Crossing Division Street: Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo Explores Chicago’s Overlooked History

More than 30 years ago, a stoplight at the intersection of Division and Larrabee Streets in Chicago's Cabrini-Green neighborhood sparked a question for author Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo: How had these sixteen-story housing projects come to exist just blocks from the luxury stores of Michigan Avenue and the homes of the Gold Coast? Her curiosity led her to the history of the neighborhood, including its earlier identity as Little Sicily, a community shaped by generations of Italian immigrants before becoming synonymous with Cabrini-Green. That question eventually became the foundation for Crossing Division Street, Ribaudo's new novel, released September 29 by Skyhorse.

Spanning four generations and moving through pivotal moments in American and Chicago history, Crossing Division Street follows Sidone Russo, a successful attorney whose life takes an unexpected turn when a young girl jumps into her car in Cabrini-Green and begs for help. The encounter brings Sidone face-to-face with a past she has spent years trying to leave behind, setting in motion a story about family secrets, inherited identities and the ways individual lives intersect across racial, ethnic and economic divides.

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Through the intertwined experiences of Italian immigrants and Black American migrants, Ribaudo examines how communities change over time, how historical events shape personal relationships, and how the stories families choose to tell, or leave untold, influence subsequent generations. Her research also revealed a more complicated history of Little Sicily and Cabrini-Green than she had initially imagined, including periods when Black and Sicilian American families lived, worked, prayed and learned alongside one another.

In this interview, Ribaudo discusses the real Chicago history that inspired the novel, the challenges of weaving major historical events into fiction, the role of family secrets in shaping identity, and what the relationship between Little Sicily and Cabrini-Green reveals about the way we understand neighborhoods, heritage and belonging. She also reflects on the novel's central idea: that the moments when seemingly disparate lives cross can challenge our assumptions about others and deepen our understanding of our shared humanity.

What inspired you to write Crossing Division Street, and when did you first know this was the story you wanted to tell?

After I'd moved to Chicago more than thirty years ago, a moment stayed with me and eventually inspired this novel. I was waiting at a stoplight at the crossroads of Division and Larrabee Streets in the middle of the Cabrini-Green housing projects. There were children outside skipping rope, and above, other children looking down from fenced-in hallways at the crossroads where I waited for a light to turn green. As I looked around, I wondered how these sixteen-story high-rises, just blocks from the luxury stores of Michigan Avenue and homes of the Gold Coast, had come to be. Who was Cabrini, and Green? And so, I began to research the neighborhood, and when I learned that Cabrini was St. Frances Cabrini, an Italian-born nun, and that the area had been called Little Sicily for decades, I knew there was a story to be told.

We were also at a time in our nation when individual and group identity were becoming increasingly inseparable. Within this context, I wanted to understand how a neighborhood of Italian immigrants and Black American migrants lived side by side, negotiating their identities in the tumult of a changing America—through segregation, poverty, riots, wars, the civil rights era, and a modern-day project rooted in the hope of a great society. The history was fascinating, and the story came from there—a story of one woman born of Cabrini-Green when it was Little Sicily, and who she became because of, and despite, all that came before.

The novel begins in 1999, when a young girl jumps into Sidone Russo's car in Cabrini-Green and asks for help. Why did you choose that dramatic moment to begin the story?

This moment of disparate lives crossing is really the essence of the novel, and so I wanted to start out with a dramatization of what happens throughout the novel and in our own lives. Sidone is waiting at a stoplight in Cabrini-Green, at Division and Larrabee Streets. On the outside, we see people from two different worlds—a successful attorney and children from the housing projects. When a little girl crosses Division Street, jumps into Sidone's car, and says, "Go lady! They gonna kill me!" the two worlds collide. We soon learn that Sidone was born in Cabrini-Green when it was Little Sicily. Sidone has not only crossed into another world through a little girl from Cabrini but has crossed back into her own past in many ways, a past she buried long ago. This opening moment, this intersection, the crossing of Division Street, these two individuals, come to embody the novel's conflicts and themes around identity, inheritance, and our shared humanity. We don't grasp the scope immediately, but when we look back as we read on, we come to understand one of the first lines—"Cabrini-Green, it turns out, offered Sidone Russo a shortcut home."

