FOREWORD

This is a work of historical fiction.  But it is fiction.

It is fiction based on the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot – or, as it commonly is known in the African-American neighborhoods of Tulsa, the Race War, and today generally referred to as the Tulsa Massacre.  Armed whites stormed the African-American district of Tulsa known as “Deep Greenwood” as well as “Black Wall Street.”  They came from at least one, possibly two entry points in a planned and coordinated invasion, and burned Deep Greenwood to the ground.

At least 35 city blocks were completely destroyed in a roughly 12-hour period beginning around 10 p.m. Tuesday, May 31, and ending the following morning.  The official death toll was around 30, including several whites.  Unofficially, but in fact, the death toll was as much as 10 times higher, primarily African-American, and there are those who claim to this day it was higher than that.

And yet as late as 1970, 50 years after the Race War, it was possible to grow up in Tulsa – I know this, because I did – and never hear a word about what was (and still is) one of the worse race riots as well as the largest act of domestic terrorism in American history.  No word in school, in books, in magazines or newspapers, not even from the pulpit.  The “conspiracy of silence” was thunderous.

All characters and their motivations in this work are entirely fictional, and any likeness to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental and unintended.  

A WORD ABOUT LANGUAGE.  The agonized struggle for politeness, dignity and discretion, known these days as “political correctness,” did not exist at the time of The Massacre.  This work tries to recreate speech patterns and vocabularies of the region, and above all during such a frantically heated time as a race massacre; accordingly much of it may grate on and offend modern sensibilities.  Specifically the “N-word” is used with great frequency, as it was in the 1920s.  Indeed, as it was during the author’s childhood and youth in Tulsa. In those days “colored” – itself now reprehensible – was considered polite.  The author asks that readers realize this is an attempt at a remembered faithfulness to the way people once talked, above all in the context of a race war; and that no disrespect or any other negative attitude is intended.

For those interested in learning more about the 1921 Tulsa Race War, a bibliography of some of the works consulted has been included.

{PROLOGUE}

In early1911 Samuel “Traveling Sam” Key is just elected to his first time in office as Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff when he has to oversee the hanging of a young man, Pell Mell Reddick, since the sheriff, Solomon “Slow Man” Perkins, is out of town.

For his last meal on earth, Pell Mell, who is 16, asks Sam for fried catfish, collard greens, corn bread, and butter milk.

         Sam sees that Pell Mell gets what he wants, although he has to threaten to arrest the cook at the Leopold Grand Hotel downtown to get him to rustle up the boy’s food.

        The boy has been condemned to hang by the neck until dead for the murder of another sheriff’s deputy.  If the jury which issued the verdict, and the judge who determined the sentence, had thought Pell Mell looked to be 18, they might have had a better reason for their action besides the fact Sam was the one who made the arrest.  In fact, at the time of the trial in 1911, Pell Mell looks more like a 14-year-old.  He is a stick kid with clothes hanging on him like rags, and in his stick-like body his great round eyes look like those of an amazed kitten.  But he also looks colored, and Sam, who has leafed through the court transcript and read the verdict as well as the judge’s sentencing remarks, thinks they render their decision based mostly on race.

        The deputy is gunned down in rural Tulsa County, just outside a place on the road to Sand Springs known as the Cave Garden.  Sam reports he discovered his body in the gravel parking lot of The Springs, an outdoor restaurant attached to the Cave Garden.  Pell Mell, drunk and unconscious, is lying nearby. Sam also reports he found the deputy’s .38 police special, recently fired, in the boy’s possession.  Sam says his interpretation of the events is that the boy manages to wrest the gun away from the deputy and, for reasons that are never made clear, shoots the officer to death.  He neither reports on, nor reacts to, the boy’s unconscious state.

        In fact Pell Mell is guilty that night, guilty of underage drinking, gulping down glasses of Choctaw beer in a “Choc joint” in North Tulsa until he is potted.  His blind drunken wandering leads him down the Sand Springs road to the parking lot of The Springs.  The trial transcripts leave wide open the possibility Pell Mell simply is unfortunate enough to have stepped off the Sand Springs road and into the parking lot at precisely the wrong moment – when Sam arrives to join the murdered deputy in a raid on a reported speakeasy built under the hills behind The Springs and accessible through the Cave Garden.

        In any event Pell Mell doesn’t remember anything.  He is too drunk.  Everything has gone blank.

        Sam turns the murder weapon over to the Tulsa Police, who do not fingerprint it or order ballistics tests.  Race and proximity seem to be sufficient.

        Sam is himself a deputy sheriff at the time he makes the arrest and, with the sheriff away for a few days, the hanging falls to Sam.

        Pell Mell Reddick is the first and only person Sam will ever hang.  He has no particular fondness for Negroes, but the thought of hanging someone sickens him.  His stomach feels like he has swallowed a great vibrating ball and he wants to throw up.  It is the prospect of hearing and then seeing a busted neck, hearing all the gurgling gasping and heaving for breath, watching all the violent flailing of the body’s death throes – and, he has to face it, the intimations of his own mortality which are awakened by the process – that encourages him to vomit.

        His desk is around the corner from the death cell on the top floor of the County Courthouse, and so he doesn’t have to look at Pell Mell while his mind wrestles with these things.  But sound travels and he can’t shut out the crunch of fried oysters and the slurp of sucked-up collard greens, the muffled breathing from a mouth full of corn bread and the liquid clutch and gulp of swallowed butter milk.

