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A Novel
by Cebo Campbell
Book Reviewed by:In a world without white people, what does it mean to be black?
One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he's now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn't even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.
Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly "post-racial" America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.
Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell's astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.
Excerpt
Sky Full of Elephants
They killed themselves.
All of them. All at once.
* * *
We unsealed the jails first.
Folks showed up swinging bolt cutters to liberate their lawless relatives into a world different from the society out of which they were exiled. No one was guarding anything anymore.
All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshiped long enough.
Time slowed down too. Sauntered like hours did in places like Chattanooga and Charleston and Savannah. A notoriously southern phenomenon now spread like honey over everything. Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, "Quarter 'til," because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.
They killed themselves. All of them. All at once. You could feel their absence in everything. On the subway. In the streets. In all the places the wild reclaimed. Where sunflowers grew through office buildings...
Is it believable in a speculative novel that negotiates both racial ambiguity and racial anxiety that Alabama is separated from its past trauma of Jim Crow, George Wallace, and the White Citizens' Council? That segregation-inducing poverty, white nationalism, and lack of opportunities would give way to a black monarchy? In this suspension of disbelief, Campbell has crafted a king and a kingdom that is the antithesis of everything Alabama offers in historical narratives. The poet Rumi wrote that miracles swell in the invisible, but this isn't a story about miracles. It's about what racial politics fail to address: Who are we beneath the color of our skin? Does black identity feed off the host of white existence? Is it refracted in white light? If white people are gone, what do black people know about themselves? I found the story itself evocative, but the execution is its real triumph. Campbell borders on poetic with his prose; it's simply beautiful to read...continued
Full Review
(1140 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Asale Angel-Ajani, author of A Country You Can Leave
Part Afrofuturism, part delicious fever dream, a lost father and his fractured daughter set out on a road trip toward a misunderstood utopia that reveals the sacred wisdom of who they are and the significance of their people. Cebo Campbell is a master griot, reordering the world with grace, beauty, and deep humanity. Sky Full of Elephants is a thrilling, original work that allows us to look deeply at each other and ask if 'white ain't an idea no more,' what are the unlimited possibilities for the idea of black? Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck
Replete with airline-less airports, sprawling mansions up for grabs, and an Alabaman monarchy, Sky Full of Elephants is a supremely imaginative exploration of family, loss, and the many roads to healing. Cebo Campbell gifts us a vivid odyssey full of possibility, proving that liberation doesn't reside in the rejection of history, but in our embrace of it. This is a debut that dares us to tap into frequencies of freedom, to view ourselves as what we truly are and always have been: beings full of light worthy of love. Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
At the heart of this post-racial apocalyptic world is the tender story of a father and daughter coming to grips with their ever-evolving connection in the midst of great upheaval. Campbell plays his notes with majestic care and the result is something completely woke and utterly satisfying. An extraordinary feat!
One of the first scenes in Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell takes place in Professor Charlie Brunton's lecture hall at Howard University. Howard is one of the oldest HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), founded in 1867. Located in Washington, D.C., it has over the decades been a space safe from racial taunts and cruelty, microaggressions, and discrimination. In Campbell's novel, Professor Brunton inspires his students at a time when all the white people in the country have died in a mass suicide known as "the event." By default, HBCUs have become the de facto breeding ground for intellectual, spiritual, and social life.
Howard is joyful. "People laughed loud and broke out into little dances. They'd see a friend...
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In his boldly imagined first novel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families.
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