Deborah Johnson is not your typical Mississippi book author. For one thing, she is an African-American Catholic. There are few Catholics in most of Mississippi. For another, she came to Mississippi after living for 18 years in Italy, working part of that time at Vatican Radio. “This must be where I was supposed to go,” this woman of faith says. Now in her 60s, it would be safe to call her one of a kind.
Her first novel, The Air Between Us (2008), about boyhood friends, Black and white, in Mississippi in the 1950s, was awarded the 2010 Mississippi Library Award for fiction. Her second, The Secret of Magic (2014), about the racist murder of a Mississippi Black soldier returning from World War II, was winner of the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, among other awards.
The final book in her Mississippi historical-fiction trilogy, her forthcoming Washington and Leigh, tells the story of exploited Black musicians in 1950s Mississippi (think of the mere $500 in royalties that Big Mama Thornton received for her recording of “Hound Dog,” the song that later made Elvis Presley famous). If everything stays on schedule, it will be available for this coming spring release season (alongside the paperback reissue of The Secret of Magic).
In this trilogy, she explores the themes of Southern culture that sparked the civil rights movement and that in many ways remain destructive across the United States today. For example, The Secret of Magic is about the post-World War II South. “It is essentially about a murder of a Black person,” Johnson explained in a phone interview with America in July. “We know who did it right away, but since the South was such an oligarchy at that time, the question becomes, ‘Is the person who did it going to be brought to justice?’” It is actually inspired by the famous case of Isaac Woodard, who was taken off a bus in South Carolina and beaten blind by the police chief for arguing with the bus driver. Historians call the chief’s acquittal by an all-white jury an awakening for President Harry Truman, who consequently desegregated the U.S. military.
Johnson’s story is built around an assistant to Thurgood Marshall, who, before becoming a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, was head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Marshall’s fictional assistant, Regina Robichard, is inspired by the real Constance Baker Motley, a young Black New York lawyer and an assistant to Marshall who became prominent in legal work for racial justice in the 1940s and ’50s. She later served as a judge in New York City. In Johnson’s story, Ms. Robichard comes to Mississippi to investigate the murder. There’s a lot of polite-society veneer to cut through for Regina to investigate the case.
“This was the time when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund would put out a sign many times during the year, ‘A man has been lynched today,’” said Johnson. The organization would learn details and publicize the cases to gain national attention and sympathy for the civil rights cause. In the novel, Robichard is looking for such a case.
A Different Time
It might be hard for younger readers to imagine that within the lifetime of older people today, public lynching, terrorist torture and the hanging of Black people and some others was a regular, unpunished occurance in the United States. But memories such as these are integral to Johnson’s storytelling. Although she focuses on Mississippi, there were recorded lynchings in all but seven states, including her state of origin.
Deborah Johnson was born south of the Mason-Dixon line, she likes to say, in Joplin, Mo., but was raised further north, in Omaha, Neb. She is one of five siblings, four girls and one boy. “Daddy went to medical school at Creighton, so that’s where we moved, and that’s where we stayed,” she told me. As a child in the 1930s, he had been hospitalized with rheumatic fever and placed in isolation because he was considered contagious.
Deborah Johnson the storyteller told me the family story:
His mother couldn’t come in. She would look at him through the window, which had chicken wire. But they discovered that at the age of 3, Daddy could read. There was a doctor who came in every night and would just sit with him and just talk about his day and stuff like that. He was the only person besides nurses who could come, and he’d bring in Little Golden Books too. And because of that, Daddy decided that he wanted to be a doctor. Now he was born on a dirt floor, so that was essentially the equivalent of saying that he wanted to walk on the moon.
Eventually, he and Creighton University made it happen. He completed his degree in 1955 and went on to be a pioneering doctor and surgeon, with a deep commitment to community service. He became Catholic as a young man; later he served as a deacon at his parish. “Our family wasn’t Catholic before Daddy, but he was ardent,” Johnson said. She and her siblings are cradle Catholics.
About her mother, she said, “Back then, women weren’t supposed to work. So she was a housewife. She would’ve been much better working.” She added, laughing, “I’m doing a book about that, too!”
Johnson attended Duchesne Academy in Omaha. “A fabulous school, run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart,” she said. “My sisters and I integrated the school. We were the first Black students. But I never felt isolated or unwelcome.”
“‘You have a talent for history,’” she recalled Mother Margaret Mary Miller telling her. “‘You could probably never be a scholar, but you can tell a story.’ She was one of the first to encourage me to be a writer, along with my mother.”
That idea, she said, “was beyond what my father could imagine. He wanted me to be a doctor. We were a medical family.” But there was an impediment: “Let me say that I had no talent whatsoever in science or math.”
