Brooklyn-based writer and creative director Cebo Campbell stuns with his kaleidoscopic speculative debut, Sky Full of Elephants, about a world reforming in the aftermath of whiteness. One-part philosophical thought experiment, and one-part thrilling road-trip odyssey, Campbell's novel entertains as it enlightens.  

One beautiful summer day, every white person in America walks straight into the nearest body of water and drowns themselves. This is the unexplained, cataclysmic event that has forever changed the world of Campbell's novel. A year later, Charlie Brunton may be living the benefits of this event, but he's also still grappling with its implications for his past, his future, and his identity. Imprisoned for years for a crime he didn't commit, Charlie now finds himself a professor at Howard University, where he nominally instructs about electric and solar power systems, but often feels like he's teaching much more than that, especially in a world that is still figuring out how to run itself in the absence of its most domineering population.

When Charlie gets a phone call from his estranged daughter, Sidney, asking for his help, he can't bring himself to say no. Sidney, who has been raised by her white mother and stepfather, finds herself abandoned in her family's home in Wisconsin, haunted by the deaths she witnessed. She is determined to go to Alabama, where she believes some of her "real" family remains, so Sidney and Charlie set out through the crumbling and spectacular landscapes, haunted and thriving, of a post-racial country, becoming first-hand witnesses to a world reborn.

Campbell succeeds at crafting, lucidly and beautifully, the small details of this new world. While seemingly minute, these eye-opening moments speak volumes not only about the novel's particular brand of utopianism, but also about the world as it is now. When Charlie and Sidney visit the airport, for example, they find that "the airport terminal vibed more like a night market, buzzing with the chatter of people, the clatter of forks and spoons on plates, grills hissing, vendors clamoring, horns barking music through the clutter of color, noise, and confusion. So many smells, spicy, sweet, and charred." The "buzzing" presence of vibrant life here is as breathtaking to readers as it is to Charlie and Sidney. But just as readers experience the night market, they also experience the uncanny relief of absences: no airport security, drug-sniffing dogs, sterile VIP lounges, or even many planes. This scene, like many others in Campbell's novel, makes magic out of sound: what can be heard and what can't, and the ever-present quality of low-frequency registers, or those sounds of absence that echo even in the deafening roar of the present.

Like the airport night market, what Charlie and Sidney find on their journey--both across the landscapes of America and within themselves--is never quite expected, yet Campbell's lyrical prose and convincing portraits of complex social structures persuade readers, again and again, of their reality. What awaits them in Alabama, for example, might feel surprising at first, but are revealed to be logical progressions more than pure imagining. Yet the way this world operates makes places like this conjured Mobile feel no less miraculous. Charlie proves to be an ideal guide through this both reasonable and extraordinary world. As a person who "understand[s] systems... any kind, really," Charlie always seeks to navigate the entanglements among one's sense of self; systemic structures of racism, sexism, and capitalism; and the logistical workings of a reconfigured world.

Yet despite Charlie's adeptness with "systems" (which he specifies as "especially electrical," but what the novel means more broadly) and his ability to fix things, his arc--like any arc that seeks to trace such complex and heady topics--is not so straightforward. The novel's ending provides no easy solutions or answers, just more journeys of self-discovery to be had. Instead of providing neat conclusions, Campbell is more invested in exploring messy middles. Again and again Campbell's characters must face what the narrative characterizes as "knots": knots of "tension" within themselves "that never seemed to unravel"; the "unmeasured knot of time" that knits together the past and the present; "a knot of traumas" that Charlie believes is all he has "to offer his only daughter"; or even just "a knot of wires" that Charlie must ultimately grapple with to fix the most important machine he'll ever work on. As one character ultimately diagnoses him, "You ain't a man. You a knot. A conflict.... Without understanding the shape of yours, you'll never be a full human being." If Campbell’s novel is a book full of knots, it's one that honors what it means to sit down with the messiness of what both society and individual human beings often don’t want to face. --Alice Martin

Cebo Campbell (photo: Michael Carnevale)

Cebo Campbell is an author and creative director based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He is the winner of the Linda B. Ross Creative Writing Award and the Stories Award for Poetry, and his work has been featured in numerous publications. He 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 (Simon & Schuster, September 10, 2024) is his debut novel, an exploration of a world in which white people have disappeared.

How did you develop the specificities of this world?

The first big thing was trying to imagine a negative space. I thought, if you just needed gas in your car, what would that look like in this world? No one is going to be digging for gas anymore, there's no system for that. I worked my way backward like that. I wanted it to look as if the world were hollow. And in so doing, it can be filled. Now, what are you going to fill it with?

Then I went back to what it's like to be at my mom's house. I wanted a good dinner scene: food at the table, everyone talking and laughing. That ends up happening in Alabama. And I wanted a spades scene, because my mom always played spades. That ended up happening at the airport.

