Writing fiction liberating for Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

After decades of writing facts, it’s a refreshing change to be able to make up a few facts.

That’s the fun part about writing fiction, said Leonard Pitts Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist for the Miami Herald who is currently touring his latest novel, “Grant Park.”

“It’s all the same craft, writing, but you’re exercising different muscles,” said Pitts, who will be in Wichita on Saturday to interact with fans and sign copies of “Grant Park.” “In nonfiction, you’re dealing with whatever the facts are, and you try to draw a narrative and get some cohesion and some meaning and some perspective and some analysis to those facts. With fiction, the facts are what you say they are.

“As a matter of historical record, there was no attempt on the president-elect’s (Barack Obama’s) life in 2008. And so what? I’m writing my novel, I say there was, because I need that for the points I’m trying to make and the things I’m trying to show you in the novel. That in a sense is very liberating. It’s a lot of fun.”

“Grant Park” offers the author’s take on race relations of the past 40 years, told through the experiences of two main characters, a 1960s black revolutionist-turned-celebrity news columnist and his unheralded editor, a white man.

Angry over another shooting of an unarmed black man, the columnist, Malcolm Toussant, writes a piece so inflammatory that it’s rejected as unfit for publication by his editor, Bob Carson, and the rest of his paper’s management staff.

Toussant, however, uses Carson’s purloined computer password to sneak it into publication on the paper’s front page, and then promptly gets kidnapped by a pair of dumb but dangerous white supremacists planning to kill Obama at his election-night victory celebration.

With Toussant’s whereabouts unknown, the newspaper’s managers scapegoat Carson and fire him to appease outraged readers who want to see heads roll over the offending column.

The telling of the story ricochets back and forth between the eve of Obama’s election in 2008 and the journalists’ formative years during the civil rights struggle and assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

The heart of the novel is “these two men and sort of their disillusionment – different kinds of disillusionment but still disillusionment – about where we’ve come with regard to race over those 40 years,” Pitts said.

Pitts’ novel reflects some of his own experience as a longtime newsman – his column appears on The Eagle’s Opinion page each Monday – who frequently writes about the state of race relations.

Of his column writing, Pitts said: “There is a sense of frustration having to say what to me are very basic fundamental and incontrovertible things and having to say them over and over. It’s like spending 40 years having to prove to people that fire burns or that oxygen is necessary for life.”

While he gets a lot of racist hate mail, the upside is that every once in a while, someone writes and says that they really connected with a column, Pitts said.

“You get that e-mail or pat on the back from a reader or somebody who really gets what you’re talking about – maybe didn’t get it at first, but gets it specifically because of what you wrote,” he said. “That’s the kind of stuff that keeps you getting up in the morning and saying, OK, let me take another swing at this.”

Pitts said race relations have been “two steps forward and one step back” since the end of the Civil War and “we are now in a definite phase of one step back.”

He cites the Supreme Court’s loosening of the federal Voting Rights Act, Sen. Rand Paul questioning the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, and a subset of conservative Americans who “seem bound and determined to give intellectual cover once again to basic bigotry.”

“People often think, and I’ve been told it in just these words, ‘If you didn’t talk about race, it wouldn’t exist,’” Pitts said. “The fact of the matter is, given that race is a cultural construct, it’s something we created that has no bearings in science or in fact, a corollary is actually closer to the truth: If there were no racism, then race wouldn’t exist.”

Pitt said the measure of that would be when being African-American is like being Irish- or Italian-American, in terms of opportunity and societal treatment.

“I would be African-American in the same way that Irish people in this country are Irish – and basically they’re Irish on St. Paddy’s Day, when we’re all Irish,” he said. “It’s part of your heritage, but it doesn’t have big bearing on how you live your life, on the opportunities that are available to you. Success would look something like that.”

Pitts said the takeaway from his novel is that nothing’s going to change the fact that white people and black people have been here a long time and that neither group is going away anytime soon.

“That’s what the two journalists in the book are dealing with in different way,” he said. “That’s essentially where the book comes down to. I think black and white, it’s just time to get over this idea that this thing is going to resolve itself without a purposeful and intentional action and without an understanding of fact one: We’re stuck with each other and we might as well deal with it. … As long as we’re going to be here, we need to live together in some peace and harmony.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 11:33 PM with the headline "Writing fiction liberating for Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist."