Sky Full of Elephants

"Bold and imaginative." -Tananarive Due
"This stunning allegory will spark much discussion." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A truly powerful and riveting story." -Booklist

In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie 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 left behind by her white mother and step-family.

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 a truly "post-racial" America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called 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.

Autorentext
Cebo Campbell is an author and creative director based in Brooklyn, New York. Winner of the Linda L. Ross Creative Writing Award and the Stories Award for Poetry, Cebo's work has been featured in numerous publications. Cebo is the cofounder of the award-winning creative agency, Spherical, where he leads a team of creatives in shaping the best hotel brands in the world. Sky Full of Elephants is his debut novel.

Klappentext

“Bold and imaginative.” —Tananarive Due
“This stunning allegory will spark much discussion.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A truly powerful and riveting story.” —Booklist

**In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie 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 left behind by her white mother and step-family.

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 a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called 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.

Zusammenfassung
In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

Leseprobe
Chapter 1 1
THEY KILLED THEMSELVES.

All of them. All at once.

We unsealed the jails first.

Folks showed up swinging bolt cutters to liberate their lawless relatives into a world different from the society out of which they were exiled. Because no one stood guard any more. No longer could anyone be exiled from anywhere.

All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshiped long enough.

Time slowed down too. Sauntered like hours did in places like Chattanooga and Charleston and Savannah. A notoriously southern phenomenon now spread like honey over everything. Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, "Quarter'til," because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.

They killed themselves. All of them. All at once. You could feel their absence in everything. On the subway. In the streets. In all the places the wild reclaimed. Where sunflowers grew through office buildings, over golf greens plagued red with ant mounds, where the earth crawled black up the sides of monuments, where all those Chihuahuas and cocker spaniels scavenged and begged in packs, their dog sweaters ragged, bedazzled collars dulled of sparkle.

They killed themselves. One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.

Even now, on nearly every shore from southern gulf to northern sound, crosses stand like the skeletons of those old beach crowds. Water crushed in waves, lapped and babbled, unwilling to respect in silence what was otherwise a graveyard.

No one expected the event. No one was prepared.

Some people were angry, cursing God for doing the business of gods. Some were quietly contented, seeing the horror as penance. Some longed for the world before, settling into movie theaters to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Titanic, sharing in the awe of misshapen memories.

Howbeit that we remained breathing on this earth at all, after such a thing, terrorized the conscience. Shame. Tortuously complex. Mornings came like a curse to be among those still waking up, even if rising to easy sunshine warm on the skin. Some nights were worse than others, some mornings better. A year later, Charlie couldn't say which emotion grabbed hold of him the morning he swiftly, and finally, pulled down all their photos.

He'd found himself a nice house out in the suburbs. Two stories tall with fat white columns and a skirt of porches. His front yard sparkled green except under the shadow of an oak where, innocently, a tire swing bolted to its arm whined on every breeze. His home, of course, added to the sum of thousands taken over as we hollowed out city tenements, spilling into the outlying neighborhoods of Germantown, Rockville, and Bethesda. To hear Al Green's voice drifting over aboveground pools out there wasn't uncommon anymore. Charlie, and he suspected many others, tried to keep the photos and memorabilia from the families who'd once owned the houses.

For his part, and for months stacked on months, Charlie kept the birthday cards and perfume bottles, jewelry, and golf clubs. He left portraits hung up on the walls and photobooth strips magnetized to refrigerators as a monument to their lives, hoping the solemn act might absolve him somehow. Maybe looking at all those blue and green eyes every day, those easy, easy smiles, might make him feel things he didn't.

But Charlie still felt what he always felt.

A husband in a suit, a blond wife, two children, and a yellow dog. Charlie did not want to know t