406-Word Summary, TO WALK HUMBLY The Chicago Trilogy, Book II
It's 1952, nighttime on the South Side of Chicago. Steve Feinberg, 14 and White, is walking the dog when four Black youths assault him. They pelt him with anti-Semitic taunts as they beat him, then ride off on bicycles.
Shift to Steve's family arguing over whether to send Steve to Hyde Park High School or flee a neighborhood undergoing rapid racial change. Mother: "Hyde Park High was fine when I went there, I had lots of friends, got a perfectly good education." Father: "That was a long time ago Jean." Mother: "Where are these people's principles? They live here all their lives then scoot to the suburbs on account of a few colored. What kind of Jews are they anyway?" Father: "The kind who want to get their kids through high school without landing in the hospital."
Shift to the home of Jesse Owens "Sass" Trimble. Like the Feinbergs, this family is thinking to flee their neighborhood the overcrowded Black ghetto known as Bronzeville. And flee they do to Hyde Park, in the vanguard of the Black influx that so worries the Feinbergs.
Steve and Sass aren't strangers though. Four years earlier they were thrown together on an all-night quest for a missing silver talisman [the subject of To Love Mercy, Chicago Trilogy Book I). Now they are to meet again at Hyde Park High School and try to rebuild a friendship in the face of rejection from Blacks and Whites alike.
They'll discover shared interests in R&B, gospel and jazz. But the friendship will be tested to the limit when Sass poaches Steve's White girlfriend, Judy.
The boys' lives are entangled in other ways too. Dora Barfield, an elderly Black woman from rural Mississippi, is both housekeeper to the Feinbergs and member of Sass's father's storefront church. Frederick, a school friend, has a 12-year-old cousin nicknamed Bobo who doesn't always watch his mouth. The youths who mugged Steve include Sass's no-good older brother Nubby. And "Mister Lucky," a brilliant jazz musician and small-time criminal, touches the lives of them all.
The novel comes to a head as Cousin Bobo is tortured and lynched in a brutal slaying that echoes the real-life martyrdom of a Black Chicago boy named Emmett Till. Cousin Bobo's funeral draws thousands who view an open casket where his mangled remains lie for all to see. As Steve and Sass pass, they pause in a gesture that sums up all they've learned.
