Bebe Moore Campbell, a Skillful Storyteller, Passes

Summary

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"She is one of the great writers of our generation because she wrote so specifically about our generation-those of us born just as Brown (v. Board of Education) replaced Plessy (v. Ferguson)-and because she wrote about the ways Black people connect in the social landscape that was just newly created with our generation," said Adrienne Ingrum, one of [Bebe Moore Campbell]'s earliest editors who became a lifelong friend. "Bebe wrote about how Black people heal each other, and heal others-white, brown or immigrant. She wrote about us incredibly challenged Black folk who grow amidst the swirl of oppression."

One can find that Campbell lyricism for long stretches in nearly all of her books, and she had a special way of melding current events with literary aplomb, retaining the interest of activists and those mainly looking for some good literature. "Esther closed her eyes, trying to calm herself by forcing air in and out of her lungs," Campbell wrote of her protagonist in "Brothers and Sisters" (1994), who from her bank teller's office window in Los Angeles was watching the police accost two young Black men. She had been thinking about Rodney King and the brutal beating he received.

A few years earlier, Campbell published her first novel "Your Blues Ain't Like Mine" (1992), which, like James Baldwin's play "Blues for Mr. Charlie," drew from the murder of Emmett Till, the youth from Chicago killed in Money, Mississippi by two white men for whistling at a white woman in 1955. It was Campbell's penchant to look at the after effects of a tragedy and mine its human complexities, which she often did with remarkable insight and a deepi regard for racial issues.

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Bebe Moore Campbell, a Skillful Storyteller, Passes

A gifted writer of fiction and non-fiction, Bebe Moore Campbell, often grounded her novels in actual events, whether general incidents like the beating of Rodney King, or intimate relations between the races. Campbell, 56, died Nov. 27 at her home in Los Angeles.

According to her longtim...

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