Deb Aronson

Bebe Moore Campbell

Stories with a Purpose

First appeared in NCTE Council Chronicle in March 2006 under Profiles

Although novelist Bebe Moore Campbell started out as a teacher, she always knew she would end up as a writer.

That knowledge was about all she had to sustain herself in the beginning. She struggled for five years in the wilderness of rejection letters before her first short story was accepted. The Shopping Trip, a story about a mother who shopped at three different grocery stores in order to make ends meet, was published in 1976 by Essence magazine.

After that, however, success came quickly. Just two years after her first story was published, Campbell was made a contributing articles editor to Essence. She published her first book in 1986 (Successful Women, Angry Men) and her first novel in 1992 (Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine). Today, Campbell has had three novels on the New York Times bestseller list (Brothers and Sisters, What You Owe Me, and Singing in the Comeback Choir) and recently published her latest novel, 72 Hour Hold, to great critical acclaim. She also is a regular commentator for National Public Radio.

Campbell, who grew up as an only child in Philadelphia, benefited from her mother’s drive. For example, Campbell’s mother, Doris Moore, found out about a rigorous public elementary school outside their Philadelphia neighborhood that Campbell could attend. The school took students from all over and was about 10 percent black.

“My mother and her little band of upwardly mobile mothers found out about it and next thing we all knew we were on the subway,” says Campbell.

Campbell excelled in school, and was selected for several special programs, including a creative writing class and a special French class. She has always loved reading , starting out with Caroline Heyworth and Nancy Drew and then discovering classics like the Brontë sisters in high school. Although Campbell doesn’t have as much time to read these days, her favorite author is Toni Morrison.

“I was so turned on {by reading},” says Campbell. “It intensified my love of writing.”

For nine months of the year, Campbell was surrounded by strong women. She lived with her mother, her grandmother, and an occasional aunt and she had numerous strong women teachers. But while Campbell’s school year was filled with “The Bosoms,” as she dubs these women, her summers, when she went to rural North Carolina to be with her father, George Moore, and other relatives, was her chance to revel in the country manners and male world of Moore, and his friends and relatives. These summers were immortalized in Campbell’s moving memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad (1989).

In 1971, Campbell graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor of science degree in elementary education. She taught language arts to students from preschool to middle school in Pittsburgh and then Atlanta, for the next five years.

“It wasn’t that there was anything I didn’t like about teaching,” she says about leaving that profession. But “I knew writing was my calling. It felt like it was another skin; when I sat down to write it filled me and satisfied me. It was something I couldn’t not do.”

Campbell credits two writing workshops, one in Atlanta and one in Washington, D.C., with saving what she calls “her writer’s life.”

The workshop in Atlanta was run by the late Toni Cade Bambara and the one Campbell took two years later in D.C. was conducted by the late John Oliver Killens.

“What was so nurturing for me was that this was when the outside world was saying ‘no, we don’t want your stuff, it does not fit, it is not good,’ and here was a place where every week people were telling me ‘yes, tweak this, do that.’ I had an assignment every week. My work was greeted with enthusiasm. I got a lot of encouragement.”

Campbell also credits Killen with the mantra “deepen the conflict.”

So, whenever she gets stuck, even now, Campbell remembers those words of wisdom. Campbell’s mother was “a huge story teller,” says Campbell. “She told stories to me and to my daughter, Maia, and now she tells stories to my granddaughter.”

Perhaps reflecting Moore’s social worker training, her stories were always instructive, had a moral, and often had a recurring character of Farmer Brown who, for example, had to get his carrots to the A&P in time for Campbell’s grandmother to buy them and prepare them for Campbell to eat.

“I learned early on that stories serve a purpose; they can change behavior,” says Campbell.

Campbell’s own writing follows this pattern. Her stories entertain, yes, but they also serve a purpose. She looks at social issues like racism, classism and sexism through the prism of personal relationships. She is a master at painting sympathetic characters on both sides of any conflict.

Clyde Edgerton wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Campbell’s writing is “powerful … she wears the skin and holds in her chest the heart of each of her characters, one after another, regardless of the character’s race or sex, or need for pity, grace, punishment or peace.”

Many of Campbell’s stories have been triggered by historical events. For example, Your Blues, is loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and Brothers and Sisters was triggered by the 1992 Los Angeles riots that grew from the verdict acquitting police of brutality against Rodney King. Campbell wanted to explore King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” through the workplace relationship of a black woman and a white woman.

The stress and stigma surrounding mental illness is the issue Campbell has most recently explored. A member of her own family has wrestled with this disease and Campbell has been working to demystify and to destigmatize it through her work. She has written a children’s book (Sometimes Mommy Gets Angry), a play (Even With the Madness) and a novel (72 Hour Hold) about mental illness. Campbell also founded a chapter of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) in the Los Angeles area.

Campbell, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Ellis Gordon, Jr., her mother and her five-year-old granddaughter, works for about four hours a day in her home office. She outlines “rather copiously” before she starts a novel. “The actual writing is pretty much about discarding the outline,” she says with a laugh. That, and revising as she writes.

Campbell’s next project will be a novel about a woman struggling to deal with her own deep-seated issues, while trying to save her grandchild from, what Campbell calls “a bad situation.” With that seed of an idea, Campbell will once again weave a web of evocative language and compelling conflict that will capture her readers and transport them into the lives of Campbell’s characters.

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power,” Toni Morrison once wrote. Campbell will, once again, ace that test.