Clete went bashful, asking if Eunice was in. The woman said she surely was, though she was just having her bath, and might the two of us be interested in spending time with Viola instead? Clete’s face went all kinds of red, especially after a hard-looking woman in a slip and garters stepped out from one of the adjoining doorways and cocked a hip at us.
Then the red-haired woman raised her eyebrows at Clete, asking, and Clete sputtered how we’d prefer to wait for Eunice and Imogene. To which the slip-and-garters woman shrugged and disappeared back where she’d come from. And the boss lady, who I figured was the sporting sort fellas whispered and passed notes about in school, said Imogene was out for a ride on her gray. “But Eunice will see you both for three dollars apiece,” she said. “One at a time, of course, this bein’ a proper establishment.” Then she paused a moment and added, “Unless you’d like to reconsider Viola?”
Well, Clete’s ears just about started to smoke. So I jumped in quick and said how I wasn’t looking for company and was only there on account of my friend. And that seemed to settle Clete enough for him to ask the madam if she minded me waiting with him. She said she didn’t normally stand for dawdlers, but since Clete was such a good customer, she’d let it slide that once. “He stays out here, though,” she added, aiming a look like darts at me. “Or it’s a dollar fifty extra.” Which even made me blush. Then she nodded, sealing the deal, and vanished behind a door of her own.
After that, Clete and me sat in the kind of silence that arises when two people have things to say to one another and can’t figure where to start. For my part, I wanted to know if it was true he’d started running with the Klan. But when he scuffed his feet against the floor and started talking, it turned out he had something altogether more mercenary on his mind.
“Imogene was supposed to be here,” he mumbled.
I replied it was fine she wasn’t since I was too covered in sweat and stink to be fit for romance. Clete shrugged, not pointing out that he was in the same state himself. But he did clear his throat so long and hard that I wondered if there was something stuck in it. And he scuffed his feet again, then asked if he could borrow three dollars. That’s when I understood the real reason Clete had invited me along: he was short on funds. To him, I was nothing but a piggy bank, full up and ready for the hammer.
I fished my wallet out of my pocket anyway and handed over the money. Clete was just palming the bills when a damp-haired girl with painted-on eyebrows came out the same door the madam had gone into. Even in the poor light, her eyes caught the exchange. She hid it quick, though, and smiled so bright that I understood how Clete could convince himself she loved him.
Then me and Clete stood up, and Clete introduced us. I shook Eunice’s hand and said it was a pleasure to make her acquaintance. She did likewise, and Clete took her arm and dragged her away so that she barely had time to wink good-bye at me over her shoulder.
Once they were gone, I flew out of that place fast as I could, down the stairs, past the stable attendant and seedy hotels and gambling parlors and opium dens that barely bothered pretending to be anything different. I figured I’d best get off the streets before someone recognized me. So I hoofed it quick to the Royal Theatre and bought popcorn and licorice whips from a sidewalk vendor. Inside, Betty Blythe was breaking hearts on the big screen as the Queen of Sheba. I watched her, grateful for the cool dark of the place, until it was time to get to work.
I sold records that afternoon. Six of them. And after closing, Pop and me took the Model T out to an empty lot on the edge of town, and he gave me a driving lesson just like he’d promised to do once my cast was off. I made a hash of coordinating all her pedals and levers at first, but towards the end I got better. Enough so that Pop promised to let me try navigating a real road next.
Still, come bedtime, steering wheels and chassis were the last things on my mind. I lay there thinking how Clete wasn’t really a friend anymore, and how close-knit and complicated the world really was, what with some folks being good and some being bad and most sitting in the middle with room to slide either way.
I thought about Clarence and what I’d done to him. About Joseph and how I’d come to know him through Ruby’s stories. And I thought about Ruby, too. For I truly did care about her, pest and bother though she was. Put together, it all added up to a revelation of sorts—big enough to bust through my thick skull, sharp enough to stay there. And maybe all that pondering I did on the things that had happened since the Two-Knock would have been enough to make a righteous man out of me after all. But in the end, I never did have a chance to find out.
Rowan
The fact that Geneva thought she could tell a body had been brown-skinned from its bare skull messed with my head.
My first reaction was to assume she was full of shit. I mean, how could you possibly tell skin color from bones? Then I remembered the glob of hair I’d pulled off the skeleton, and figured maybe there had still been some skin on it. But when I asked, Geneva assured me the matted gnarl had been pure, unadulterated, flesh-free human hair.
“I know he was black from his skull,” she said.
My internal you’re-a-racist radar pinged like crazy, and I started hating her just a little bit. She didn’t seem to notice. Then again, when it came to the living, Geneva didn’t notice much.
“Skull morphology is influenced by the environment a population evolves in,” she said. “I can evaluate discrete skull characteristics and match them up with typical profiles for geographically distinct human groups.”
Translation: black people’s skulls are different from white people’s skulls.
And she didn’t stop explaining there. “For example, eye orbits tend to be sloped in people with European ancestry, rounded in American Indian descendants, and rectangular in groups from sub-Saharan Africa.”
