Virtual Book Tour + #Giveaway: To Do Justice by Frank S Joseph @GoddessFish

TO DO JUSTICE

Frank S. Justice

GENRE: Historical Fiction

BLURB:

It’s 1965, summer in Chicago, and it’s hot. Pinkie looks white but is being ‘raised Black’ by shiftless Jolene -- who’s in it for Pinkie’s child support check and nothing more. But how did Jolene come to be raising Pinkie anyway? Join this daughter of the city’s meanest streets as she sets out on a quest to find the White woman who gave her birth, braving the inner-city riots of the turbulent ‘60s to discover who she really is. An IndieReader Best Book; finalist for Chicago Writers Assn. Book of the Year and First Prize, CWA novel contest; 5 Stars from Reedsy Reviews, Readers’ Favorite and Midwest Book Review.

Excerpt:

Cop, he’s one of them greaseball Italians that run things around here. Do their business in them social clubs and ice cream parlors over to Taylor Street and Racine. Walk around smoking cheap cigars and acting like they own it all. I hear the Irish and the Polish got the cop racket sewed up in other parts of town but around here it’s the dagoes. Doubt if the colored be in charge in any part of town. …

Cop turns from Bettina and smiles down. Seen all kind of cops in my life—angry cops, tricky cops, cops that act friendly till they get what they want. Think this one be the last kind.

I ask what he’s looking after. Says there’s been complaints about the hydrant so he ordering it closed.

“It’s a hundred degrees out Mister.”

Cop don’t care. Says it’s against city law to open a hydrant. Says what if there’s a fire on the block, you leave the hydrant running ain’t going to be enough pressure to fight the fire. Says anyhow the fire marshal wants it closed so he done called in a fire truck. Going to close it whether you kids like it or not.

Cop asks who opened it in the first place. I wouldn’t tell and get someone in trouble even if I knew though I surely don’t. I say we’re just kids trying to stay cool on a hot day. Cop says baloney, he knows how things work, everyone on this street knows everyone else so tell who opened it if you know what’s good for you. Gives us one of them cop looks. Bettina she’s scared but I know better. He’s just a wop in a cop suit, throwing his weight around.

Interview with Frank S Joseph

1. Have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction?

• Yes, modern memoirs. Back when the term was “autobiography,” personal-recollection books followed the structure of biography-by-third-party. Then such books started getting more personal and anecdotal, influenced possibly by the rise of psychotherapy and almost certainly by confessional trends in modern fiction. Then came television and shows like Jerry Springer, then reality TV, each one trying to top the other in personal revelation. The memoirists couldn’t help being affected. Now, I read a modern memoir like a fiction author, looking for parallels and clues.

2. How do you select the names of your characters?

• Love this question. Out of thin air, honestly. Not in every case but lots of times, especially when it’s a minor character. For example, in To Walk Humbly, the second novel of my Chicago Trilogy, there’s brief mention of a character named Minerva Stein. I was thinking of a specific person I know whose first name is Virginia. I didn’t want to use that name but there was something resonant about “Minerva.” Besides, it was cool; don’t often see characters named Minerva.

3. Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

• Who doesn’t?

4. What was your hardest scene to write?

• That’s easy. The scene where Pinkie’s White birth mother tells her she can’t be her “momma.” I had to capture a lifetime of pain in a few words, and they had to be in Pinkie’s African-American patois. Here’s what I wrote:

Like a gong done struck. A gong in a big empty room, room big as a movie theater, a church, the biggest emptiest room in the whole world, gonging and echoing and gonging and echoing.

5. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

• I’ve written a trilogy. Each book is connected to the last one, but each book stands alone. That’s not an easy thing to do. I had to convey backstory: Fully enough to be understood, but briefly enough not to bog down the novel I was writing.

6. What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?

• In every book of this trilogy, I’ve tried to do some or all of the following:

  • Show the differences between the way Black and White individuals may view the same things;

  • Portray my characters as people, not stereotypes;

  • Be true to the way people actually spoke in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s in Chicago. This means several things: a) the language, speaking styles, regionalisms, slang they used; b) their accents and patois, which can be subtly different between seemingly similar characters. Example: a 65-year-old Black woman from Sunflower MS with a second-grade education; vs. a 12-year-old Black boy who’s the son of her pastor; vs. the pastor and his wife. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent trying to get this sort of thing exactly right.

  • Be true to the Chicago that was, the city of my growing-up. Many readers have said that Chicago is like a character in these novels. It makes me happy when I hear that.

  • Write from the heart.