        For not the first time in his life – Sam is just shy of 40 years of age – he wants to gasp and sigh and weep over visions of his own end, even if that is to be by old age.

        “Muh me...mook,” the boy says, his mouth full of food, blurring some words, obliterating others.

        “Cain’t hear ye,” Sam says with some pique, his reveries of desolation interrupted as he pictures the pursed lips of the Negro boy covered in crumbles of spewed food.

        There is a crunching gulp from around the corner, and the sweet sucking sound of Pell Mell tonguing flecks and flakes off his gums and into his mouth to swallow.  “My mam,” he says, his mouth cleared, “she tole me be readin the Good Book tonight depty.”

        Hilda Reddick is Pell Mell’s mother and she is a deeply religious woman.  She belongs to the Fire of Sinai Holiness Church, a tiny clapboard building that is home to 35 members.  Every Tuesday morning she and a half-dozen other Negro women, all elderly, meet for 90 minutes of Bible study; and every Sunday morning the 35 members, minus a few shut-ins and sleep-ins, meet to worship and pray in tongues.  She says she doesn’t understand any of the messages in tongues, but the experience always leaves her feeling especially close to God.

        “Yere mam left ye a Bible here, if that’s what ye mean,” Sam says.  “She said ye’d ask for it.  Ye askin for it now?”

        “Yessir depty, may I have it please?”

        Sam has rested one booted foot in the open desk drawer into which he had considered vomiting just moments before.  His hands are folded behind his head, tucked up underneath his Tom Mix Stetson hat with its sweat-blackened hat band, staring out the lone office window.  He stares at the moon, a brilliant head lamp in the sky that night, shadows on it looking like a strange and alien mouth opened in a ghastly moan.

        He cannot block out the sound of a 16-year-old boy behind him, set to die in five hours, at sunup.  All that comes through to him is the feeling of being alien.  He is not a part of this world.  The world has turned a

sickening and hideous kind of strange on him, wherever he looks, whatever he sees.  He will never find himself in anything out there.  He feels lonelier now than at any time in his life.  What was it the preacher woman told him not long ago?  Something some really old-timey person in the church – she calls him a church father – once said, that God is a wilderness where no one dwells.  Sam doesn’t know about God, but the world is indeed a wilderness tonight where no one except one lonely Negro dwells, least of all the deputy sheriff.   He can feel his own absence.

                Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,

                Too-ra-loo-ra-li,

                Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,

                Hush, now don’t you cry!

        The Bible is in the open drawer under the heel of his boot.  He leans forward, drags it out, stands up, takes the book into the adjoining room where the death cell awaits.  It is the size of a big city phone book, the Bible is, bound in beat-up black leather rubbed a worn-out brown where who knows how many people have held it, folded it, thumbed it.  It is festooned with ribbons and book marks like banners at a horse race.

        Pell Mell stands to get the Bible.  Corn bread crumbs shower out of the folds of his overalls like ants.  He wipes buttermilk off his mouth with the back of one hand, reaches out for the book with the other.

        “You ever read the Good Book depty?”

        “No I ain’t read it much.”  Sam doesn’t want to chat with a child he is about to hang.

        “You can see how come they calls it good because that’s what it is, depty, good!  Real good!”

        “Well y’all enjoy it,” Sam says.  He looks at Pell Mell’s knees and then at his boots as he pivots to go back to his desk.  Anything to avoid eye contact with a condemned child.  The scraping noise his boot makes as he turns on his left heel is as loud as sandpaper on a plywood box.

        Half an hour later Pell Mell says, “You mine depty if I sang me some gospel songs?  I can keep it real quiet like.”

        “Go ahead,” Sam says, not meaning it.  Plaintive gospel could grab and rip out whatever is left of his heart.

        Pell Mell sings, softly.  His high pipey voice is that of a little girl.

        As the boy sings, it is as though the moon, too, loses the contents of its stone belly; and a sour film of

 skimmed milk seeps across the world outside Sam’s solitary window.  It is a gentle putrescence, looking for

a world to sadden, a soul to infect.  The boy’s gospel hymn is a lethean lullaby.

        Around midnight Hilda Reddick, along with Pell Mell’s adoptive brothers Sol, age 16, and Jimmy, age five, come for a final visit.  Hilda is a large and puffy-fat widow with enormous breasts and belly and pendulous sacks of skin hanging from her arms.  Brother Sol is a withdrawn and intense boy with a gaze that could curl sheet metal.  Jimmy is a toddler barely out of diapers.  He is unrestrainedly curious and goes exploring the deputy’s office and desk.

        “My boy,” Hilda says, and her voice erupts in crying.  She reaches through the bars and takes hold of Pell Mell, draws him to her.

        “No touchin the prisoner ma’am,” Sam says.  Hilda slides her hands down Pell Mell’s arms to his hands and then off and back outside the bars.

        “Mamma,” Pell Mell says, and the lump in his own throat is as difficult as a partly swallowed lemon to talk around.  The lemon grows with his feelings and his tears, and his voice cracks and once again is that of a pipey little girl.

        “You readin the Good Book?” she asks him.

        “Yes’m I been readin it,” he says.

        “And you be’s prayin,” she says.

        “I am.  I will.”

