Column: "Crossing Division Street" is a new novel set in Cabrini-Green

Over the many decades it loomed across a large portion of the Near North Side, the Cabrini-Green public housing project was many things to many people.

It inspired some — Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Bradley Parker-Sparrow — to make music and others — Ben Austen, Natalie Moore — to write books. It broke a lot of hearts, terrified and traumatized generations. But still, tens of thousands of people lived there, survived and dreamed.

It has largely been physically erased now but comes roaring back in a remarkable first novel by Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo titled “Crossing Division Street.”

She first saw the remnants of Cabrini-Green when she came here more than 30 years ago, married to a Harvard University classmate starting his career as an attorney with a prestigious firm.

They lived not far from Cabrini-Green and started a family that now includes a grown daughter who is a nuclear submarine officer in the U.S. Navy and a younger daughter studying at Harvard.

“When we first moved here, Cabrini represented a whole different experience for me, as I could go from one world to the next in the matter of a block,” she says. “I was fascinated and I began to tutor there at a couple of the public schools — Jenner and Byrd — in part to help kids but also to help me understand this place.”

“People think of Boston as a big city, but it’s a small city. The buildings at Harvard are quaint and everything is idyllic, beautiful, perfect, and the ivy is trimmed. And here I saw children in fenced-in hallways, in towers. How did these towers get here? Who’s Cabrini? Who’s Green? And, of course, then that history, if you study it, is just fascinating. And obviously, the public housing experiment at that time is worth exploring.”

Ribaudo had always wanted to write, growing up on the East Coast. “I have been writing since childhood,” she says. “That’s where I found my private time. I created imaginary worlds, with imaginary friends.”

In college, she took a practical route, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in social studies, graduating magna cum laude in 1993. “I ended up in advertising and marketing,” she says. “I wanted to write for whomever I could and, you know, I found my way. No matter what I did, I ended up writing something for somebody.”

And, late at night in a basement office, her novel began to form. “I had a 50-page outline, chapter by chapter, then each character outlined carefully in terms of who they were, what they stood for, and what they believed. I really tried to understand them as people before I wrote the scenes. And then I did feel overwhelmed at times, depending on what I was writing, because some of it got personal and emotional to me.”

“Crossing Division Street’ covers nearly 500 pages and more than 100 years. Centered in what was once Cabrini-Green, it travels back in Chicago time to the area when it was known as Little Sicily and Little Hell, to Bridgeport, New Orleans.

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It begins dramatically on a summer day in 1999, with a successful attorney named Sidone Russo driving her car across what had once been Cabrini-Green, where she had grown up and where ‘massive white towers rose from tracts of dirt patched with burned grass, reaching into a hot, fearless sky the color of blue flame.’ At a stoplight, a little girl jumps into the car’s backseat, shouts, ‘Go lady! They gonna kill me.’”

And off we all go, Russo, the girl, whose name is Delu James, and eventually dozens of other characters. Nuanced and tender, tough and expansive, brave and lyrical, this novel takes its place among the small crowd of great first novels (my favorite, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural”) and will surely find its place on any list of great Chicago books. It is ambitious, self-assured and deeply connected to the complexities of Chicago, a thoughtful dive into matters of race, responsibility, family, fate and the heavy shadows of the past.

The mid-20th century intermingling of Italians and Black people is sensitively handled and we follow this multi-family story into historical events, including the Korean War, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.

Ribaudo tells me that some literary agents suggested removing details of the historical backstory and she wisely ignored them. She, and Skyhorse Publishing, had faith in her story and her writing ability. On most any page you will find polished prose:

“Sidone was no longer sure of her place in the world — being black, being white — and within her own family — her Italian father who wasn’t really her father, her biological, black father who didn’t acknowledge her existence, didn’t grant her a ticket into his world — and then, not least of all, her mother, blood of her blood, a mother who wanted, tried, maybe did abort Sidone’s child, her own grandchild, because it was a black baby, a mixed-race child that should never have been. Somewhere, Sidone thought she’d heard those words — in the hospital, eyes closed, an unconscious waking.”

There’s a lot packed into that paragraph, but Ribaudo is adept at keeping the narrative brisk and compelling.

I am not the only one to think so. Early reviews are studded with such praise as “a heartfelt story about what family really is, and the luminous struggle toward forgiveness and true happiness” and “a colorful, tightly woven tapestry of four generations — follows one woman’s choice between her principles and heritage. Crossing Division Street is a tender, astonishing debut that will shake — and delight — all readers to the core.”

Ribaudo takes such acclaim graciously. She is at work on her next book in the city that, she says, “has given me so much. This is just such a fascinating city. Every day I learn something more, something new, something …”