TO DO JUSTICE

A young girl searches for her roots in a city torn by racial conflict in this historical melodrama, part of the author’s Chicago trilogy.

Joseph’s novel centers on Pinkie, an 11-year-old girl who looks white enough to stick out like a sore thumb in Chicago’s West Side ghetto in the mid-1960s. She has been brought up there by Jolene Watkins, a Black woman who is not her mother and lets slip that Pinkie’s real name is Rachel Levine. Chaos engulfs Pinkie when policemen rough up neighborhood kids for opening a hydrant on a sweltering summer day, touching off a four-day riot fueled by rage over poverty, racism, and police brutality. Pinkie is taken in by Nizzie Sawhill, a canny Black precinct boss in Chicago’s Democratic Party machine. She also meets Mollie Hinton, a young white reporter covering the riots for the Chicago Associated Press bureau. Pinkie falls in with a sketchy Black reverend and civil rights activist Reverend Jared Levi Bivens, with pedophilic impulses. Nizzie further ratchets up tensions by telling Mollie and other reporters that there is a Black plot to stockpile weapons and start a race war. While chronicling public unrest, Mollie helps Pinkie in her quest to find her real mother. Joseph, who covered the 1966 Chicago riots for the Associated Press, weaves a colorful, gritty tapestry of the city, from the gorgeous Loop skyscrapers, to the dejected North Lawndale slum, to the grungy madhouse of the AP newsroom, with its scurrying copy boys and clacking teletypes. He conveys the city’s seething racial tensions in muscular, evocative prose and pitch-perfect dialogue (“Second night folks got pop-bottle gasoline bombs, what the guy on WVON calls Molotov cocktails. Now there’s less to steal, folks go to setting buildings on fire. Ain’t laughing so much neither. Some got signs Pigs Out! and Get Whitey! and Black Power!…Black Power. Got a good ring to it”). The result is an unforgettable portrait of a city burning with hatred and hope.

A gripping, richly textured saga of the civil rights era.