        Jimmy pulls a drawer completely out of Sam’s desk around the corner.  The crash as it hits the floor distracts the deputy from what is going on at the death cell, and he goes to clean up the mess and get

the little boy out of the way.

        “Pray for the people too.  At the … the …,” she says, and can’t finish the sentence.

        “I know mamma,” Pell Mell says.  “I be prayin for everbody.”

        “Here, I brung you my own Bible,” she says and she produces a copy from within the folds of her skirts.  “It’s all marked.”

        “Hold on there ma’am!” Sam says as he scurries back around the corner to the cell. “Don’t be handin the prisoner nothin!”  He takes the Bible and carries it back to his desk and puts it in the desk drawer little Jimmy has pulled out.

        “Oh son!” Hilda moans.  “I don’t know what to say.”

        “I don’t neither mamma,” Pell Mell says.

        Brother Sol folds his hands and holds them up to his mouth, gnawing on a thumb joint.

        “I’ll...I’ll miss you son!” she cries.  “Oh God oh God oh God!” she wails.

        Pell Mell has to turn away.

        Sam stays at his desk on the other side of the wall while the crying and farewells last, another ten minutes.  Then he comes out. “Time’s up folks,” he says.  “Time to be gettin on.  Say your goodbyes now and let’s be gettin on.”

        Getting Hilda and her son to part is like slowly pulling a scab off a sore.  It doesn’t want to come, and it makes you sick to try.

        “I’ll be there this mornin!” she says at the door.

        “I...I’ll miss you too mamma,” Pell Mell whispers, but loudly enough for Sam to hear him.

        And the deputy cups his hands and hides his face and cries, sometimes hard, off and on over the rest of the night because of what he now must make happen, until a single tree catches sunrise fire atop his window ledge and he knows it is getting on to dawn and time to steel himself for the hanging.

        “Time we got goin boy,” Sam calls out, snorting back enough watery catarrh in his head to make himself cough.  His feet, now crossed at the ankles and resting atop the still open desk drawer, drop to the floor and make a sharp, harsh clump.  He bends over and cradles his face in his cupped hands again, digging into his eyes with the heels of each hand.  His eyes are burning from a lack of sleep and a surplus of sorrow.

        He stands up.  There is no noise from the other side of the wall.

        He steps around the corner and sees Pell Mell lying on the bench in his cell, his arms crossed, his feet on the floor, breathing with a noise like a flittery butterfly.  He is asleep, lightly.

        Shit far, Sam whispers.  How can a body sleep, time like this.

        “Rouse ‘n shine Pell Mell Reddick,” he says without a whole lot of oomph.  “It’s judgment day.”  He always anticipates these will be the words he says to a condemned criminal if the time ever comes to escort the criminal from the death cell to the place of execution.  He never dreams they would be so hard.

        Pell Mell sits up slowly, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles.  “I’d like a preacher to go with me depty.”

        “We done got ye a preacher to go to the...” Sam says, and he doesn’t finish the sentence.  Gallows.  Death yard.  Killin grounds.  “It’s standard.  You got you a preacher, be here momentarily,” he says, and at that moment there is a loud knocking at the office door.  “It ain’t my choice o’ one but I ain’t the one gets to decide these thangs.”

        And in fact the Rev. Asher Dodd stands in the doorway, ready to take the boy down to die, and on the way to speak to him of sin and, as he believes and preaches, the always remote chance of divine love and

mercy.  There is always a chance, but it is always remote, race considered.

        The Rev. Dodd is dressed in a pasty blue suit, the texture and thickness of wrapping paper, and a white dress shirt with collars the size of duck wings, a black string tie, and a Bible that outsizes even

Pell Mell’s.  Like the deputy, he wears a hat, his a fedora.

        “Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” Dodd asks Pell Mell after taking two steps into the office.  “And you, deputy, are you washed in the Blood?”

        “Clean as a whistle,” Sam lies.  “Him too,” he adds, jerking a thumb at Pell Mell.  “You can skip that part, you want to.”

        “I don’t want to,” Dodd says.

        Pell Mell wears no expression.  He has become as immobile as an onyx figurine.  His face shines in the fiery sunrise light.

        “May I have a word with the prisoner,” Dodd says.

        “Ye may.  I’ll jest stand right here while ye have yere word.”

        “I’d prefer a pastoral confidence if you don’t mind,” Dodd says.

        “A pastoral con...con what?”

        “I’d like to speak to the prisoner in private.”

        Sam’s hands go to his hips.  He purses his mouth, chews his bottom lip.

        “All right but make it quick, hear?” Sam says at last.

        “Oh definitely deputy, this will be quick.  I just need to speak pastor to penitent, if you know what I mean.”

        “...”

        “Preacher to sinner.”

        “Ye jest go right on ahead but make it quick-like.”

        Sam steps back around the corner and sits at his desk, boots on top as before.  He can hear muttered voices.  Five minutes pass.

        “Deputy, we are finished in here,” Dodd says at last.

        Sam gets up, goes to the cell, unlocks the door.  Pell Mell attaches his hands at the wrists and holds them out for the deputy to cuff.

        “We don’t be needin no cuffs boy,” Sam says.  “Come jest the way ye is.  See there, preacher Dodd, that’s a gospel hymn ain’t it, Jest Like Ye Is or some such thang ain’t it.  So I done my part here too.  Maybe that’s all the religion stuff ought to get said, what do ye thank.”

