Also by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Becoming Dad
Forward from This Moment
Before I Forget
Freeman
Copyright 2015 by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pitts, Leonard.
Grant Park / Leonard Pitts, Jr.
pages; cm
Summary: ““A novel that weaves together the stories of two veteran journalists from Martin Luther King’s final days in Memphis to the 2008 presidential election”--Provided by publisher”.
ISBN 978-1-57284-762-0 (ebook)
1.Editors--Fiction. 2.Journalists--Fiction. 3.Race discrimination--United States--Fiction. 4.United States--Race relations--Fiction. I.Title.
PS3616.I92G73 2015
813’.6--dc23
2015021248
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for specific fictionalized depictions of public figures, products, or services, as characterized in this book’s acknowledgments, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.
Bolden Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. Single copies are available prepaid direct from the publisher.
agatepublishing.com
For Onjél, who said, “You’ve never dedicated a book to me…”
For Lena, who calls me “Pop-pop”
And always, for Marilyn
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead.
—Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968
But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change.
—Senator Barack Obama, March 18, 2008
Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Acknowledgments
About the author
one
Martin Luther King stood at the railing, facing west. The moon was a pale crescent just rising in early twilight to share the sky with a waning sun. He leaned over, joking with the men in the parking lot below. A couple of them were wrestling playfully with James Orange, a good-natured man with a build like a brick wall.
“Now, you be careful with preachers half your size,” King teased him.
“Dr. King,” called Orange in a plaintive voice, “it’s two of them and one of me. You should be asking them not to hurt me.”
“Doc,” someone called out from below, “this is Ben Branch. You remember Ben.”
“Oh yes,” said King. “He’s my man. How are ya, Ben?”
Another voice yelled up from below. “Glad to see you, Doc.”
As Malcolm Toussaint moved toward King, it struck him that the preacher seemed somehow lighter than he had the last time Malcolm had seen him. It had been late one night a week before, by the Dumpsters out back of the Holiday Inn. The man Malcolm met that night had seemed… weighted, so much so that even Malcolm had found himself concerned and moved—Malcolm, who had long scorned the great reverend doctor, who had, in the fashion of other young men hip, impatient, and cruel, mocked him as “De Lawd.”
But that was before Malcolm had met the man. That was before they had talked. Now he moved toward King, his mind roiling with the decision that had sprung from that moment, the news he had come to share. King, he knew, would be pleased. There would be a smile, perhaps a heavy hand clamping on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Good for you, Brother Malcolm,” he would say. “Good for you.”
Malcolm was vaguely amused to find himself here on this balcony, anticipating this man’s approval. If you had told him just a few days ago that he would be here, ready to go back to school, ready to embrace nonviolent protest, he would have laughed. But that, too, was before.
Malcolm meant to raise his hand just then, to catch King’s attention, but a movement caught his eye. Just a reflected ray of the dying sun, really, glinting off something in a window across the street. Something that—he knew this instinctively—should not have been there. He wondered distractedly what it was.
King’s voice drew him back. “I want you to sing it like you’ve never sung it before,” he was calling to someone in the parking lot below. “Sing it real pretty.”
And Malcolm realized he had missed something, because he had no idea what they were talking about. His attention had been distracted by… what was that?
“It’s getting chilly.” Yet another voice calling to King from below. “I think you’ll need a topcoat.”
“Okay, Jonesy,” King was saying. “You really know how to take good care of me.”
And here, the moment breaks, time fracturing as time sometimes will into its component parts, until an event is no longer composed of things happening in a sequence, but somehow all happens at once. And you can see and touch and live all the smaller moments inside the right now. This is how it is for Malcolm Toussaint now.
King is laughing. Malcolm is taking a step toward him. King is straightening. Laughter is echoing from below. King is reaching into a pocket for his cigarettes. He is becoming aware of Malcolm on his left. His head is coming around. There are the bare beginnings of a welcoming smile.
And Malcolm knows. Suddenly knows. And Malcolm is leaping, leaping across space, across time itself, becoming airborne—he was sure of it, that detail felt right, even though by this time King is barely six feet away. Malcolm grabbing two hands full of expensive silk, yanking Martin Luther King off balance, yanking him down hard in the same instant they all hear the popping sound like a firecracker, in the same instant he feels the soft-nosed 30.06 bullet whistle past his cheek like a phantom breath, in the same instant he falls awkwardly across King’s chest.
And then…
And then time seems to reel for a crazy breathless moment, as if deciding what to do now. The fulcrum of history teetering, the future hanging, suspended in midair.
Until all at once and with a brutal force, time decides itself and slams back into gear.
