People Like Us, Call & Response, and the Power and Potential of Local Indies

WIR: People Like Us by Jason Mott 

In this post, I'm going to direct you to my separately published review of Jason Mott's People Like Us in The Christian Century. This was my second review for that publication. Being somewhat new to the magazine review game, I rushed out and bought a copy as soon as I received and accepted the invitation from TCC's Books Editor, Elizabeth Palmer. It occurred to me only after I got back that I was likely to get a review copy.

People Like Us was one of my top 20% of 2025 reads, for all the reasons you can read about in the linked review, and probably a few more besides. I'm hoping to get to Mott's prior Hell of a Book sometime soon, or at least before the end of the year. It won the National Book Award in 2021.

AWIGI: Call & Response Books

Interior shot of Call and Response Books
source: Call and Response Facebook page,
photographer uncredited

I'm fortunate to have 6 local, independent bookstores within about a 30 minute walk from my home, and Call & Response is the closest, by about 0.l mile. Also, as a general rule, if I'm going to seek out a book by an African-American author, I'd like to do my best to support Black-owned stores dedicated to getting such stories out to readers. Buying a book from a store I want to support is fair consolation for my "oops!" moment of not realizing I would get a review copy from the magazine.

Call & Response opened in May 2024, just a week after that year's Chicagoland Independent Bookstore Day Book Crawl. I visited there first during its opening weekend, if not Opening Day, picking up a copy of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by DePaul University Professor Francesca T. Royster.

Amidst all my bookstore wanderings, I'm reasonably certain I've been back to C&R about a dozen times, and have regularly enjoyed good chats with owner Courtney Bledsoe, and Tamara, an alum of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores who works as a bookseller with Courtney. I've been to several "start-up" stores in recent years, and see Call & Response as doing great work in getting off the ground--not just in terms of content curation in the process of building sales and inventory, but in the number and variety of community engagement events C&R runs. These events include Book Clubs (of course), Open Mic Nights, Trivia Nights and Friend Speed-Dating. Also, they've been "punching above their weight" in terms of supporting area book signings, including one with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The store's presence and activities are particularly meaningful because Courtney grew up in the neighborhood. Although I'm inclined to wax idealistic or romantic about the power of local indies, I think there's something to celebrate here in booksellers who start a business to build the kind of community they want to continue living in. 

C&R is part of a growing group of Black woman-owned bookstores in Chicago. Semicolon Books has received a lot of press, especially since 2020, but others in the area include Da Book Joint, Burst Into Books*, as well as Build Coffee & Books (which is, at least as of my last visit, much heavier on the café operation than the bookselling). I also had a chance to visit Last Chapter Bookstore in Chicago's Roscoe Village neighborhood during last year's Chicago Indie Book Crawl. It's a bit out of my wheelhouse as a Romance-focused store. For those of you outside Chicago who consider Evanston "Chicago," I'll happily add L'oreal Thompson Payton's Zora's Place in Evanston to this list.

(*Full disclosure: I serve on the Planning Committee for Burst Into Books's annual Words of Wonder Litfest on the South Side of Chicago)

Call & Response's "About" statement from their web site says a lot about this important niche in bookselling:

Call & Response is a Black woman-owned bookstore focused on fostering a love of reading, community, human connections, and the sharing of ideas across cultures and backgrounds. With the knowledge that the publishing industry has historically overlooked and sidelined writers of color, we place the voices of Black and other authors of color at the center of our work. We hope to provide a space for the many people who, for so long, have not seen ourselves represented in literature, empowering all to share their stories with the world.

In a future post, I'm looking forward to digging into Char Adams's Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore (AWIGI: Source Booksellers, Detroit), and am also looking forward to celebrating Source and the legendary Ms. Janet Webster Jones.  Adams's book provides a helpful directory to Black-owned bookstores in its appendices, unfortunately missing both Burst Into Books and Call & Response. (No criticism there; the landscape shifts constantly.)

