TO DO JUSTICE
Frank S. Justice
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: Historical Fiction
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCERPT
Ever since I’m little I be wondering who my momma is.
It ain’t
Jolene. Jolene’s been raising me but I ain’t her blood. Reminds me of it every
chance she gets. Picked me out of a trash pile one day, that’s what Jolene
says. Like a maggot out of a garbage can.
If I’m trash I say, why you done it? Just teasing she says, you be worth real money, check for $102.80 on the first of every month. Calls it her Pinkie check. …
Jolene just
laughs when I ask about my real momma. One day I be finding her though. See
does Jolene laugh when that day comes.
Jolene don’t treat Bettina no better than me even though Bettina be blood and flesh to her. Bettina asks who her poppa was but Jolene pretends she don’t hear. Poor little thing, Bettina, bumping into things like she does. Jolene says Bettina was born with a caul, that’s why she so clumsy. I know better though. Bettina can’t help it. Something wrong inside her head. She plenty smart all right, just something inside there don’t work how it’s supposed to, like a doorbell is busted or a toaster don’t pop.
All Jolene cares about is the money though, $102.80 a month for me and $94.73 for Bettina. And Bettina’ll be worth more soon Jolene says, worth as much as you gal, $102.80 a month when she turns nine. Then in September when you turn twelve, you’ll be worth $106.35, and Jolene grins.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The just-published novel To Do Justice is Book #3 of my “Chicago Trilogy” – tales of Blacks and Whites, Christians and Jews, how children view the world, conflict and forgiveness … and Chicago at mid century, a great city going up in flames.
But I didn’t start out planning to write a trilogy.
I knew I wanted to write a novel; and I knew generally that it would be about Chicago in the ‘40s, when I was a kid. (Yes, I’m an old guy now.)
I knew too that whatever I wrote would be about Blacks and Whites because that was my hometown’s unspoken story, the 800-pound gorilla in the big room called Chicago.
I knew this as early as age 6. My dad demonstrated it to me. Not on purpose of course.
We driving from our home in the prosperous South Side neighborhood called Hyde Park, to Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox some 30 blocks away.
To get to a game, one had to drive through a neighborhood called Bronzeville, where almost every Black family in Chicago was forced to live by legal documents called restrictive covenants. These covenants could assert a landlord’s right not to rent to any group the landlord chose. In the rest of the city, that group was African Americans.
The almost-sole exception was Bronzeville, then a poor, terribly overcrowded area with unsafe streets, lousy schools and the other things you’d expect in a racially segregated ghetto.
As we approached it, my dad said, “Lock the doors.”
What my 6-year-old self heard was: ‘You are now approaching the most dangerous place on Planet Earth.’
What I didn’t know – and wasn’t to discover until decades later, interviewing Black people who’d grown up there in the ‘40s as research for the novel – was that they thought the same thing about the rest of the city.
More than one told me of feeling warm, comfortable and safe while in Bronzeville – and threatened when they went elsewhere. Bronzeville was where neighbors watched out for one another’s kids, where you could borrow a cup of sugar from anyone, where nobody locked their doors.
It's this parallax view – Blacks and Whites who see the same thing but interpret it as the opposite – that I wanted to write about. Eventually I did so, three novels’ worth.
The first of the three, To Love Mercy, focuses in on two boys, one White the other Black, who meet under the worst of circumstances – dark parking lot, after midnight, following a White Sox game. A melee ensues and the White family finds themselves taking an injured and unconscious Black kid to an emergency room. One thing leads to another and off the boys go, on a quest for a silver talisman that the White kid’s grandfather has accused the Black kid of pickpocketing during the melee.
To Love Mercy ends with the boys knowing Chicago won’t let them see each other again, ever. But they do – in novel #2, To Walk Humbly.
It’s now 1952, four years later, and the Supreme Court has knocked down restrictive covenants. Black families are free to escape Bronzeville and they do – to nearby Hyde Park. The boys who never thought they’d see one another again, meet – in a bathroom of Hyde Park High School. An uneasy friendship forms, and guess what: It’s around that mysterious silver talisman, still missing.
Flash forward to the turbulent ‘60s. Riot season. Now we’re in the mind of an 11-year-old mixed-race girl nicknamed Pinkie because she could pass for White. But Pinkie is being ‘raised Black’ in an inner-city neighborhoods where almost everyone is Black.
That includes Jolene, the woman who is raising her. Jolene is just in it for the money – Pinkie’s monthly welfare check. How she came to have custody is a mystery to be solved. But Pinkie longs to break free and be reunited with the White woman who gave her birth.
One might say Pinkie ought to be careful what she wishes for. You’ll just have to read Trilogy novel #3, To Do Justice, to find out.
To Do Justice, just published, is garnering awards right and left. It has been named an IndieReader Best Book and a finalist for Chicago Writers Assn. Book of the Year. It also won the CWA novel contest. Professional reviewers have been showering it with five stars – Reedsy Reviews, Readers’ Favorite®, Midwest Book Review. It’s available on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. I hope you’ll read and enjoy it.
-- Frank S Joseph
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
.jpg "TO DO JUSTICE Frank S. Justice ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ GENRE: Historical Fiction ~~~~~~~~~~~~~")
Frank lived it. He came of age in the ’40s and ’50s as a sheltered White boy in comfortable South Side neighborhoods undergoing racial turnover and “white flight." And in his 20s, as an Associated Press correspondent, he covered the ’60s riots that wracked Chicago’s inner city as well as the '67 Detroit riot, where 37 died, and the notorious '68 Democratic National Convention street disorders.
Frank left Chicago in 1969, landed at The Washington Post during Watergate, and went on to a career as an award-winning journalist, publisher and direct marketer. His Chicago Trilogy novels all have won award after award, most recently TO DO JUSTICE winning the Chicago Writers Assn. novel contest and being named an IndieReader Best Book
TO DO JUSTICE, Trilogy Book III, is out from Key Literary. TO LOVE MERCY, Trilogy Book I, and TO WALK HUMBLY, Trilogy Book II, are forthcoming from Key Literary. TO LOVE MERCY was previously published in 2006 by Mid Atlantic Highlands.
Frank and his wife Carol Jason, an artist and sculptor, live in Chevy Chase MD. They are the parents of Sam and Shawn.
An IndieReader Best Book
First Prize, Chicago Writers Assn. Novel Contest
Finalist, Chicago Writers Assn. Book of the Year
A Readers' Favorite® Five Star Selection
Five Stars -- Reedsy Reviews
Midwest Book Review - 5 Stars
Website: https://frankjoseph.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE
The author will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
.gif)
.gif)
3 Comments
We appreciate you featuring TO DO JUSTICE today.
ReplyDeleteWelcome.
DeleteAnd thanks from me, the author, too. I’m pleased to be here and grateful to Owen for hosting me. If you’d like to reach out to me, I’ll be around all day to answer questions and respond to comments. Check out my website too — https://frankjoseph.com.
ReplyDelete