Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump

“And there’s anger, yes, there’s anger,” Bump writes. Fires roar, windows break and sirens drown out all sense. Led by a towering figure named Big Columbus, the Redbelters and police clash in a scene all too reminiscent of infamous real-life race riots.Ĭlaude, innocent and terrified and a stand-in for every kid in Chicago somehow caught in the middle, watches the streets turn apocalyptic. Redbelters respond with their own bullets.

A black boy like Claude is shot and killed by police, and the These episodes are somehow both upsetting and detached as Claude drifts from one year to the next.įinally, as a young teenager, Claude watches the South Side explode with riots, led by a local gang known as the Redbelters. At a friend’s party, he’s forced into a gladiator-like fighting match. In a basketball cage, he’s beaten and hospitalized. Most of his friends have faded from his life or been sucked into the violence of the South Side. His parents both left him when he was young. It’s purposefully eyebrow-raising it’s so true it bites.ĭespite Paul and Grandma’s insistence that going to Columbia is the wrong choice - “I’ll let you come right back when everything goes wrong,” Grandma says - Claude needs to leave. Bump employs this staccato, hyperbolic humor with fine-tuned precision. That’s the kind of sting even the most hard-hearted, homegrown Missourian can’t help but chuckle to hear.

Raised by his grandmother and her beloved but troubled friend Paul, Claude applies to MU without his family’s approval, to which Paul responds: “All they got in Missouri is barbecue and guns and backward politics.” His world revolves around Chicago’s South Side - specifically Euclid Avenue, where Bump himself once spent his mornings walking to the Jeffrey Local bus stop, headphones in, mind miles away. The protagonist of Gabriel Bump’s gut-punch of a debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, Claude knows nothing of Missouri. Claude McKay Love isn’t sure what he’s doing in Columbia, Missouri.

Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump