Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings

by Keenan Norris

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258538
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	01/09/2023
Series:	Machete
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Keenan Norris has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. His books include the novel The Confession of Copeland Cane and the anthology Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. He teaches at San José State University.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

I Origin Stories 1

Chi Boys 3

A Tomb in Connecticut 5

A Migration of One 14

II Exodus Archive: First- and Second-Wave Migration, WWI-1960s 17

Richard Wright and a Boy Called Butch 19

A Poetic Negro Comes to Town 31

The West Side's Many Sides 44

Sin and Society 54

Reckoning with Richard Wright's Misogyny 59

Leaving the City, Part I: The Vice Lords and a Boy in Cleveland 73

Leaving the City, Part II: Ditch Diggers and the Junk Man 81

III Death in Paris: 1960 103

IV On the Shore: 1961-2016 109

Rebirth on the Big Island 111

The Tribeless Youth 115

Frank, Revisited 122

V Chi-Raq Does Not Exist: 2017, 1968, 1970, 2021 125

The Third Wave 127

Open Caskets 134

Multimedia Narratives 139

Violence and History 146

American History 163

Family 168

Unreported America 170

See the Child 179

Epilogue: Truth and Reconciliation 187

Notes 197

Sources Consulted 217

Acknowledgments 227

Editorial Reviews

08/29/2022

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.)

Publishers Weekly

The author’s precise, often luminous prose powerfully reconstructs his family’s journey and its reflection of Chicago’s troubling relationship to Black America … [A] striking, unusual blend of meditative memoir and urgent social critique.” —Kirkus

“Poignant and elegantly written, this is a moving look at a city’s contradictions laid bare.” —Publishers Weekly

“One of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. … Chi Boy is a powerful indictment of Jim Crow’s enduring legacy. Both deeply personal and deeply political, it is a palpable denunciation of white supremacy and the foundational lies that sustain it.” —Eleanor J. Bader, The Indypendent

“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.” —Philip Zozzaro, Booklist

“Keenan Norris presents Chicago as both the existential and the historical touchstone for the composite American that is the Black man, from Richard Wright to Jeff Fort to Barack Obama to those who died young either in the city or in deep connection with it. … At the same time, Chi Boy is a book written by a son about his father. Its formal arrangement as pastiche foreshadows this throughout and brings it into utter and utterly beautiful relief in the closing chapters.… All of this makes Chi Boy at once sobering yet hopeful.” —Richard Rosengarten, The Christian Century

​​​​“Norris paints a fierce, clear-eyed portrait of Chicago as he plumbs the parallel lives of Richard Wright and his own family members, who escaped the Jim Crow South for the ‘James Crow’ North. In illuminating the lives of men tempered in the fires of Chicago social divides, Norris lays bare the pain at the root of the hope that defines Black experience in America.” —Sherri L. Smith, author of The Blossom and the Firefly

“Norris beautifully memorializes his father with a fascinating explication of the man and the city that shaped him. Whether through the lens of the Great Migration, Richard Wright and Native Son, the flamboyant nihilism of drill music, the inadequacy of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and the term itself, or the making of Barack Obama, Norris renders Chicago and its Black citizens with the depth and complexity they deserve. As informative as it is inventive, as poetic as it is profound, Chi Boy is an absolute must-read.” —Jerald Walker, National Book Award finalist for How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

“Chi Boy is at once a love letter to Chicago and a searing indictment of the violence that shaped it. By revealing in painstaking detail what America has been, Norris leaves us with the important question of what it will become.” —Justin Gifford, author of Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim

From the Publisher

2022-09-23
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.

Kirkus Reviews