Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell is an innovative science fiction novel that explores race, identity, and trauma in new and unexpected ways. It follows its characters after all the white people in the United States abruptly commit suicide, in what the novel refers to simply as “the event.” Those left behind after the event attempt to rebuild the world and their communities, and the novel describes these efforts on both personal and cultural levels. In so doing, the narrative offers a kind of metaphorical commentary on contemporary social questions and what it might mean to move forward and heal after centuries of trauma.
The novel’s primary protagonist is Charlie Brunton, a black man who finds himself navigating the strange and complicated post-event world. He’s spent years in prison after being wrongfully accused of a crime, and when the novel opens he’s in the process of rebuilding his life in the post-white era as a professor teaching solar power and electricity at Howard University. Charlie has a technical and scientific mind, and he knows how to fix things. In the unsteady culture that’s still in the process of being created out of the ashes of what came before, his curiosity and desire to re-engineer both his personal world and the wider one around him give him a sense of purpose and power.
Early in the novel, Charlie is contacted by a daughter he’s never met—nineteen-year-old Sidney, whose mother was a white woman named Elizabeth. Elizabeth, along with all of Sidney’s other white relatives, died in the event, leaving Sidney behind to fend for herself. She lives in the former family home in Wisconsin and needs Charlie’s help to travel to Orange Beach, Alabama, where she believes her aunt Agnes might be living in a colony of at least partly white survivors. Charlie is eager to mend the relationship with his daughter and find a way to be her father, so he agrees to travel to Wisconsin, pick her up, and help her get to Alabama.
They embark together on this long and dangerous journey, and in the course of their travels—as well as after they arrive—they gradually get to know each other and start to develop the beginnings of a father-daughter relationship. Charlie teaches Sidney to drive, for instance—a skill that becomes a metaphor for moving forward in her life after everything that has happened. While negotiating a tenuous path through this uncharted territory, they explore questions of racial identity, history, and healing.
Though Charlie is apprehensive at first about traveling to the south, since he’s heard stories of a violent culture in ruins, they discover instead that Alabama has a rich and thriving post-event society. Mobile, which becomes their home base, is almost a kind of utopian community. The reader hears, for instance, that the “city operated with intention,” and that “Mobile’s dynamism bordered on effortless, each person striding with purpose and grace. Smiling. Nodding. Confident” (p. 143). Charlie describes the place as having “a great spectrum of marvelous earth tones,” marked by the “wide-open boldness of black people” (p. 144). The city is powered by a mysterious electricity that Charlie wants to learn more about, since he “saw no power lines, no solar panels in fields or windmills towering into white steel forests, yet everything pulsed with electric silence” (p. 144). It’s a world not suffering, but thriving, and both he and Sidney are eager to get to know this place and its secrets.
One unusual feature of this Alabama is that it operates as a kingdom, though it’s a relatively benevolent monarchy that welcomes Charlie and Sidney with open arms. They spend much of the last half of the novel gradually finding their place in this mysterious community. Sidney, like Charlie, is impressed by the world she encounters in Mobile, and the reader hears through her perspective about the “shapes and forms of the building architecture, the slow-moving trolleys that seemed to almost hover, and nature, nature most of all, seemed to harmonize, as though the roads, the technology, and even the people had grown right out of the soil no different from the peach trees” (p. 167).
Even as she marvels at Mobile, however, Sidney is committed to making her way to Orange Beach, which had been her original destination all along. Through the course of the novel, she gradually becomes more accepting of her black father and heritage, but she still thinks of herself, to some degree, as white, and Orange Beach remains a kind of promised land for her.
When she finally arrives in Orange Beach, however, it’s not exactly what she’d been expecting. She does find Agnes and the colony, but it turns out to be made up of what the novel calls, perhaps in a nod to The Walking Dead, “walkers”—reactionary mixed-heritage people who cling to old notions of what it means to be “white” and want to return to the way things were, rather than move ahead into a promising and transformative future. When she first arrives in Orange Beach, she is “aware of the pronounced difference between it and Mobile’s electric streets. She could feel the tension. A collection of laws, beliefs, and stereotypes wound tight with the maintenance of its own form” (p. 228). Gradually, talking with her aunt and meeting the people in this backward-looking colony, Sidney realizes she doesn’t belong there, though she’s still not exactly certain where she does belong.
Through the perspective of Sidney, the novel explores the fraught territory of racial identity in America. As the novel progresses she gradually shifts away from her “white” identity, learning instead to think of an “us” that includes her father. Charlie, too, works toward understanding what race and identity might mean in this post-event world. Old categories of identity have been upended, and the novel explores what identity might mean going forward.
At the heart of the novel’s exploration of the cultural and racial transformation in Alabama is a mysterious machine, and Charlie’s engineering mind proves to be important not only for the future of that machine but for the future of society itself. Existing somewhere at the intersection of magic and science, the machine functions as a kind of radio, transmitting and receiving experiences, history, and understanding to those who hear its frequency. The machine can be both transformative and destructive, however, and the characters struggle with determining what role it can and should play in the society’s future. The machine also requires a significant amount of power to operate, and it needs to be calibrated to make sure that its potentially negative effects are mitigated. Charlie’s up to the task, however, and he undertakes the project of overhauling it.
The machine, once it’s fixed, promises to be a way for people to communicate with those who came before, a means of achieving a deeper and richer understanding of slavery, colonialism, and cultural trauma in order to heal and connect. Charlie knows that if “he could get the machine to work, this feeling, the special sense of connectedness, healing, would be felt all over the world” (p. 245). The machine, when working, “would transform rage into creativity, despair into ingenuity” (p. 245).
It’s a metaphorical machine, to be sure—perhaps serving as a way to visualize black power, education, and community. The reader hears, for instance, that “the machine tapped into black consciousness, its signal liberating memory, oppression, anger, discontent, fear, and all other repressed trauma” (p. 246). In the novel’s world, however, it’s a real, physical machine that needs work, and Charlie’s on the job. He repairs it, modulates its effects, and even finds a way to draw on the stars to power it. In so doing he creates a way for the consciousness-raising effects of the machine to heal people without destroying them. The machine is a fascinating trope, and it gives Campbell a way to discuss race, healing, and the power of education and historical awareness.
The end of the novel is left somewhat open. There does seem to be hope for this society now that Charlie has fine-tuned the machine. Sidney is on her way to understanding and being at peace with her identity, and Charlie is on track both to heal his relationship with his daughter and to contribute to the flourishing of the society in which they live. The final page of the novel focuses on the transformative and hopeful moment when Charlie switches on the machine, “tapping into that astounding black power” (p. 286). It’s ultimately a moment of connectedness for Charlie, Sidney, and everyone who will be part of this evolving culture:
Connection washed over him as he gazed up at the stars, the energy of the signal flowing through his every experience. A life, even in its limitations, full enough to include all of us. Charlie let his conflict, his darkness, flow out across the world. (p. 286)
In this moment, the phrase “all of us” is central; no longer is there an “us” and a “them.” This developing sense of connectedness is the novel’s ultimate goal, since it promises to be the way that healing from centuries of trauma will finally occur.