You explore the history of Little Sicily, also known as Little Hell, and Cabrini-Green. What do you think people misunderstand or overlook about these Chicago neighborhoods?

As is true of nations as well as neighborhoods, Cabrini-Green as a Black American neighborhood is a moment in a longer story. For every Chicago neighborhood, and much of the land, there is history that includes individuals, families, communities, and circumstances. That history is not one person's or group's story. One example is the Frances Cabrini Row Houses, the first part of the larger Cabrini-Green project and the only part of the project still standing, with 140 or so units still in use. Sicilian tenements, described by sociologists as part of the "slums," were demolished to make way for the row houses and for the larger Cabrini project. Before the Sicilians defined the neighborhood, it was the Swedes and Germans, and before them, the Irish. And if we go even further back, of course, we have the Native American population, which itself comprised various peoples over time. We have these concrete ideas of a neighborhood, and whose history and identity it represents, but the deeper story is often more complicated.

Your story spans four generations. What did researching your characters' family histories teach you about how identity gets passed down from one generation to the next?

The characters in Crossing Division Street are fictional, yet their stories reflect how messy the idea of a passed-down identity can be. There are the categories we think of most often, including racial, ethnic, religious, and national groups that we carry with us. At times in history, including slavery, segregation, genocide, and war, these groups have been embraced or rejected for survival. At other times, they are embraced or left behind for other advantages, including social or economic. But a passed-down identity is also a sense of heritage shaped by the stories we are told. This makes the inherited part of identity incredibly imperfect because those before us did what we will do—they chose framings and stories they wished to tell and pass down. Narratives are not neutral. Grandpa was a war hero. Your great-grandmother was a saint. That group has always hated us. There is also the fact that our identities are not only passed down but also developed in opposition to those who came before. In Crossing Division Street, we see this with Sidone's grandfather, Nico, and how he develops his American identity by "othering" his own father, Maurizio, a Sicilian immigrant.

Race, ethnicity, religion and immigration all play a role in the novel. How do those different pieces of identity shape the way your characters see themselves and each other?

The characters in Crossing Division Street are all very different in how they see themselves and one another, and this is a product not only of their individual worldview and inheritances, but of their experiences and place in time. We have Sidone's great-grandfather, Maurizio, for example, an immigrant who witnesses the lynching of fellow Sicilians in 1891 Louisiana. This event shapes how he sees the world, and how he ends up relating to his Black American neighbors in Chicago not by their color, but as those who endured a shared experience and are struggling, just like him, to feed their families. As an immigrant, he has also left extreme poverty and violence behind in Sicily and is grateful for America, where he ascends from field hand to rag man to street sweeper. His son, Nico, is the opposite. In realizing that his own dark color and Sicilian heritage work against him, he sees everyone according to the color line and tries to become as white and pure Italian as possible, embracing the Fascist ideas of Mussolini. Nico becomes one of the most racist men in his neighborhood, trying to evict his Black American neighbors. He also resents America as excluding him from its economic system and turns instead to the Mafia. Later, we have Lincoln, a young man who does not define himself or judge others by their skin color until he sees the body of Emmett Till, after which he embraces race-based nationalism. Main character, Sidone, after experiencing a life-changing event, turns away from group identities altogether, embracing a pure, Randian individualist approach to her own life and to others. In Crossing Division Street, each character is directly impacted by racial, ethnic, religious, and other categories, but how they respond to such categorization is deeply personal and vastly different.

Sidone has spent years distancing herself from part of her family history. Why are family secrets and the things we choose not to talk about so powerful?

We are told stories, and pass down stories, that have been chosen to be passed down to us. Rarely do we think of what the generations before us chose not to tell. This is a powerful concept as it is humbling—we don't know the full truth of our own heritage; we never can. We carry this idea of our heritage, and thus ourselves, that is incredibly imperfect. And then there are times when the truth of things that were recalled incorrectly, or deliberately left behind, comes to light, and this can change our entire sense of self, our identity. We see this with history as facts emerge over time that contradict deeply embedded narratives. In Crossing Division Street, the protagonist, Sidone, discovers a family secret when she is only eleven years old. This secret eventually forces Sidone to put parts of her own heritage behind her, and so we see this happening generation to generation—what we choose to pass down and what we hold within as shaping our self-conception and that of those to come. Sidone's name in the novel means "it is heard," which embodies this idea of how we understand ourselves through those who tell the stories—how and what they choose to tell.

