Askew - Fire in Beulah

PENGUIN BOOKS

FIRE IN BEULAH

Rilla Askew is the author of Strange Business, a collection of stories, and The Mercy Seat, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award and winner of the Western Heritage Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. She divides her time between the San Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma and upstate New York.

Praise for Fire in Beulah

A haunting, engrossing portrait of two familiesone white, one blackwhose lives are woven together and then shattered. Askews final hundred pages are a cinematic, apocalyptic denouement, as all the characters are swept up in the terrible racial tidal wave.

The Washington Post

In Rilla Askews tinderbox of a novel, racial distrust runs deep as marrow in the Oklahoma of the 1920s. Black and white Oklahomans eye one another with deeply embedded trepidation, moving like partners in an uneasy dance where they think they know each other too well, but dont really know each other at all. What clearly compels Askew is that indelible stain on our psyche, the great American dilemma of race that vexes us still. Askew nails as well as any author in recent memory the claustrophobia of racism, the devastation of hate and the way it sucks all the air out of the world.

The Boston Globe

The novel moves back and forth between the worlds of its two central characters, one white and one black, in order to explore the devastating consequences of the powerful let loose upon the powerless. Fire in Beulah recalls and recreates a devastating if largely forgotten historical event in order to explore the awful consequences of human failure.

Chicago Tribune

Superbwith great passion and conviction, Askew has turned the story of the riot into a work of compelling fiction that is nevertheless true to the basic facts of an American tragedy.

The Baltimore Sun

Askew has crafted a gripping drama, infusing this novel with the rich de tails of human dilemmas . There are no pat machinations hereFire in Beulah touches on the substance of morality and the composition of the human spirit, underscoring the fact that our lives transcend perceived boundaries.

Black Issues Book Review

An unflinching, yet redemptive story of AmericaFire in Beulah delves deeply into the troubled history of blacks and whites in America, emerging with scenes so poignant and painfully rendered as to inspire comparisons with the greatest chroniclers of the race line that snakes through our history: Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison.

The St. Louis Riverfront Times

A devastating story of greed, violence, and destructionAskews novel is riveting and remarkably relevant.

The Portland Oregonian

A fine novel to open our eyes to a history thats more complex than we usually believemany readers may be shocked at the setting, the time, and the violence of feelings, assuming racial hatred was confined to the South.

The Denver Post

In an arresting examination of race and heritage, Askew mixes historical fact with compelling fiction. [Askews] proserich, leisurely, gracefulengages all the senses and encloses the reader in a bell jar of heat, hate, and budding violence.

Publishers Weekly

Askew is skilled at characterization and description, and the reader viscerally feels the anger, evil, fear, anxiety, tension, grief and love of the characters.

Library Journal

Fire
in
Beulah

RILLA ASKEW

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin.

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2001

Published in Penguin Books 2002

Copyright Rilla Askew, 2001

All rights reserved

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS :

Askew. Rilla.

Fire in Beulah / Rilla Askew.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-20021-6

I. Title

PS3551.S545 F57 2001

813.54dc21 00-043366

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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Version_2

For Travis
and Marlene
and Ebonyrose

My gratitude, always, to my husband, Paul Austin, first reader, final critic; and to my sister Ruth, who receives all. Friends and family members have sent articles and clippings about the Tulsa Race Riot through the years, and I appreciate all of them. Warm thanks to my agent, Jane Gelfman, who asks the right questions, and to my editor, Paul Slovak, for all their good work. A special word of gratitude for my friend and teacher, the late Dr. Nancy Vunovich, who in the months of her final illness read these pages with enthusiasm, interest, miraculous patience. For the facts of the riot Ive used a number of sources, and have drawn particularly from Scott Ellsworths seminal work, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; Eddie Faye Gates gathering of oral histories, They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa; Hannibal B. Johnsons study of the Greenwood district, Black Wall Street; and the contemporary eyewitness account of the riot by Mary E. Jones Parrish, Race Riot 1921: Events of the Tulsa Disaster. Finally, a note of sorrowful indebtedness: although the characters here are entirely fictional or, in the case of historical persons, fictionally portrayed, the incidents of racial violence are all real; they took place almost exactly as described, perpetrated by Americans, on Americans, in this promised land.

PART ONE