A debut worth the wait
Professor’s acclaimed 1st novel was 10-year journey
Eric Charles May took a circuitous route to his acclaimed debut novel, ‘‘Bedrock Faith.’’ It took him 10 years to complete his novel about the character ‘‘Stew Pot,’’ who returns from jail to a black middle-class neighborhood, newly ‘‘saved’’ and terrorizing folks with religion.
Eric Charles May, 60, took a circuitous route to his acclaimed debut novel, “Bedrock Faith.” Published last year by Akashic Books, it was named a “Notable African-American Title” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “Top Ten Debut Novel” by Booklist and one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now” by Oprah Winfrey’s Omagazine. Now, the South Side native and Columbia College Chicago fiction writing professor’s first novel has won the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, saluting an author who’s released few but exceptional books. He’ll be honored Wednesday at the 16th annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards gala. It took May 10 years to complete his novel about hell-raising lead character “Stew Pot,” who returns from jail to a fictional black middle-class neighborhood on the South Side newly “saved”— and terrorizing folks with religion.
Iwas raised in Morgan Park. My father was a truck driver, went to night school and became a computer programmer. He died in a car accident in 1981. Mom was a Chicago Public Schools teacher. She and I both attended Shoop Elementary.
I’m the oldest of five. In eighth grade, we moved to South Shore for a bigger home. We couldn’t find a place in Morgan Park because nobody ever moved from there. Mom’s 88 and still lives in the same house in South Shore.
I graduated South Shore High, then Columbia College in 1975 with a degree in writ- ing and English. I worked at the Tribune as a mail clerk in college and after graduating worked full time in their stockroom. I was hired a year later to teach writing and English part time at Columbia, working both jobs until 1983, when I became a full-time adjunct professor.
In 1985, I moved to D.C. to attend graduate school, taking a part-time job as a copy aide at The Washington Post. I ended up writing for them in spring 1987: A guy died, and they needed to replace him, and the metro editor looked around and said, “Is there anybody who can do this?” I said, “Yeah, me.”
I left graduate school because I couldn’t do both, worked at the Post till ’91, then went back to grad school for a semester and came back to Chicago in ’93 when I was rehired at Columbia as a tenure-track professor.
The idea for “Bedrock Faith” started when I saw a TV news story on a kid in the South terrorizing classmates by telling them they were going to hell because they weren’t sufficiently religious. Kids were crying. Parents were upset. But the school couldn’t do anything because he wasn’t hurting anyone, just terrorizing them with the word of God.
A few years later, I saw a “60 Minutes” piece about a guy in a tony area of Manhattan. He’d occasionally go off his meds and just start yelling at people. Again, there wasn’t anything they could do to him. I remem- bered the child incident and thought, “What if it wasn’t a child terrorizing other children, but adults terrorizing adults?”
It began as a short story. At about 50 pages, I realized it could be a novel. I’d been wanting to write something about the black middleclass experience that you don’t often find in literary fiction. If you do find them, they’re represented as miserable, out of touch with their blackness.
The fictional “Parkland” is a lot like the Morgan Park where I grewup, close-knit. People knew each other. If they didn’t know you, they knew your parents or relatives. You couldn’t get away with anything. A lot of neighborhood life centered around church life. Police presence was almost nonexistent. It was a very safe place. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how hard adults had worked to keep it that way. It saddens me so many kids today will never know that life.
“Bedrock Faith” is a story where neither racism nor the three D’s— drugs, destitution and dysfunction — are driving the drama. I’m not condemning African-American fiction that does deal with those things. I’m saying the African-American experience is as varied as the Euro-American experience.
Themes that run through are growing old, laws of unintended consequences, what happens when being right becomes more important than anything else.
I must say I’m very satisfied with the book. The highlight was the day I was able to pull it from a backpack and give my mother my first autographed copy.