The airport scene in particular made me think: How do I make the experience of walking into an airport, which in our world is notoriously full of all sorts of rigor? You've got to have your ID, you have to have this and that. To strip it of all of that, strip it of all the rules, make it accessible and turn it into a place of fun versus a place of waiting, a place of community and gathering rather than a place of transience and departure.

There's a line early in the book where it says something like, when people ask the time, they just say "quarter til." And that was important nod to all of it. None of it is a hard line in the sand; it's a thing that you feel. It's all negotiable. And I wanted that to flow through all the touchpoints and all the locations.

What about Charlie made him feel like the right protagonist for you to follow in this novel?

At the heart of him is just desire. All he wanted to do was be in love and have a good life. To me, the uncomplicated nature of something like that, the simplicity of it, is at the heart of the American dream.

The truth of it is, I originally was trying to picture Ferris Bueller. You think of this character who's young and innocent and vulnerable, even, but he's able to navigate by doing all the mischief, and we love it. He's impersonating a cop and changing his grades and stealing a car and before you know it, he's in a parade and you're like, "This is my guy." So, I was sitting and watching Ferris Bueller, and all of a sudden, I wondered: What would happen if he was Trayvon Martin? Would this story even work? Would it be believable? Would he still be innocent? Would his mischief be something we root for? I don't think so.

I went back through everything I'd written before, and I realized I was putting the expectations of a character who could be free and noble and observably so in a world that was bound to the same rules as my world. And it didn't work. It just failed upon arrival. That's when I thought, "Oh I get to write some different stories." And as I tried to write these stories, I couldn't figure it out. It was because I couldn't imagine it. I needed to clear my own traumas up so I could imagine it. I thought, let's try to imagine a world where nothing was standing in your way anymore, and now you have to process your own traumas, you have to process who you are, you have to navigate your identity. And that was Charlie.

Sky Full of Elephants begins with the image of every white person walking into the nearest body of water and drowning themselves. Is that image how the idea for the novel first came to you?

Originally, the image was the opposite; it was all the Black people. But that didn't feel right. Then, I took myself away from the beginning of the story and tried to live in the characters, in what their response to it would be, what it would feel like. After I navigated that, the image of how it began almost became second nature. I just needed a doorway into their world and that was it. The doorway I wanted was for an erasure. I wanted to see that world very quickly, and I didn't want it to be painful. I just want it to be visible.

What were some of the challenges of crafting Sidney's character?

I was lucky; my wife is biracial, and I have two biracial kids. I get to observe them relative to how they see themselves and their identity in different scenarios. When I was having conversations with [my wife] about Sidney, the things that she would talk about that meant a lot to her were interesting. One of them was her hair, how she didn't even know how to properly do her hair until she was 20. That, while simple, frames her identity both in herself and observably. People would look at her and say, "Your kid has messy hair." But it's not. She just didn't know how to do it. Those things, while small, gave me an inroad to a kind of psychographic for how Sidney might exist.

I grew up in a very small, Southern beach town. I grew up on one side of the beach--the bay--and it was considered low-income housing. When you think of the beach you think of houses on the water; that's not what you're getting where I lived. Then, on the other side of the beach it was mansions: these towering, beautiful homes and this very Americana way of life. You could feel the difference when you crossed the bridge: how people reacted to me, how they could feel my presence.

At the time, Wisconsin was at the center of a lot of stuff that was happening nationally. And I thought that was the perfect place to set Sidney because I wanted her to not know the other side of the bridge until she didn't have a choice but to know the other side of the bridge. In a lot of ways, we'd be discovering a Black identity with her. I needed her to have a lens on [Charlie] that started him out as the villain and then, over time, showed him as a hero, in the same way that over time you can cross that bridge and see it as a place that could be home.

Without giving too much away, I'll just say sound is very important in this novel. Why does sound resonate so strongly in this book?

The first time I read Toni Morrison, I was in college, and I was given Sula. I was not a reader growing up. My family was not literary at all. I just read whatever was given to me in school and did my best and that was it. So, I get to college, and someone said read this book. I'll never forget this. I opened it and read three pages. Then I closed it, and I was like, what the hell was that? Why do I feel the way I feel? These are the same words I've read in every other book. What is she doing that I feel like I'm being transported to another world?

What I think was happening is there's a certain rhythm to how she delivers her words, a certain narrative in between the narrative that you have to be on the frequency to access. And I realized, whatever that was, I wanted to do that. So as a writer, I'm always interested in the rhythm with which you read. How can I break that up? How can I create propulsion? How can I slow it down? It can feel poetic, but it must also have a certain energy. That was the drumbeat.

In the last 30 pages of the book, which are my favorite, I was trying to make a crescendo--out of words and images--that ends in a very specific line. I wanted the whole thing to feel like you're hearing something you don't realize you're hearing until you reach the end. And then you're like, "Oh, I hear it." Because there is a rhythm. I think my goal was to match the rhythm of the writing itself with the experience of the characters. Then, by the end, we're all on the same frequency. --Alice Martin