JournalFrom the Friend of Frank archive
An informal poll: Which novel gets published next?
To Love Mercy or To Walk Humbly? I cannot decide, so I am asking the list.
THE WRITING LIFE
I'm trying to decide which Chicago Trilogy novel to release next. I'm hoping you can help.
Should it be Book I, To Love Mercy? Or Book II, To Walk Humbly?
For To Love Mercy this would be re-publication. In 2006, a nearly identical version was published by Mid Atlantic Highlands.
Some of you already have read this first edition. You might not buy it a second time. But others hopefully would; it's the tale that touches everything off.
To Walk Humbly has never been published anywhere ... but it's the middle book. I worry that publishing it next would lead to confusion.
That's the dilemma you can help me solve.
Here are brief summaries of both novels. Please read them, then email me your opinion. Try to be as impartial as you can. My email address is frank@frankjoseph.com.
Summary #1: To Love Mercy
It’s June 15, 1948, midnight in a deserted parking lot on the South Side of Chicago. Steve Feinberg, age 10, his father and grandfather, are returning from a White Sox game when a crowd of little kids emerges from the darkness. The Feinbergs are White; the kids are Black.
The kids taunt the White family and beg for dimes. But in the confusion, things spin out of control. Grandpa Nate slips and falls on one of the kids, breaking his nose. The White family has no choice but to take the unconscious Black kid to an emergency room.
This episode knocks young Steve utterly off balance. Next day, in a daze, he makes his way to the hospital to visit the Black kid (nicknamed Sass because of his smart mouth).
Initially Sass wants nothing to do with Steve. But then Nate accuses Sass of pickpocketing a precious silver talisman crafted by Steve’s great-great-great-grandfather. The boys must find the talisman to save Sass from jail.
They board a bus and promptly get lost, as kids will. They wind up ranging across a hostile city on an all-night odyssey. Stops along the way include the storied Maxwell Street flea market; and Riverview, once the world’s largest amusement park. Both are mere memories today.
As the long night wears on, each boy tastes discrimination and prejudice that tests their budding friendship again and again. The story ends at dawn on the lakefront, the boys watching the sun burst above the horizon as they recount lessons they’ve learned.
Summary No. 2: To Walk Humbly
It’s 1952, nighttime on the South Side of Chicago. Steve Feinberg, 14 and White, is walking the dog when four Black youths assault him. They pelt him with anti-Semitic taunts as they beat him, then ride off on bicycles.
Shift to Steve’s family arguing over whether to send Steve to Hyde Park High School or flee a neighborhood undergoing rapid racial change. Mother: “Hyde Park High was fine when I went there, I had lots of friends, got a perfectly good education.” Father: “That was a long time ago Jean.” Mother: “Where are these people’s principles? They live here all their lives then scoot to the suburbs on account of a few colored. What kind of Jews are they anyway?” Father: “The kind who want to get their kids through high school without landing in the hospital.”
Shift to the home of Jesse Owens “Sass” Trimble. This Black family faces losing their way of life too. Like the Feinbergs, they too are thinking of fleeing their neighborhood – the overcrowded ghetto known as Bronzeville. And flee they do – to Hyde Park, in the vanguard of a Black influx that so troubles the Feinberg family.
Steve and Sass aren’t strangers though. Four years earlier they were thrown together on an all-night quest for a missing silver talisman (the subject of To Love Mercy, Chicago Trilogy Book I). Now the boys are to meet again at Hyde Park High School and try to rebuild a friendship in the face of disapproval from Blacks and Whites alike.
They’ll discover shared interests in R&B, gospel and jazz. But the friendship will be tested to the limit when Sass poaches on Steve’s relationship with his White girlfriend, Judy.
The boys’ lives are entangled in other ways too. Dora Barfield, an elderly Black woman from rural Mississippi, is both housekeeper to the Feinbergs and member of Sass’s father’s storefront church. Frederick, a mutual friend, has a 12-year-old cousin nicknamed Bobo who doesn’t always watch his mouth. The youths who mugged Steve include Sass’s bad-seed older brother Nubby. And “Mister Lucky,” a brilliant jazz musician and small-time criminal, touches the lives of them all.
The novel comes to a crisis as Cousin Bobo is tortured and lynched in a brutal slaying that echoes the real-life martyrdom of a Black Chicago boy named Emmett Till. Cousin Bobo’s funeral draws thousands; they pass an open casket where the boy’s mangled remains lie for all to see. As Steve and Sass pass, they pause to make a gesture that sums up all that they’ve learned.
That's your challenge if you choose to accept it. Shoot me your unbiased opinion at frank@frankjoseph.com. It'll really help.
Frank S Joseph Author