KGOU Readers Club; Tulsa Race Massacre Episode 3 Part 1

We're back for another week of the TGOU Reader's Club. I'm managing editor Logan Layden, thanks for listening this afternoon. This week we're talking about the novel, Fire in Bula, and we've got OU Professor and author of that book, Rilla asks you. Rilla, thanks for joining me today, why don't you introduce yourself to the any small number of our listeners who don't know who you are and what you do. Well, thank you very much Logan, it's really good to be here and good to see you. And well, it's, you know, I'm a novelist, that's my primary sense of what I do as an artist. I also write creative nonfiction, I've also written short fiction, and I teach, I teach creative writing here at the University of Oklahoma in the English department, which I just love doing. But my primary sense of myself is as a novelist, and particularly an historical novelist,

and that began with my interest in the Tulsa race massacre, what we know now is the Tulsa race massacre. So when I first began to write, I didn't think I was going to write historical fiction, I thought I would write contemporary fiction when I first began as a writer. But when I first learned about the Tulsa race massacre, which like most Oklahoma's I had never been taught in school, and I knew I wanted to write about it, and so I knew I had to go deep and dig deep to find out the history. And so that just, that led me actually to finding out more about Oklahoma's story and the years prior to the Tulsa race massacre and the conditions that led to it and so forth. So I've, most of my books are historical fiction, not all of them, but they mostly are. And I think that that's my deepest impulse is to mine the past so that we can understand who we are now.

Well, that's one of the things I did want to talk to you about about a fire in Bula, as you know, as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, we have books coming out, we have the HBO series Watchmen who, you know, depicted it on the screen. You see it more and more in popular culture, but you wrote fire in Bula. It's been what, about 20 years ago now? It was published in January of 2001, so exactly 20 years from publication and 30 years since I began researching and setting out to write about it. So I learned about it in 1989 and began researching and writing in 1990. What was it that set you down that path? What was it that kind of changed the course of what you thought your career was going to be? Why was that the case? What drew you in about it? So I lived in New York then. I had gone to get my masters of fine arts in creative writing at Brooklyn College and stayed there to teach as many of us do. I began teaching as a grad student in the MFA program.

And almost all of my students were young people of color. It was Brooklyn. They were really from around the world because it's such an international city. Many of my students were African-American and West Indian, Jamaican, Chinatadi and from Barbados and really all the islands. And they gave me such a different perspective. So in my classroom, very often I was the minority. And there were just probably a handful of white students in my classes. And almost everyone else was, many of them were immigrants, first and second generation immigrants, as well as African-American. It was really illuminating for me and it just inverted my entire understanding of the world, having grown up white in Bartlesville in a dominant white state in a dominant white city in the years of such unspoken bias and prejudice.

I mean, there was plenty that was spoken as well, but the assumptions and the presumptions of whiteness that we know now and I know to call now white supremacy. I didn't know to call that then. I didn't understand it, but it was my students who, in the beginning, turned my world around and made me see things through entirely different eyes and I think almost anyone who loves to teach will tell you how much their students teach them. So that was part of it. Then I became really close to a family and Jamaican family in Brooklyn and I became Godmother to my friend's son and then watched him growing up as a young black man in America, watched the harassment at school, the racial profiling by the police, just on and on and on violence against her husband for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time from police. It was not just elements having, you know, these things happened much later, actually, because

they were after Travis, my godson was not no longer a little boy, a baby and a little boy. So my connection to the family happened very quickly and very strongly and very much as family. So that further opened my eyes. So I was already close to Marlene and her family. I was already, things had changed in terms of my view of the world and that's why I was reading Richard Wright. And it was while I was reading a biography of the great African-American novelist Richard Wright that I heard that I read for the first time about the Tulsa race massacre. So it was in the very beginning of the book, it's called Demonic Genius and they had spoke about the red summer of 1919, it spoke about the race riots as they were called then in Chicago and Helena, Arkansas and then it mentioned Tulsa. And I was just stunned because of having grown up 50 miles from Tulsa, having thought that

I knew Oklahoma's story to know that something happened. They called it a race riot, that book called it a race riot. It was what that was what it was called for many, many years. But I couldn't find out what happened. I came back. I went to the Tulsa City County Library to look in the archives. A new then, by then, the essential dates of it, the archives for the Tulsa world and the Tulsa Tribune stopped in May of 1921 and began again in September. I couldn't find out what happened. So it took a long time to do the research. So some people call it a culture of silence, Scott Ellsworth who's really such a well-known. He wrote the death in a promised land, which is some consider the urtext actually of the history of the Tulsa race massacre. It was the first historical treatment in a book and he calls it a curtain of silence. Some people call it a culture, some people call it a conspiracy.

I think you have to consider it a conspiracy because it was collaborative and it was intentional. So it's not just that we weren't paying attention. It's the reason most white people in this state and the country didn't know about it. It was intentionally suppressed and when records and archives are expunged, when no one will talk to you, when you go and you try to find out what happened and people will not speak of it, you understand that it's enormous. It's an incredible import and that there's a reason that it's been held in secrecy. So I'm so glad to see so much of that change now. I mean, the attention now that's happening in this centennial year is so important. And the stories being told from the point of view largely, mostly in the point of view of the victims' survivors and their descendants and that's as it should be.

So I think I can't went far afield of your initial question, but which was what? Well, but that immediate cover up that you talk about adds to sort of the merceness today as we try to look back. Did that editorial appear in the Tulsa Tribune that so many survivors said did? Did that horn that went off at daybreak on the 1st of June was that a call to invade Greenwood or was it OGN's whistle? Did the biplanes drop bombs on people's houses or did they just fly over? Because right away, just even the next day, the shame of the event had descended upon the Tulsa community, the white community. This was not something that they thought was good for Tulsa. It was insane. They were proud of necessarily, right? That's true, but they also immediately began to blame the black community in Greenwood.

It was the justification for the invasion in the first place. They called it a quote, unquote Negro uprising, and they continued to call it that, and they continued to call it a riot as if the people of Greenwood were doing the rioting. When it was literally an invasion, there's so much documentation of that now. But those, yeah, the story was immediately reconfigured and then disappeared. So it was reconfigured to be, we know this is happening right now in our country. So there'll be a circumstance, perhaps, for instance, a police shooting. And in the past, before we had the documentation of so much cell phone, the police characterized it one way and the person who was shot or the witnesses might characterize it another. And until there was documentation to prove one way or another, the dominant story,

just like the dominant culture, just like the dominant news sources of 1921 told this story. So that's a big, big part of it. That's why we're in such a place of change in turmoil now. The people who have suffered these violences have been telling it and telling it and telling it and could not get the platform or the means by which to tell the story in a way that the dominant culture will believe it. And now we have video evidence and that's huge. And it's something, it's something people would, you've got to acknowledge it. It happened. You need to learn about it. It's important for history. It's an awful thing. It's not fun to read about and to immerse yourself in, but to get an understanding, you must expose yourself to it. And that's

what I think has been different for me as I've gone through these last several weeks and the show itself learning more about this sort of vague thing that I had heard about the Tulsa race mask. I knew it was awful. It can condemn it, but to get down into the details of it, it makes you uncomfortable and it should. It's supposed to. You bring the story more to life with these characters in the novel, fire, and Bula. And again, we get to the massacre itself and the events around it for our characters in the novel later. But the book isn't about the Tulsa race massacre. That is one thing that it's about a lot more of the environment leading up to it, the situation leading leading up to it. We're going to get into that. We're going to talk about that more here in just a minute or so. I'm going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with a Rilla to ask you, author of Fire in Bula.