Everywhere You Don't Belong

 

 

 

EVERYWHERE YOU DON’T BELONG (2020)

By Gabriel Bump

Algonquin Books, 288 pages.

★★★

 

Claude is a young black man raised by his grandmother and her partner Paul–more she than he, who is a bumbling gasbag–on the South Side of Chicago. Claude is a straight arrow in a quiver full of Windy City bad news. 

 

 His early education in a Catholic school vanishes when grandma has it out with the nuns. The city’s public schools and neighborhoods induce the feeling that Chicago is a place where he doesn’t belong. He gets along with most of the cast on the streets–people with handles such as Nugget, Bubbly, Teeth­–but he’s also aware of the drugs, gangs, and bullies. Claude is more of a principled appeaser than a fighter, which leads to conflict when he informs “Principal Big Ass,” as he’s been dubbed, that star high school basketball George Burns routinely beats him up and won’t back down on his accusation, though it means Burns is off the team. You can imagine Claude’s social isolation after that.

 

The Chicago sections of the book are set when Barack Obama has just been elected to the U.S. Senate. I don’t know if author Gabriel Bump intended a critique of how the South Side was ignored, but one certainly doesn’t get a sense of much being done to help folks there, quite a few of whom vanish in one way of another. One player on the streets is “Big Columbus,” a drug dealer and key member of the violent Red Belters gang, but also a community activist, Still another is local sports star Chester Drexler, who goes to fabulous parties outside the ‘hood and always has a bevy of attractive young women around him. One of them, Janice, takes a fancy to Claude. The alternative to Big Columbus is Baggs, a white cop into community policing–until he isn’t.

 

The crunch comes during a street protest led by Big Columbus that clashes with the Chicago police. If you know anything about Chicago, you know that its police are better at cracking skulls than defusing tension. What do you do if, like Claude and Janice, you are literally caught in the middle of a riot pitting a gang versus the police? Or a situation in which cops choke to death a 14-year-old they falsely thought was stealing? Maybe get out of Dodge? As Claude observes, “people coming and going, valuable things left in a hurry.”

 

Claude decides to become one of the people “going.” Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a novel in three acts, Chicago, Missouri, and points unknown. When it’s time for college, Claude decides to major in journalism at a school in Missouri. If he didn’t belong in Chicago, imagine how out of place he is in a backwater town in the Show-Me State. What is shown mostly is white privilege and arrogance. Claude is uncomfortable with the inanity of college life, the piggish behavior of white males, the gibberish from one of his professors, and the fact that he and another black student are always asked to write “black” stories. After all, Obama has just been elected president, so they can speak for African Americans, right? Umm… Claude doesn’t relate to much about his past life, which is why he’s in Missouri in the first place.

 

Janice reappears, but brings trouble with her. Much of the last part of the novel involves capers and chases that flush Claude from Missouri and send both he and Janet on the road. Where’s a good place to be if everywhere is a place you don’t belong? This part of the novel reminded me a bit too much of clichéd Hollywood on-the-lam films.

 

Kudos to Bump for presenting black urban life as multivalent and for presenting Missouri rednecks and Chicago Red Belters as cut from the same indifferent-to-human life cloth. His is a solid debut offering, even when Bump leans too heavily on formulae. Not everything coheres. Though the two novels differ in content, Bump’s look at street life lacks the vividness or tension-cracking humorous digressions of James McBride’s Deacon King. Bump gives us three mood shifts­ related to where Claude finds himself: Chicago, Missouri, and in flight. The first two work, but the third feels disconnected, as its tone shifts from psychological to atavistic.

 

Overall, though, Bump’s novel is an attention-grabbing book. Although I am white, I grew up working-class poor and moved up in status. That often means feeling ill at ease in both blue-collar and bourgeois company. Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a wonderful title and I’m sure many readers will relate to its central dilemma.

 

Rob Weir