CHAPTER 14

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Only a few days after the Klan rally at Convention Hall, Tulsa attorney Washington Hudson drove across the Frisco tracks to deliver the happy news to Damie Rowland’s tent on Archer Street. Sarah Page had decided to drop her charges. Damie’s boy and Wash Hudson’s client, Dick Rowland, was a free man, at that very moment probably strolling the streets of Kansas City, the place where Sheriff McCullough had hidden Dick since the burning. Damie nearly fainted. She made Mr. Hudson tell her the news again. Then she hugged him, weeping for joy in the musty shadows of the Red Cross tent erected on the ashes of her boardinghouse. It was her first glimmer of sunlight after three months of endless night.

Damie had lost everything in the burning—the boardinghouse, her clothes, her savings—but few in the Negro community extended her much sympathy. She knew instead from the averted glances and the whispers when she passed on the street that people in Greenwood blamed Dick for what happened, and they blamed Damie, too, for she had brought that troublemaker to town in the first place and had failed to keep him in line when she did.

Not that Damie didn’t blame herself. Every day for weeks, she sat in a rickety wooden chair outside her tent and thought about her years with Dick, starting with the day the skinny orphan named Jimmie Jones appeared at her door in Vinita with a grown man’s shirt draped over his bones, complaining of hunger. She remembered his laughter and sweetness then, the radiance of the boy’s smile, then the move to Tulsa and Jimmie’s new name and his diamond ring, and his rolls of cash, and the rumors that made their way back to Damie about Dick showing up in Greenwood’s choc joints and brothels. Then Dick and Sarah Page. Where had Damie gone wrong? What should she have taught Dick that she didn’t? Why hadn’t he had the good sense to leave that trashy white girl alone?

And look at what happened. A whole community in ruins. Because of that, there were plenty in Greenwood who felt that the mob should have had its way with Dick Rowland that night at the courthouse, even if the boy was guilty of nothing worse than stupidity. Everyone would have been better off if the whites had satisfied their blood lust with one shiftless, choc-swilling young Negro who insisted on messing with a white girl. Instead, dozens of Greenwood mothers and wives and children wept for sons, husbands, and fathers who had disappeared into hidden graves in the countryside. The tents were everywhere in Greenwood now, and people still picked the ashes from their teeth and their clothes, and brushed them from their hair when the wind blew. The whole place still smelled of charred lumber. All those folks still wore donated clothes that didn’t fit, and dirty bandages over their burns and gunshot wounds. The women still burst into tears for no reason, and the men stared into the distance. Dick had brought that onto his people. Dick and Damie.

If that weren’t misery enough, Damie had still dreaded what would happen when they brought Dick back to town and put him on trial for trying to rape Sarah that day in the elevator. What chance did Dick have then, famous white lawyer or not? None, Damie knew. The whites would hang him anyway, which would be the final dagger in Damie Rowland’s ailing heart.

But then on that day in September, Mr. Hudson rolled up in his expensive Ford, wearing a beautiful brown suit with a vest and bow tie, and a nice straw hat, which he tipped politely to Damie before bending to step into her tent. Then he delivered his wondrous news, which she made him repeat to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. It was over. Dick was free. There would be no hanging, no more death. Before she could stop herself, Damie’s tiny arms flew around the white lawyer’s thick body. She grabbed Mr. Hudson into a big hug and pulled the tall fellow down to her height so she could kiss his cheek, smelling his sweet cologne up close when she did. She never forgot that scent. In the years to come, on the infrequent occasions she caught a whiff of that cologne on other men, Damie’s insides tingled with the memory of Dick’s deliverance.

*   *   *

He came in the night, and then only once. Damie didn’t recognize him at first, thought him another young Negro beggar desperate for some food or for a few pennies to buy choc beer with. Damie heard the man whisper her name outside her tent, and when she poked her head out the front flap, he stood to the side, outlined in the shadows. The young man had put on a belly from the jail food, and even in the dark, Damie could see that his cheeks were shiny with tears.

“Isn’t this an awful mess that I caused?” Dick whispered.