More seriously, though, she adds, “My parents were both very supportive. It’s just that, for African Americans, in that class that pulled themselves up, education was the acme of achievement. They both were very, very focused on education. I can say that! We all went to Catholic schools. My brother went to Creighton Prep, too. My father was devoted to the Jesuits.”
“There were very few Black Catholics in Omaha. So we were socially mobile. However, my daddy was the kind of doctor who—I remember him crying over lost patients. And he was very, very involved in the community. There were little parks named after him.”
A Sojourn in Rome
Fast forward. Johnson married and moved to San Francisco, where she and her husband eventually had one son. Her marriage ended there after 13 years with an “amiable divorce,” she said.
She had always wanted to go to Rome, and this was her opportunity. “We were brought up with the idea of Rome; the Religious of the Sacred Heart had their motherhouse there on Trinità dei Monti. I wanted to see it,” she told me.
Her young son came along for what she thought would be a year. “I liked it so much that I ended up staying for 18 years.” Perhaps hearing a muse within, Johnson wanted to study Latin. She wound up in the Latin classes of the famous Carmelite friar Reginald Foster. “I snuck in,” Johnson said. (Father Reginald, world-renowned Latinist for four popes and countless other Roman church figures, let nonpaying students into his classes—he used to say he wanted serious students.) Rubbing shoulders with so many clerics there, she found freelance work copy-editing doctoral theses for graduate students for whom English was a second language.
“I was in a really good prayer group, and—it’s a God thing—one of the women in it was in charge of English-speaking Africa at Vatican Radio,” she said. “She asked me: Did I want to come to work there? And I did!”
“Aside from the BBC, Vatican Radio was the most listened-to radio of any sort of media in English-speaking Africa,” she recalled. “It went into the bush, everywhere. If the radio took up a subject, we could see changes in it as we were reporting on it.”
She offered the example of child soldiers, which Vatican Radio covered extensively. “When we started talking about child soldiers in Uganda, it started bringing more attention to the subject everywhere. We could see that the atmosphere change. We saw this with women’s health, a lot of different things. You could actually see that there were benefits from what you were doing.” Clearly she relished the work.
Her job was to watch the media for stories and develop them for Vatican Radio’s audience. “I would put together stories, occasionally reading them on the air. I did a lot of youth programs,” she recalled. “It was interesting work. I met all kinds of people, and it was right down from St. Peter’s Basilica. It was kind of a magical experience.”
What was her best story? “My masterpiece, for which I deserve an Academy Award, I do believe, was the piece I did for the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.”
She also tried her hand at writing historical romance novels set in Italy during the Hundred Years’ War, and actually wrote a few. You won’t hear her talking about the Rev. Andrew Greeley’s “sacramental imagination,” though; she just writes with it, and lives it.
Finding Her Voice
In 2002, Johnson decided to return to the United States. Her son was in college, at Princeton; she would find her voice at home writing stories around injustice among her own people. But she needed a job, too. She became director of the Colom Foundation, in Columbus, Miss., a small foundation that supports literacy and other human development programs. She devoted early mornings to writing novels.
You learn something of her curiosity and faith when she explains how she got to Columbus, in the heart of Mississippi. “By that point in my life, I was so used to doing strange things that I said, ‘OK, this must be where I’m supposed to go.’” She looked at the map and saw the similarly named Columbia, Miss., about two hours from New Orleans. “Then, maybe a week before, when I found out that I wasn’t going to go near New Orleans, but up near Birmingham, it took my breath away. We all know Birmingham from the ’60s. But I came anyway. And here I am.”
The alluvial soil of the Pearl Valley turned out to be fertile ground for this writer. But why fiction? “It works because I like to tell stories. And I love to listen to stories. And this has been true my whole life. Even in Mississippi. Most of the stories that I tell are connected to stories that people told me, especially in The Air Between Us,” she said.
Her next novel after Washington and Leigh will focus on something closer to home: “It is actually talking about being a Black Catholic.” She’s developing the plot now—and keeping it to herself. “Get your first draft together before you start talking to too many people about it. Everyone will have an opinion!”
She has blossomed in the post-50 stage of her life, not only as a novelist but now also as a faculty member in Stanford University’s online Continuing Studies program. “I like being able to inspire people,” she says of her teaching work. “I like to be able to tell people they can do this. A lot of times people don’t get the support that I got from my family—and from the nuns at my school.”
And once again she is back to talking about Catholicism, which for her is more like the adage about good writing: Show, don’t tell. She came from a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools, became enamored of her Catholic faith, now worships at a parish where she appreciates the pastor, and has an abiding sense that being Catholic is a driving part of her identity.
“I’m a walking miracle,” she says. “So many times, I’ve seen that God gave me a big helping hand. Every day when I wake up it’s with a sense of wonder. And gratitude.”
This article appears in October 2025.