“That’s great news, Bob. Glad to hear it.”
Now Obama turned to nod at Malcolm. “Toussaint,” he said. His gaze was cool.
Malcolm was not surprised. He had written a number of unflattering columns about Obama back when the president-elect was a senatorial candidate in a hurry. He had dubbed him “Flash,” both for the speed of his ascent and for Malcolm’s argument that the bright young lawmaker would ultimately prove himself a flash in the pan. They had not enjoyed a cordial relationship since then. Now Malcolm came to his feet, extended his hand. “Mr. President-elect,” he said, “I suppose this is my day for being proven wrong. Congratulations, sir. And godspeed.”
Obama accepted the handshake. “You know, brother,” he said, his voice as cool as his gaze, “that was a heck of a column you wrote yesterday.” He measured Malcolm with his stare, making sure Malcolm knew this wasn’t a compliment. “And it was a heck of a day you chose to publish it,” he continued. “Or to sneak it into the paper, I guess would be more accurate. Reporters have been trying to get me to comment on what you said for the last 24 hours. Thanks a lot.”
“Yes, sir,” said Malcolm. He almost said, “Glad to help” but choked the sarcasm back.
Obama gave him a look as if he’d heard the words anyway. He turned back to Janeka. “Well,” he said, “I won’t keep you any longer. I just wanted to say I hope you feel better soon and thank you for everything you did for the campaign. When you feel up to it, I hope you’ll contact the transition office. I’m sure we’ll have need of your talents in Washington. Tell them I said so.”
“Yes, sir,” said Janeka. “Thank you.” She took Bob’s hand again. “I’ll certainly think about it, but to tell you the truth, we haven’t figured out yet what we’re going to do.”
And there was that word again: We.
Malcolm liked the sound of it. Obama seemed to as well. “Well, let us know,” he said. He smiled the toothy smile, lifted his hand—“Thanks everybody,” he said—and disappeared from the room.
Malcolm stood, watching through the door as the next president shook hands with doctors and nurses in the hallway under the watchful gaze of Secret Service agents.
“You said he could never win.” Bob spoke from behind him.
“Yep.”
“Wrote it in that column.”
“Yep.”
“You were wrong.”
Malcolm turned. “Yes, I was.”
“The country’s changing, Malcolm. That’s what you haven’t figured out yet. You’re still living in the past. And yeah, the past was bad, but it’s still the past. All that old racial stuff, we’re moving beyond that. These next four years, you’ll see. It’ll be different from now on. We just elected a black president! You can’t tell me that doesn’t mean people are finally getting over all this stuff. It’s changing for the better. I mean, don’t you think?”
He looked at Malcolm, then at Janeka. There was hope in his eyes.
Malcolm looked at Janeka. Her eyes reflected back his own doubt.
Malcolm’s gaze returned to the president-elect, surrounded by Secret Service agents, smiling and waving to well-wishers as he moved toward a waiting elevator. And then Malcolm was standing at the river’s edge in the darkness many hours before the dawn and Martin Luther King was telling him again that there would be no armed revolution, no black separatist state, no mass emigration, and that the only option he had was to wrestle with white people in the faith that someday his humanity would touch something in theirs.
“Don’t you think?” Bob repeated it.
Malcolm turned to look at him. He and Janeka were still holding hands. And there was still hope in Bob’s eyes. Hope, asking for reassurance. Hope, needing to believe.
Malcolm shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe so.” And he tried to believe it himself. Because King had been right.
He had no other choice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is one question I expect to be asked a lot by people when they read this book: How much of this is real?
The answer: it depends on what you mean by real.
For instance, while Clarence Pym and Dwayne McLarty are complete works of fiction, their outlandish plot to kill Barack Obama is, in fact, based on a real plan hatched by two white supremacists.
According to their scheme, which was broken up by law enforcement, Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman would first have murdered 88 African Americans in a killing spree at a black school and then beheaded another 14. The significance of the numbers? Well, “h” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so in the world of white supremacy, 88 is understood as a coded salute: “Heil Hitler.”
The other number, meanwhile, is a reference to the so-called “14 Words” of white supremacy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
With 102 black people thus butchered, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to somehow drive toward Obama, firing automatic weapons. And yes, they reportedly planned to wear white ties and top hats. Some things are simply too bizarre to be anything but true.
Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr., are, of course, real historical figures. The quotes from King’s two speeches in Memphis and Obama’s election night speech in Grant Park are both accurate. Obama’s election day quip while voting and the banter between King and his men in those final moments on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel is also true to the historical record. Everything else mouthed by both men in this book is made up by me, though King’s arguments against the term “black power” are paraphrased from what he actually wrote. And yes, on the night of the riot, Dr. King did, indeed, stay at the Holiday Inn.
“Eddie” is not real. No history of the Memphis riot that I have ever read has definitively indicted any one person or group for what happened. The superheated atmosphere and the collision of interests that marked that day may have made the conflagration simply inevitable.
On the other hand, the email that sends Malcolm over the edge is real, if by “real” you mean typical of what passes for dissent in the Internet age. Every pundit gets this stuff regardless of his or her race, creed, or political affiliation. But the hatefulness, coarseness, and sheer intellectual incontinence of these communications, particularly when they are based in race, is truly startling. Indeed, “Joe MacPherson” is an amalgam of thousands of different folks who have cluttered my Miami Herald inbox every day, dozens of times a day, for 20 years. For what it’s worth, “Your so stupid” and “Your such a racist nigger” are complete and verbatim quotes from two of the more memorable missives.
That said, I would be remiss if I left the impression that the only folks who write me are miserable maggots with a perilous grasp of English grammar. So allow me to lift my figurative glass to those many writers of thoughtful dissent and all-too-generous praise who have helped me maintain my sometimes-tenuous faith in human decency over the years.
Here’s something else I expect someone to ask: Have I ever come close to doing as Malcolm does, writing a fiery, kiss-my-backside letter to white America? The answer is an emphatic “no.” I am not Malcolm Toussaint, nor he me. This is a work of fiction, an attempt to grapple with the tantalizing question, What if…? Though there are obvious similarities between us, I try always to remember what Malcolm allowed himself to forget: there are Joe MacPhersons in the world, yes. But there are Amy Landinghams, too. The momentary satisfaction of lashing out at the former will never be worth betraying the trust of the latter.
And no, I have never been tempted—nor am I aware of anyone who has ever tried—to sneak something into the paper.
And on that note, let me proceed to some thank-yous.
As always, first and last, I thank God for this and every good thing in my life, and also for the not-so-good things, because it is in life’s challenges that we find growth—and learn faith.
Thank you to Marilyn, my wife (34 years and counting!) and former elementary school crush, for always believing, always supporting, an
d always having my back.
Thank you to my agent, Janell Walden-Agyeman of Marie Brown and Associates, for her quiet toughness and unfailing good humor in a partnership that now has 20 years of mileage on it.
Thank you to Doug Seibold, my publisher, for believing in this odd duck of a book and for supporting me over the years as I follow the sometimes-fickle dictates of the muse.
Thank you to Judi Smith, my assistant, for her sharp proofreader’s eye and for filtering out enough of the Joe MacPhersons of the world to protect my aforementioned faith in human decency, though perhaps at the cost of her own.
Thank you in advance to the citizens of Chicago and Memphis for overlooking the intentional (and, probably, a few unintentional) liberties I have taken with the geography of these two great American cities. I am aware, for instance, that the freeway interchange where the Funn Toys warehouse is located is arguably too far from Grant Park for the sounds of celebration to have carried there. What can I say? I worked hard to respect the geography of your cities (to the point of spending a morning hiking the route Malcolm takes along the banks of the Mississippi the night of the riot) but when the realities of geography conflict with the needs of the story, I chose the latter every time.
Thank you, also, to: Dr. Ziad E. Batrouni, DDS, who answered some questions for me regarding the treatment of Amy’s injury; my cousins Richard Wesley Pitts, Jr., and the Reverend Tony Pitts, Sr., my go-to sources for questions about their hometown of Chicago; my friend and colleague Wendi C. Thomas, my guide to all things Memphis; Detective Victor Moore, retired L.A. County Sheriff’s detective, who answered questions about police procedure—and attitude; retired Secret Service agent Orlando Lee, who helped me shape my characters’ meeting with the president-elect; Earl Caldwell, who was the only reporter at the Lorraine Motel on the night of King’s assassination, and who helped me get a better handle on the man; Rick Hirsch, managing editor of the Miami Herald, and Nancy Ancrum, editor of the opinion pages, who helped me understand how a newspaper might respond to a situation like the one Malcolm creates; Lem Jones, who works at the Mason Temple in Memphis, and who allowed me to wander through that sacred space, communing with its ghosts; Officer Jose Estrada of the Chicago Police Department, who confirmed that I was on firm ground in having Detective Raintree threaten Bob with a “Class B misdemeanor;” Jan Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, who gave me access to photos of Memphis “back in the day,” and also to some images of the King assassination and its aftermath that I had never seen before (and I’ve seen a lot); and Billy Do, who stepped in from the Twitterverse when I needed some last minute reassurance that my Vietnamese dialogue was correct.
I am also indebted to the Memphis Public Library for opening a trove of vintage photos for me, and to the staff of the map room at the Library of Congress for providing maps of Memphis as it was in 1968. Michael K. Honey’s book, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign and Joan Turner Beifuss’ book, At the River I Stand were invaluable to me in trying to recreate not only what happened during those troubled days, but also, how it felt.
