by Clara Nipper
I looked up suddenly at the sound of a gentle cough. Practice had told me the sound was a woman, so I wanted to check it out.
Max stood in front of me, looking magnificent in faded jeans, boots, and a white T-shirt. Looking suddenly so Caucasian. My entire family seemed to be staring at Max through my eyes. I felt a nappy afro sprout on my gleaming black scalp. In my mind, my grandmother’s gnarled, arthritic hands petted me; my mother’s soft smile and steely spirit warmed me.
I felt every generation of my bloodline all the way back to Africa. I seemed to be growing darker by the second. And what am I doing, chasing her sorry cracker ass? I thought before I could stop myself. I shook it off when I noticed the worry in her eyes.
“Take you to lunch?” Max held out her hand. Wordlessly, I reached out and took it.
Chapter Twenty
We went to Olson’s Buffeteria, where Max assured me the food was legendary and old-fashioned in the very best way. There was a line of businesspeople out the door.
“You have to try the chicken-fried steak. It’s required that while you visit, you eat one. It is smothered in homemade cream gravy and it will melt in your mouth. Everything they make is good. And they have mile-high pies. Save room for a piece. Are you okay? You haven’t said anything yet.”
I shook my head. I was numb. Greenwood was nationally known black history. How had I not known it? Why hadn’t someone told me? Why the fuck did I waste all those years in school on the sanitized and revised history of white men when this was out there begging to be known? Why was the world so wrong? If blacks had done it to whites, it would be in every history book. I was revolted at white privilege. At straight privilege. Christian privilege. Money privilege. Power privilege. I wanted to run until my lungs burned out of me, wisps of smoke curling with every exhale. Run until my mind was jelly with no awareness and no memory. Run until I was pure.
The lunch line moved swiftly. Wonderful aromas almost relaxed me. I smiled stiffly at Max and shrugged. My vocal cords were paralyzed. If I tried to use them, I might start yelling instead. I felt as if I had found something new, like I had discovered fire. How could everyone around her be so calm and nonchalant? Didn’t they know what had happened?
The line for Olson’s led into a very narrow hallway. There were photos of old Tulsa on the walls. Signs commanded customers to be ready with their orders to keep up the speed. As they neared the food, I noticed it was all older black men serving plates to the white businesspeople. A knife in my throat unlatched my voice.
“No, no, no, no,” I whispered, my eyes fixed on the servers. Max stared, trying to guess what upset me.
“That’s just Solomon.” Max, confused and soothing, gestured to the oldest worker. “He’s great. He’s been here for a hundred years.”
I turned on her. “You call him by his first name? And what does he call you? Miss Abbott? Or ma’am? Does he tap dance for you?”
“What?” she asked. People were beginning to stare.
“I’ve got to get out of here.” I saw no way out other than shoving and pushing people as I fought my way back through the cramped line. Max followed, making apologies.
At the car, Max sat in silence with me. Finally, she asked, “What’s wrong?” I stared straight ahead.
“I’ll take you somewhere else.” She started the car and drove. I noticed we passed Swan Lake. Images and sentences from the books about Greenwood just kept flashing in my mind. It was apropos that the pictures were in black and white. They slid into my thoughts like a drowned savior.
to lynch a nigger tonight, the white tourist couple posing in front of a black family’s burned-out, destroyed home, black children being held in custody at gunpoint by white police, photos of dead black people merely captioned: victim, victim, victim. A ghostly photo of twisted metal bedsteads, still standing in spite of the homes still smoking ashes; white Tulsans roaming free while blacks were imprisoned for no crime; BC Franklin practicing law out of a tent; black Tulsans forced to spend that winter in tents; cremated dreams, and for what?
Max stopped the car.
“The Savory Spoon?” I asked.
“Yes, we can sit outside in the shade if it’s not too hot.”
“You say, I’ll do.” I was indifferent to the scalding weather and molten air.
Max and I went inside where she just informed the hostess that we would be outside. As we turned to go, I noticed bold, brilliant colors everywhere—animal print carpets, and tens of beautiful torsos of nude women all painted vibrantly and hung many to a wall.
