have Native American blood despite her very bright blonde hair; Louis Chang, a San Francisco native who uses his Malaysian identity to make constant jokes; and Charlie, the preppy jock, yet bookish kid, from an impoverished neighborhood in Chicago who fashions himself after Barack Obama and graduated two years early. They each quickly learn to speak “Berzerkeley,” a self-conscious form of speech that employs frequent pious phrases from thinkers such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky. D’aron starts going by “Daron” to avoid any charges of cultural appropriation from African-Americans. He dreams in “Berzerkeley.”

When sophomore year starts, they each want to take a class together. They choose the course “American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives.” The class is mostly a joke where they discuss their feelings more than study anything. D’aron tells everyone about the Civil War reenactment his town hosts every year (the event was recently retitled “Patriot Days”). As a final project, Louis tells D’aron that they all should travel back to Braggsville to stage their own version of the Civil War alongside the usual main event.



They refer to their efforts as “interventions” and jokingly call themselves the “Four Little Indians.” They plan for Candice to act the role of a slave master and Louis to be “lynched” while D’aron and Charlie interview people for their thoughts on the intervention.

In Braggsville, D’aron’s friends are horrified to find the opposite of everything they value in life. In Braggsville, no one sees the value of education and people happily shout behind banners supporting the KKK and the Confederacy. The town of 712 people still enforces segregation, even though it’s illegal on a national level.

They learn the idealism they learned at their very liberal university might not be relevant in the ordinary world. The intervention turns horribly violent, and Louis ends up dead after he dons blackface and pretends to be a corpse; he had assumed no crowd would attack a corpse.



The sheriff—a stereotypical white southern male with jarring diction—interrogates Charlie and Candice. The sheriff asks why he’s in Braggsville, and Charlie replies with something about adaptive testing and identity as performance; despite the sheriff’s farcical tone, it’s clear that he is bright and has a good time teasing Charlie. Next, the sheriff interrogates Candice. She says that she’s in Braggsville because to be an artist requires making radical gestures. Referring to Love in the Time of Cholera, she says, “Gabriel García Márquez never wrote a novel called ‘Love in the Time of Cold and Flu Season.’”

After Louis’s death, reporters and counselors come to the aid of the sophomores. When Candice or D’aron try to say that Louis was murdered by a mob, they are shut down; all authorities are adamant—lynch mobs don’t exist anymore in the south.

The three remaining students are interviewed by several FBI agents. Once they’re released, D’aron accuses Charlie of raping Candice (she had sustained some injuries from the intervention). He does this mostly out of jealously, but also because he can’t help espousing the racist philosophy of his town: black men, in all cases, are a threat to white women. But soon after the accusation, Charlie comes out as gay, thus mocking D’aron’s accusation and the larger culture behind it.



After the experience in Braggsville, none of the students want to return to Berkeley. Candice and D’aron end up transferring to the University of New Orleans, and Charlie transfers to a school closer to his own home in Chicago.

When he returns home from college, D’aron finds that the entire town blames him for the botched intervention. He starts thinking about his racist upbringing, and how, though his education helped him escape from it, didn’t give him the tools to effectively ameliorate racism.

Back in New Orleans, Candice and D’aron host the visiting Charlie and his new boyfriend, Frederick. The novel closes with Charlie feeling grateful for his friends and ready to take on the world in a more practical, less zealous fashion.