Welcome to the excerpt tour for Gouster Girl by David E. Gumpert! I have an exclusive excerpt for you to check out today. And then be sure to follow the rest of the tour to read even more of them and download your own copy! Leave questions and comments for the author along the way. And of course, best of luck entering the giveaway!
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.
Read an exclusive excerpt:
Not only had the seniors heard about the fight but they treated me like a hero. They spoke in soft tones so as not to stir up gousters who might be nearby. Like Mel Graham, a dark-haired broad-shouldered handsome senior who also happened to be captain of the swim team, president of the honor society, and had pretty Shirley James as his steady girlfriend.
“Way to stand up and fight, Jeff, I heard you gave it to that mother.” The admiration in his bright and glowing baby blue eyes was sincere. “Very groovy.”
“I don’t know about that,” I responded, feeling awkward, since he was one of the coolest white kids in school and I had never before had a real conversation with him. What was the cool thing to say, to do? I tried to be valiant despite my personal shakiness. “Who knows, maybe some of them will think twice before picking a fight.”
The swim team was the only varsity sport dominated by whites. I assumed that was because whites tended to gravitate toward water during the summer—parents sent their kids to summer camp, where they had swim lessons, or retreated to summer houses at the Indiana and Michigan Dunes on Lake Michigan. Nate, Lee, and I had gone together to a YMCA camp on a small lake in a tiny town in Michigan for month-long periods each of three summers beginning when we were ten. The Negro kids, meantime, spent most of their summers hanging around city basketball courts or baseball fields.
I had no idea if it was the cool thing to do, but so long as I had Mel’s attention, I decided to inquire about his college plans. I had heard he was headed to Brown University in the East after graduation.
“I hear you’re going to an Ivy League school next year,” I offered. I could see the surprise flash in his blue eyes that I had such inside information.
“Yeah, I’m going to Brown. They want me to be on their swim team.”
I don’t know what made me ask him my next question, except that it fit into my own worries about the disintegration of our neighborhood: “Is your family moving out of South Shore after you graduate?”
Now he was looking at me in a serious way, almost as if he was trying to look inside me. “Who told you that?” he asked.
“No one. I was just wondering. So many people are leaving South Shore, I just wondered if you were, since you are graduating.”
“Yeah. My parents want out. I’m the youngest in my family, last to graduate. So it’s a good time to be leaving. I can’t say I’ll be real sorry. Maybe if more people had stood up to all this crap, like you did today, we wouldn’t be running. But not many stood up, so here we go.”
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About David E. Gumpert
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
David E. Gumpert will be awarding a $25 gift card to Garrett Popcorn, then a Water bottle with Chicago flag for a second winner, and a Mug with Chicago flag for a third winner, all randomly drawn via rafflecopter during the tour.
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Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteGreat excerpt and awesome giveaway, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteAnother thanks for hosting. I'm glad you used the excerpt about Jeff's conversation with one of the cool kids in his high school. Because the underlying theme of that conversation was really about the suspicion and secretiveness going on about white people leaving the neighborhood--about so-called "white flight." People talk about white flight, without realizing how wrapped up the whole experience was in fear.
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