“Reese do those?” I gestured to the feminine forms gracing the walls. Max and I found a table in the shade. She laughed.
“No, she didn’t. Good guess, though. I’m afraid I don’t know what to recommend here since I love everything.”
“I really don’t care what I eat. Or that I do at all.” I leaned back, stretching, thinking I needed a long game and a great fuck to clear my mind. Then a slow cigarette to calm.
After we ate, Max finally asked again, “What’s wrong? Something about Michelle?”
I chuckled dryly. “No, that’s cool.” I shrugged. “I mean, fairly. At least I know how to handle it. But I don’t know how to manage this. I did what I told you, I researched Greenwood.”
Max sucked in her breath.
“It’s as if I’ve had on blinders and they’re gone, poof. It’s inside me like a virus. You know all about it, don’t you?” I prayed that she did. For some reason, that would redeem her in my eyes right now.
“Yes. I had a progressive education and had very progressive parents. I went through a private integrated school system that was sixty/forty black to white. I memorized ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ which, as I’m sure you know, is the black national anthem.”
A flood of gratitude swamped me. I clasped her hand. “I thought Rodney King was bad. I thought Abner Luima was bad. I thought Amadou Diallo was bad. And those are only the ones we know about. I thought ‘Driving While Black’ and profiling were bad. I thought being passed over for promotions was bad. I thought not being able to get credit or a loan or a taxi was bad. Shit. I didn’t know anything. Now everything looks different. Now I’m different.”
Max listened attentively. The sympathy in her face made me weak and weepy, so I looked away. The Savory Spoon’s overhead fans and cool water misters barely provided any relief. I licked perspiration off the corners of my mouth. The ice in our drinks was melted, the glasses rested in puddles. After we ate, Max knew to change the subject.
“So, wasn’t the food fabulous?”
I looked around and said carefully, “The décor is amazing.”
“And the food was great, right?”
“The location is good.”
“And the food?”
“Sitting outside is very nice.”
“Okay, so I’ll take you to your car.” Max laughed.
“Yeah, I need some alone time.” I walked slowly to her vehicle feeling as if I were an unexploded bomb.
*
Near the library, we stood next to my rental car and hugged. I was regretful I couldn’t appreciate all the erotic possibilities of the hug, but I was too far gone. Max drove away and I got in my car and decided to look at north Tulsa.
As I drove, I admitted my profoundly naïve hope of finding a photo at the library of Old Man McKerr shooting the black man in the head. What I had found was much worse. And it had blindsided me. I knew that race riots were commonplace around 1921, and I knew vaguely about Rosewood in Florida and similar assaults on segregated thriving black settlements all over the nation including New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Duluth, and even Los Angeles, but Tulsa was by far the worst of all. The most destruction, devastation, and death. The most hostile and racist aggression to prevent rebuilding or any sort of restitution. I remembered the beautiful monument I had seen at the cemetery. Not erected by the city, I realized.
“Probably some old brother bought the whole thing and paid to put it on his privat
e plot,” I muttered. I just drove aimlessly through all of north Tulsa, spontaneously cruising neighborhoods, not caring where I ended up, only needing to see these people. Was sorrow stamped on their faces? Would I recognize an ancestor to such tragedy? I fumbled for the box of wooden matches I left on the passenger seat and lit one, watching it burn. I needed to smoke to do this. I extracted my emergency cigarettes from the briefcase full of paperwork and stats and game plans and put the end into the match and slowly sucked the cigarette to life.
What would their homes and businesses tell me? Were they different from me? Were they nobler because they had suffered and I had always been middle class and well insulated from overt abuse? Would their eyes know things? Would they be blacker than me?
I drove by Tisdale’s Barbecue again, a place called Southern-style Barbecue, May’s Barbecue, and Elijah’s Barbecue where the sign out front proclaimed, “Thou Shalt Not Kill, no profanity, open all night.”
