Free Burning: A Novel

by Bayo Ojikutu

Tommie Simms was supposed to be the community hope, the young man from the neighborhood who made good. He attended a state university, married a respectable woman, and landed a position at a white-collar insurance firm. Watching over Chicago from the thirty-third floor of his company’s downtown high rise, Tommie ignores the gnawing sense that he doesn’t belong on this path—and that in a blink of an eye, he could stray from its given destination. And then he does . . .

Soon Tommie is laid off, and he begins to see himself as just another faceless entity on the city’s fringes. After each fruitless job interview, Tommie’s wife withdraws from him further, and in the mirror he faces
the reflection of failure his family never intended for him. Stymied by rejection and mounting debt, Tommie is seduced into peddling dope as his best opportunity to define himself and to provide for those he loves.

But a corporate job is no preparation for hustling, and when Tommie finds himself on the wrong side of a crooked cop, everyone wants a piece of his street-hustling cousins, the police, friends, loan sharks, even
a panderer from his white-collar past. In order to break free, Tommie must find a way to dig himself out of a deepening hole, before the city buries him.

383 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2006

About the author

Bayo Ojikutu is a Nigerian-American creative writer, novelist and university lecturer. His first novel, 47th Street Black, received the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Award.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bayo Ojikutu's Free Burning is set in my hometown of Chicago, but his city could scarcely be different than mine. Tommie Simms moves gingerly through a bleak, desolate, all-but-hopeless corner of the South Side, where one seemingly only has a choice between selling out for a corporate job in the distant downtown or dealing drugs on the local street corner. Tommie experiences both, as he loses his downtown insurance job in the fallout of 9/11 and, in a desperate bid to keep supporting his wife and infant daughter, turns to dealing pot, a tough business to which he couldn't be any less suited. Despite confronting an endless string of obstacles, from the greed of crooked cops to the violence of rival dealers, the book's open-ended conclusion gives a slight bit of hope for Tommie's survival. He still could go either way, good or bad, but there's just enough of a chance for good to give the reader some optimism for his future. During its best moments, Free Burning echoes the dizzying and (yes) fiery prose of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man.

[Francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was written by one of my very favorite professors. His characters are memorable and the voice that's captured is incredible.

[Zweegas]

Yesterday I went to the library and checked out 8 books.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very poetic.