PRESS RELEASE
After decades of delaying his most passionate project, the more than 30-year director of public relations at Alabama A&M University has completed his first novel, The Chinaberry Tree, which will be available worldwide upon its April 11, 2025, publication date or via pre-order.
Jerome Saintjones, only recently retired from AAMU following 32 years of service, also received the Ed.S. degree in higher education administration. It was only after retirement that he completed the dream he had held deep within for years.
The book opens with the stream-of-consciousness meltdown of Arnold Giovanni, a white professor at a black college in a small Southern town.
Arnold has developed an obsessive fascination for black culture and black women. Through The Chinaberry Tree, the local bar, he has been able to befriend several patrons and to eavesdrop on others. Like a sly, modern-day Chaucer, he has retrieved revealing stories of their journeys through the American experience, while expertly being “in” the [black] world but not necessarily “of” that world. On Judgment Day, however, a heated conversation ensues at The Chinaberry Tree, and Arnold too freely chirps in as one of the guys. This time, Bo Willie, the bar’s co-owner and a Vietnam vet often plagued by flashbacks, stops him in his tracks with a deceptively simple question. Those few words launch the stream of consciousness tirade going on inside Arnold’s brain when the novel opens, spinning him across time dimensions. The “tales” that follow replay the intricacies of the several lives “colonized” by Arnold’s journal in his personal quest to delve into an authentic black experience.