A woman shrieked.
Someone yelled, “Somebody is shooting!”
Someone yelled, “Doc, are you OK?”
Someone yelled, “Stay down!”
Malcolm’s breath was ragged in his own ears. His heart hammered like drums. Then from beneath him, he heard a familiar baritone voice say calmly, very calmly, but yet, with a touch of breathless wonder. “Oh my God. Was that a gunshot?”
Their eyes met. Malcolm didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. “Brother Malcolm,” said Martin Luther King, his voice still suffused with wonder and yet, also, an almost unnatural calm, “I think you just saved my life.”
/> Malcolm was overwhelmed by the thereness of the man. He was not myth and mist and history. He was not a posterboard image on a wall behind a child dutifully reciting in a child’s thin, sweet tenor, “I have a dream today.” No, he was there, beneath 20-year-old Malcolm Toussaint, who had fallen crosswise on top of him. Malcolm could feel the weight and heft of him, the fall and rise of his chest. He could see his very pores, could smell the tobacco on his breath, the Aramis on his collar. Martin Luther King was there, still alive, beneath him. Malcolm opened his mouth to speak.
And then, he awoke.
two
He did not scream. He did not sit bolt upright panting and shivering in the predawn chill.
The dream was an old one, had haunted his sleep off and on for 40 years, and had long since lost the power to shake him. No, by now it was almost an old friend, dropping by every now and again to remind him of the singular failure of his life, that fateful instant when he had seen—he had seen—but did not react in time, did not understand in time, froze.
Sometimes, as tonight, the dream gave him a do-over, allowed him to react in time, let him make it right.
More often, the dream unfolded precisely as that awful moment had unfolded, less a true dream than just a memory relived while sleeping. Malcolm failing to act, failing to understand what he saw, failing to realize what was about to happen until the very instant it did. Failing. The shot coming. The bullet driving Martin Luther King down as a hammer drives a nail. The gore spattering.
Malcolm Toussaint standing there, not six feet away, impotent, staring.
Enough.
He pushed the covers away, sat on the edge of the bed, the hardwood floor cool beneath his bare feet. No more time to dwell on the thing he had failed to do back when Lyndon Johnson was president and the space race was in full swing. It was time to face today. And today, he was going to be fired. It was even possible he was going to be arrested; he supposed there might be some statute that criminalized what he had done.
He didn’t think prosecution was likely—surely, they’d leave him some tattered shred of his previous dignity—though he could not dismiss the possibility out of hand. But at the very least, yes, he would be fired. And he would deserve firing as much as any of the serial plagiarists and fiction writers he had railed against so loudly, the fucking liars who had so spectacularly besmirched a noble profession, his noble profession, in the last 20 years.
Now, he was one of them. He was journalism’s latest scandal.
A storied career—from a hovel on the south side of Memphis to this palace in Chicago, two Pulitzer Prizes, countless lesser awards lining the walls of his office—would end in ruin today. No more twice-weekly nationally syndicated column. No more New York Times bestsellers blurbed by Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton. No more daily radio talk show. No more regular appearances on the Sunday morning political programs. No more. Nor would anyone speak in his defense. The National Association of Black Journalists, which had given him a lifetime achievement award just four years ago, would maintain an embarrassed silence, the NAACP would look the other way.
He would be a pariah. And the worst part is, he would deserve it.
Inevitably, someone would ask why he did it. And what could he say? He could tell them the truth, but they would never understand it. He regretted what he had done, yes. But he was not sorry. Even now, having slept fitfully on it, he was not sorry. Did that make sense? Would they get the distinction?
“I just got tired,” he would say.
And they would ask him, not understanding, “Tired of what?” But someone in the mob, he imagined, black like him, journalist like him, up in years like him, would not need to ask. Would only close his notebook and shake his head, would understand if not condone and would, maybe…
Enough.
Malcolm got out of bed and padded toward a marble bathroom not much smaller than the house he had grown up in. It was just a little after four in the morning. If he hurried, he could get into the building, pack up his office, the mementoes of a 36-year career, and be gone before anyone got there. The alternative made him shudder. The alternative was to go in there, endure the humiliation of their questions and their anger, and be required to wait outside his office while security—“Loss Prevention,” they called it now—threw his things in a box and then escorted him out under the stunned and disappointed gaze of people he had worked with, laughed with, fought with, mentored.
He showered quickly in the walk-in stall, where needles of water hit you from five directions at once. Moments later, he used his towel to wipe clean a circle of mirror and began to shave the face of the old man who stared back at him.
Old man.
