American audiences are hungry for complex and compelling literary characters. That`s what Bebe Moore Campbell says accounts for the success of her first novel, as well as the blockbuster appeal of the latest works by African- American writers Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
Campbell`s first work, ”Sweet Summer,” was a lush and evocative memoir that brought to life the rich characters in Moore`s own family: her ”jazzy” urban maternal relatives, and the laid-back, rurally rooted relatives on her father`s side. Moore lived with her mother in Philadelphia during the school year, then traveled to North Carolina to spend ”sweet summers” with the family of her father, who died 15 years ago.
In her latest work, ”Your Blues Ain`t Like Mine” (Putnam, $22.95), Moore uses passionate prose to animate fictional families affected by racism. Set in pre-civil rights era Mississippi, the book traces the impact of the casual killing of a black youth on the families of the victim and the killer. ”It`s a societal problem, but it`s a family problem too,” says Campbell, 42, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, a banker, and 15-year-old daughter, and sees the legacy of ”ancient rage” in the violence that erupted there after the Rodney King verdict last spring.
”If you don`t talk it out, you act it out,” Campbell says, ”not to dismiss personal responsibility for handling it.”
And it`s perpetuated in dysfunctional families, she adds. In writing
”Blues,” Campbell says she aimed to ”put a human face on racism.”
And there is a resulting victory: ”I write to heal myself, and to help begin healing in others.
”I wanted to create a story that is very clear that life gives you justice, even if society withholds it.”