Ping.
“And nasal openings evolved high and narrow in Europeans, heart-shaped at the base in Native Americans, and wider in dark-skinned Africans.”
Ping ping ping.
But even though what Geneva said had rubbed me wrong in all kinds of ways, I hadn’t had any trouble accepting what creaky old Mrs. Manos taught us in ninth-grade Bio—that the closer your ancestors lived to the equator, the more likely you were to have dark skin. Melanin protects you from ultraviolet radiation. More UV at the equator, more melanin. It was evolution. It made sense. So why was it hard to accept that there might be other differences? Ones that ran deeper than skin?
I’ve got some ideas about that now, but when I walked out of the back house that afternoon, all I knew was that I felt dirty. And since Mom keeps the thermostat pegged at sixty-seven so she can wear sweaters all summer, a long, hot shower in our house feels good even if it’s a hundred degrees outside.
My shower, by the way, has four spray nozzles and an overhead rainfall faucet and is amazing. I stood underneath it a long, long time, steaming away the tension in my shoulders, washing my hair slowly. I rubbed shampoo over the bumps and ridges of my skull, wondering what it would look like after I died and all the skin and fat and muscle were gone.
I traced the bones of my face—the ridges at the tops of my eye sockets, my cheekbones, my jaw. Water cascaded over the brown of my hands, the pinks of my nails, splashing onto the white shower tiles at my feet.
If Geneva had my skeleton on a slab in front of her, what would she see? The white ancestors on Dad’s side who’d left Germany and Ireland for greener American pastures? Or the black men and women from Mom’s who’d been dragged across the ocean in chains and worked to death in Alabama cotton fields?
To be fair, Geneva made a point of telling me things got a lot more complicated after people from different areas started intermarrying. But anti-miscegenation laws in Oklahoma made it illegal for blacks to marry whites all the way up to 1967, which meant there were a lot fewer mixed-race kids in the 1920s than there are now. “Skull morphology is getting less and less distinct,” she’d said. “But the person in your back house died
around 1921. And to me, his skull features indicate that he was black.”
I stayed in the shower until my fingers pruned and my skin felt raw, trying to sort out how I felt. In the end, I gave up and decided Geneva could believe whatever she wanted to. Black or white, the man buried in our back house had been smashed in the back of the head with a brick. Knowing he was black might help James and me figure out who he was, but in the end, murder was murder. No matter what his skin color, the dead man deserved to have his killer found.
He deserved justice.
It turned out Mom was actually kind of proud when I told her about the clinic. “I’m on Jackson’s board of directors,” she said. “And Marguerite Woods and I graduated from Booker T. together.”
She was tearing lettuce for a salad. Dad was grilling steaks on the back porch.
“You know who it was named for?” she asked.
I didn’t.
“A. C. Jackson. He was one of the best surgeons in the country, black or white. At least he was until white men shot him down in his own front yard during the riot. He came out of the house when they ordered him to, unarmed, hands in the air. And they shot him dead.”
“Just because he was black, or because he was a doctor?” I asked.
She wiped her hands on the Mother’s Day apron I’d finger-painted for her in first grade. “No one knows if they singled him out or if they even knew who he was. No one knows anything for sure about the riot except that Greenwood burned to ashes.” She traced the outline of a thumbprint flower. “Even though your great-great-uncle on my side disappeared that night, my mother didn’t hear about him or the riot until she was in her forties.”
Mom never talked about her family. I wanted her to keep going, but she stopped and asked me to get carrots from the fridge. She took a sip of wine and started breaking down a yellow pepper. Her knife pattered quick and hard against the cutting board.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
“Why?”
The knife stopped. “Why don’t we know more about that night, or why didn’t your grandmother hear about it for so long?”
“Both.”
She started chopping again. Slowly, with movements as tight and precise as her voice. “I don’t know,” she said.
Mom always had answers, especially to the hard questions. I didn’t like how carefully she measured her words or how she kept looking at the neat pile of pepper slices instead of me. I wanted her to pull her shoulders back, lift her chin, and force everything to make sense.
“I don’t need a perfect answer,” I said.
She finished the pepper and leaned her hips against the sink.
“It’s history, Ro. The messy kind where truth gets stretched out over thousands of unwritten stories. We don’t know how many people died, or even if we should call it a race riot. Riot is convenient, and it’s what most people use. But it isn’t right.”
I leaned onto my elbows. “Why?”
“Because when people hear the word riot—white people, I mean—they picture black people running crazy in the streets, looting stores and homes and burning things. That wasn’t what happened in Greenwood. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying black folks weren’t angry or that none of them fought back. But it was white folks who rioted that night. They looted Greenwood, then burned it to the ground.”
Mom’s voice stayed even, but she was squeezing the knife handle so hard the tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. And the vein in her neck—the one I’ve always used to tell how much trouble I was in—looked ready to burst.
“What’s the right word?” I asked.