Damie nearly fainted again. She rushed the few yards toward him and hugged him like she had hugged Wash Hudson, only Dick smelled like several days of riding in boxcars. Then Damie remembered herself, remembered what the other Greenwood folks might say or do if they saw Dick, so she grabbed him by his muscular arm and pulled him inside her tent. She fed him and they talked some, and Dick said he was so sorry, but there were only so many ways he could express his remorse. What was done was done, Damie said.

She looked closely at her boy in the thin light of her gas lamp. Dick’s diamond ring was gone from his finger. A dirty piece of string was tied around that finger instead, as if to remind him of his flamboyant life and where that life had led him. Eyes that once twinkled like the evening star on a clear night were now dull and old, though Dick had just turned twenty. He asked Damie about the folks around Greenwood, wondering who died in the burning and who survived. He asked Damie what she would do, with her boardinghouse and all her money gone. Damie said she would find a way to get back on her feet, that Dick shouldn’t worry. Then, well before dawn, Dick hugged her one last time and disappeared into the night.

He wrote to her every month from Kansas City. Damie was surprised when he told her that Sarah Page had moved back to Kansas City, too, the place where she had grown up and divorced her husband before moving to Tulsa. By his letters, it sounded like Dick and Sarah saw a great deal of each other. Dick said that Sarah felt terrible that the police had arrested him for something he didn’t do, but she never talked at all about the burning and killing set in motion by her lies. If Dick still loved Sarah, he didn’t say. Then her name disappeared from Dick’s letters, and not long after that, he moved to Oregon, where he found work in shipyards along the coast.

He continued to write from Oregon, telling Damie of his love for the ocean, how the sound and the smell and the hugeness of it made it easier to forget the bad things that he had done, letters that kept coming for forty years. Dick wrote to Damie about his work and the sea, but he never mentioned a wife or a family, or even a friend. Then a final letter came from Oregon, one delivered to Damie in the 1960s and written by a man who said he had been Dick’s roommate there. He was sorry to inform Damie that Dick had been killed in an accident on a wharf. Damie was the only person that Dick ever really loved, the man said. Damie’s new boardinghouse on Archer Street, the one she eventually had rebuilt after the burning, was closed for several days after she got the news.

*   *   *

Bill Williams first heard the sound about a week after the burning. He was working with his father near dusk, pulling charred metal frames of theater seats from the ashes of the Dreamland and piling them onto a truck parked in the street, when a blues melody someone was tapping out on a piano drifted toward them from a tent across Greenwood Avenue. It was the first music Bill and his father had heard since the trouble had happened, and they paused from their labors and smiled at the sound for a few minutes before getting back to work. Not long after that, Bill heard a sax wailing along Greenwood Avenue, and within a few weeks, regular crowds gathered along the street to eat ribs and greens cooked over open fires and to listen to the jazz and the blues, which expressed feelings that the Negroes of Greenwood couldn’t otherwise put into words.

So somehow life in Greenwood continued. To be a slave before the Civil War, or to be a Negro in America afterward, was to learn endurance, how to move forward through terrible things that colored folks had come to expect out of life, things that would make members of a weaker people turn to dust. That’s how it was in Greenwood after the burning. People moved forward. Life continued.

Vegetable stands sprouted among the tents within a week. Cows were milked, and eggs collected from nervous hens. The thousands of Negroes resumed their daily treks back across the railroad tracks to shine shoes, or hang a white family’s laundry and do its cooking, or trim hedges and cut lawns, or drive limousines, or run elevators, or wash dishes in white restaurants. Then they came home to the tents across the tracks and made do, the rich Negroes and the poor Negroes alike, because after the burning, there wasn’t much to distinguish the two.

Before the burning, the fellow named C. L. Netherland lived in a ten-room home with a basement, and cut hair in a Greenwood Avenue parlor with five enamel chairs, four baths, a set of electric clippers, an electric fan, two lavatories and shampoo stands, a double shine stand of marble, and an income of five hundred dollars a month. After the burning, he lived in his coal barn and cut hair in a folding chair set on the sidewalk, because life went on, no matter how terrible it could be. Townsend Jackson cut hair in his tent on Cincinnati, grieving for his son, the doctor. Young Robert Fairchild, Dick Rowland’s old buddy, shined shoes downtown. Professor Hughes taught his classes at Booker T. Washington High School, which became a school again when the injured people were moved into a little hospital built by the Red Cross on Hartford Avenue. H. A. Guess hung his law shingle in his family’s tent, assuring his wife and two daughters all along:

“Don’t worry, girls. I’m gonna build you a nice new house, better than the last one.” Within a few months, he did.

