It won!

Sometimes a character simply appears.

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 and brought Amtrak to a screeching halt, when Pinkie came down from Somewhere Above.

And started talking.

I just wrote it down. 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.

So that's how Pinkie came to be. The same doesn’t happen every time though.

Take Mollie, the other heroine of To Do Justice. The character of Mollie was inspired by a real-life woman named Margaret "Maggie" Scherf, 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 instead what she got was harassment from a bunch of immature boys.

Oh, and ... she had a monster crush on me.

So when I sat down to write To Do Justice, I decided Mollie/Maggie deserved better treatment in my fiction than we male-chauvinist oafs had given her in real life. When you read this, the character Steve is modeled on the male-chauvinist oaf that was 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 she came to be raising Pinkie … how Pinkie rescues beloved “baby sister” Bettina (not once but twice) … 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, are there too, as is a devious King henchman whom I fictionalize as “Rev Bivens." And finally, this story is how -- when there's no one else -- Pinkie turns to Mollie for help.

Reviewers must like these characters. IndieReader chose To Do Justice as a Best Book. The book won the Chicago Writers Assn. novel contest. Reviewers from IndieReader, Readers’ Favorite®, Reedsy Reviews and Midwest Book Review all have awarded it five stars.

And now the Chicago Writers Assn. has chosen it runner-up (Honorable Mention) for indie fiction Book of the Year.

The awards ceremony is next Saturday. I'm going.

I know, flying from D.C. to Chicago in mid January is, how you say, crazy? But hey, my novel was runner-up for Book of the Year, How could I not go?

Especially since the awards banquet is at the Allerton Hotel, a Chicago landmark. Specifically, the banquet is in the storied Tip Top Tap.

(c) The Allerton

The Allerton is dead center along the Magnificent Mile, that gilded length of North Michigan Avenue that stretches from the Chicago River to the Oak Street Beach. I looked up at that iconic red-lit neon sign countless nights when I lived in Chicago. I even name-check the Tip Top Tap in Chapter 8 of To Do Justice, the scene where Steve and Susan, more than a bit tipsy, encounter Mollie and her "date" Wayne. But In the 29 years I lived in Chicago, I never stepped in for a drink.

So I repeat: how could I not attend this awards banquet?

You can read the rest of Chapter 1 -- and the entire novel -- at Amazon, IndieReader, BookBaby, your favorite bookseller, or directly from me. If you order paperbacks from me, I'll custom-autograph them.

I hope you enjoy reading To Do Justice.

Frank S Joseph Author

P.S. The next Chicago Trilogy novel to be released will be Book II, To Walk Humbly. The cover is ready now and I'd like your opinion of it. Check it out then email me at frank@frankjoseph.com.

P.P.S. for D.C.-area locals: I'm talking about To Do Justice, the writing process, Chicago Back in the Day, and related topics at the Chevy Chase Library, 8005 Connecticut Ave., Chevy Chase MD 20815. The appearance (free of course) is on Saturday, Jan. 25, at 2 p.m. Mark your calendar. I hope to see you there.