by David E. Gumpert
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: YA, Young Adult
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
Gouster
Girl is the coming of age, risky affair between Valerie Davis a cute black girl
from the South Side of Chicago and nerdy white Jeffrey Stark.
While the two are
somewhat smitten they are late to realize that falling in love on Chicago’s
South Side in 1963 is a highly risky business for an interracial couple.
Opportunities arise for
both of them to help one another out of tough fixes—he saves her from attack at
an all-white amusement park and she saves him from injury in a racial brawl at
their high school. But as their romance becomes more serious, so do the racial
dangers. White police target Valerie as a prostitute and black gang members see
Jeffrey as trying to sexually exploit a black girl. Seemingly inevitably, the
blossoming romance collides head on with the realities of Northern-style racism
one hot summer afternoon at one of Chicago’s most beautiful Lake Michigan
beaches, when a racial protest turns ugly, confronting the couple with terrible
choices.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCERPTS
The voice of Rev. King couldn’t be heard back here, because
another transistor radio was playing music. Not Bobby Darin or Frankie Valli
and the Four Seasons that I was used to, but rather Negro singers and jazz I
had no familiarity with.
I decided to use the opening Paul and Robert had provided by
inquiring where Robert lived. “We just moved to South Shore,” he said.
Strange as it may sound, I felt as if I was heading into
no-man’s land, since I had never spoken in any kind of detail with a Negro
student about his or her living situation.
“What made you move?” I asked, the words seeming to stick in
my throat as they came out.
Robert looked at me a little more closely, as if he was also
sensing the shift into foreign territory. “Woodlawn was getting seriously
overcrowded. Six of us in my family were getting on each other’s nerves in a
one-bedroom apartment.”
I could feel more intense nervousness invade my stomach and
chest as it dawned on me that he might start quizzing me about where I lived
and why. But something kept me at it, some kind of nearly morbid curiosity. I
sensed I was going to hear something quite apart from the talk by my parents and
other white adults about huge Negro families moving into our neighborhood, and
the implied assumption that Negroes always had big families and liked living in
crowded apartments.
I pushed on. “So you came to South Shore to get a bigger
place?”
“Yeah, my parents wanted my brother and me to have our own
rooms finally. I was fine with that. I’m only sixteen, but it sure would be
nice to have some privacy.”
Robert wasn’t done. “There was more and more crime in
Woodlawn. The new gang that started up, the Blackstone Rangers. They tried to
recruit Marcus, my younger brother. Told him he had to beat up another kid if
he wanted to join.”
“Where in South Shore did you go?” I asked.
“We’ve got a really nice three-bedroom on Ridgeland,” he
said.
It was as if outside forces had taken over my side of the
conversation. “Where on Ridgeland?”
“6830.”
“Really? We lived in that building. Which floor are you on?”
“The third floor.”
“Gee, you have our old apartment. Which is your room?”
“The back one, that looks out over the porch.”
“That’s too much. You have my old room.”
Robert smiled at the irony. I moved back on my seat,
expecting him to begin questioning me about why we had left that nice
apartment. About where we had gone. And how the new place was working out. How
candid should I be? Should I implicate my parents for their racism?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David E.
Gumpert grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in South Shore and Hyde Park. In
the years since graduating from the University of Chicago, he has attended
Columbia Journalism School and worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal
and an editor for the Harvard Business Review and Inc. magazine. He has also
authored ten nonfiction books on a variety of subjects—from entrepreneurship
and small business management to food politics. His most prominent titles
include How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan (from Inc. Publishing);
How to Really Start Your Own Business (Inc. Publishing); Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Food Rights (Chelsea Green Publishing), and The Raw Milk Answer Book
(Lauson Publishing).
He spent ten
years in the 1990s and early 2000s researching his family's history during the
Holocaust. The result was a book co-authored with his deceased aunt Inge
Belier: Inge: A Girl’s Journey Through Nazi Europe (Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing).
He spent much
of the last half-dozen years going back to his own roots in Chicago to research
and write the historical novel, Gouster Girl. While some of it stems from his own
experiences growing up in South Shore and Hyde Park, he also conducted
significant additional research to complete the book in late 2019.
Author website
http://www.goustergirl.com/
Twitter:
@davidgumpert
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