Author Guest Post with Frank S Joseph: To Do Justice

It’s 1965, summer in Chicago, and it’s hot.

Welcome of the November 11th stop on the blog tour for To Do Justice by Frank S Joseph with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more author guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

Sometimes my characters simply appear. That was the case with Pinkie, the 11-year-old mixed-race heroine of To Do Justice, Book #3 of my award-winning “Chicago Trilogy.”

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.”

To Do Justice is about Pinkie’s quest to find the White woman who gave birth to her … the mystery surrounding shiftless Jolene and how Jolene came to get custody of Pinkie … how Pinkie rescues beloved “baby sister” Bettina – not once but twice …  and how Pinkie in turn is rescued by Missus Sawhill, the hunchbacked crone who’s a political powerhouse of the Democratic machine … Dr Martin Luther King’s Fair Housing marches, a historical fact of mid ‘60s Chicago, and King’s devious henchman who I fictionalize as “Rev Bivens” … and finally how, when she has no one else to turn to, Pinkie reaches out to Mollie for help.

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. I hope you enjoy reading it too.

— Frank S Joseph

About the Book

To Do Justice
The Chicago Trilogy Book Three
by Frank S Joseph

Published 9 May 2024
Key Literary

Genre: Historical Fiction
Page Count: 283
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

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.

Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK

Excerpt

Bureau chief Bob Mangelsdorf exits his office with Steve in tow. I see this guy, a little chubby, hair starting to go back at the temples, seems very shy. Mangelsdorf says, “Mollie, meet your new coworker Steve Feinberg. Steve comes to us from City News Bureau and he just finished his active duty at Fort Leonard Wood. Could you show him around?” Mangelsdorf ambles back to his office, leaving me and Steve to get acquainted.

“My name’s Marlene Hinton but you can call me Mollie. Everyone does.”

Steve looks down at his shoes. Captivating.

“You uh want to meet the others?”

Steve looks up and smiles. Just a little at the corners of his eyes. They’re big and brown and he’s got long dark eyelashes. I really go for long eyelashes.

“So you were in the Army?”

“Sort of,” he says, flashing that shy smile. “I was in the six-month plan.” Oh Steve what a voice! Like licorice, like baby oil, like tan cashmere.

“Draft dodger eh?”

“Yeah I guess.” He laughs and looks down again. He’s demure, he’s fetching, he’s irresistible. I’m gone.

About the Author

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

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Giveaway Alert!

The author will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

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