Cebo Campbell

In this exquisite speculative novel set in a world where white people no longer exist, college professor Charlie Brunton receives a call from his estranged daughter Sidney, setting off a chain of events as they journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search of answers. One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles 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 who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house. 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 America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it. When they enter 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.

Sky Full of Elephants

Lindsay

Truth, Charlie learned, could be whatever he decided.

But like the bulk of a mountain broken down by wind and water, truth devolves. With enough lies, one cannot defend himself with his own truth no more than stone can stop a river. So, what is a truth when fact is on longer accepted as true?

Charlie observed the man, his oscillation between grief and rage, between the powerlessness of being Little and draping himself in the only real power he'd ever seen. A man cracked in half under the pressure of being.

Words are magic, you see? You say anything enough and you believe it. Belief is the first step on the path of being.

Down the river a ways is Natchez - the Devil's Punchbowl - where they built a concentration camp for freed slaves. Killed a hundred thousand people.

You been beat down enough, you learn to survive on crumbs. The things white folks put people through - my god, cruel in ways I just can't even reconcile. Should be ashamed for a thousand years for all the lynching and raping, using people like goddamn animals.

The south has always been a monarchy in some form or another. Everybody thinks they're the king of something here. People, land, business. That's why you'd hear them talk about their manors and their birthrights and societies, all of them, carrying on like royals in court, having balls and cotillions while people was going off to war. Wouldn't be the first time some fool in Alabama claimed themselves lord of everything.

Sad? Confused? Ashamed? Afraid? Let yourself feel it. Feel all of it. Then dance with me until it burns up, until you can finally stop apologizing for being who you are. You can't go backward and there's nothing you need to settle to go forward. Let go of it

What if you just let go of everything you've been taught about right and wrong - forget what your schoolteacher said, your church pastor; forget about your Girl Scout leader - and you just tried to feel right and wrong in your bones, in your heart - would you still think what they are doing is wrong?

Science. Magic is just all science at once. Chemistry, physics, medicine. All the ones you know, and others you don't.

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