        “The boy needs the saving of his soul,” Dodd says.  “There’s a lot more needs to get said here.”

        “I’d like to say somethin,” Pell Mell says.  “I’d like y’all’s permission to pray when we get there.”

        “Our Heavenly Father is surely anxious to hear your prayers boy,” Dodd says.  “But if I were you I wouldn’t wait until we get to the gallows yonder.  I’d start to do a whole lot of praying, boy, right here, right now.”

        “No sir, I mean pray for the folks as’ll be watchin me get …. Pray out loud,” Pell Mell says, again in the voice of a little girl.  He sounds near tears: his voice has a soft warble to it.  “My mamma she’s a prayin woman and I want her to know I been prayin for folks mysef.”

        “How come your mamma’s not here visiting with you?” Dodd asks.

        “She done been here.  Plus she said she’d be at the...” Sam begins and then chokes on the word again.  “Place.”

        “Well as for praying out loud,” Dodd says, “I can’t see how that would do anybody any good, these good folks getting prayed at by a colored boy,” he says, but Sam cuts him off.

        “I’m the one to decide that preacher, and yes,” Sam says, turning now to look Pell Mell Reddick straight in the eye for the first and last time ever, “ye can pray son.  Pray out loud for the folks there.  I said so.  But ye got to make it quick, hear?  We ain’t got all day.”

        “Thank you depty and I do unnerstan.”

        “This ain’t no revival meetin.  Cain’t go on and on forever.”

        “No sir I unnerstan.”

        “Well then,” Sam says, and taking Pell Mell by an elbow he escorts him out of the death cell and the fourth floor office, and walks down a twisted and winding, narrow stairway to the ground floor.

        The gallows are atop one of the hills immediately behind the Cave Garden, out in the county, and Sam drives the prisoner and a deputy there in his beat-up Lozier Model 51 automobile.  There is a small crowd of onlookers that includes Hilda Reddick and Pell Mell’s two brothers.  As soon as she sees the deputy begin to escort her son up to the deadly gallows, Hilda turns, wipes great quantities of tears from her eyes, and she leaves.  She cannot bear to watch.

        Even on the platform Pell Mell’s hands are joined at the wrists as though cuffed, held out in front as though he is offering flowers to the hangman, who puts a noose as thick as a fire hose around his neck.

        Sam gestures to the hangman to hold on to the hood and turns to the crowd.  He estimated it numbers around 30 souls.  Thirty souls who turned out of bed early on a Saturday morning to see a colored boy get hanged.  Of the 30, perhaps a dozen are female, a surprisingly high number since, as Sam presumes, a hanging crowd would be largely male.  All the women and some of the men, perhaps seven or eight, are dressed up.  They might have stopped for the hanging on their way to church.  The rest are dressed for labor and might have gone on that morning to factories and warehouses to put in a day’s work.

        “I’m lettin this boy here say a prayer.  He done asked me and I told him he could.  They count as his final words and ever man’s got a right to his final words.  When he’s done I’ll read the official charges before the hangin.”

        “Nigger ain’t got no right, prayin over white folks!” someone in the crowd shouts.

        “Shut that coon up!” someone else shouts.

        “I said he can pray and that’s final,” the sheriff says.  “Any o’ y’all don’t like it, we can settle it afterwards.”  He stands spread-legged, hands on hips and within grabbing distance of his two pearl-handled Colt .45s.  It has been known in Tulsa County for a mob to take a prisoner out of custody and to his death, and Sam has no intention of letting that happen.  He has no idea how that might work out but it suffices to quiet the onlookers.  After all, they still get to see the teenager die.

        Pell Mell takes a deep breath.  He squares his shoulders. Sam nods at him and he starts to step closer to the crowd but the noose holds him where he stands.

        “My mamma she done tole me always read the Good Book and abide by its teachins,” he says, spacing his thoughts and his words carefully.  “And I always tried to do that.  Now I ain’t killed no sheriff’s deputy.  I ain’t that kind.”

        “Trial’s over boy,” Sam says.  “Ain’t no time for ye to be makin no defense.  And what’d I say about no revival.  Make it quick.”

        “Yessir depty.  Well, and I know y’all thank o’ me’s y’all’s enemy, and the Lord He says to pray with our enemies so I’m askin y’all to join me in prayer.  Let us bow our heads.”  He of course cannot bow his head with the enormous thick noose around his neck, but he does close his eyes in a tight squint.  “Heavenly Father I’m askin thee to cleanse our hearts of all hatred and unforgiveness.  Forgive me for all my sins and definitely cleanse my heart from all that’s displeasin unto thee.  Be...be...”        

        The only sound is the skitter of a newspaper across the grass, and the muted crunch of Hilda and Brother Sol and his kid brother Jimmy’s footsteps as they leave.  But unseen by Brother Sol, who is distracted with heartache and rage, Jimmy turns and comes back.

        “...be especially kind and merciful to each one here Lord.  They all gots they own burdens to carry Lord.  Our heads is bowed low by our burdens and sometimes we cain’t even see around us.  But that’s all right Lord because thou seest and we put our trust in thee.  Be, Lord, our eyes and our hearin, and take away our sins that blind us to...to...to what’s goin on.  Lord have mercy amen.”