Before she could answer, Dad came inside with a platter of grilled zucchini.
“Five minutes on the steaks,” he said, giving Mom and me this look like he knew exactly what he’d walked in on. He squeezed my shoulder, smiled at Mom, and went back outside.
Mom started on the cucumber. “I don’t know what the right word is,” she said. “Some people say massacre, but to me that implies wholesale slaughter. It wasn’t like that—plenty of folks lived and had to rebuild their lives from scratch.”
She stopped cutting and stared down at the board.
“Greenwood burned because white folks—not all of them, mind you, but plenty—wanted to clear the ‘bad niggers’ out of Tulsa. To them, that meant any black man, woman, or child with the audacity to believe they deserved as much dignity and respect as a white person. Only, those white folks failed, because in the end, the survivors went right back and rebuilt what had been theirs from the start.”
I’d never heard my mother use the n-word. It made my lungs feel too small.
She saw, and her face softened.
“Your father and I have done our best to make things easier for you,” she said. “And maybe that was a mistake. But we wanted you to fill up on good things before you had to face the bad.”
I tried to tell her I wasn’t as naïve as she thought, that I knew what code words like thug and uppity and urban really meant, and that I saw the looks some people gave me when they thought I wasn’t watching. Mom closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.
“I know,” she said. “I do. But there is so much you haven’t learned yet, Rowan. And as much as I wish I could protect you forever, I can’t. So I’m glad you’re working at the Jackson Clinic and asking questions. It’s time.”
Dad whistled outside, making as much noise as he could getting the lid on the grill and closing the grate to shut the fire down. Mom glanced toward the racket and smiled.
“There are things your father will never understand the way you and I do. Things he can’t understand. But he tries, and I love him. I love you, too. So very much.”
She smiled, and the strength I needed was there. Deeper, even, as if the roots she used to anchor our family had spread wider and sunk further as we talked.
“You’re growing up fast,” she said, “and that’s how it should be. Just please, know this…”
I leaned closer, wishing the counter wasn’t between us.
“The lives that ended that night mattered. It was a mistake for this city to try to forget, and it’s an even bigger one to pretend everything’s fine now. Black men and women are dying today for the same reasons they did in 1921. And we have to call that out, Rowan. Every single time.”
Part II
You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
WILLIAM
I wasn’t in Tulsa the day Sarah Page screamed.
It being Memorial Day Monday, Pop didn’t open the shop. He was relaxed at breakfast that morning, saying how he might start teaching me to keep accounts once school let out. “I’ve seen worse instincts than yours when it comes to customers,” he said. “We might as well let that stubborn head of yours have a go at managing sums.”
Mama smiled over her biscuits and gravy, and I basked in the lukewarm glow of Pop’s praise, trying not to dwell on the fact that my tenure at the shop would apparently continue through the summer.
After that, the three of us drove by the new house to check on its progress. The workers had installed windows in the main building and put red tile roofs on it and the quarters, both, and that made Mama and Pop so happy that our long drive up to Pawhuska was actually pleasant.
First thing we did when we got to town was lay flowers on the graves of Mama’s mother and brother. Then we headed off to visit Mama’s cousins, Margaret and Mary, who lived next door to each other on a street of grand houses built with Osage oil money. They had six children between them, and every single one made me push them about in their pedal cars. It was a good day. The kind that made you remember there’s more to the world than just the town you live in.
I didn’t hear about Sarah Page the next morning, either, for Pop carried his newspaper with him into the parlor while he and Mama engaged in early-morning negotiations over whether or not I could attend the Junior-Senior Powwow. Pop considered school festivals a frivolou
s waste of time and felt I should spend my day off of school working at the shop. Mama was of a different mind, and in the end she came out of the parlor with a shine in her eye that told me who’d won. She gave me fifteen dollars, too, which was a princely enough sum, and said I should get to work half an hour early. I promised quick, then sprinted up Boston Avenue to catch the dime trolley to Sand Springs with the rest of my classmates.
Only there was no sign of Clete. Not then, not for half an hour after we arrived at the park. That’s when he pulled up in his daddy’s Cadillac, Eunice at his side.
Right out of the gate, he spent a stack of dimes trying to win her a teddy bear at the ringtoss. I figure he just about bankrupted himself winning that thing. Afterwards, she fussed and cooed and pretended to feed it boiled peanuts, looking so much like a normal girl that you’d never guess her secret.
And Clete, he made a great show of ignoring me, parading around like a cock of the walk, so that I got fed up with the spectacle of it and caught the first train back after lunch. It was better that way, seeing how sore tempted I was to tell all our classmates it wasn’t just the teddy bear Clete had paid too much for.
Besides, it was Tuesday. Ruby day. And since Joseph had paid all but the two-dollar-and-fifty-cent finance fee on the Victrola and was set to receive it Friday evening, I was worried her visit that afternoon might be her last.
So it wasn’t until I stepped off the train in Tulsa that I first heard a paperboy on the platform hollering, “Negro attacks white woman! Read all about it!”
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