Toni Morrison once said that her writing almost always began with a question she doesn't have an answer to yet. The Bluest Eye started with an inquiry into how children learn self-loathing. Sula explores how one loves after betrayal. I bring up Morrison not only because Cebo Campbell mentions her directly in the book's Acknowledgements, but because this book clearly started with a question that plagued Campbell just as much as it plagues the rest of us: What would a world without white people look like?
This book and ones like it are exactly the kind of thing that Morrison called "the only preoccupation of Black American writers" in her 1986 interview with Christina Davis. She talks about the role, and dare I say it, duty, of the Black American writer in the reclamation of our own history. "There's a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of black people has been systematically annihilated in many, many ways and the job of recovery is ours." Recovery. Healing. A foundational truth that Sky Full of Elephants gets right to the heart of.
We meet Charlie Brunton, one year after his release from prison. A release brought on by a mass event that led to the death of every white person in America.
Yeah. I know. I'll give you a second to catch your breath.
Now a solar-electric systems professor at Howard University, Charlie is contacted by his estranged biracial daughter, Sidney, seeking his help after losing the only family she's ever known. Though he's practically a stranger, Charlie is her only hope of reclaiming a sense of normalcy. She asks him to take her from her home in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to Orange Beach, Alabama, where she believes the surviving white people are living. However, their journey quickly takes a turn when they find out that Alabama is no longer part of the American democracy, but an independent monarchy with a king and a queen.
My favorite thing about this work was Campbell's depiction of a non-white America. Although we may think a world without whiteness is ideal, Campbell beautifully expresses the conflict that reality would come with. When white people hold primary ownership of this country's economic, social, political, and physical infrastructure, what happens when they disappear? Rather than being idealistic, Campbell highlights how years of disenfranchisement and systemic oppression handicap black people's ability to thrive. America without white people is not a utopia. It is a nation revealed. And with revelation comes change. At least, that's what the characters in Campbell's story aim to do. Faced with the realization that the "old ways" are not suitable for this new world, both Charlie and Sidney eventually accept the fact that change has to start within, and then and only then will we see changes without.
This book is a journey to self-discovery and self-acceptance, a rhetoric that exposes our deepest fears and inadequacies as both a nation and as Black Americans, packaged in some of the most beautiful prose I've read from a modern writer in a long time. It challenged my preconceived notions about Blackness and how we would truly start to reconcile our history in America. Like Morrison said, it is our duty to recover and reclaim our history as ours, rather than continue to allow it to be shaped by and viewed through a white-centered lens.
Sky Full of Elephants is a balm for the disconnected Black spirit, inviting you into a world that calls you to exchange your I and Me for an Us and We.
If you're interested in reading Sky Full of Elephants, click the link below to purchase. Or you know, patronize your locally owned bookstore or public library.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sky-Full-of-Elephants/Cebo-Campbell/9781668034927
As always, it's a pleasure to have you here down at the Noir Narrative.
- Til next time.
Words mean things, and sometimes context clues ain't enough to tell us what that meaning is, and that's when we look it up. Here are some words from the book I had to look up:
assiduous: showing great care, relentless attention, and persistent effort in doing something
ubiquitous: existing, present, or appearing everywhere simultaneously
imprecision: the state or quality of lacking exactness, accuracy, or clarity
emulously: to act in a way that tries to equal, excel, or copy someone else's success
raucous: unpleasantly loud, harsh, and disorderly
dynamism: great energy, active force, or continuous progress
fortuitous: happening by chance, accidental or lucky
erudition: deep and extensive learning, scholarship, and profound knowledge gained chiefly through intensive reading, study, and research
apotheosized: to elevate someone or something to the rank of a god, deify, or glorify to an extreme degree
coterie: a small, exclusive group of people who share the same interests, tastes, or goals
Works Cited