        The length of the prayer makes Sam grind his teeth.  He has visions of the boy’s lips, mouth and chin with crumbs of food stuck all over them.

        The hangman slips a black hood over Pell Mell’s head.        

        Sam grits and gnashes his teeth and then, with his eyes squinted shut, stumbles and trips and falls against Pell Mell, who plummets over the edge of the gallows and down to his death.

        Brother Sol has discovered his little brother’s absence and has come back for him.  Pell Mell already has fallen by the time Brother Sol gets back.

        To the end of his days little Jimmy, later known as Black Ruby, will remember the hanging.  Surprisingly, he will be left with a melancholy hole in his heart but otherwise relatively unembittered by the memory.

        Not so surprisingly, in later years Brother Sol eventually goes mad.  The hanging is a major factor in his descent.

        In later years it fairly can be said that the only memory the deputy can clearly conjure up is sound: in all its awful clarity, the sharp slapping thwang of the rope as it comes taught, and the one fierce hup as the drop forces out the held breath of Pell Mell Reddick before the strength of the noose combined with his body weight snaps his neck and windpipe into a pestilent curl.  He will hear, more than see, the creak of the rope as it sways, heavily, back and forth, back and forth, a young boy hanging from the end like a skinny lead sinker.

        In fact, no one completely forgets what they have seen – and, sickeningly, heard – that day, although there are those in the crowd who will remember it largely in terms of the kind of postal card the scene would have made, had there been a camera present.

        Sam Key will say he never goes to work in the morning, from that day forward, without remembering Pell Mell’s high piping voice.  In fact, he claims he sometimes still goes to bed at night crying himself to sleep, and rarely makes it to the county courthouse without having to fight off the tears.  Mornings are hard.  But that is something he will only admit to one other human being, ever.

the

first

tishomingo

hotel

{1}

THE ASSIGNMENT

My name is Josiah Thibodeaux, and until early 1931 I had never heard of Tulsa’s Race War.

        Everything changed on Monday, February 23, 1931, the day C. J. Goldfarb, my editor at Tulsa’s morning paper, the Sooner, called me in to discuss a story he had in mind.  I now realize he was thinking only partly of the Sooner.

        “May 31 and the next morning, June 1, is the tenth anniversary of the Tulsa race riot,” he said.  I studied Goldfarb’s face as he spoke.  At five feet five inches he was even shorter than me, so that, seated, I had to look down to maintain eye contact.  His eyes were gray, and his face rubbery around the mouth.  His mouth was too wide for his face, but with a lot of laugh lines, and lines and creases at the corners of his eyes, the width of his mouth made him look exceptionally good-humored.

        “Race riot,” I said.

        “Yeah.  I’ll give you some files.  Hardly anybody ever talks about it, and you being from Louisiana and all, I wouldn’t expect you’ve even heard about it.”

        “I haven’t.”

        “No.  Well, it was ten years ago, nineteen and twenty-one.  About 40 blocks of North Tulsa, colored town, burned to the ground overnight.”

        “Forty blocks overnight!”

        “Thirty-five, 40.  Numbers got reported differently.  Like I said, I’ll give you some files, although there’s not much in them.  Some stuff has even been taken.  Torn out.  Disappeared.”

        “Really?  Sounds like somebody doesn’t want this thing talked about.”

        “They don’t.”

        “Something that big though … why not?”

        “Listen.  I want you to swallow your pride and do a fluff piece.”

        “Fluff piece on a riot?”

        “On the deputy sheriff at the time of the riot.  Sam Key.  He lives at the Tishomingo Hotel which you can find in the phone book.  May 31 also happens to be his birthday.  His sixtieth.  Your piece is to be a kind of low-key tribute.  Man has served as deputy more than anyone else to date.  Plus the riot.  Plus the fact we’re in the middle of this Depression and it will make for a nice little bit of escape.”

        “Nothing about the riot for the papers?”

        “Nothing.  Oh he’ll mention it, no doubt, and in any event you’ll have to identify him as the deputy at that time – in fact, make sure you mention that – but that’s all.”

        “Is The Sooner worried about backlash?”

        “The Sooner is worried about a Molotov cocktail through the plate glass windows on the presses downstairs, yes.  Through my living room window.  Yours.”

        “There must be some folks don’t want their secrets told.”

        “There are.”

        “So...”

        “So for now this is as close as I’m going to get, throwing it in their face.  Close enough to prick the memory, but not close enough to set off alarm bells.  Nobody even mentions the riot nowadays, so just a casual mention in your piece is going to make some people edgy.  That’s good!  Edgy is okay.  Just nothing too confrontational.  I’m leaving that for some other time.”

        “I see.  I guess.”

        “Atta boy.  Remember.  The riot story as a whole isn’t for the papers!”

        His stare made me flinch.

        “Yes sir, I’ll remember.”  As a whole?

        “Not for the papers,” he said again.

        Then what’s it for? I wondered.  “Deadline?”

        “No later than …” – he looked at a large desk calendar – “… no later than Friday morning, May 29.  That gives you a little over three months, and it gives editorial a little time to figure out how, or whether, to use it.  You’ll have what files there are on your desk within the hour,” Goldfarb said.

        Three months to do a fluff piece!

