Leonard Pitts, Jr.

I first became acquainted with the passionate social commentary of Leonard Pitts, Jr. (http://www.leonardpittsjr.com/about.html)when his Pulitzer Prize-winning column was syndicated in my local Ft. Myers newspaper. I followed him for years, at least until I dropped my subscription after "The News-Press" sold its soul to "USA Today." When I heard that Pitts was turning his talents to fiction I was thrilled but found the first novel I read, "Freeman," less than thrilling. I'm happy to report that his latest effort, "The Last Thing You Surrender," is a stellar work of historical fiction.

"He was dreaming of home when the explosion came." From the very first line Pitts lets readers know that this will be an explosive book. Marine private George Simon is thrown from his bunk in the ship docked at Pearl Harbor, and as the water rushes in and he tries to navigate with a broken hip, we learn everything we need to know about George Simon while he ruminates for several pages on the likelihood of death. 

And then a vision appears, a "hulking colored guy" who George recognizes from the mess hall where the black soldiers cook and serve food to the enlisted men. As Gordy hauls George up onto his back, eventually carrying them both to safety, we intuit that the lives of these two men, one white and one black,  hailing from very different sections of Mobile, Alabama, will be forever intertwined.

An incredible amount of research went into the writing of this novel even as Pitts mines the experiences of his own father, a corporal in the United States Army during World War II. To readers my age it's no secret that the armed forces were still segregated in the 1940's and that black troops were despicably treated. I guess I assume that everyone is knowledgeable about the famed Tuskegee Airmen. Eleanor Roosevelt flew with one of the black pilots to bring about awareness of their heroic feats. But, have you heard of the Black Panthers? http://www.761st.com/18update/2018a/ I certainly had not. Another shortcoming in my education!

Pitts brings alive the struggles of the 761st tank battalion to be respected and commissioned to battle through the complex character of Luther Hayes, whose visceral hatred of the United States, its military, and the white men who run it, stems from the unspeakable trauma of having witnessed the lynching of his parents when he was only nine years old. Through a strange quirk of fate Luther's redemption from life as an imprisoned alcoholic will come through the intervention of his sister Thelma and George's father, Atty. John Simon.

I simply could not put this book down. It is wrenchingly violent and realistically tragic, in that horrific things do happen to good people. Man's inhumanity to man is seen not just in the Japanese prisoner of war camps but right here in the shipyards of Mobile where black workers were ostracized and abused. George Simon will lose his faith in God even as Thelma Hayes will make a momentously faith-inspired decision. You will be appalled at the evil Pitts reveals even as you may sob at the acts of love and redemption. 

At a time when so many younger writers seem to lean in to gimmicky means of grabbing a reader's attention or priding themselves on deliberately obtuse prose to be waded through rather than enjoyed, Leonard Pitts, Jr. has created a straight forward, honest story steeped in the accurate history of a flawed country yearning, I have to believe, to be better.