The south side of Chicago has a rich literary history. Saul Bellow called the University of Chicago his academic home for more than 30 years, and set many of his books nearby. Stuart Dybek’s short stories use the south side as a backdrop. The manhunt for Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son spans many of the city’s precincts.
The most recent installment in this tradition comes from Gabriel Bump who grew up in the neighborhood of Hyde Park. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, captures the verve of the South Side while tangling with issues of identity and injustice in — and hope for — the black community in America.
The narrative is narrated by Claude McKay Love, whose parents abandon him and his brother Paul to be raised by their tough-loving grandmother. We follow Claude through his childhood and adolescence on the South Side as he comes to terms with his parents’ abandonment, struggles to relate to his emotionally volatile brother, and falls in love with a quirky girl at school named Janice. Claude’s life unfurls episodically, featuring a rich cast of characters — a high school football phenom named Chester Dexter who dates Janice — or the leader of the black nationalist “Redbelters” named Big Columbus. After high school, Claude matriculates to the University of Missouri’s prestigious journalism program, an experience that comprises the novel’s second half.
Bump’s fiction moves at a rapid clip. Short bursts of lovely prose skim across the surface of his world, breaking up long sections of dialogue that sometimes read lyrically. The novel also offers quieter moments of emotional fullness. Early on in the novel, when Claude is still in grammar school, he falls in love with a girl named Tiffany, and his brother Paul and Paul’s girlfriend Teeth mock him for it:
“I hear you want to fuck someone, Claude.” Teeth stood up and kissed Paul.
“We’re not swearing anymore,” Paul said, an arm around Teeth’s waist.
“Is that what Claude wants to do?” Teeth asked. “Do you want to fuck someone?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to marry her.”
“What are you going to do when you’re married?” Teeth asked me.
“Go on adventures,” I said.
Moments like these not only provide comic relief amid the novel’s many tragedies, but also imbue Claude with a profound pathos that makes him a relatable narrator. Claude is the novel’s connective tissue, its warm soul.
Bump subverts the traditional bildungsroman structure with his treatment of time and his use of flash forward, a bold and successful departure. Speaking about a childhood friend affectionally nicknamed Nugget, Claude says:
Nugget went to a magnet school up north, one of those schools with a middle school and a high school in a big building with big windows. He graduated valedictorian. He went to Northwestern for history, Yale for Law. He moved to New York. He blogged about urban decline and America’s moral decay. He organized rallies whenever the police shot an unarmed black kid. He flew back to Chicago for civil rights summits, conversations about violence and economic development. There are pictures of him online laughing with Obama. His parachute didn’t open on his fortieth birthday. I went to his funeral. I couldn’t find a seat.
Alhough it’s never clear how old Claude is when telling his story or how he has gained access to so much information about others, the profundity and originality of such gestures make for captivating breaks from the scene-driven narrative, and add a layer of significance to descriptions of the mundanities of childhood. These passages also work to undercut the expected narratives around his characters. The assertion that a black boy named Nugget from the south side of Chicago would emerge as a civil rights activist friend of Barack Obama with a law degree from Yale works to disprove the mainstream media narratives about Chicago’s south side and the people who live there.
Perhaps the novel’s strongest moment comes in the form of the showdown between the black nationalist Redbelters and the Chicago Police, a violent uprising that takes on the hyperpoliticized tone of Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door or Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Suddenly we are taken from the life and times of a boy approaching manhood to a race war showdown that feels nearly surreal. And yet the strangeness of the sequence is grounded by the fact that the racist policing of black communities results in militarized ethnic cleansings (Tulsa, 1921) and full-scale rebellions (Ferguson, 2014). The battle between the police and the Redbelters is but another episode in a long history of similar conflicts.
Claude’s account of the traumatizing violence again skirts the boundary between prose and poetry:
I saw a blinded and coughing woman break a cop’s leg with a shovel.
I saw a blinded and coughing man spin his arms like windmills against a riot shield.
I saw mounted horsemen on the horizon.
I saw helicopters above.
I saw madness and confusion.
I saw humanity collapse in on itself.
I was scared.
I was alone.
In the end, 26 people perish. However, the irony of the showdown between the Redbelters and the police rests in how the community turns against the Redbelters, blaming them for the violence and terror wrought by the confrontation with the police as opposed to holding the police accountable for their racist mistreatment of the community they purportedly protect and serve.
This formative experience haunts Claude for the rest of the narrative, from the south side of Chicago to Missouri, where he goes to college and encounters dynamics and challenges that are new and yet all-too-familiar. In Missouri we meet another memorable set of characters: a burnout hippy philosopher taco chef named Martin, a fellow black reporter at the student newspaper named Simone, and perhaps the novel’s funniest character: Connie Stove, a wisened and withered reporter who serves as the faculty advisor to the newspaper.
The novel’s second half feels just as alive as its first. On joining the school newspaper, Claude and Simone are assigned to cover race on campus, naturally, because they are the only reporters of color on staff. They begin their assignment by researching all of the race-related articles the paper has published, which forces them to read about lynching on campus, police beating up homeless black people, and campus debates about “whether abolition was worth all these valuable white lives.” Claude is so exhausted by the experience that he leaves the offices:
I slid behind [Simone], up the stairs, out the door, into a quiet campus—classes still in session. I stood in the sun for a moment and fought back tears I didn’t expect. My head rattled with noise and anger. I wanted home. I headed for my dorm, tried to hide my eyes from passersby.
Chicago and Missouri collide toward the end of the novel when Janice appears on campus, on the run from the Redbelters who follow her to campus and square off against the Missouri police in the parking lot of a motel nearby. This second showdown is drawn less compellingly than its predecessor, and leads to a somewhat confusing and abrupt ending. And yet the novel’s conclusion is in keeping with the overarching spirit of Bump’s novel, a book with no shortage of boldness or emotional depth. Claude McKay Love is a quiet, melancholy boy who has endured the quaking instability of his surroundings to become a man. He chooses to define himself through his love for Janice, to prioritize her protection. Such a rejection of the violence, horror, and hatred he has faced is a rebellion in and of itself — a conclusion that seems to resonate in contrast with the choice made by Bigger Thomas.
[Published by Algonquin Books on February 4, 2020, 272 pages, $25.95 hardcover]