Johnnie Robert Capers releases “The Deal Is Real: GODS Pension Plan For Man,” a testimony carried out of Ohio reformatories, Minnesota courtrooms, and a hospital bed he was not supposed to leave.
There is a particular quiet that settles over a man when the jury foreperson stands, clears her throat, and says the words Not Guilty. Johnnie Robert Capers remembers that quiet. He remembers the stroke that arrived 2 months later, in the middle of a sentence he never finished. He remembers the woman he had loved for 15 years closing the door behind her while he sat on the edge of a hospital bed trying to make his hand hold a spoon. And he remembers, through all of it, the one voice that never left the room.
“The Deal Is Real: GODS Pension Plan For Man” is that voice, set down on paper.
The book, released this season by Parker Publishers, is the autobiographical testimony of a songwriter who has been written off more times than he can count. Elyria, Ohio. The only son in a house of 6 sisters. A runaway at 13. Fairfield School for Boys, the place the children inside it simply called The Hill. 4 years and 9 months at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield for something he did not do. Then, nearly 3 decades later, a detective waiting in his parole officer’s lobby with a DNA swab kit and questions about a woman murdered long before Johnnie had ever set foot in Saint Paul.
He kept silent through almost all of it. Not out of strategy. Out of prayer.
Readers expecting a triumphant courtroom drama will find one, briefly, and then find it handed back to GOD on the very next page. Johnnie is not interested in being the hero of his own story. He writes about Egypt the way the Bible writes about Egypt, as a state of mind a person wanders into and stays in for years without realizing. He writes about a frame of mind he names “I’mmado,” the quiet decision to run on self instead of on faith, and he traces the wreckage it leaves behind in his own life without self pity or performance. He writes about the Garden of Eden as a place that was never actually locked.
The prose has the cadence of someone who learned scripture by reading it alone in a cell and later, alone, in a bedroom with one lamp on. It does not try to sound literary. It does not try to sound humble. It simply tells the truth the way Johnnie tells it, which is plainly, and with every reference to GOD in full capitals, the way he believes the Name should be written.
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done nor where you’re at in life. GOD makes it crystal clear. The Deal Is Real.”
Johnnie Robert Capers
The book is written for readers 12 and older and moves through territory most memoirs try to soften. Grief. Addiction. Racism. Abandonment. The particular loneliness of carrying charges you did not earn, more than once, across more than one decade. Johnnie holds a firm line the whole way through. No hatred toward any human being. Actions named, people not condemned. The love he is pointing to is not his own, and he never confuses the two.
What makes the book difficult to shelve, and difficult to forget, is the absence of the familiar upward arc. Johnnie does not end in a house he bought himself or on a stage he earned. He ends at a desk in Saint Paul, with a guitar nearby, writing lyrics to GOD because GOD is the only audience he has ever truly been writing for.
The Pension Plan, he says, was never tied to a paycheck.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Johnnie Robert Capers was born and raised in Elyria, Ohio. He left home at 13, spent 4 years and 9 months at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield for a crime he did not commit, and moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1985, where he still lives. He is a songwriter and guitarist whose lyrics center on GOD and Jesus Christ. “The Deal Is Real: GODS Pension Plan For Man” is his first book.
BOOK DETAILS
Title: The Deal Is Real: GODS Pension Plan For Man
Author: Johnnie Robert Capers
Publisher: Parker Publishers
Genre: Autobiographical Testimony
Audience: Readers 12 and older
Available on: Amazon
MEDIA CONTACT
Parker Publishers
Email: info@parkerpublishers.com
Website: www.parkerpublishers.com