I saw persistent devastation and struggle present in north Tulsa. Even though I’d read that Greenwood had rebuilt itself and was thriving in the thirties even better than its previous peak years, it had survived by segregation. Once the white merchants realized that a black dollar and a white dollar were equally green, and integration began, Greenwood died. The heart of the black economy dried up. Black businesses perished. The greater segregation began. Put all the successful businesses and shops and services on the south side and abandon the black residents of the north side who were now forced to travel far and wide for goods and services. Weeds grew in the middle of Greenwood Avenue for fifty years. No renaissance for north Tulsa. No resurgence of merchants setting up shop to serve the mostly black dollars.
I noticed all that was absent from north Tulsa. Things that should have been there to bind the community together, but weren’t. North Tulsa had no theaters, no grocery stores, where on the south side, there might be three supermarkets all dueling for business on four corners. North Tulsa had no offices, only one bank, no shopping centers or malls, no boutiques, no restaurants other than the four barbecues, no municipal landscaping, only two parks and no mid- to high-range services offered. Hardly any legitimate businesses at all. And the north side had all the train tracks. It was a cultural desert. Blocks and blocks and miles and miles of depressed housing. All the projects were on the north side.
What there was and plenty of it: pawn shops, body shops, mechanics, rent-to-own shops, bleak, bland industrial parks and enormous factories, abandoned warehouses, off-brand stores with cheap goods, resale shops, quik marts that accepted only WIC, auto parts superstores, check cashing and cash fast outfits, storefront loans, cheap food chains, a drugstore or two with bars on the windows, filthy, deep discount superstores, bars, bars, bars, and churches, churches, churches, churches.
The poverty was obvious. What was also evident was that the city of Tulsa didn’t give a damn. The ugliness of a lot of this part of town tore at me and depressed me.
But also, in a way, north Tulsa was nice. I had the feeling of being in a subculture that was undetectable to the mainstream radar. Like I could do what I wanted and no one would care or tell. North Tulsa was so so far from the courthouse where the cops parked. It was so far from Whitey and his neighborhood covenants and codified behavior.
And some parts were beautiful simply because they had been left alone. There was a Baptist church that was shaped like a huge upright purple teardrop. There were fields and fields of clover and wisteria gone wild. It was quiet and peaceful with no traffic. On the north side, there was personality and individuality. On the north side, there was architectural interest in buildings from eras that believed in design and quality. Homes and yards had actual differences, not that neo-suburban conformist look. In the north, there were open-air fruit and vegetable stands; there was a nightclub painted hot pink; there was a large new university, still isolated by fields; there were beautiful historic homes that had been built in the early oil boom; there were wide, pretty streets and jungles of old urban trees.
I preferred this laid-back area full of real people and real buildings and even real ugliness to the flat, bland, white mainstream corporate commercial mall culture sprawling farther south. Cookie-cutter homes, cookie-cutter shops, cookie-cutter businesses, cookie-cutter cars, and yes, cookie-cutter people. I firmly believed that the suburbanization of the nation was killing the individual soul. I saw that the nation was becoming gated communities with super malls connected by turnpikes. That caused me pain about Los Angeles, so I stayed in my particular middle-class ghettos that pleased me, so I never had to look at the further destruction of my hometown. With everything the same and everyone safe and tame, who would be the fools? The wise men? The artists? The lunatics? The saviors? The eccentrics? Creativity and sensuality needed chaos, mess, and individualism to thrive. But with all the people going from their just-alike homes to their just-alike malls with their just-alike clothes and eating the just-alike food, America was losing its heart. People became more afraid of difference rather than less. The great United States was becoming bland, homogenized, risk-free, and average. What was the difference between Seattle and Chicago? The Starbucks were on different corners.
People need inner cities and windows that open and front porches and secret paths and old women growing herbs in their front yards. People need to hear a rooster in the distance and to have wildlife around them and wild people too. Society needs beautiful bridges and breathtaking parks and unique shops and wildflowers and wonder. Wonder. The mall killed wonder. The mall killed daring. The mall killed window-shopping.
Why don’t the cities at least tell the truth about themselves and make postcards of the malls and the snarled traffic around Banana Republic? I didn’t understand it. If cities wanted to show themselves as having stunning architecture, why didn’t they continue to make it?
