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Grant Park
by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
c.2015, Bolden
$24.95 / higher in Canada
400 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Open
mouth, insert foot.
Maybe it doesn’t happen often, but there are times when you
have a knack for saying what’s on your mind at precisely the
wrong time. You can’t un-say things, though, especially if
you mean them but as you’ll see in the new novel Grant
Park by Leonard Pitts, Jr., at least those words
won’t kill you.
In his heart, Malcolm Toussaint was always an activist.
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The son of a Memphis sanitary worker, Toussaint grew up
seeing the lack of equality around him, and he understood
that higher education was a means of escape. Once at
college, he grew an Afro, wrote angry pamphlets, and spoke
his mind but, though he wasn’t alone in his radicalism, he
was expelled from white-man’s school anyway.
That was February 1968; it was cold but so was life, which
Toussaint learned the spring before he returned to college,
chastened and wiser.
Four decades later, the award-winning newspaper columnist
hadn’t forgotten those days, which was why, early one
morning, he snuck into his editor’s office and quietly
inserted a rant in the paper, a column that had been
rejected by his superiors, a tired-of-white-people column
that Toussaint knew would kill his career.
As the paper’s editor, Bob Carson was the first to reject
the column so it especially stung that Toussaint’s action
caused Bob to lose his job, too. Being fired was a shock,
and there was more: not only was Toussaint missing,
but an old girlfriend, Bob’s first love whom he hadn’t seen
in years, was in Chicago with the Obama campaign and was
hoping to have lunch with Bob.
That was fine. He had nothing else to do. Toussaint had seen
to that, hadn’t he?
For most of his life, Clarence Pym was bullied, abused, and
didn’t have many friends, but he had Dwayne and their
carefully-laid plans for Something Big. Recently, they’d
formed the White Resistance Army, and Dwayne said it was
time for white men to take America back. It didn’t matter
who died – starting with that black writer from the
newspaper…
It’s-only-a-book, it’s-only-a-book, that’s what to keep
reminding yourself here. It’s only a book which, because
you’re immersed in history and authentic events and because
the fictional parts feel natural, is easy to forget when
you’re reading Grant Park.
And then there are those thrills – gasping, mouth-gaping
page-turners that author Leonard Pitts, Jr. weaves through
another realism: truthful, brutal plot-lines about racial
issues of the last five decades, mulling over exactly how
far we’ve really come. That makes this
will-they-live-or-won’t-they nail-biter into something that
also made me think, and I absolutely loved it…
Until three pages from the end. There’s where Pitts, Jr.
inserted a tiny little thread that almost made me cry with
frustration and cliché-repulsion.
I could cry now, in fact, but instead, I’ll recommend this
book with one caveat: stop before you finish it. If you can,
you’ll love it wholeheartedly with no disappointment. If you
absolutely must read to the end, well, then liking Grant
Park, is for open discussion.
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