Angel of Greenwood

by Randi Pink

  Isaiah took a dull pencil from his suit jacket and began transcribing his favorite passages directly from memory to pass slow church time.

  With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

  As imagination of him walking alongside W.E.B. Du Bois swept his mind away from Sunday school, he felt a twisting pinch to his rib cage.

  “Ouch!” he yelled out, calling attention to him and his mother, who was silently apologizing to surrounding church members. “That one hurt!”

  With a stealthy movement, his mother snatched the squatty pencil from his grasp. She must’ve peeked over his shoulders to read the passage as he was daydreaming.

  “Stop writing that militant nonsense,” she told him in a whisper. “It’s counterintuitive to our cause.”

  She was onto him, he thought, also she was wholly wrong—stuck in her docile ways in a world that demanded action and movement. This was the mentality that had kept him frozen behind the curtain while Angel Hill stood threatened. Regret entered his tense body as he realized the magnitude of his own cowardice. Du Bois never would’ve hidden. He would have burst through the door, revealing himself a savior. Isaiah sat in his regret until it passed, and then, with nothing left to write with, he folded his arms and simmered.

  Greenwood folks filled the church with an orchard of flowered hats and fedoras. A symphony of fluttering fans stapled sturdily onto Popsicle sticks brought the wind, while Pastor’s sermon brought the fire, blazing the congregation into singular accord. Isaiah wished he could do this one day—meld a people into one body, shifting back and forth together without ever realizing. But he couldn’t even convince his mother to love Du Bois as much as he did. And worse, he couldn’t convince himself to be brave.

  By the end of Sunday school, the pastor opened the floor for weekly testimonies. Seventy-eight-year-old Mother Williams, as always, went first. Shakily thanking God for being here today and waking her up this morning and such. Hypercompetitive and never to be outdone, eighty-year-old Mother Jackson went second. Equally shakily thanking God for being here today, and yes, waking her up this morning. She won that round with an impromptu rendition of “A Charge to Keep I Have.” Then went everyone else—a procession of similar thankfulness and praise hands. After the thirteenth, Isaiah was having trouble with his heavy eyelids. In addition to the redundant testimonies, the Oklahoma heat was draining him of energy and thoughts.

  “Wake up, child!” his mother said with an elbow to his still-aching ribs. “You’re in the Lord’s house.”

  By the time the choir marched in for 10:45 A.M. service, they’d already been there two whole hours. He kept huffing at his mother’s lavender lace hat and her praise hands raised toward the wooden cross hanging from the ceiling and the painting of pale blue-eyed Jesus centered on the rear wall directly behind it. Even more dread took him over when the male chorus marched in with a depressed, synchronized sway. The male chorus was never music; it was instead a low, guttural growl and a moan, entirely without harmony or exuberance. Just his luck, he thought, he’d chosen to go to Sunday school on the male chorus’s Sunday to lament.

  As the gloomy choir rocked side to side grumbling “This Little Light of Mine,” Isaiah thought, never again would he accompany his mother to pre-church. There were so many things he could be doing with his time rather than listening to what sounded like baritone birds dying in unison. He could be walking around Greenwood with his best friend, Muggy, whose family owned the town butcher shop. Or he could simply be sitting on his porch and writing his poetry or reading some of his favorite works. He knew he shouldn’t have given in to his mother. He folded his lean arms even tighter.

  “All heads bowed,” said the pastor after the male chorus finally took their seats in the stand behind him. “All eyes closed.”

  After prayer, Mother Evans began singing the Lord’s Prayer a cappella from the pulpit, and three young girls dressed in ankle-length white dance robes pushed each other out of the rear study and onto their makeshift dance floor. The congregation chuckled at the youngest one, who kept stepping on her robes and stumbling, but the last one out brought all laughter to a quick halt.

  It was Angel Hill.

  The stark white silk against her deep dark complexion made Isaiah feel like he was trying to stare at the sun. His eyes unconsciously began to squint, and he quickly shook it off. Someone might have been watching him, but after a quick look around the sanctuary, he knew that no one was. On that strangely hot, tornadic, spring Sunday morning, the only thing anybody in that room saw was Angel.

  Without inhibition, she danced. With passionate expression and force, pressing against something that needed to be defied. She threw around her toned arms and fought the air with closed fists. On the tips of her toes, she spun around so fast he thought she might knee the rim of the baptizing pool, but she didn’t. She was both power and serenity. Skill and rawness. Activism and patience. When she reached the center, the younger two girls fell to their knees around her to give her the spotlight she deserved.

  To Isaiah, she was the girl who had faced those boys. Anyone else would have bolted immediately, Isaiah knew. But even when he whispered it into the curtain, the girl stood. Face-to-face with an evil so loveless. And then mere days later, she was able to find enough love within herself to spin a congregation fond. She was captivating. He’d seen her in a glimpse that day at the talent show, but he could press that down deep and deny it.

  This? Only feet in front of him, he could not ignore a magic such as this.

  Angel’s solo lasted for the entire second half of the song, but Isaiah could no longer hear Mother Evans’s singing. There was only Angel, spinning Greenwood’s thirty-five blocks into something much more confusing and complicated. He was a man of seventeen, best friend to Muggy Little Jr.: the self-crowned love king of Greenwood Avenue. He was an aspiring foot soldier in the swelling ground war of societal change led by the one and only W.E.B. Du Bois. And since his father died a few years ago in the big war, most important, Isaiah was the man of the house.

  A real man wouldn’t notice Angel’s hair was wild and free and more beautiful than anything he’d ever seen in his life. A real man wouldn’t wonder if she liked Du Bois as much as he did or if she cared for activism at all. A real man didn’t watch the most peculiar girl in school dance as if she were some kind of an angel. And a real man certainly didn’t feel unworthy of watching her dance in front of him like she was living, breathing, moving poetry.

  He forced his gaze back to the maroon carpet until the song had ended. When it did, everyone, even the elderly mothers of the church, stood to their feet. Some outright cried afterward, and others pretended not to. He stood along with them so he wouldn’t look odd, but didn’t dare look up at her. Real men surely didn’t cry.

  MONDAY, MAY 23, 1921; 8 DAYS BEFORE

  ANGEL

  On the second-to-last day of school, Angel sat on the front stoop of her house, hugging five large books to her chest and humming the Lord’s Prayer. As usual, she was ready early, so she tucked her knees inside of her long navy skirt and listened to the crisscrossing groups of chirping birds perched atop her favorite weeping soapberry tree. Suddenly, the sound of her neighbor Mrs. Nichelle’s screaming infant punctured the peace of her quiet street.

  Everyone else was sleeping or already off to work and school, including Mrs. Nichelle’s husband, the high school vice principal, Mr. Anniston. Angel’s heart went out to her neighbor, left alone with their colicky six-month-old baby boy, Michael. Peeking at her ticking pocket watch, Angel saw that she had twenty more minutes before she should set off for the schoolhouse. She jumped to her feet and went over to knock on her neighbor’s screen door.

  “Who’s there?” Mrs. Nichelle asked frantically over Michael’s
screams.

  “It’s me. Angel. Anything I can help with? I’m a bit early again.”

  “You’re a godsend,” Mrs. Nichelle said as she pushed through the screen door with Michael dangling from her hip. He was bright red from his yelling and as mad as a viper. “Few moments of privacy would do me good. I’ve been holding it all night.”

  “Of course,” said Angel. She held her hands out for Michael to fall into them. Mrs. Nichelle squeezed her legs together, and she quickly walked toward the bathroom. “Take as long as you need.”

  Angel rocked Michael on her neighbor’s front step for what felt like a while, and she glanced at her ticking watch to see that an hour had passed. Angel’s first mind told her to go check on Mrs. Nichelle, but Michael had finally dozed off on her upper shoulder. She decided to let him sleep. But then a second hour had passed. He was snoring, blowing tiny spit bubbles while he slept. Angel didn’t dare put him in his crib; he’d surely wake up raging.

  Angel found peace in the simplicity of rocking a neighbor’s fussy baby to sleep and watching the smaller birds chase the larger ones away from their nests hidden in the soapberry. She thought of what her father had told her of the birds in that very tree. He’d said they were longing for rest within unrest. While gently rocking Michael, she thought, that’s all any of us long for really. Especially Black folks in these shifty times. So many had crossed the Frisco tracks in search of rest, and in Greenwood, they’d found it.

  When sweat began dripping from the tiny tip of Michael’s nose, she headed toward the Williamses’ drugstore for a cold drink and cool air. As she walked, the sun scrambled in the approaching clouds, trying greatly to get a peek at the gorgeous Greenwood District. It was another one of those days just like the day before, phony storm telling people to stay indoors. But Angel knew there was nothing behind it—only the bluster of trickster gray clouds. Still, with tiny Michael resting on her now-aching shoulder, rolling sky two days in a row sent tiny chills up her back. Her papa had told her that God’ll send signs to the most observant among us. Most ignore them with blind, unreasonable faith. But the chosen few moved through life according to those signals, like a chimney train on its tracks, he’d say.

  The pungent aroma of man-tall juniper lined the walkways alongside her quiet street, effectively taking attention from the ominous above. Mrs. Tate’s blue house on the corner was the origin of the smell. Her juniper won prizes all over. She’d nursed it through the driest Oklahoma droughts and even the fluke cold spell a few years back. Her husband owned and ran the Greenwood pharmacy, and when her only son, Timothy, went south for medical school, she’d shifted her mothering to the juniper. And Angel’s already-manicured street benefitted greatly. Mrs. Tate, however, was never nearly as pleasant as her juniper.

  When Mrs. Tate peeked over a cone-shaped shrub taller than she was, Angel leaped back with her hand firmly on Michael’s rear end. She was a tiny woman, flitting around like a hummingbird. She wore wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun at bay and zip-front flowered housedresses.

  “Just me, Angel,” Mrs. Tate called out in a whisper. “Nice of you to watch Nichelle’s boy. He’s a hollerer, that one.”

  Feeling defensive of Michael, Angel ignored the slight affront and instead focused on the two things Mrs. Tate cared for in the world. “Your juniper is looking better than I’ve ever seen it. Oh, and how’s Timothy?”

  As expected, Mrs. Tate’s face lit up with gladness. “Tim’s a dream of a son. An absolute dream. His letter came today, you know that? Handwriting of a champion. Always knew he’d grow up to be something special. He was a good baby. No hollering and carrying on like that one there you’re holding on to.”

  “We should really get on our way,” Angel interrupted as respectfully as possible. “Little man’s sweating in his sleep. We’re heading on to the Williamses’ shop for a sip.” Angel began walking. “See you later on.”

  “Come on back by soon!” Mrs. Tate reluctantly waved. “So I can finish up telling you about my boy. And this juniper, too!”

  By the end, Mrs. Tate was yelling her words. Angel made a mental note to take the long way home.

  ISAIAH

  There was no room left in Isaiah’s mind—only Angel.

  But this was not the fate of the Black boys of 1921. This was for daydreamers who walked through life tripping over their own loafers. This was for woolgatherers, aimlessly grinning at nothing. This, most of all, was for white boys.

  White boys could get away with an all-consuming kind of love. They could learn every meticulous baritone note within “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” gather a quartet, and serenade their loves with no consequences to follow. No impending smack at the nape of the neck from steely fathers or philandering best friends. With no worry of looming revolution or invasion, they got to fall in love. And love, after all, was the only thing in the world that mattered. Love could lead a man to long for much more than mediocrity. Love of family. Love of community. It was a force stronger than hate, Isaiah realized. It was also, for him, not allowed.

  And then there he was. Walking to school, surrounded by the excellence of the formerly enslaved—the very demonstration of that type of powerful, perseverant love. Those who pulled themselves up to build and create and manufacture for the sake of community and family. Yet still, Isaiah toiled internally from the wrongness of the us and them. Envying a simplicity existing a mere stone’s throw over the Frisco railroad tracks. Isaiah was not one man, but two—himself and his black shadow—following him, sometimes pestering him, to utilize his own ingenuity in order to navigate the world made complicated by the color of his skin.

  Through the concept of double consciousness, Du Bois had said as much in Souls:

  It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  A sharp slap at his nape snapped Isaiah back to the mundane reality of walking to school with his best friend, Muggy Little Jr.

  “Get your dreamy head out the clouds,” Muggy told him, twisting his unlit cigar between thumb and index finger. “Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

  Isaiah shrugged in return. “I believe you were talking about … Frances.”

  “That was last week,” Muggy said, very proud of himself. “Try again.”

  “Helen?”

  “Two months ago.” Muggy laughed. “Again.”

  “Okay, Gladys.”

  Muggy doubled over in hysterics. “Am I really this much of a dog?”

  “Just tell me,” Isaiah replied. “And no, I wasn’t listening.”

  “Dorothy Mae,” Muggy said before twisting a spin in the middle of the street. “Foxy broad. And more than willing, if you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Isaiah replied. He’d been necking around with Dorothy Mae for many months now. Beautiful she was, but not much for conversation.

  “Oh, yeah.” Muggy chuckled. “You and Dorothy had a little something, you mind if I…”

  Again, Isaiah shrugged and walked ahead.

  This was what was expected of Black boys like him, Isaiah thought. He was to be a Muggy, uselessly spreading himself around like the whites of a dandelion on the wind. What was he to dare do? Challenge Muggy? Never. If he did, there would be hell to pay.

  Muggy’s family butcher business was booming. Even white folks crossed the tracks to get their hands on his father’s cuts. The Littles had more than they needed, and after Isaiah’s father fell in the war, they’d agreed to pass along some of their extra to Isaiah’s mother. Most of the district did. From the neighborhood pharmacist to the growers, Greenwood chipped in to help prop up Isaiah’s household. He, therefore, was quietly indebted to them all, even his best friend. Isaiah
could never show himself as he truly was on the inside. He could only acquiesce and get through the day.

  “She’s a fine dame,” Isaiah said of Dorothy Mae, still walking ahead so Muggy couldn’t read his face. “But not mine alone to have. Do with her what you will.”

  Isaiah hung his head slightly, and Muggy leaped into the air and onto Isaiah’s back, nearly pulling them both to the ground. “Attaboy!” Muggy hollered. “What were you daydreaming about anyway? Looks like your mind’s lost in your own dame.”

  “Actually…,” Isaiah said, leaning sideways to ease Muggy, who was a head shorter than him, off of his back. “Have you heard much about double consciousness?”

  Muggy let out an audible huff. “Not this Du Bois foolishness again,” he replied. “Look around you!” Muggy held his arms open and spun around twice. “We’re living in a Black man’s paradise. We’re free to come and go as we please, walk down our own streets, sipping our own cola and smacking our own broads on the backside.”

  “Yes,” Isaiah replied, facing Muggy. “But for a Black man in a stranger’s nation, are we ever truly safe? And too, whose nation even is this? Whose land are we walking on right now? Sure isn’t theirs.” Isaiah motioned toward the white side of Tulsa. “Look at this…” Isaiah lifted his well-worn copy of Souls from his innermost jacket pocket. And in response, Muggy dramatically plugged his ears.

  “If you tell me one more thing Du Bois said in that damn book, I’ll scream,” Muggy snapped, and then grabbed Isaiah by the shoulders to stare him directly in the eyes. “Nothing ever happens in the Greenwood District. If revolution comes, it doesn’t even need to come here. We’re Black folks governing Black folks. Minding our own damn business, just like them.” Muggy pointed across the Frisco tracks to a small group of white teenagers leaning against a soda machine. “Long as we keep to ourselves, we could live like this forever. Now tell me about the dame you’re daydreaming about. No man looks at the sky like that if it isn’t about a dame.”