As with many indies, Call & Response is preaching the message about the power of local independent bookstores, especially against the [amazingly large online retailer], on its socials. More importantly, perhaps, Courtney Bledsoe has been on-point and positive about the community impact of stores like hers in the face of recent and planned corporate incursions by Barnes & Noble.

Local Indies and the Corporate Behemoth

Former building for Marshal Field & Company department
store in Oak Park, Illinois, likely pre-2011, when the building
served as a location for Borders (source: Wikipedia,
credited to "Zol87)

My neighborhood, like several across Chicagoland (including Oak Park, depicted above), is about to get a new Barnes & Noble. I want to strike the right balance as I discuss this development and the impact of other major chain stores, in part because I am committed to strategies that increase book access, especially in Chicago. The B&N coming to my neighborhood will be easily accessible to several bus routes and one commuter train line serving the broader South Side. If B&N can add to book access without destabilizing the existing ecosystem, that's a positive. I suspect, however, that that's not an effort B&N itself will make, and whether it happens will depend on the community's ongoing engagement with the "home-grown" independent booksellers. It remains to be seen how much the Hyde Park Barnes & Noble will adapt its offerings to serve the reading interests of that broader South Side.

It's not too difficult to see that Barnes & Noble's development plans in Chicago focus on areas that already have relatively high saturation of local, independent booksellers. The most prominent of these, so far, has been the Wicker Park location on Milwaukee Avenue. The arrival of Barnes & Noble precipitated the demise of nearby Volumes Bookcafe, according to Volumes's co-owner Rebecca George. George has noted that her sales immediately dropped by about 20-30% after B&N's arrival in the neighborhood.

Recently, WBEZ (Chicago's Public Media station) convened George, C&R's Bledsoe, and B&N's CEO James Daunt for a conversation on one of its morning talk shows, "In the Loop." It's a 23 minute conversation, and well worth the listen for the issues it raises. Kudos to substitute host Clare Lane and the participants for an illuminating discussion--definitely more light than heat--that gets to some of the core issues around the local bookstore landscape and the potentially destabilizing effects of big chains.

Listen to the "In the Loop" conversation here.

I had a few reflections after listening to the segment. First, Volumes has a case, and Daunt's suggestion that B&N is a different kind of business than Volumes doesn't ring true. Second, Courtney Bledsoe does a terrific job of staying positive and focused on the distinctive offerings a store like hers can offer. She projects a seriousness about the added precariousness introduced by a new neighborhood B&N near her, and remains focused on the distinctive values and opportunities her store has in a way that does ring true.

Despite Daunt's general civility, there are a number of unfortunate aspects to the case that he presents. To my ear, one can hear the moral turmoil involved in having been on both sides of this particular kind of "Empire vs. the Scrappy rebels" confrontation. His Daunt Books had to square off against large chains in the U.K. before he was hired to run Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately, his description of this experience insinuates that the indies getting their business displaced just need to become better at their jobs.

In some sense, it's the quintessential capitalist conundrum. Even as businesses vie to offer services of benefit to the community, they compete not merely to compete, but they compete to win--where "winning" amounts to "vanquishing." At least the big ones do this. I don't think any of the region's local, independent booksellers see their goal as to put any of their peers out of business.

Daunt also seems to argue that Barnes & Noble is just a different kind of bookstore, and isn't going into any neighborhood that already has something like it (implicitly, "something like it" being a large, chain bookstore). This strikes me as a deliberate obfuscation of the oxygen-sucking power that large retailers, with greater capacity to discount books, play within the bookselling ecosystem.

It is not the case that B&N is filling in geographic gaps in bookstore access or accessibility. When I did the 2024 Chicagoland Indie Book Crawl, I wanted to do it as much as possible on foot and by transit within the time available. To that end, I picked the Milwaukee Avenue corridor as the best way. It had the highest concentration of local independents participating in the Crawl (as well as a major used shop in Chicago that doesn't participate). I walked from Skunk Cabbage down to Open Books in the West Loop, 8 stores in all.