        I read through the files Goldfarb sent to my desk from the morgue, but there was little information.  They were all clippings from Tulsa’s two daily newspapers, The Sooner and the evening paper, The Land Run.  The Land Run was named for the method of letting prospective settlers onto the land where they could homestead.  The Sooner was named for those settlers who snuck into the territory ahead of the Land Run and squatted illegally.

        There were two notes attached, one of which said a front page Land Run editorial calling for a lynching had been removed and couldn’t be found – the paper was indeed missing part of its front page where presumably the editorial had run – the other a reminder I could find Deputy Key at the Tishomingo Hotel.

        From the available clippings what I could glean about the riot was this: a colored man, Jimmy “Black Ruby” Reddick, was arrested on charges of attempting to rape a white woman, who was unnamed.  A name had been penciled into the story – Savannah Key – and I wondered if she was any relation to Deputy Key.  In any event, the attempted rape was on Tuesday, May 31, 1921, during the day.  By that evening a crowd of whites numbering several hundred had gathered at the county courthouse where Reddick was being held on the fourth floor, and by 10:30 p.m. shots had been fired.  By morning, June 1, when the National Guard arrived, nearly 40 blocks of North Tulsa lay in ruins. The Negro business district – known locally as “Deep Greenwood” because it was centered on North Greenwood Street, and nationally as “The Black Wall Street” since it was a show place of Negro entrepreneurship – was gone.  The official death toll numbered around 30, including several whites.

        I said it again, under my breath: Forty blocks!

        It was nothing short of amazing that the death toll was only 30.

Both daily papers called the riot a Negro uprising.

        And that information, along with a few grainy photographs and a peculiar clipping from what appeared to be a larger advertisement in the Sooner, was all that was in the file.  The advertisement was from the Sooner and was dated June 15, 1921, two weeks after the Race War.  It read:

                “Asher Dodd, chairman of the city’s Reconstruction Committee, is in favor of using

                 a part of the riot area for a railroad station – to be called Central Station – depending on when                 the project s ready for consideration by passenger lines serving the City of Tulsa.”

        Someone had underlined “Asher Dodd” and “Central Station” twice, in red pencil.

        The scant information in the file, plus the missing editorial, plus the frequent mention of Asher Dodd, all caught my interest.  I had a lot of questions and it was going to be hard to restrict my interview with Deputy Key to fluff.  Much later I realized Goldfarb not only recognized this but counted on it.  After all, he had given me over three months to write the piece, when in fact a fluff piece on the old deputy would take two days at most, assuming Deputy Key wasn’t out of town or otherwise indisposed: a day to make contact, a day to interview and write it up.

        So why three months?

{2}

DEPUTY SHERIFF KEY

According to the phone book, the deputy sheriff – “Traveling Sam” Key – lived at the Tishomingo Hotel on the corner of Archer and Greenwood streets.  Judging from the building number the hotel was on the southeast corner of the intersection, putting it in South Tulsa, barely,  on the boundary between South Tulsa and north, white Tulsa and colored.  I called the number and, through the desk clerk, arranged to meet with the sheriff in an hour.  The desk clerk – I later learned his name was Eli Orchenbacher – sounded like I was talking to someone using a comb-and-tissue mouth harp.

        If you were to come upon the Tishomingo at sunset, you would see its red bricks glowing fiery orange in the light.  Sunset was its best time of day for the place.  Sunrise was entirely too intense, and mid-day was depressing.  Sunset at least was soft, and soft was what the place needed.

        As I approached the hotel from the west, it looked to me like a brick package of Philip Morris cigarettes.  The trademark bellhop was painted on that side, calling for Mr. Morris.  There was a window where the bellhop’s mouth should be, cupped by a painted hand.  The window opened on the hotel office, and on occasion Eli, the little desk clerk, could be seen leaning out of the window, an uncertain tongue in the bellhop’s mouth.

        The hotel had three floors, counting the lobby.  The second floor was for guests and residents, mostly a handful of residents.  In the hotel’s later years, guests were few.  There were twelve rooms, and a sitting area across the north end of the second floor, looking out on the Archer/Greenwood intersection, with furnishings and two pole lamps to match the lobby décor.  There was a storage room at each end of the floor.  The third floor was empty, the windows boarded.  It had at one time been intended as a jazz club, but eventually it locked horns with the city over some questionable matters, and was forced to close.

        The lobby door was propped open by a brick to let in a breeze – it was warm and sticky for late March, and a storm was brewing – and a screen door kept the bugs out.  Ahead and to the left, as I entered the lobby, were stairs leading to the floors above.  At the foot of the stairs the lobby desk ran from nearly one side to the other on the south end of the lobby.  It fell 12 feet short of covering the complete width, just enough room for the stairs and for a short hallway for customers on their way back to Florine’s Flower Shoppe, after which, in the same hallway, came Eddie’s Tonsorial Parlor for Colored Gentlemen of Quality.  They each had been displaced to the Tishomingo from their original site by the 1921 riot.

        The lobby was furnished with second- and, probably, third- and fourth-hand goods from Danny’s Hard Working Imporyum (sic) next door, a second-, third- and much more-hand store where goods spilled out on the sidewalk as though a delivery truck had rammed into the place from the vacant lot behind.  There were four armchairs upholstered in worn-out corduroy, originally burgundy in color but now faded pink by blasts of sunshine through the lobby windows.  There was a sofa covered in the same material, faded for the same reasons to the same color.  There was a small end table by the sofa, stacked with ancient and coffee-crisped copies of Life and Sporting News and National Geographic magazines.  At the other end of the sofa was an elephant.  It was made of ceramic and designed to look vaguely as though it had stepped out of a Hindu parade.  It was an ashtray, unique, surely, in all the world.  It stood waist-high and lent a stogie stink to the lobby, an olfactory suggestion the hotel had been roasted over a mound of cigars a week before it opened.

