“White Flight” is the fictional tale of Joe Walsh, a teenager whose family moves to LaGrange and later Brookfield from Chicago and whose life events mirror Hillmann’s own. Credit: Provided by Julia Borcherts
In the 1990s, Bill Hillmann and his family moved from Rogers Park on Chicago’s far north side to LaGrange during a tumultuous time — one of his sisters was recovering from being shot while his older brother was freshly released from jail.
After a few years, he and his family relocated from LaGrange to Brookfield, where Hillmann has lived on-and-off for two decades and where his parents settled down once and for all.
Now, the author, boxer and professor at East-West University has dramatized his family’s experiences during their stay in LaGrange and time in Brookfield — the good, the bad and the ugly — in his autobiographical novel, “White Flight,” set to publish on Sept. 2 through Tortoise Books.
Hillmann will celebrate the book launch with a reading and meet and greet at the Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago, 4802 N. Broadway, on Sunday, Sept. 21, from 3-5 p.m. He said he’s looking into bringing a similar event to Brookfield, too.
A spiritual successor to his 2014 book “The Old Neighborhood,” “White Flight” follows a mixed-race family who, much like Hillmann’s own, briefly moves to LaGrange in the ‘90s before settling down in Brookfield. While Hillmann said his family is mostly white, two of his sisters are Afro-Caribbean adoptees, which added to the tension the family experienced in the suburbs, he said.
“The family, they kind of escape, but, of course, they’re still goofy Chicago people. They move out onto LaGrange Road, and there’s a huge culture clash that happens,” Hillmann told the Landmark. “At one point in the LaGrange part, they’re having a fight about something [with the neighbor] because my sister bumps their BMW … Then the lady is like, ‘Who is she? The maid?’ That really happened. They really thought that my sisters were the maids.”
Brookfield resident Bill Hillmann is the author of “White Flight,” set for publication on Sept. 2. Credit: Provided by Julia Borcherts
The protagonist, a teenager named Joe Walsh, experiences similar life events to Hillmann. Joe’s sister is recovering from a gunshot wound when his family moves, and his brother is released from jail, too. In the meantime, the teen starts attending St. Joseph High School in Westchester, discovers his love of boxing and studies physics, just like Hillmann did.
“He starts accumulating wins and fights. He wins the Golden Gloves [amateur boxing tournament], and he starts to dream about going to the Olympics,” Hillmann said, based on his own time in the Olympic boxing circuit. “But every step, he kind of runs into a brick wall. Then, he finds his way through it, and then he gets to another layer, and he runs into another brick wall.”
The conflict in the book escalates when Joe’s brother starts to fall back on his old ways and their grandmother enables his behavior, Hillmann said, culminating in a violent confrontation between the two brothers.
“He decides he’s got to kill his oldest brother,” Hillmann said. “It’s a really crazy family drama.”
Eventually — spoiler alert — after the story takes Joe to Louisiana and he ends up in prison alongside his brother, his brother manages to redeem himself before dying in Joe’s arms. Hillmann said he and his brother really fought, physically as well as verbally, like the characters in the book, but that his real-life brother survived the ordeal and managed to turn his life around.
“In the book, I hint at it a little bit. As he’s dying, the main character is holding his hand in the hospital inside the prison, and he’s telling him, ‘You’re going to live. You’re going to do great. You’re going to meet a great woman, and you’re going to marry her. She’ll give you children, and you’re going to have a big house in the suburbs, and it’s going to be beautiful,’” he said. “The real-life happy ending is the coolest thing.”
Hillmann said the 150-page manuscript that eventually became “White Flight” was first written in 2005 while he was in college and had just been introduced to the world of literature and writing, inspired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway.
He started writing about the events of his life but said he “realized pretty quickly that I was really embarrassed” by the quality of his fledgling prose.
“I put that down. I went back and wrote ‘The Old Neighborhood.’ I wrote that for 10 years, and that came out in 2014. Then, I said, ‘OK, I got to write the sequel,’ so around 2015, I started working on it again,” he said. “I put a lot of effort into it and took a lot of years with it, and I’m really happy with it. I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote.”
He said the message of the book is that there’s always the possibility to overcome the obstacles you face and find redemption.
“No matter how good you are, or how good you’re trying to be, life is probably going to grab you and tear you down and drag you through the mud. The thing is, even in an inhumane environment and world, you can still hold onto your humanity, and you can overcome,” he said. “Your spirit can be set free, no matter how bad the things [are] you had to go through … You just got to hold onto the goodness and to the hope and love, and you can survive, and you can escape, and you can make it.”
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