*   *   *

A few days after the burning, Bill Williams and his parents had walked to Greenwood Avenue because their car was burned up or stolen, and they saw for the first time that the Dreamland was a pile of rubble with only a couple of walls standing, and the Williams Building on the corner was in the same condition. They found Loula Williams’ safe lying open in the middle of the street, empty of course. Loula cried for a few minutes that day, clinging to her husband’s arm as she looked at their property. But then her tears dried and John and Loula Williams plowed forward, as they had since the first day they were married.

They started rebuilding with the savings they had in a white bank downtown, and by September, the family was able to move from their tent along Greenwood Avenue to the second floor of the new Williams Building, which was almost exactly like the one before. Crowds stood in line to get into Williams’ Confectionary the day it opened, desperate for Greenwood life as it used to be. People congregated around the soda fountain, and young men resumed their confectionary marriage proposals. The Dreamland also came back to life that autumn, but half of the seats sat empty for many months, except on the nights when Loula Williams decided to show movies for free.

John Williams rebuilt his engine shop, too, and within a few weeks, the rich white men brought their cars back north across the tracks so he could work on them. A few of the whites told John Williams that they were sorry about what had happened in Greenwood, that they felt like the burning had been a very bad thing. But most of John Williams’ white customers said nothing at all about the tragedy. They just looked a little sheepish when they walked into the garage with this or that complaint about their cars, wondering if old John could have a look under the hood. Bill’s father knew that many of the men who owned those cars were part of the mob that came pouring over the tracks when the whistle blew before dawn on June 1, that many of those same men shattered the windows and splintered the bricks of the Williams Building with their rifles and shotguns. But John Williams fixed their cars anyway, because life went on and that’s what Negroes did in America after the Civil War. Whatever other feelings John might have had about such matters, he kept to himself.

By winter, most of John and Loula’s neighbors along Greenwood Avenue were back in their buildings, too. Deep Greenwood, in fact, looked almost exactly as it did before the burning, except newer.

Out in the neighborhoods, Negro homeowners sometimes borrowed money from their white employers, and the white lumber and brick dealers donated materials or sold them cheap, so by the end of the year, more than six hundred homes in Greenwood also had been rebuilt. By the spring of 1922, the last of the tents were gone and the only reminders of the burning were the occasional piles of rubble, or the empty shotgun and rifle shells that kept turning up in the dirt like arrowheads, or the thousand-yard stares, or the nightmares that afflicted almost every Greenwood house like a plague from the Bible.

*   *   *

It was workers from the Red Cross who cut the huge spruce in the country and hauled it to the spot outside the Negro hospital on Hartford Avenue, where twenty-seven victims of the burning were still convalescing. A wealthy white businessman named Charles Page, from nearby Sand Springs, purchased lights and other decorations for the Christmas tree, including the huge white cross that was placed on top. It had been Page, the oilman and erstwhile newspaper publisher, who had sold the Tulsa Tribune to Richard Lloyd Jones only two years earlier.

Then, on a night shortly before Christmas, Negro families walked across Greenwood and gathered around the Christmas tree in the evening chill. Red Cross workers scurried about, distributing twenty-seven hundred half-pound packages of fruits and nuts to the Negro children, and spools of thread, pillows, children’s underwear, and quilts to the adults. The singing began when the last gifts were given, two thousand voices raised to the heavens as Greenwood sang traditional Christmas carols, interspersed with spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The throng clapped for “Down by the River Side.” Men and boys removed their hats for “Standing in the Need of Prayer.”

Then, when the singing was over, a black preacher climbed onto the back of a truck and began to speak. He wished the crowd a Merry Christmas and reminded the people that they had much to be grateful for.

“Let us always remember the old Negro tradition,” the preacher concluded. “There is no room in our hearts for hatred.”

“Amen,” some of the men and women replied. Then the crowd began to drift away, dispersing back across Greenwood to new homes in some cases, to tents in others. A few days later, on January 1, 1921, the last of the Red Cross workers who had come from around the nation packed up and left town for good.