To whatever degree I have managed to achieve verisimilitude here and to tell a story that compels, I am indebted to all of the above. To whatever degree I have fallen short of those goals, I have only myself to blame.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in addition to many other awards. He is also the author of the novels Freeman (Agate Bolden, 2012) and Before I Forget (Agate Bolden, 2009); the collection Forward From this Moment: Selected Columns, 1994–2009, Daily Triumphs, Tragedies, and Curiosities (Agate Bolden, 2009); and Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood (Agate Bolden, 2006). Born and raised in Southern California, Pitts now lives in suburban Washington, DC, with his family.
Q & A with Leonard Pitts, Jr.
AUTHOR OF Grant Park
What was the genesis of Grant Park? Where did the idea first come from?
My books usually start with themes, and then characters and plotlines flow out of them. So this particular book began with a frustration not unlike what motivates Malcolm when he reads the racist email from Joe MacPherson. I was less interested, though, in exploring the racial aspect of communiqués like that than the sheer illogic and incoherence of them. In my experience, as in Malcolm’s, that sort of facts-optional absurdity has become pretty ubiquitous in discussions of race—and other contentious social issues—in the last half-century or so, whether on cable news, online, or in the local paper. If you’re emotionally invested in resolving such issues, it’s a deeply frustrating thing.
So I decided to write about one man’s response to that frustration and, through him, to talk about how our approach to the things that divide us has changed in the last 40 years. That was the nugget of it. From there, of course, the book sprawled to include themes of fathers and sons, the splintering of the civil rights coalition, and the loss and reclamation of hope.
Your book explores themes that have everything to do with the civil unrest that has affected Baltimore, Ferguson, and other parts of the country. Does a fiction writer have any advantages over a journalist when it comes to shedding light on these issues?
Oh, yes. Reality is seldom neat, for as much as pundits like myself like to try to impose social and ideological order upon it.
In dealing with serious real-life issues in a fictional venue, however, you can order the world according to your own specifications to show whatever it is you’re trying to show and to say whatever it is you’re trying to say. The world is what you say it is, subject, obviously, to the constraints of internal logic. But within those constraints, you can manipulate the “facts” in hopes of finding the truth.
As a journalist, was it challenging to fictionalize well-known political figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and President Barack Obama?
Writing Obama was not challenging at all. In the first place, he doesn’t have a whole lot to say in the book, and second, he is in our ears almost every day, so I’m very familiar with his speech patterns. For instance, the whole “Hi, everybody” with which he enters the room in the book is pretty well known to us after six-years-and-change of his presidency. My biggest challenge in writing him was to get the behavior of the Secret Service correct.
King was just the opposite. The only scene of him not taken directly from the historical record, of course, was the long dialogue with Malcolm out back of the hotel. I rewrote that scene several times. I think I was intimidated by the idea of putting words into the mouth of a man who is so revered and well remembered. I wanted to present an off-duty King, shorn of the marble in which he has so long been entombed, but on my first pass at that scene, I had him speaking essentially in bursts of rhetoric, all of which could be sourced to his speeches and books.
Problem is, even great speakers, when they are off duty, do not speak in rhetoric. They speak like people. So I really had to struggle with giving myself permission to write him just as a man. Much of what he says and does (the drinking and smoking) are still traceable to the historical record, but I also consciously pushed myself to go beyond that and speculate about what he would have said in this particular circumstance.
It was really kind of a scary, but exciting, thing.
Your rendering of King plays a very active role in the story. How do you think your King compares to other popular depictions, such as the King depicted in Selma?
Well, as already noted, I wanted to present him in a less formal and structured way than we are used to seeing, and I think that’s what the depiction in Selma was about. At the end of the day, I think my novel and that movie are both doing the same thing—trying to free him from the amber of our reverence.
It’s interesting. Over the years, we’ve seen warts-and-all cinematic portrayals of other revered figures—John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson—but only now are we beginn
ing to see that view of Dr. King. He was a great and noble man. He was also a drinker, smoker, and philanderer who suffered from depression in his last days. Only now are we getting around to presenting this truer, fuller portrait of who and what he was.
This novel unfolds primarily through two distinct points of view: that of celebrated black journalist Malcolm Toussaint and that of his white editor Bob Carson. Which character’s story was more difficult to tell?
Neither character was particularly difficult, though I did have to take a few passes at the chapters of young Malcolm to get the tone right. For some reason, the scenes of him in Memphis as a teenager interacting with his father were difficult to get a handle on.
Otherwise, the characters were pretty easy. I particularly enjoyed playing with each man’s late-life disillusionment and how each reflected the other.
What are you working on next?
It’s called The Thing You Last Surrender. It’s about George Simon, a Marine during World War II. He experiences a kind of racial coming-of-age when his life is saved by a black Navy messman at Pearl Harbor. He forges an unlikely friendship with Thelma, the sister of the man who saved him.
As the war grinds on, George finds himself in a very real sense struggling to hold onto his humanity while fighting under brutal conditions in the South Pacific. Meanwhile, Thelma is in their shared hometown of Mobile, Alabama, facing a very different racial coming-of-age of her own.
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