Chi boy Native sons and Chicago reckonings

Review by Booklist Review

In this memoir, novelist Norris (The Confession of Copeland Cane, 2021) examines the past while accessing the archive of Richard Wright's work and papers held by Yale University. While Yale had no established connection with Wright, Norris' association is more cerebral. He was introduced to Wright's work by his father, Butch, who, like Wright, lived in Chicago. After having fled the soul-crushing racism of Jim Crow Mississippi, Wright witnessed in Chicago the opaque racism and transparent violence that fueled his seminal Native Son. Wright's frustration with the racism and hypocrisy of the "American dream" led him to France in 1946. Butch Norris, meanwhile, braved the wayward ways of the Windy City until his family relocated to California. Both men were shaped, but not defined, by their Chicago lives. Blending biography with history and sociology, Chi Boy is highly absorbing as it compares the Chicago-connected paths of Wright, Butch, and President Barack Obama. Norris adeptly profiles the three men, along with the travails of a city perpetually haunted by corruption, racism, and violence.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Norris (The Confession of Copeland Cane) blends sociological study and memoir in this impassioned collection of essays. The author juxtaposes his own family history in Chicago with the varied stories of other Black former Chicagoans--author Richard Wright, former president Barack Obama, and journalist Frank Marshall Davis among them. "See the Child" is a powerful account of Norris's father's death, and in "Open Caskets" Norris examines Chicago's media reputation as "Chi-Raq," writing that "Chicago and Iraq are being melted into the metropolitan equivalents of statuary etched with the iconography of violence and death." "Richard Wright and a Boy Called Butch" traces the 20th-century Great Migration from the Deep South to Chicago, a movement that his father had in common with Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, and covers "the tension between Southern horrors and Northern dreams, and Southern institutionalized racial hierarchy and capricious Northern racial oppression." Norris's conclusion is marked by a complex look at the promise of Chicago and of "our paradoxical cities": he paints a vivid picture of it as a place that encourages personal reinvention, but also one "deeply resistant to fundamental change." Poignant and elegantly written, this is a moving look at a city's contradictions laid bare. Agent: Felicia Eth, Felicia Eth Literary. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Arresting fusion of literary biography, memoir, and consideration of African American community and violence within a segregated nation. Norris moves from the Jim Crow South to Chicago to California's Inland Empire, establishing a multigenerational, hardscrabble familial odyssey and a broader discussion of Black endurance and culture. "This book," he writes, "maps a narrative lineage from the books about black life in mid-twentieth-century Chicago and other Great Migration destinations that my father gave me when I was a boy so that I would understand him better, to the stories about himself." Writing about his grandfather, Norris notes, "it was by assisting in the war effort of the American empire that Gramps won some measure of dignity and self-determination." In contrast, the author portrays his father, Butch, a reserved athletic prodigy targeted by neighborhood gangsters, as "a mystery and a contradiction…an anti-authoritarian lone wolf." Chicago's perpetual violence and poverty drove their family to the agricultural West, but Norris remains fascinated by the city's flaws and rituals. He links this gritty family history to a broader arc of Black radical expression, focused on Richard Wright but also including Barack Obama, Ralph Ellison, and others. Norris is troubled by Wright's misogyny yet argues for the vitality of his Chicago connection: "It is in this crucible of a city where he brings to sharpest, hottest edge his understanding of the devastation wrought upon Black America." The discursive narrative also encompasses how Chicago's violence is both a cynical right-wing talking point and a portent of increasingly gentrified, marginalized urban life, reminding readers that "the dismantlement of gang hierarchies by federal prosecutions and the destruction of the housing projects across Chicago were the all-important catalysts for the present violence." The author's precise, often luminous prose powerfully reconstructs his family's journey and its reflection of Chicago's troubling relationship to Black America, but the literary and biographical critiques of Wright and others have less visceral impact. Striking, unusual blend of meditative memoir and urgent social critique. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Origin Stories Not long after the end of World War II, a family of three travels from Canton, Ohio, to Chicago, Illinois. They are moving between great factory-powered provinces, but really they are Southerners: The man is from Birmingham, the woman from an old, rural Florida, and she is beautiful and sad as everything raised there is. The child, known to close family as Butch, meanwhile, is an infant born in the passage: Unlike his parents, he is a Northerner. Born in Canton, he will be a son of Chicago, of Kedzie Avenue and Cottage Grove. Chicago sits at America's center, unique among American cities in that it is the only Midwestern metropolis not barriered from New York by a mountain range. This fact makes Chicago the economic heart of the country, its busiest inland harbor. It was the French-Canadian trader and explorer Louis Joliet, a product of Jesuit education in Quebec and French Manifest Destiny dreams more generally, who in 1673 first dared to conceive that a tribal intersection where the native peoples of the land had bartered goods with each other for centuries, their Chicagoua, could become the centerpiece of New France. The Indians of the western lakes spoke of a great river to the south, the Messipi, or Great Water. The French hoped both to establish influence over the native tribes as far south as present-day Florida and Mexico and to find this great river and follow it all the way to its promised source at the California sea, a distant destination West that would in turn serve as the waterway to the golden land Cathay. But in ignoring Joliet, who died penniless, his revelation unfinanced, France overlooked Chicagoua's centrifugal force, a miscalculation of continental proportions. In living fact, Chicago, from its earliest settlement by the Haitian fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in the late eighteenth century, was a great convergence, a teaming welter of races and customs and sordid commerce and outsized ambition. The Wolf Point area, the center of early Chicago, was a rollicking gathering place. The French Canadians remained, as well as Native Americans and Anglo-Americans and the mixed-race progeny of these peoples. Joliet and du Sable are well known now, their status as dead men far outstripping any recognition they received while alive. Yet this, in itself, is telling: The world discards living beings no matter how brilliant, no matter the originality of their designs. And their records are rarely ever kept. Joliet's name can be found in a thousand books and du Sable's adorns a museum and a high school, amongst other Chicago institutions. Yet almost nothing is known about these men aside from the fact that they founded some small slice of the big city we now know-the city we assume we know. But how much can we know about people and their places when what we call history is just a small sliver of what really happened, when our most foundational archives are, at best, fragmentary and incomplete if not forgotten or misplaced or erased altogether? Some archives are right where they should be, while others are misplaced in ivory towers. Meanwhile most, like my family's, that should sit somewhere, don't exist at all. Excerpted from Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings by Keenan Norris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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