“Sky Full of Elephants” Imagines an America Without White People

Cebo Campbell’s debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants, revolves around a shocking and audacious premise. “They killed themselves. All at once,” the novel begins, “they” meaning all the white people in the world, who end their lives by walking into the nearest bodies of water. In America, where the novel takes place, centuries of an established social order are suddenly upended, leaving Black people and other people of color the task of running the government, the economy, universities, and more — and giving them the opportunity to consider afresh what American society’s true values and priorities should be.

The novel follows Charlie Brunton, a man gifted with machines and computer programs, who suddenly finds himself teaching at Howard after decades spent in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. But even though the incarcerated have been liberated in this new world, Charlie doesn’t entirely trust his new life, and must come face to face with his past when his estranged daughter, Sydney, calls him out of the blue to come to her home in Wisconsin. Sydney, who’s grown up with her white mother and white stepfamily, is alone and traumatized in the wake of the event. Now, father and daughter must somehow find a way to relate to each other as they travel south to outside Mobile, where Sydney believes a colony of white people remains.

In our Zoom conversation, Campbell ruminated on the deep questions that his book asks, reflecting on the dearth of Black characters in classical genre storytelling, the influence of Toni Morrison on his writing, and the inspiration he drew from the history of Haiti in dreaming up this alternate universe.

Morgan Leigh Davies: I’m curious where the inspiration for the book came from, and if there were any touchstones, either for the writing or the concept, for you when you were setting out.

Cebo Campbell: There’s honestly so many things that have impacted this story and its points of origin. But I’ve been trying to consolidate it into one thing and when I do that, it’s the book Paradise, by Toni Morrison. There’s an opening line in that, and it reads, “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” I remember reading that and being like, “Yo, what in the world is this book?” It was astonishing, it was such a gripping thing to draw me in. As I was writing this book, I would have these waking images in my mind of Toni Morrison going, “Cebo, don’t hold back. Write this book. Write this book.”

And honestly, I love movies, I love books, I just love storytelling, and there’s been so much that I’ve experienced without even thinking about it — enjoying a movie or a book, and I will suddenly realize that there’s no person of color in the book or in the film at all. And I’m like, wait a minute, how are we all cool with this? Not that that needs to be the case with everything, obviously, but particularly when you’re watching sci-fi — not even in Mordor? Not one? Come on, Middle Earth. I think in my mind, I could feel a gap that needed to be filled. 

And frankly, I didn’t want to write the book like this. I wanted to actually write a comedy, or a love story or something. When I tried to imagine the characters I had in my mind, they were freer, funnier; they moved with a degree of audacity, not unlike you see in a John Hughes film. When I tried to write those type of characters, and I used the rules of the world as I understood it, they didn’t work. So I went, how do I fix that within me? And then the book became an exercise in processing traumas, I suppose.

MLD: How do the rules of narrative structure, as we think of it, change when you’ve remove the ruling class from the equation?

CC: There was a moment when I thought, “What would happen if there were no Black people?” And then I thought, Well, that happens all the time, so let me not do that. Let me try something else. I’ve been trying to understand the difference between culture as we understand it, and stereotypes. How do I define what Blackness is, if I can’t determine the difference between two? As I was analyzing this and thinking about it, I thought, Well, if I were to take a character in anything, and I were to replace that character with the viewpoint of a person of color, automatically, there are things that are presupposed that would be different. 

I’ll give you a really simple example. Take a horror story, right? I want to see the new Alien: Romulus with Cailee Spaeny. We understand the reality of the film through her viewpoint, and she makes certain decisions and I can see her making those decisions. You put a Black woman in that — half of those decisions, she’s not making, right? Like, she’s not going down a dark alley. She’s not doing that. And I think that that begins to orient us to a sense of cultural understanding, which is a collective thing that we are all connected to somehow. And so I guess in the best way to answer that is, if I take this character, they’re going to bring with them a series of understandings, a series of viewpoints and traumas and triumphs, and if we are using that as our lens to understand the world that we’re viewing, or at least at snapshot of the world then those are the things that are different. 

It’s hard to really nail it down. It’s hard to say X, Y and Z. It’s more like a feeling. Once you have that vantage point, it automatically changes the lens by which you understand that reality in that world. Even if you can’t name it, you feel it. I think for me, that was part of the challenge of the book, honestly, because this is somewhat new to me in the context of today. When I read something from Toni Morrison, from James Baldwin, I can understand the sixties, seventies, and eighties. We’re in the TikTok era. So how am I articulating that same vantage point today? For the most part, the book had to strip some of that stuff out in order for it to make sense.

MLD: The whole concept of community is the core of the soul of the book. How did you think about that idea?

CC: I had a thought early on: What if unity was a technology? What would that look like? And immediately I was like, Well, Black Twitter, obviously. 

But if it were a form of actual technology, how would that work? It felt like it would be a collective understanding and a collective empathy, and then it would not just be for people who exist now, but it would also be collective and ancestral. That, to me, felt very profound, in part because, as a Black American, I don’t have that. When I go to my lineage, it stops in South Carolina. At best, you hear West Africa, maybe, but even then, tribally, you don’t have access to, like, what were the things that they ate? What were the customs? I don’t have any of it. And so I thought, if there was an internet that I could tap in and get all that information whenever I wanted, I thought that would be remarkable. It’s community and it’s unity, but it’s made into an accessible and tangible thing in the now, in the future and in the past, all at once.

MLD: What avenues open up when you’re writing speculative fiction to sort of talk about these ideas?

CC: To be honest, some of it I’m not even aware of until I come upon it. The change of the world is that the concept of whiteness is gone. Now what? As you begin to walk down the road, the characters begin to walk down the road. Certain things are being revealed that I didn’t anticipate. There’s a big scene in the airport. Everyone who’s read a book always brings up the airport scene because it’s core to that analysis. You arrive and you go, “Okay, how does the airport work now?” I wasn’t thinking that when I wrote the book, but I’m like, Okay, how many Black people are pilots? It’s only around 3%, so it’s not enough to man all these airplanes. Okay, well, who can repair an airplane if you need it? What is the airline going to be? Are they making money off of this? What’s happening? 

So it sort of gave the world back to me, renewed, and I got to be analytical of it. I wasn’t going into it, I know that this is going to change. I would just suddenly kind of walk down the street with these characters and go, Well, that would be different, and that would be different, and that would be different. Now, what would that do? That revealed this negative space, which I hope is a lot of the conversation that comes through with the book. Once [the deaths] do happen, there is a vacancy. All of a sudden you go, Oh, wait, we don’t know how to do some of these things. I don’t know very many people of color are doing at volume some of the things that the dominating class is. In order to maintain the society, you have to know some of the stuff to be able to do some of these things. 

I grew up in a small town. I didn’t know a single person that could build a solar panel or fly a plane. I knew people who could skin a buck, which is a great thing to be able to do. But the skills were not as broad and far-reaching. All of a sudden, it was like it’s a requisite to be able to be self-actualized fully, to immerse oneself in knowing as much as you can, and encouraging others to know as much as they can. In the event that you do need to run a whole country, that sort of sets up an expectation. 

I just created the environment, and then as I walked through the environment, I was like, oh shit, I hadn’t thought about any of this stuff, and that was really, really illuminating, because I don’t think in my real life, if I had thought about much of that.

MLD: My gut reaction was, Capitalism would just continue to dominate! But a lot of what you’re talking about is logical. I felt like that challenge to the dominant expectation was really interesting and valuable as a reader.

CC: Capitalism was a big one. It became a question of, what’s valuable now, how does one orient around what value means? I always revert to my family. I have a big, big family of ten brothers and sisters. I think my mom had thirteen, and she had some that died when they were very young. The way that we lived was very different than when I got older, went to college and got a job. When I was a kid, my grandmother would kick us out of the house in the morning, would not make breakfast, would not make lunch, and we would just go figure it out. We had pecan trees, we had pear trees, we had plum trees, and we would just eat fruit, play football in the field, and then get into trouble, or go fishing and catch our own fish and then make it. In that world, the value was in something else.