        Eli Orchenbacher stood behind the desk.  He was a thin and short man, no more than five feet tall, with a thin and straight mustache three-quarters of an inch above his upper lip.  His mouth was perpetually pursed, which made him look like he were trying to sniff the mustache up his nose.  He kept his hair parted in the middle and slicked straight back with enough pomade that you could smell him coming around the corner and down the hall.

        “I’m Josiah Thibodeaux,” I said to Eli, “from the Tulsa Sooner.  I called you about meeting with Deputy Key.”

        “I can arrange that,” Eli said, “if someone will just watch the desk while I go and get the deputy.”

        “Well, I guess I could do that,” I said.

        “I’ll just run up and get him, and be back in a jiffy,” Eli said.  “Just sign in any guests who arrive while I’m away”

        I was shocked by the request but then Eli winked and said, “Don’t worry, we won’t get any.”

        While Eli was upstairs, I inspected the front desk.  There was a guest register, sitting beside a candlestick rotary telephone, and I started to check it out to see whether in fact the hotel had had guests recently.  But then I caught Eli out of the corner of my eye coming lightly back down the stairs, followed by a clumping set of larger, heavier feet.

        The man behind Eli was at least six feet tall and built like a pear, narrow in the shoulders but bulging at the hips.  I was startled by his appearance and stared, despite my best efforts not to.

        “Mr. Thibodeaux?” Eli said.  “Deputy Key.”

        Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Samuel Key looked like he had been shot in the back of the head with a 12-gauge load of turkey eggs, so big and bulging were his eyes.  His gray fly-away hair looked concussed right out of his head.  He smiled a purely horizontal smile with such intensity that it alone could have bulged his eyes out.   He wore a tan duster, and in fact every time I saw him, for as long as I knew him, he wore that duster, weather notwithstanding.  He held a sweat-blackened Tom Mix Stetson hat.  He always wore that hat, too, and he had removed it strictly as a gesture of being pleased to meet me.  He carried two pearl-handled Colt.45s stuck in the waist band of his khaki trousers.  From the weighted sway to his duster I guessed the pockets were loaded with fists full of cartridges.

        Was it an omen of things to come, that with Sam’s appearance in the lobby a furious thunderstorm broke out?  The thud of nearby thunder by itself might have been responsible for the deputy’s hair.

        “Ye wanted a word with me,” he said, smiling straight from side to side so hard I thought his eyes would shoot out of his head.

        “Yes sir, Deputy Key, I do.  May we sit over there in the corner?”

        “That suits yer fancy, why that’s what we’ll do.”

        I walked us to the corner of the lobby farthest from the desk, to where two armchairs were located, one on either side of a lamp.  We sat and I looked the sheriff in the eye.  He was no longer smiling.

        “I’m a reporter with the Tulsa Sooner.”

        “So I heared.”

        “And my editor wants me to interview you on the occasion of your sixtieth birthday.”

        “Well son it pains me to disppoint ye but I ain’t Sheriff Perkins.”

        “Oh I know!  I’d like to interview you!”

        “Ye would.”

        “My editor is interested in this.  And yes, I’m interested as well.”

        “Ye are.”

        “Would you be willing to let me ask you some questions about your life, including your time as deputy sheriff?”

        “Ye gonna ask me about the rat?”

        “Rat?”

        “Nineteen and twenty-one. When I was depty sheriff.  The race rat.”

        “Oh, that.  Well, as a matter of fact my editor said not to go into that beyond just saying you were deputy at the time.  He said it’s okay to mention it.  Just not go into it.”

        “Then what’s the point young man?  I ain’t done nothin else worth talkin bout.  Hell I ain’t really done nothin then either.  It was all Sheriff Perkins.”

        “Well, Mr. Goldfarb, he’s my editor, he’d say you’re well-known to Tulsans just because you were one of the first deputy sheriffs, and because you held that office during the riot, and so an interview with you would make for interesting reading.”

        “Just because.”

        “Well, because of how you are well-known.  Two times a deputy – holy cow, you must have made quite an impact on the sheriff himself!”

        “Did ye know about me before ye got this here assignment?”

        “No.”  I squirmed in my chair.  It felt like the deputy had turned things around and suddenly I was being interviewed.  “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even know about the riot before I got this assignment.”

        “Thibodeaux.  Y’all’s from Loosiana.”

        “As a matter of fact I am.  Originally.  Little town of New Iberia. My name gives it away, doesn’t it.”

        “So’s yer accent, gives ye away.”

        “Ah!”

        “From Loosiana, it figures ye ain’t heared nothin about the rat.  But then again, ye could be from right here, Tulsey Town, and never heared nothin.  It’s the biggest goddamn thang in all creation don’t nobody never talk bout.”

        “My editor told me that.  In fact there isn’t much in the morgue – the old newspaper files – about the riot.  And even one part of them is missing, torn out, part of the front page out one of the papers.”