“It’s everywhere, not just Tulsa,” I chided myself, while realizing that if I were to settle in Tulsa for some reason, I would choose to live north.
I returned to Max’s. Both Sloane’s and Max’s cars were gone. I went inside and collapsed into a deep, troubled nap.
I woke to a phone ringing. I stretched and saw I had been asleep for five hours. I had half an hour to get to Lila and Reese’s.
I showered, took more allergy pills, dressed, and searched Max’s wine rack for a bottle I could give Lila. I consulted the map and plotted my course and left after placing a note to Max on her pillow, telling her where I had gone and when I might be back.
“I’m already whipped,” I muttered hatefully, not entirely disliking it.
Chapter Twenty-One
At Winthrop Tower, the doorman buzzed the couple to make sure I was expected.
“ No-Ra! ” Lila cried, holding her cigarette holder high and extending her other hand for a kiss. “So glad you could come.” Lila embraced me, holding too long. Reese cleared her throat and Lila let go reluctantly. Reese stuck her hand out and I gripped it, winning the macho butch-off. Reese seemed to strain and stretch for tallness and once again, I was fiercely proud of my chiseled body and skyscraper height.
“My pleasure,” I purred to Lila as I handed Reese the bottle of wine, dismissing her. Reese just rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to rankle her. “My, Lila, have you gotten more beautiful since the last time I saw you? What am I saying, of course you have.”
“Oh, you darling poppet. You simply must stay in town as long as you can,” Lila cried giddily. Reese glared at me. It would be a long evening.
“Let’s sit. Nora, you come here close to me.” Lila clattered grandly over the parquet floors in her leopard-print mules and settled on the love seat, drawing her billowy, leopard-print dress out of the way and patting the space next to her.
“I believe I will. Tulsa is the welcomest place I’ve ever been.” Knowing I was flirting with danger as well as with Lila, I grinned big and sat.
“How soon will you be on your way then, Norene?” Reese asked, sitting in an overstuffed chair on Lil
a’s right, touching Lila’s knee to bring her attention back.
“Nora,” I said. Reese shrugged. “I’m not sure, maybe longer than I planned.” I smiled unpleasantly at Reese.
“We’ll have to keep her forever. Isn’t she just adorable? We’ll have to make sure she never leaves, right, Reese Cup?” Lila’s eyes smoldered at Reese, who didn’t rise to the bait.
“What are you drinking?” Reese rose, shaking the wrinkles from her pressed khakis, and stood before the bar.
“G and T.”
“I’ll have my usual, Reese darling,” Lila said.
“Right. Vodka rocks and gin and tonic. Bombay all right?”
“Sure.”
“I had a lover who drank only gin and tonics,” Reese said casually, mixing drinks.
“Really?” My chest felt tight. I couldn’t ask who it was because I didn’t know anyone here and to reveal my Max attraction to this barracuda would be fatal. There was also something going on between Lila and Reese. An undercurrent of rage and passion. They had either fought or fucked recently. Probably both. I knew that Lila’s flirtation was just to get to Reese. Well, fine with me. I’d been a part of plenty of ugly lesbian scenes and cruel head trips, one more wouldn’t hurt. I knew this territory and was good at it.
“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry, Nora darling, I don’t know where my head has been.” Lila glared at Reese’s back. “I should’ve invited a nice single woman for you.”
“We don’t know any nice ones,” Reese said, bringing drinks.
“We could call someone now if you have a friend in mind,” Lila offered.
“Well, that Max Abbott seemed interesting.” I couldn’t resist, even though I knew it was a mistake.
Reese came to life. “Yes! Call Max.”
Lila tittered. “Call old Max? Maxi-Pad, as she is sometimes known, because she’s such a definite rag. Don’t be silly. She can barely string sentences together. And if we sing tonight,” Lila batted her eyes and tilted her head toward the gleaming grand piano perched in front of the sheet of windows overlooking the city, “she simply wouldn’t fit in. She has as much coordination as a quadro in a wheelchair and she can’t carry a tune with a handle on it. Besides, she has karate class tonight, I believe. But we can call if you both want to…” Lila shrugged primly, unembarrassed by her tirade.