Author Cebo Campbell was hoping to answer a specific question when he sat down with an idea for a story: What would happen if he took Ferris Bueller and replaced him with Trayvon Martin?
Campbell reveals in a conversation with author Jason Reynolds that within 10 pages, his story fell apart. He couldn’t authentically create a world where Martin, a 17-year-old Floridian who was killed by civilian George Zimmerman in 2012, would survive after performing the antics actor Matthew Broderick gets away with in the 1986 classic movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
“Being a Black man in the United States, you move through the world with what feels like something around you at all times,” Campbell told Reynolds during their interview at Politics and Prose Bookstore last month. Before he could write comedy, Campbell was compelled to create a world free of the constraints he lives with every day. The result is his provocative speculative-fiction debut “Sky Full of Elephants,” a novel that opens a year after “every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.”
This shocking incident of ethnic cleansing is called “the event” and brings about mass change as people of color adapt to a new way of life. Individual reactions are mixed. Some survivors are angry or convinced they have been left behind. Others experience the event as an improvement and feel avenged or freed. And still others long for the world as it was before. Regardless, all experience a vacuum left by these deaths.
Although other nonwhite ethnicities also survive, Campbell focuses on the Black experience through his protagonist, Charlie Brunton. Charlie is a cautious and methodical character who is burdened with the “conflict of his own darkness.” He struggles to stop seeing himself “through the eyes of the world and how it reacted to him” after spending two decades wrongfully incarcerated. Campbell’s prose is philosophical and lyrical as he journeys through Charlie’s mind while he adapts to his newfound freedom.
A professor at Howard University, Charlie receives a call one day from his biracial daughter whom he has never met asking for his help. Her request sends him on a road trip from Washington, D.C., to her location in Wisconsin as he navigates a postapocalyptic terrain of abandoned suburbs and defunct electric-vehicle charging stations.
Campbell builds a vivid world as he reveals which systems and institutions stay, which go away, and what crops up in their place. Although it’s impossible to address every facet, he covers a lot of terrain as he conceives of a world without whiteness and what is important to those who survive.
Gas stations, chain grocery stores and online shopping have gone belly up “as a result of us having too little to say in the running of the before world.” The internet is spotty, and TV still broadcasts something resembling the news. Historically Black universities flourish, with towns like D.C. and Chicago thriving as a result. Meanwhile, Harvard and Yale are “haunted with vacancy.” Police stations are boarded up, country clubs burned down, and the White House sits desecrated with human excrement.
The airport is still functioning but under a completely different set of operating guidelines than before. Fuel is scarce because nobody has resumed drilling for oil or trading internationally. Housing is plentiful and homelessness has been eradicated, but things like packaged cakes and chips are running scarce after the collapse of manufacturing.
Divisive factions emerge, such as those who formerly passed for white bonding over the memories of their own supremacy. But overwhelmingly, Campbell makes his point that the survivors have rejected white elitism for a different idea of both power and a good life. However, many are exhausted from spending their lives in an unequal system. After a year spent scrambling to survive, they have yet to define what a progressive future looks like.
Charlie’s 19-year-old daughter Sidney is traumatized after watching her white family members walk into the lake behind their house. She spends a year in solitude before her uncle’s wife makes contact. Determined to reunite with her in Alabama, Sidney calls Charlie for help. He is the only person she knows who didn’t die, and she can’t reunite with her Aunt Agnes without him.
Campbell’s setup provides a compelling springboard for the estranged father and daughter to explore different aspects of this new society on their “Mad Max” journey through Southern states. As their adventure takes wild turns, Charlie’s charge is to overcome his lifelong battle with externalized subjugation caused by his wrongful conviction. Conversely, Sidney’s struggle is internal as she embarks on a mission to reclaim the advantage she experienced while passing as white.
Sidney believes she will encounter like-minded individuals once they reach Alabama, now a kingdom considered too dangerous to visit. Nobody is sure what has happened in the South, other than it’s a place people don’t return from. Nevertheless, Sidney is determined to find her aunt. And Charlie is committed to supporting his daughter.
As the unlikely duo venture deeper into the unknown, Cebo Campbell gets a step closer to creating a world where Trayvon Martin could have behaved like Ferris Bueller and prevailed. His protagonists discover a movement is taking hold. Survivors are discovering not only hope but joy.
As Charlie and Sidney barrel toward their own resolutions, “Sky Full of Elephants” provides a spectacular plot twist that asks an uncomfortable question worthy of an honest answer. How can a country that has never made space for a racial reckoning heal from generations of oppression?
FICTION
“Sky Full of Elephants”
by Cebo Campbell
Simon & Schuster
304 pages, $27.99
About the Author
