Besides, me and Joseph hid the body well, covering it with quicklime from the mason’s supply and wrapping it in the tarp from the Model T. After that, we pulled up all the planks Vernon and Joseph had bled on, flipped them so the blood wouldn’t show, and set the body on the dirt underneath before putting the planks back in place. When the workmen showed up a few days later, they laid a hardwood floor over top of him, never suspecting they were hammering nails into Vernon Fish’s coffin.
As for me, I left Tulsa soon as Mama got settled with her cousin Margaret in Pawhuska. She forgave Pop for taking Angelina’s family away that awful morning, but she never could forget. They sold their fine new place to an oilman just a few months after it was complete. Pop stayed in the house I grew up in. I moved north to Kansas City and opened a Victrola shop of my own.
All are welcome on my sales floor, and I’ll extend credit to any man or woman who can show evidence of a steady income. I still go by Tillman, though for discretion’s sake, I’ve abandoned the first and middle names given to me at birth. Only my beloved wife, Claire, still calls me Will, and only within the walls of the house we call home.
As for the details of what occurred in Tulsa later that day, June 1, 1921, I can only attest to the few I know. Like the fact that after Pop found the body James and I had picked up on the street, he dumped it onto one of the trucks carrying Negro corpses out of the city and considered the matter closed. And that Angelina’s family was held at McNulty Park until Mama got them out, swearing seven ways to Sunday that their mother was our cook. Their father turned up at the fairgrounds detention center two days later, shaken and bruised, but alive.
Up in Greenwood, Booker T. survived the rioters’ torches and served as a hospital for the wounded. That’s where they treated Joseph, and where he and Ruby were reunited with their mama. And that’s where I delivered Joseph’s Victrola, along with a stack of records for them and the patients and doctors and nurses at the hospital to listen to. I never did ask Pop for permission to make the delivery, and decided on my own that the records should be a donation from him. I did, however, put two dollars and fifty cents in the register to cover Joseph’s finance fee. And every year since then, on June 1, Mama has found a fresh-baked peach pie on her doorstep in Pawhuska, along with a card signed simply, “Love, Ruby.”
In the weeks and months following the riot, Tulsa city government refused to accept any of the emergency funds donated by good souls all over the country to help in the aid and care of those left homeless. Greenwood business owners struggled after their insurance companies denied payment on the grounds that the riot was an act of man, not God. But they rebuilt on their own, proud and strong. Even Mount Zion Baptist Church rose again, despite the congregation owing near the full eighty-thousand-dollar mortgage from the new building they’d been forced to watch burn. Proving, I suppose, that while a body can be burned to ash, the spirit inside it cannot.
But pleased as I am that Greenwood rebuilt, I’ll always remember it the way I saw it first: lights flickering on over the Dreamland Theatre, families strolling along streets they’d built together. For on that warm spring night, it wasn’t just a promise I beheld, but a thing real as bricks and mortar and hope.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Between the evening of May 31 and the afternoon of June 1, 1921, white rioters looted the thriving African American section of Tulsa known as Greenwood. After taking what they wanted, they burned the rest to the ground. Thirty-five blocks were destroyed. At least 8,000 black men, women, and children lost everything they owned. More than 1,200 homes and businesses were reduced to ash, along with churches. A hospital. A school. It was one of the deadliest race riots in US history.
No one’s sure how many people died, but historians put the number at around 300. And though some victims were white, most were not. Tulsans were shot, lynched, burned, and dragged through the streets behind cars that night because their skin was brown. In the aftermath, not a single white man or woman faced charges.
As soon as the smoke cleared, the city started to forget. For more than fifty years, references to the riot were scrubbed from history books, and black and white children alike grew up without hearing a word about it. That’s changing now, but not fast enough. I hope you’ll want to learn more after reading this book. Online resources, including websites for the Tulsa Historical Society, the Tulsa World, and the New York Times, are great places to start.*
If you’re wondering where fact ends and fiction begins in Dreamland Burning, a good guideline is that any characters with dialogue are fictional. I only made up a few places, like the Two-Knock, the Victory Victrola Shop, and Vernon’s tobacco store. Speakeasies, brothels, and Jim Crow laws were real. The Ku Klux Klan had just started oozing its way into the state in 1921. In the years following the riot, membership exploded.
The term Tulsa race riot is controversial. Some people prefer black holocaust, others use race massacre or race war. I’ve gone with race riot not because I disagree with the accuracy of the other labels, but because it’s the most commonly used historical term. And honestly, I believe riot is a fair description of what white Tulsans did.
Some characters in the book use derogatory terms for African Americans and Native Americans, though not as freely as they would have in 1921. These words are ugly, offensive, and hateful, but I chose to include them because I felt that blunting the sharp edges of racism in a book about genocide would be a mistake.
The research behind Rowan’s, Will’s, Joseph’s, and Ruby’s stories would not have been possible without the University of Tulsa’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives at McFarlin Library. Or without resources made available by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Tulsa World, the Osage Nation, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Tulsa City-County Library. I’m also indebted to reporting in This Land Press, the New York Times, and Ebony, and to the research and writings of Tim Madigan, Dr. Scott Ellsworth, Hannibal B. Johnson, and James S. Hirsch.
Marc Carlson, Dr. Brian Hosmer, Dr. Robert Pickering, Wilson Pipestem, Dr. Robert Allen, Marvin Shirley, Matt Latham, and Jayme Howland all shared their insights and expertise with me so generously—I’m grateful to them all. Huge thanks also go to my eagle-eyed readers Sundee Frazier, Okcate Smith, and Linda Bolin, to my fact checker, Norma Jean Garriton, and to the lady with the hyphens, Christine Ma.
As ever, I’m thankful for Rachel Orr at Prospect Agency, who keeps my chin up and my head straight. Then there’s the wonderful team at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Marcie Lawrence, Jen Graham, Victoria Stapleton, Jenny Choy, Lisa Moraleda, Stefanie Hoffman, Allegra Green, Jane Lee, Kheryn Callender, and Esther Cajahuaringa. Thank you, all. And thank you to my editors, Pam Garfinkel (who saw the potential), Bethany Strout (who nudged it along), and the very smart and ever-patient Allison Moore (who made it better… and made it happen).
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend and reader Dr. Jocelyn Lee Payne, whose work at the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation helped promote racial justice and social unity in Tulsa and beyond. She has been a true touchstone.
Last but most definitely not least, thank you, S, Z, and S, for putting up with Deadline Jen and I-Can’t-Right-Now-I’m-Working Mom.
Speaking of which…
Like Rowan’s mom, I don’t believe that history holds easy answers or simple lessons, because those answers and lessons are stretched out over thousands—millions—of untold stories. But I do believe that if we seek those stories out, and if we listen to them and talk to each other with open hearts and minds, we can start to heal. I believe that good people working together can create meaningful change. And I believe that the Josephs, Rubys, and Wills of this world are stronger than the Vernon Fishes.
Jen Latham
Tulsa, 2017
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About the Author
Jennifer Latham is an army brat with a soft spot for babies, books, and poorly behaved dogs. She’s the author of Scarlett Undercover and Dreamland Burning and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and two daughters.
* “1921 Tulsa Race Riot,” Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, accessed December 17, 2015, http://tulsahistory.org/learn/online-exhibits/the-tulsa-race-riot.
“The Questions That Remain,” Tulsa World, accessed December 17, 2015, http://www.tulsaworld.com/app/race-riot/default.html.
“Unearthing a Riot,” Brent Staples, New York Times, December 19, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/magazine/unearthing-a-riot.html.
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