*   *   *

He stood at the edge of the crowd that had gathered around the Christmas tree, a head taller than anyone, and maybe the only person in the throng who didn’t sing. O. B. Mann had been walking across Greenwood on one of his nightly strolls when he heard the strange noises in the dusk. So he turned toward Hartford to investigate and saw all those Negroes at the Christmas tree, singing and taking handouts from the whites. His blood boiled once again.

O. B. had snuck back into Tulsa only the week before, ending a six-month exile that began the day after the burning, when he happened into his brother McKinley, who was staying with a bunch of other Negroes in an abandoned barn in the country. McKinley had cleaned out the safe at the grocery store before fleeing on June 1, so he handed his brother a stack of bills, telling O. B. to head north because word was getting around about how many whites the youngest Mann brother had killed during the burning.

“Canada might be a good place for you about now,” McKinley said. “I hear Toronto’s got a fair number of Negroes.”

“I ain’t running from nothin’ or nobody,” O. B. stated.

“Well, suit yourself,” McKinley said. “But if you stay in Tulsa, I’m telling you, you’re as good as hung.”

O. B. Mann didn’t have the energy to argue long. He hopped a train to Kansas City. There he bought a rail ticket to Chicago, then to Detroit, then to Toronto, the city that did indeed have plenty of other Negroes, and poor white people from Europe who couldn’t speak English, burly men who worked next to O. B. building bridges. O. B. took a bed in a boardinghouse with the bridge builders, and at night wrote to his family in Tulsa. The letters that came back said that the grocery store had burned along with almost everything else in Greenwood, but because of all those days O. B. had ridden his horse to the white bank downtown, there had been plenty of money to rebuild the store. In July, McKinley wrote to say that an indictment at the courthouse had O. B.’s name on it, and that five white deputies had come looking for him at the store. But another letter from McKinley about four months later told O. B. to come on home if he wanted to, because the whites no longer seemed interested in anything that had to do with the burning, including messing with Negro fellows, whether they had been indicted or not. So O. B. rode the train back across the border, from Toronto to Detroit to Kansas City, and finally to Okmulgee, where a friend he knew from the Army drove him into Tulsa in the middle of the night and dropped him off in front of the new Mann Brothers Grocery Store on Lansing.

For weeks after that, O. B. put on his apron and went to work behind the counter, or stocked shelves, or slaughtered chickens. He ventured outside only at night, leery that some deputy might still want to make a name for himself by capturing the giant Negro with so much white blood on his hands. On his evening strolls, O. B. nervously checked over his shoulder as he saw the new homes that took the place of the ones that had burned, and the new brick buildings in Deep Greenwood, and the piles of bricks where Mount Zion Baptist used to be. He heard the Christmas carols on one of those strolls and stood at the edge of the crowd, so much taller than anyone else, fuming. Sleep in heavenly peace. How could anyone sleep in peace again?

He almost couldn’t restrain himself at the end, when that fellow stood up on the truck and yelled, “There is no room in our hearts for hatred.” Where whites were concerned, there was no room in O. B. Mann’s heart for anything but hatred. The sight of blue eyes nearly drove him crazy, nearly set him off to find his rifle. But the people of Greenwood, these sorry folks singing their carols, they had been beaten down. They were still slaves. They would keep their mouths shut, except to sing carols, and to keep their heads down to take whatever the whites wanted to give.

The crowd at the Christmas tree began to disperse, hauling away their Red Cross packages, and O. B. Mann went mumbling off into the night, wrestling with a rage that lived until the day in the 1940s, when cancer finally killed him. By then, he and McKinley had grown rich with their grocery store. Nephews remembered Uncle O. B. coming for visits to Southern California in a chauffeur-driven limousine. This huge man climbed out of the backseat and handed out candy and dollar bills to the children, and paid his nephews handsomely for washing his long car. But there was always a menace about him, too—the long silences when Uncle O. B.’s eyes darkened and his teeth ground together, and his fits of temper over the smallest things. Even the adults in his family were afraid of him.

Back in Oklahoma, O. B. Mann grew into a Negro legend from one end of the state to the other. The stories were told of how the giant Negro veteran killed all those whites during the great Tulsa burning of 1921, stories that grew more spectacular with each passing decade. That was one Negro who made the whites pay for their sins. But no one dared raise the subject with O. B. