Dreamland Burning

by Jennifer Latham

  “Stanley,” he said in his deep Georgia drawl, “I come over to let you know I met up with some of the Ku Klux Klan’s most influential leaders last night, and seeing’s how you took a squaw for a wife, you ended up being the topic of some discussion.”

  Pop’s face betrayed no emotion as he rolled an unlit Corona between his fingers. He never actually smoked them, just chewed one end and sniffed the tobacco leaves. Bad as they smelled when they burned, sometimes I wished he’d just up and light one.

  Vernon tapped ash from his Maduro into the ashtray that Pop kept for customers and drew another mouthful of smoke before he continued.

  “See, the Klan may not have much of a presence here yet, but they’ve got big plans for Tulsa. Big enough that we decided we need upstanding business owners such as yourself too much to begrudge you your, shall we say, exotic choice of spouse.”

  Pop replied with a false smile. Though he didn’t say so, he knew perfectly well that Mama’s Osage roots ran deeper into the soil under our feet than his or Vernon’s, either one, making her about as exotic as an Oklahoma redbud tree. Why, not thirty years prior, the land Tulsa sat on had belonged to Indians: Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, and Osage. The Perryman family alone had near single-handedly founded the place, and they were mostly Muscogee Creek. And the better part of Oklahoma itself had been called Indian Territory right up until it became a state in 1907. Far as I could tell, Indians and part-Indians like me had just as much right to be there as anyone. More, even.

  “Now, Vernon,” Pop said, “that willingness wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that my wife is a wealthy woman, would it?”

  Vernon looked offended. “Quite the contrary,” he said. “In fact, we want to give you money. Once you join the Klan, you’ll earn a commission for every new member you recruit.”

  “Like the one you’ll get if I join?” Pop asked.

  Vernon shook his head and looked all sad and hangdog, like Pop had wounded his soul. “That’s not why I want you in, Stanley, and you know it,” he said. “Supporting the Klan’s the right thing to do. We got coloreds round these parts thinkin’ they’re good as white folks. Black Wall Street my foot! That strip of junk shops and cathouses up on Greenwood ain’t nothin’ but a blighted piece of Africa befouling our fair city.”

  A hint of a smile flickered across Pop’s face. I’m not sure Vernon saw it, but I did. And Pop said how he’d heard tell that the Negro quarter up around Greenwood was one of the richest of its kind in the whole country. Plus they had folks like that Dr. Jackson, who’d trained at the Mayo Clinic and treated white and Negro women both. And what about John and Loula Williams, with their Dreamland Theatre and confectionery and garage that fixed as many white folks’ cars as coloreds’?

  Vernon turned his head sideways and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. Said, “Seems to me that when white men such as yourself start talking like that, Stanley, it’s a sure sign folks up in Little Africa are due to be put back in their place. Besides, the Klan ain’t just about keeping uppity Negroes in line, it’s about making sure our town stays pure and righteous. There’s white men abusing God’s laws, too, and the Klan makes sure they get what they got comin’. Especially all them Catholics and Jews movin’ in amongst us good Protestants, twisting the Bible round with their talk of blood and temples and such.”

  Pop shrugged and said people’s pocketbooks interested him more than their prayers. Vernon puffed a few times, then said how Pop should be grateful the Klan was willing to forgive him his Injun wife and let him join. Pop went tight-lipped and quiet; Vernon had finally got under his skin.

  “What about you, Half-breed?” Vernon said, turning to me. “How do you opine?”

  I told him I didn’t. And he said that was hogwash, for a boy my age ought to have the world figured out and caught up by the tail. So I looked to Pop for help, and when none was forthcoming, I turned towards the window instead, pretending to watch Vernon’s shop and muttering, “I haven’t got time for all that, Mr. Fish, what with school and work and all.”

  And Vernon pounced, saying, “Then it seems to me you oughtn’t have time to be out carousing at night, getting in fights.” And he weighted his words down heavy, letting me know there was more behind them than just bluster.

  The shop went quiet as the rain picked up outside and the sky spit hail pebbles against the window. Vernon’s lips made wet little pwaps, loosing smoke rings over the dark, slicked-back curls atop his head. After a while, I couldn’t help but meet his eyes. And what I saw in the milky blueness of them sent a jolt through me like biting down on a bad tooth.

  He knew about the Two-Knock.

  Vernon Fish knew.

  Rowan

  Finding a skeleton with a bashed-in skull was a bad way to start the day. Getting into a fight with my best friend was a supremely shitty way to end it.

  At first, things were fine. It was one of those gorgeous Oklahoma nights in the Brady Arts District when the sun hovers low in the sky so long you wonder if it’s ever going to set. Even with a Drillers game at ONEOK Field, James and I found parking spots outside the instrument repair shop that has rows of old violins hanging in the window. He wanted to catch a few innings from the five-dollar outfield lawn seats, but it gets crowded back there, and I wasn’t crazy about the idea of people listening to our conversation. So we sat on one of the benches around the Guthrie Green splash pad instead, close enough to catch spray from the kids running through in their shorts and T-shirts, but far enough away from their parents to have some privacy.

  James and I go to the Brady a lot. It’s a few blocks north of downtown and just west of Greenwood, with art galleries and restaurants and bars and a glassblowing studio where they let you get close enough to the ovens to break a sweat. There’s usually some kind of performance happening on the stage at the Green—Red Dirt bands, dancers, the symphony. That night it was actors in black leggings and white T-shirts doing scenes from Othello. A few families were scattered around on blankets, along with oldsters in lawn chairs and a white couple with matching dreads making out next to their bikes.

  “What happened after I left?” James asked. “Anything good?”

  I pretended to think hard. “Oh, definitely. Let’s see… you were there for most of our conversation with the world’s least exciting police detectives, so the main thing you missed would have to be the medical examiner who spent ten minutes not touching the body. And—oh yeah—you didn’t get to hear Dad making sure our shiny family name stays out of the news.”

  James’s forehead wrinkled.

  “I promise,” I said. “It was completely undramatic. Even this was a letdown.” I took the wallet from my purse and handed it to him, busted side up. “See for yourself.”

  He opened it up and felt around inside the empty bill compartment.

  “Careful,” I said. “One side of the change pocket is shot.”

  He caught two coins as they fell out. “We should have given this to the police. If they find out we took it—”

  I cut him off. “Trust me, they won’t. The detectives basically told Mom and Dad they’re too busy with new cases to spend time on something this old. If the forensic anthropologist doesn’t find anything, my guess is no one will. I’m glad we kept the wallet. At least this way the two of us can do some detective work on our own.”

  James jiggled the rest of the coins in his palm and turned them over one by one.

  “The newest’s from 1921,” he said.

  “Right. So unless someone snuck back to the crime scene, tore up the floor, and stuck fresh coins in the skeleton’s wallet, it must have been a live human being then.”

  A little girl next to us gathered water in her cupped hands and threw it in a littler boy’s face. The boy ran off howling. James took out his phone, punched something in, and scrolled down, muttering, “Well, that makes things interesting.”

  I leaned closer. “What?”

  “The race riot was in 1921.”

 
; Which, I confess, was something I didn’t know much about beyond what we’d covered in ninth-grade Oklahoma History. Something had happened between a black teenage boy and a white teenage girl in a department store elevator, then things melted down outside the courthouse the next night. Most of Greenwood ended up burning, and everyone pretty much tried to forget about it.

  One thing I did remember was that no one knew for sure how many black people had been killed. But what stuck with me most was our teacher’s description of how black survivors had been marched like prisoners of war to holding centers and forced to stay there until a white person showed up to vouch for them. Once they were released, they’d had to pin a green card onto their clothes that basically said, “I’m a good Negro.” It wasn’t exactly the same as the yellow stars the Nazis made Jewish people wear, but it wasn’t completely different, either.

  Still, I didn’t see how the skeleton could have had anything to do with all that. The riot happened at the northern edge of downtown and in Greenwood—not in my neighborhood. And even more than now, Maple Ridge in the 1920s had been for rich white people.

  James kept messing with his phone, twisting his mouth up on one side.

  “There’s a cold case database on the police department’s website,” he said. “But it only goes back to the 1970s.” His fingers kept moving. “Jesus—did you know forty-one people were hanged in Oklahoma between 1907 and 1930? Most of them were black, and there were probably a lot more lynchings that never got recorded.”

  I hadn’t known that, and kind of wished I still didn’t.

  James elbowed my ribs. “Did you hear me?”

  I elbowed him back. “I did. And it’s awful. I’m just glad things are better now.”

  A look came over James’s face, like all of a sudden he couldn’t recognize me. “Are they?” he said.

  I swung one leg behind the bench, straddling it so we were looking at each other. “Are they what?”

  “Better?”

  I leaned away without meaning to. “I’m not an idiot, James. I know things aren’t perfect now, but they aren’t as bad as they were in the 1920s. People don’t get lynched anymore. You and I can go anywhere we want. We’re black, and we both go to a nicer school than most white kids.”

  The wrinkles on his forehead disappeared and his face went blank. “It’s way more complicated than that, Chase.”

  I bit my tongue.

  “I never told you what happened to the guy I’m tutoring at the library, did I?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Well, his name’s Eduardo, and last month he spent two weeks hanging drywall for this contractor who promised him fifteen hundred bucks cash for the work. Eduardo’s got three kids. He’s a good guy, and he wouldn’t do things under the table if he could get a work permit. Only he can’t. So he takes this job, and when he finishes and goes to the contractor to get paid, the contractor tells him sure, he’ll write a check—as soon as Eduardo shows him his papers. Only he knows Eduardo doesn’t have papers. And since Eduardo can’t go to the police and report him, he also knows there’s no way he’ll get caught. He ripped off my friend and there’s nothing Eduardo can do about it.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “And now I get why you were worried about the workmen. But Mom and Dad wouldn’t hire a contractor like that. I’m sure the one they’re using pays his workers.”

  James was getting worked up. “That doesn’t change the fact that the system’s jacked against people like Eduardo and me.”

  He said it loud enough to make the little girl in the splash pad look over at us. I tilted my head toward her, letting James know he needed to calm down, and whispered through my teeth, “There’s a big difference between a mob lynching a black man and some asshole ripping off a guy because he’s undocumented, and you know it.”

  James shook his head slowly. “The crime’s different but the problem’s the same. It’s about power and prejudice and shit rooted so deep that people don’t see it anymore. You know we’re six times as likely to go to jail as white people, right?”

  “Of course I know that,” I shot back. “My mother’s a black public defender, for God’s sake, so you can skip the lecture.”

  “You can’t wish it away,” James said softly. “Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Harris, Laquan McDonald—they’re just the ones who made the news. And I know you know that, but sometimes you disappear inside this rich-girl bubble where someone always fixes things when they go wrong, and your brown skin only counts against you until you mention your daddy’s name. Most of us don’t have that luxury, Chase. There’s no room for us in your bubble.”

  Things were happening inside me. Ugly, uncomfortable things that I can’t even describe. But I wasn’t going to let James see me cry.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you,” I said around the tightness in my throat. James pretended to watch the actors on the stage. I got up, turned my back on my friend, and walked away. And I didn’t shed a single tear. Not until I was safe inside my car, with the tinted windows rolled up and the door locked tight behind me.

  WILLIAM

  It was torture, staring out into the rain on Main Street while Vernon Fish savored the effect of his words. He knew about me and Clarence Banks, and clearly suspected I hadn’t given Pop a full and accurate account of the circumstances behind my broken wrist. Now that he’d stuck the knife in me good, Vernon intended to enjoy twisting it.

  After a while, though, the silence got to be too much even for him, and he set about unraveling the rest of his smug tale.

  “See, I have this policeman friend, Carl,” he said. “Works in a… well, I guess you’d call it an unsavory part of town. And Carl, he tells me there’s establishments out there where Negroes and whites mix, drinkin’ and dancin’ and sinnin’ together in some kind of unholy mess. Turns my stomach to think of it.”

  This was news to neither Pop nor me; everyone in town, even polite society ladies in their fancy hats and starched white dresses, knew about Tulsa’s speakeasies and roadhouses. They also knew better than to talk about them.

  But Vernon jawed on, saying, “Yep, old Carl and me met up yesterday, and he told me about a little scene he come upon in one of these places the other night. Seems a white boy tangled with a big coon, name of Clarence somethin’ or other. Pissed old Clarence off so bad he broke that white boy’s leg… or was it his arm?”

  Vernon stopped, letting the weight of his words settle in on me and Pop. And there was nothing to fill the silence except for the sound of the rain. Not until Pop cleared his throat and said how he thought we might have a leak in the storeroom ceiling, and did Vernon have a bucket he could lend us to catch the drips?

  And Vernon, he just smirked and said, “Only bucket I got’s underneath a drip of my own. I ain’t through with my story, neither. See, it turns out old Clarence was such a coward that when he seen what he’d done to that poor white boy, he ran away with his tail between his legs. Only, the cops found out his name, and just last night they caught him sitting down to supper with his little old mammy.”

  At that, my heart set to beating fast. Mostly, I’ll admit, because I feared further repercussions from Pop. But I like to think that some small part of me felt a twinge of guilt over the notion that Clarence Banks had suffered a beating on my account. And Vernon kept hammering away, saying, “Cops got ways of keeping the courthouse from getting too clogged up, see, and sometimes good citizens like me help ’em. We got solutions of our own for problems like old Clarence. Ones that don’t cost more’n a strop of leather and a length of sturdy rope.”

  Pop wiped imaginary dust from the big, gilded cash register Mama had bought for him the year prior. Vernon blew three smoke rings, plup, plup, plup. Said, “Remind me to show you my whipping strap sometime, Half-breed. Three foot long it is. Four inches wide. Got slits carved into the end, make it cut through skin easier’n warm butter.”

  I tried not to let my fear show, but Vernon saw. He saw, and from the way
his close-set eyes danced about, he liked it. “You understand, don’t you, Will,” he said, “that righteous men take care of their own?”

  I wasn’t so sure that Vernon was qualified to give lectures on righteousness, but it seemed neither the time nor place to point that out.

  “Yes, Mr. Fish,” I said.

  “And you want to overcome your own mongrel blood and be a righteous man, don’t you?”

  To which I whispered yes once more. But that wasn’t good enough for Vernon, who pounded his fist against the counter, saying, “God gave you a voice, son. Use it, I tell you! Use it!”

  I looked to Pop, wishing he’d say something—anything—to help me. But he just kept wiping nonexistent dust off the register.

  So in the strongest voice I could muster, I looked Vernon Fish dead-on and said: “Yes, Mr. Fish. Yes, I do.”

  Whatever thoughts Pop may have had about Vernon Fish’s tale, he kept them to himself. We were learning things about each other, Pop and me, and both of us had the good sense not to make a fuss over them.

  As for myself, I was a seventeen-year-old boy with all the wisdom and moral rectitude of a turnip. Bad as Vernon Fish had scared me, bad as I started feeling about Clarence Banks, it didn’t take long to convince myself that Clarence would recover and the whole mess would go away if only I apologized to Addie.

  Two days later, I waited for her outside school after dismissal to do just that.

  She must have seen me from the foyer, for she made a beeline down the front stairs and across the street, cutting westward in front of an oncoming sedan. “Addie!” I cried, thinking to stop her before she got killed. But she only sped up, forcing me into a jog.

  “Addie!” I hollered. “Addie, I’m sorry! Please… just wait a minute!”

  Her footsteps slowed enough for me to catch up and fall in at her side. She wouldn’t look at me, though, and I could feel her chilly disdain in spite of the warm afternoon sun. We walked side by side a good ways, me catching my breath, her refusing to acknowledge I was there.