18 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
B
oth are black. Both
knew they wanted to
write. Both grew up
on Euclid Avenue in
the heart of South
Shore, a Chicago neighborhood
known for its background music of
gunshots and sirens.
But the similarities between
Gabriel Bump and the antihero of
his debut novel—Everywhere You
Don’t Belong, due out February 2020
from Algonquin—end there.
Bump’s nuclear family remains
intact. Claude McKay Love’s aban-
doned him when he was a bewil-
dered five. “My daughter’s not
awful,” his grandmother says. “She’s
just ridiculous.” Grandma loves
Claude and believes in him—
“Claude’s going to make a difference
in this world,” she says. But, as he’s
on the verge of escaping to college,
she warns him: “The world is no
place for a self-hating black boy.”
“Why won’t you let me leave?”
Claude asks.
“I’ll let you leave,” she says.
“And I’ll let you come right back
when everything goes wrong.”
Anyone who grew up during the
1960s race riots has the names of cer-
tain places burned into their brains:
Baltimore; Harlem; Newark; Watts;
and, of course, Chicago. Claude is 14
when South Shore erupts. Bump
wrote this chapter while in grad
school, with the 1968 Democratic
National Convention and the after-
math of the shooting of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in mind.
Using the model of the Blackstone
Rangers (a late-’60s/early-’70s
Chicago street gang), Bump creates
a gang called the Redbelters, led by a
man named Big Columbus.Nowhere Boy
A debut novelist delves into a boy’s life in inner-city Chicago
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Patricia Volk© patti rohrlich