Chi Boy
Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
In Chi Boy, Keenan Norris melds memoir, cultural criticism, and literary biography to indelibly depict Chicago—from the Great Migration to the present day—as both a cradle of black intellect, art, and politics and a distillation of America’s deepest tragedies. With the life and work of Richard Wright as his throughline, Norris braids the story of his family and particularly of his father, Butch Norris, with those of other black men—Wright, Barack Obama, Ralph Ellison, Frank Marshall Davis—who have called Chicago home. Along the way he examines the rise of black street organizations and the murders of Yummy Sandifer and Hadiya Pendleton to examine the city’s status in the cultural imaginary as “Chi-Raq,” a war zone within the nation itself. In Norris’s telling, the specter of violence over black life is inescapable: in the South that Wright and Butch Norris escaped, in the North where it finds new forms, and worldwide where American militarism abroad echoes brutalities at home. Yet, in the family story at the center of this unforgettable book, Norris also presents an enduring vision of hope and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