        “That there Land Run thang.”

        “Yes sir, the Land Run.” I debated whether to say more and then remembered Goldfarb’s repeated words to me: not for the papers.  Did he mean the story was for somewhere else?  Words tumbled out.  “An editorial, I believe it was.  Missing.  Someone said it called for a lynching on the night of the riot.”

        “Everbody knowed about that even if don’t nobody ever talk bout it.  Even if all them copies is been stole.”

        “I find this very strange, deputy.  Something this big – 35, 40 city blocks burned to the ground overnight! – and nobody talks about it.  And if the copies of the editorial have been stolen, then somebody doesn’t want anybody knowing about it.  Or talking about it.”

        “Didn’t y’all’s editor hissef, didn’t he say don’t go into the rat when you talk with ol Travelin Sam?”

        “He did.”

        “Well there ye have it.  Don’t nobody ever brang this thang up.  Don’t nobody want it brung up.”

        “Why is that Deputy Key?”

        “Ye ain’t sposed to be interviewin me about that now, is ye.”

        “No, I suppose not.”  There was a lull in the conversation, and I had the feeling Sam expected me to say something else, but I didn’t know what.  “No, that’s off limits for my interview,” I said after a few moments.  I looked around the lobby as though it would give me ideas about what to say next.

        Sam finally broke the lull.  “They’s a couple o’ others I need to be conversatin with, bout whether to do this thang or not”

        “I see.”

        “The sheriff’s one of them as I need to okay it with.”

        “I see.  And the second person is?”

        “Orchenbacher!” Sam said, in time with a blast of thunder.  “Run upstairs, brang me the preacher.  She in?  Brang her down here.”

        “She’s in her room, yes?”

        “Well I don’t know goddammit.  Y’all’s sposed to be the one knowed stuff like that.  Go look!”

        “Mr. Thibodeaux?” Eli said.  “Please be so kind?”

        “By all means,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out for new guests.”  I looked at the sheriff and rolled my eyes and shrugged.

        “It might surprise ye,” Sam said.

        When Eli came back downstairs, he was preceded by an elegant Negress, short, perhaps five feet tall, shorter even than Eli, with a mouth full of teeth and a headlamp smile.  She had deep and dark eyes and luxuriant black hair

        “Mr. Thibodeaux?  Rev. DaVida King,” Eli said.

        I told her how pleased to meet her, and for some reason I was, too.  It may have been her smile.  I know now that is part of what seduced the deputy in days to come.  DaVida nodded at me, her remarkable teeth serving as a smile even when the corners of her mouth weren’t turned up.

        Eli pulled around another armchair for her to sit in.

        “Reporter here, Thibodeaux,” Sam said, “says he wants to do a interview with me on account of it bein my sixtieth.  What say ye?”

        “Will it deal with the Race War?” DaVida asked.  I was struck by the word war.

        “No,” I said, “if you mean the 1921 riot, no.  I’ll have to refer to the fact Deputy Key was in office then, but no, it’s not about the riot.  The good deputy here is a public figure and worked with one of our first sheriffs.  We figure our readers will want to know all about him – where he’s been, what he’s done, what he thinks of the city now, things like that.  It’s not about the riot.”

        “Whatcha thank?” Sam said to DaVida.

        Rev. King folded her hands on her lap and pursed her lips and looked aside and at the floor.  Her mouth still would not close all the way, and her teeth looked like a golf ball in a deeply shadowed cup.  She shook her head, which I took to mean she didn’t know what to think and not that she necessarily was opposed to the idea.

        “It’s time?” Sam asked her, quietly.

        “Time?”

        “Tell folks what really happened.”

        “My editor doesn’t want me to go into the race riot,” I said.

        “War,” DaVida said.  “Folks around here call it the Race War.”

        “Race War,” I said.  “The interview is just supposed to be about Deputy Key, as a public figure a lot of people will recognize, and anyhow a lot of our readers will find interesting.”

        “I don’t know, Sam,” DaVida said.

        “Well ye know what they say.  The truth will make ye free,” Sam said.

        “That truth is a person, Sam, not a set of facts.”

        The deputy looked at me and winked.  “Sunny School lesson.”

        “Deputy Key doesn’t have much use for Sunny School,” she said.

        “We shouldn’t be the onliest ones makin this decision anyhow,” Sam said  “There’s the Slow Man and I betcha he’ll have a opinion on the matter.”

        “So let’s go see Solomon,” Rev. King said.  “That’s who the Slow Man is,” she said to me.  “Solomon Perkins.”

        “I know.  He’s the sheriff.”

        “He ...” DaVida started to say, but Sam interrupted excitedly.

        “Wait wait wait!  Hole on!” Sam said.  “Who’s that?”  He pointed to a figure in silhouette who had been standing just outside the screen door of the lobby throughout – I had noticed – our entire conversation.

        A thunderstorm had come up out of nowhere.  Wind caught the screen door, lifted it open, slammed it shut.

        “Who?” Rev. King said.

        “I’ll be goddamn, it’s Dodd,” Key said as the silhouette stepped quickly away.  “No, wait.  It’s that clown, works with Dodd!  Spyin on us no doubt.  I’ll be damn.”

        Lightning struck within a half block of the Tishomingo.  There was an enormous CRAAAAACK!  There was no thunder.

Next Chapter: "Slow Man’s Coney Island"