CHI BOY

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.