That said, Chicago is a city with 2.7 million people, not counting the suburbs, and there should be more than enough business to go around. Even in a city as bookstore-rich as Chicago, there is likely more business to go around. B&N, though, is not exactly "hitting 'em where they ain't." In addition to the bookshop dense Milwaukee Avenue corridor, B&N is planning stores in Hyde Park and Downtown, as well as a near west suburb of Oak Park. Each of these locations has at least 4 local, independent bookstores within a 30 minute walk or a 5-10 minute drive. Again, I'm not buying the idea that they are avoiding direct "competition" with the local indies.

I called it an "Empire vs. Rebels' affair above rather than "David vs. Goliath," in that Malcolm Gladwell has argued that the latter scenario is really one that favors David. I keep this in mind in this instance partly because in at least two instances, B&N is taking over former Borders locations, and in a 3rd is moving into a space about 2.5 blocks away from an old Borders location. Oak Park is giving B&N tax breaks to recoup the space it's moving into, which was a Marshall Field's department store before it was a Borders. It seems to me that history might provide some lesson there. I only hope it is not after B&N drives other stores out of business.

The remaining matter for me with regard to Daunt's comments in the WBEZ discussion, is that he's clearly going to avoid conceding any points that will run contrary to B&N's ownership. B&N is currently owned by Elliot Advisors, a UK private equity firm. I've talked to one B&N alum who is aware that one clear possibility for the chain going forward is an Initial Public Offering to make the store a publicly-traded company. 

In the publicly-traded situation, the priority of "maximizing shareholder value" will enter into the mix of other values present in the bookstore ecosystem, and not necessarily for the better. This is especially the case if it reduces the diversity of voices available and the economies of scale a large chain can afford wind up sucking the oxygen out of the local indie book market. Profit, growth, community benefit, increasing diversity of voices and representation are all values that can co-exist in theory, at least, but how they get optimized in a pinch winds up making a big difference. It will likely diminish the range of "people like us" who get their stories out there.

I see the dilemma on the consumer side as well. In my own personal spending reckoning as a customer, as much as I support local independent bookstores, I tend to mentally kick myself if I forget to use my 15% discount card (from the Book Crawl) when making a purchase. My "bargain brain" and my "healthy community" brain don't completely jibe, even when I'm aware that my purchase dollars at a local bookstore provide me with a wider range of community-building benefits than buying it from a big corporation would. I can't, however, ever bring myself to participate in the behavior Rebecca George describes at Volumes, where customers would set down stacks of books they picked up off of her shelves and just go up the street to buy them, at a discount, from B&N--essentially "showrooming," with or without a camera.

As Danny Caine discusses in How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling (AWIGI: a kind gift from dear friends, doubtless purchased at 57th St. Books), some dimension of the B&N threat would be diminished if stores were more or completely limited in their ability to discount books. See the discussion of the French bookstore ecosystem in Chapter 4. I'd be interested in advocating for this, but am more hopeful than optimistic, at least in the near term, regarding success in such a campaign. (It galls me that the [Amazingly large online retailer] is the first hit for Caine's book on a Google search.)

Ultimately, I think we're better off finding a pathway for the Call & Responses of the world, the efforts of folks like Courtney Bledsoe to contribute to healthy and inclusive democratic cultures in the neighborhoods and towns where they grew up. It feels like the way to be properly (locally) patriotic, in the Wendell Berry sense, which very much involves blooming where one is planted, and acknowledging that the "Empire" stores are the ones that will be much more likely to optimize profit over community benefit (or diversity of voices, etc) every time.

I didn't intend to go on so long about this matter in this post, as indeed the discussion of this issue is going to be a recurring theme here. I hope we'll make some productive advance in driving the conversation and further socializing the community-building value of indie bookstores and local economies.