The novel moves through major moments in American and Chicago history, including immigration, racial violence, war and riots. How did you balance those real historical events with the fictional story?

I think it's always difficult for an author of historical fiction to balance the showing and telling. We need to get the history across, but it can't become a nonfiction work. What I have done, for the most part, is to have the characters experiencing major events rather than trying to weave them into the events as main players. In real life, we don't know the full story of any event at any given time. We know our place in it. We recall where we were on 9/11 and what we saw, felt, and understood in that moment. We had no context or narratives telling us what to think or feel. This is how I wrote Crossing Division Street, by researching the totality of the event, and then placing one character within or outside something happening, and imagining, from their perspective, how that moment would have been experienced and how they would have responded. What would it have been like to be a Black American teenage boy in 1955 seeing the body of Emmett Till? How about a Marine who finds himself alone in the sub-zero cold, separated from his unit and surrounded by Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir, 1950? An eighteen-year-old boy seeing his own father running from an armored vehicle during the 1919 Chicago race riot? A man sitting in the Audubon Ballroom when someone who's like a brother—Malcolm X—is killed?

What surprised you most while researching the real history behind Little Sicily and Cabrini-Green?

Every day of research uncovered something surprising that I hadn't known. For example, Chicago's Balbo Drive was named in honor of Italo Balbo after an aviation feat in which he led twenty-four seaplanes from Italy to Chicago for the 1933 World's Fair. At the time, he was one of Mussolini's right-hand men and a Fascist Blackshirt leader who helped bring Mussolini to power. On a broader, thematic level, I was surprised by accounts of when Little Sicily, which became Cabrini-Green, was a mixed neighborhood where Black and Sicilian Americans lived, worked, prayed, and learned side by side. I had imagined enormous strife. There was some, of course, and more would come, but there were years when relations were closer than I'd imagined, and families were trying to make it together in a new city. I think it was more about survival for both groups at that time, the early 1900s. They had a shared experience not only with poverty and trying to survive day to day, but also, for many, as field hands who had endured harsh conditions and discrimination in the South before migrating north to Chicago.

At a time when Americans are having so many conversations about identity, heritage and belonging, what do you hope readers take away from Sidone's journey?

I hope readers take away a few things from Sidone's journey. Firstly, that identity is incredibly complex and imperfect. We have the inherited narratives described earlier, what is told and left untold, and changing ideas around identity as well. America's color line itself has not only shifted over time but has harmed or benefited those on one side or the other at any given cultural moment. Secondly, the very use of racial, ethnic, religious, and other inherited groups to define individuals can be dehumanizing, and this is where the book parallels nationalist ideologies that we don't normally consider in the same breath. History has shown that when we make the individual inseparable from the group, we have an enormous capacity to dehumanize and justify treating the "other" in ways that are unconscionable, from censoring and silencing to segregating, and, ultimately, in the worst historical cases, enslaving and committing genocide.

Lastly, I hope readers come away with an understanding that Crossing Division Street is more than a title. Sidone's papa, Salvatore, says something that speaks to this idea, and I hope that his words stay with readers—"We each take our own roads, Sidone, but there are places where disparate lives intersect. These are the very crossroads where we must face the truth about ourselves, and our humanity." What Salvatore articulates here is really the heart of the novel, not only for Sidone and the other characters but for any author imagining the lives of others, and for readers who, by the act of reading, cross into other communities, eras, and lives that are not their own. It is this very act of disparate lives crossing that engenders the type of understanding and empathy necessary for a sense of shared humanity.

If someone finishes Crossing Division Street and wants to understand Chicago's history a little differently, what is the one thing you hope they remember?

The one thing? That's a tough one. In the larger sense, I want readers to remember that Cabrini-Green and Little Sicily are the same place, just a different place in time.

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