Nobody walks in Tulsa. At least not to get anywhere. Oil built our houses, paved our streets, and turned us from a cow town stop on the Frisco Railroad into the heart of Route 66. My ninth-grade Oklahoma History teacher joked that around these parts, walking is sacrilege. Real Tulsans drive.
The book features two different narrators. Things open with this paragraph from a narrator living in the present-day, Rowan, a bi-racial teenage girl who enjoys the benefits wealth and privilege. Tulsa is clearly situated as the setting, but the reference to oil is just as significant to that setting. Oklahoma is one of those states that has managed over the course of the 20th century to live or die based on relative circumstances of a single economic product. It is a state that has experienced booms and busts thanks to the inventions of the combustion engine and the automobile. People in Oklahoma—not necessarily Oklahomans, of course—literally became millionaires overnight or, alternatively, lost everything overnight. And all because of something familiarly known—ironically—as “black gold…Texas Tea.” Oil, that is.
Plenty of the roustabout gangs running Tulsa’s streets would have taken us in, but I always figured the two of us were spoiled enough and maybe even smart enough to know the difference between hell-raising and causing real harm. Those gangs were chock-full of unemployed young men back from the Great War who’d come to Oklahoma looking for oilfield work down at the Glenn Pool strike. They’d seen bad things, done a few themselves, and liked showing off for locals. Problem was, the locals would try to one-up ’em, the roustabouts would take things a step further, and in the end, someone always spent the night in jail.
William is the other narrator, a 17-year-old boy living in Tulsa in 1921. While oil could and did make millionaires overnight, that was mainly the propaganda. For the vast majority of those working in the oil industry then as now, the money isn’t quite that spectacular. And back then it was actually hard work because machines weren’t doing all the hard labor. William shares much with Rowan, but easy money and privilege are not among them. He is an Okie plain and simple despite how much Oklahomans might detest that vernacular. In addition to the state being highly dependent upon the revenue brought in by Big Oil, Oklahoma is also a state that has with precious few exceptions always gone to the more conservative Presidential candidate. It is as dependably conservative in its politics as any state in the union. And when young men like William start letting their conservative views take hold of their impulses, bad things usually happen.
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’?
The title is referenced in this quote and it is essential to the story. This is work of fiction that is steeped in the historical fact of one of the worst expressions of racist mob violence in the country’s history. While it has been widely known among the African American community since it happened, it was really only with the arrival of the 100th anniversary in early summer of 2021 that the event most familiarly known simply as “Black Wall Street” but also often referred to as “the Tulsa Race Massacre” occurred. The event was aimed at black residents of what was essentially a segregated city within a city.
But to say that it was white mob violence acting out racist anger toward blacks is to miss half the story. Because the area targeted was not done so merely because blacks lived there. Remember, oil could make people wealthy overnight and if there is one thing that angry uneducated white men like William cannot stand more than anything it is seeing a black person living better than they do. The very name Black Wall Street should be context enough to give a clue about the relative economic status of those living there as opposed to hick yokels with nothing better to do with their lives than go out looking for a fight.
