"He looked up when he heard the truck. Stood up when he heard the motor stop. The headlights revealed three men, one sort of short, the other two tall and strong-looking, their expressions fixed and hard. For a moment he sat in dazed uncertainty. Then fear, as primal as the first scream, flooded his body. 'Turn them damn lights out!' he heard one of the men say. They're coming for me, he thought. He didn't realize that he'd bitten his tongue until he tasted blood in his mouth as he called, 'Mama.'" Fifteen-year-old Armstrong Todd, the protagonist of Bebe Moore Campbell's first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, was right to be scared: he was about to be killed, to become a victim of ignorance and racism.

In Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and her other novels, however, Campbell does not just communicate the feelings of...