Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. deals with racism in “Grant Park”

It’s Nov. 3, 2008, the day before Americans go to the polls to elect the next president. And Malcolm Toussaint is tired.

So tired, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago newspaper columnist, despairing that yet another black man has been killed by police, goes on a tear in his latest column. It’s a piece so incendiary, his editor, Bob Carlson, spikes it. Despite Toussaint’s appeals up the chain of command, that column will not appear in this newspaper.

That doesn’t stop Malcolm. He sneaks into the office that night, logs into his editor’s computer and puts his column on the front page.

That act of rebellion sets in motion the events of “Grant Park,” the second novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. Toussaint and his editor, Carlson, are fired. An angry Carlson sets off to find Toussaint, but can’t, because the columnist has since been kidnapped by a couple of white supremacists who plan to blow up a bomb at the election-night gathering for Sen. Barack Obama in Chicago’s Grant Park.

While the contemporary portion of the story is set in one 24-hour period, other parts of the novel flash back to the late 1960s as Malcolm’s life is shaped by the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

While Toussaint and Pitts share the same awards, job titles and race, that’s where the comparisons end, Pitts said in a recent telephone interview. And Malcolm’s rant – which boils down to “I’m sick of white people’s crap” – is pure fiction, although the events and the racist emails that sparked it are true to life.

“I’ve never wanted to say what Malcolm says,” said Pitts, who will read from “Grant Park” on Saturday at Auntie’s Book Store in Spokane.

When writing fiction, he said he’s not trying to make arguments that he can’t make in his twice-weekly nationally syndicated column, because he’s never felt the need.

“In the larger sense of what you can say in a novel, there’s not really any difference between that and what I have been able to say in the column, at least as far as I can tell,” Pitts said. “The theme of (Malcolm’s) column isn’t so much Malcolm’s rant, as the frustration that causes it, and this sense that he has that things are not progressing as they should have. And that’s something I’ve said in my column on any number of occasions.”

And while it might seem that some of the events in “Grant Park” were inspired by the cases of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or Freddie Gray, Pitts said the novel was already underway when those events happened.

“What I actually wanted to deal with was this sense of the absurdity of our modern discussion of race. I just find that so much of it is ridiculous,” he said. “That was probably the first inkling I had of this book. I liked the idea of this guy being captured by these two crazy people, whose ideas don’t have any logical coherence … and see how he responds to it.”

There is plenty of “real life” in “Grant Park” as it is, including the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in 1968 and the Obama gathering in Grant Park. But one piece of fictionalized writing kept Pitts stumped: a “conversation” between young Malcolm and King in Memphis.

“That was a difficult scene to write only because I was intimidated purporting to put words in the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Pitts said.

Initially, he wrote the scene using phrases culled from King’s speeches, interviews and writing.

“And it was very stiff. I hadn’t given myself permission to write him like a person,” he said. “And only when I gave myself permission did the scene become easier to write.”

And while there’s plenty out there to keep him busy with his column – the upcoming presidential election, continued racial unrest, what have you – he’s drawn to writing fiction because, simply, “You get to make stuff up.

“You basically create this world with all these interesting and crazy and insane people, then you get to go play with them for a few hours every day,” he said. “It’s a sandbox.”