7. What inspired you to write To Do Justice?

• After I decided that To Love Mercy was the first novel of what was to become the Chicago Trilogy, my then-publisher – who had also been my colleague at The Associated Press, covering the mid ‘60s inner-city riots – said something like ‘Yeah! You gotta write that novel!’ I nodded but I was hesitant; I did have to write the riot novel but there was something else, something in between. It turned out to be To Walk Humbly, Trilogy Novel #2, set over 5 years in the mid ‘50s. I think of it as the high-school novel.

8. Can you tell us a little bit about the next books in To Do Justice or what you have planned for the future?

• This trilogy is done, complete, finito. It’s the what-if story of my growing-up time in Chicago, which I left for Washington at age 29. The novel I’m writing now is completely different, a dystopian satire (some would call it science fiction) in which Puerto Rico achieves dominance of the world. Oh, and it’s funny.

9. Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in To Do Justice?

• Sometimes my characters simply appear. That was the case with Pinkie, the 11-year-old mixed-race heroine of To Do Justice. I was stranded in a North Side hotel room, stuck in my hometown for four days by a freak storm that shuttered the airports, when Pinkie came down from Somewhere Above and started talking. I just wrote down what she was saying. Here’s the voice I heard:

“Ever since I’m little I be wondering who my momma is.

“It ain’t Jolene. Jolene 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. Long as the Welfare keeps sending the Pinkie check, that’s all she cares about, Jolene.

“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.”

This doesn’t happen with all my characters. Take Mollie, my other heroine. The character of Mollie was inspired by a real-life woman named Maggie, my fellow striver in the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press. Real-life Maggie was a plucky, talented journalist. She deserved the respect of her male colleagues. But it was the ‘60s, so what she got instead was torment from a bunch of male chauvinists. Oh, and she also had a monster crush on me. So …

When I sat down to write To Do Justice, I decided Mollie/Maggie deserved better treatment in fiction than I’d given her in real life. When you read this, the character Steve is … me:

“Consider my cat. He’s everything Steve is not. My cat loves me to pieces.

“My cat is strong, brave, and true. He goes out at night with his tail high and comes back in the morning smiling. He’s been wowing the ladies. Wish someone would wow me.

“Unlike my cat, who will wrap his sinuous self around me while he licks the Cover Girl off my face with his sandpaper tongue, Steve shrinks away as he edges past my Underwood. Like I’m Typhoid Nelly or Typhoid Mary or something. A play I think or maybe history. A cook in New York. Not Nelly. Mary.

“I’m not Typhoid Anybody. I am a fine individual with a good heart and a deep soul and a desire that would bond any man to me for eternity if only he could experience it. But my chin is too small, I’m blind without glasses, and I’ve been plagued with zits since I was thirteen. Forget Clearasil. The doc calls it cystic acne and says if one of those cysts goes in the wrong way it can sink through your skull and infect your brain and you die. He doesn’t have a thing for it either, just lances the boils and you can guess how enjoyable that is. He says I might outgrow it. What, when I’m thirty-five and Steve is in Winnetka with some blonde bimbo and their two-and-a-half kids? If I’m lucky.

“I’m twenty pounds over too. I eat like a bird but it’s the goddamn Miller’s.

“Steve, the rat, is nobody really. Five seven, round shoulders, horn rims. I can see a pot belly when he’s in his forties. But he’d be good enough for me.”

Reviewers must like these characters’ voices. IndieReader has chosen To Do Justice as a Best Book. The Chicago Writers Assn. has declared it a finalist for CWA Book of the Year. And reviewers from Readers’ Favorite®, Reedsy Reviews and Midwest Book Review all have awarded it five stars.

10. What did you enjoy most about writing this book?

• Writing in Pinkie’s voice. In Mollie’s voice too. Some male authors find writing in women’s voices hard to do, and some do it badly. It came naturally to me. One of these voices is that of an 11-year-old Black girl, which some would say makes it harder still. All I can say is it wasn’t. (The other voice, that of a 23-year-old White woman journalist, was a piece of cake. She was modeled on such an individual, a former AP colleague.) I’ve had thoughts about why this was the case. I think I may be blessed (or cursed) with a bit more empathy than some ‘bros I know.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Frank S Joseph's “Chicago Trilogy” novels -- TO LOVE MERCY, TO WALK HUMBLY and TO DO JUSTICE -- tell a story of lives forever changed by racial turmoil that marked and marred Chicago at mid century, a great city going up in flames.

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

Connect with Frank S Joseph

Website ~ Facebook ~ Instagram

 

Giveaway:

$20 Amazon/BN GC

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