It was always something of a shock to apply those words to himself, but the evidence of the mirror could not be denied. His eyes were tired and sad, nested in twin hollows of wrinkles and crinkles. His brown skin seemed papery and thin. The short black Afro he had worn that awful day on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel had shrunk down to a defeated gray frizz, thinning on the top.
Malcolm was 60.
He looked 70.
He felt 80. Arthritis had stiffened his joints. His blood pressure was a problem. His eyesight was going to hell. His feet hurt. Worst of all, there was the fatigue, an abiding exhaustion not so much of body, he felt, as of mind. Of spirit. Living had become an act of penance.
He was tired. Indeed, he had been so tired for so long that he could barely remember being anything else. The happy young man who had approached Martin Luther King in the last instant of the great man’s life seemed a stranger. No, a lie. A memory of someone who never was.
Malcolm shaved. He dressed quickly. Long johns, blue jeans, long-sleeved blue shirt with the logo of the Chicago Post above the breast pocket, a fur-lined, waist-length jacket, a Bulls cap on his head. No need for one of the natty ties and sport coats that always made his slovenly young colleagues roll their eyes and laugh behind their hands. That was the uniform of a man working in an office, something he no longer was.
He walked slowly, down the hall and down the gently winding staircase, past the African-American folk art, mostly paintings and a few small sculptures, that had been Marie’s passion until she died of breast cancer. It had always made him feel a bit like he was living in a museum, all that fancy art covering the walls and tables, but Marie was two years dead and he hadn’t yet taken it down. Doing that, he supposed, would be like admitting that she actually was gone, that it wasn’t a mistake, an oversight, something for which he could demand a recount. That was something he was not yet prepared to do.
In the living room, he pulled on his gloves, images of his son and daughter and their spouses and children watching him from the mantel. Both were married, raising their families in California. He usually saw them at Thanksgiving, when they inevitably started the argument that was becoming all too familiar since his wife’s death, the one about how he should retire, sell the house, and join them on the West Coast. With Mom gone, did he really need the big house? At his age, did he really need the Chicago winters?
At his age. As if, having reached 60, there was nothing left for him to do except wait for death. And the hell of it was, since Marie left him, there were days he found he couldn’t think of anything better to do.
Enough.
Enough, enough, enough.
His car was parked at the bottom of the stairs in the driveway that circled the front of the house, looping around a fountain—off for the winter—like a doughnut around a hole. Malcolm drove a red Corvette. It was hard on his knees and a four-wheeled cliché for a man of his age, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved that car.
He lowered himself into it now, wincing a bit as Uncle Arthur—his mother’s name for arthritis, once upon a time—took a hammer to his bones. As always, he was compensated for his suffering when the car started with a deep, satisfying roar and he eased it around the circle, down the drive, and to the street. At the mailbox, he stopped and lowered his window to pluck ou
t the day’s paper.
Malcolm folded the paper open and turned on the interior light. “Day of Reckoning,” read the headline, above photos of John McCain and Barack Obama giving speeches. Election Day. With all that he was dealing with, he had almost forgotten. Almost. He wanted to go and vote this morning when the polls opened, but he wondered if his presence—everyone in town knew his face, after all—might cause too much of a distraction, especially today.
What an irony, he thought, if what he’d done forced him to miss the most historic election of his lifetime.
He flipped the paper over and there it was. His sig picture and the column that Bob Carson, his editor, had rejected, the one he’d said was too furious, too incendiary, unworthy of him and destined to be published in the Chicago Post only after Sarah Palin wed Jeremiah Wright on a nude beach in Jamaica. “I’m doing you a favor,” Bob had said. “Go home. Get some rest. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
He had never had a column rejected before. Granted, he’d never written anything like this before, but still… Malcolm had cursed Bob and threatened to quit, taking with him all the prestige his byline brought to this third-rate paper in a time when even first-rate papers were cutting staff, cutting sections, cutting news hole, and looking to the future as one stares down the barrel of a gun.
But Bob had stood firm. “Go home,” he had repeated. “Get some rest.”
Malcolm had stormed out. He had taken his case to the managing editor, to the editor, to the publisher. Each had read the column—this column, that now sat below the fold on the front page. Each had paled visibly by the time they reached the end, even Lydia Barnett, the publisher. She had looked up at him, this stylish sister of about 40 years, of whom he had always secretly said in his heart, “Man, if I was just 20 years younger…” and he knew he was doomed from the moment she began to speak in that honeyed voice one uses to instruct children and the feeble-minded.
“Malcolm, you know we can’t publish this. Why did you even bring this to me? You think I’m going to interfere with an editorial decision?”
Grant Park Page 1