I work right now in the luxury space. I work in luxury hotels, doing branding for luxury hotels, and what they sell at the most luxurious hotels in the world is time and nature. That’s it. They will sell you a beach that you can look at, or a spot in the mountains, and then they will say, We’ll take care of everything. So you have your time back. I think that in my mind, that’s where the value will be. It won’t be in the money, it’ll be in something else.

MLD: There’s an inherent contradiction that the concept of whiteness is gone, but it’s obviously not. People are really clinging to this idea that they sort of can be white. They’re attached to this identity that is gone and is harmful. But for Sydney, it is really complicated, because she’s grown up in a white family.

CC: Toni Morrison used to talk about the white gaze. With this book, I wanted to take the white gaze away. What you realize with Sydney is that it isn’t the gaze that looks in on her, it’s the gaze through which she looks out. If it was only this one lens versus the prismatic multitudes of vantage points that she should have that would most benefit her, it would be really tough for her. 

Before the event happens, she’s been living in this space where she is a stepdaughter and has twin brothers. So the twin brothers become this homogenization of whiteness for her, and she always felt like she was on the outside of that. Never felt included. So there’s a great desire, and the desire remains. She’s desirous of something that she can’t achieve. We don’t know if it is identity relative to race, we don’t know if it’s identity relative to daughterhood. We don’t know if it’s identity relative to geography, because she’s only been in Wisconsin, she’s never been anywhere else. So she exists in the state of great, great desire. I think that that is, in a lot of ways, her identity, and in the story, she has to roll that back. Desire has to become an internal thing versus an external one.

And watching her parents walk into the water — super traumatic. I wrote that scene, and I was very afraid for anyone to look at it, because it was terrifying. I sent it off to a friend to read it, and what he said shocked me. He goes, “Yeah, sort of like when they strip slave families away from their families.” I was like, Oh, my God, that is traumatic. And then all of a sudden you go, Whoa. That experience the trauma of that — people do need to see that. I don’t think they realize what that would feel like, really, to have your whole family stripped away. So I kind of was like, Alright, I’m keeping it.

MLD: I wanted to ask about the significance of Mobile, and why you chose that location to create this utopian community in the later part of the book.

CC: I grew up very close to Mobile. We used to go there quite a lot, it was just very familiar to me. And the first time I ever read about Mobile in a book was actually in Toni Morrison. It was in The Bluest Eye. It was this beautiful line where she says, They come from Mobile, and she eventually says that, When they say it, it feels like you’ve been kissed. I thought, This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I never thought of Mobile being that beautiful, but I’ll take it. It was really, it was profound. 

When we think of ships coming in, we always think of them coming into the New Orleans port, but in reality, they were coming into the Mobile port. So you have this, this breathtaking victory over the French with Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, and then you get the Louisiana Purchase, which now allows America to become America. That is such an astonishing thing that doesn’t live in our history books. It’s not contextualized—Toissaint is the hero. You literally wouldn’t have California if it then didn’t happen. How is that not a way to uplift, to encourage, to remind us that the contribution of not just Black Americans, but Haitian American or Black Haitians was profound and transformative. That really interests me, let’s figure out what we can do with that. It felt like all of this stuff was concentrating into Mobile: you had Africatown, you had [the last slaving ship] Clotilda, you had the origin of Mardi Gras, all happening in this one place. It felt like a sort of gravitational force. You had Africatown, but you also had slavery, you know? 

So I thought, this feels like an opportunity to tell that story, and because it’s so near to Haiti, and Haiti is the last vestige of our access to Africa. If you think of all the ships coming in, and everything that they left before they came to the mainland, the idea of spirituality in that context, like voodoo: that’s Yoruba, that’s from Africa. You think of the languages. You think of some of the ways that people exist culturally. It’s as if in Black America, Haiti isn’t a part of our reality. So we’re not going to Haiti hanging out on beaches. We’re not connecting to our culture through Haiti. And I just thought we should. I wanted to use the book as an opportunity to celebrate Haiti, to put it on a pedestal and acknowledge that that little island transformed this entire continent as we know it.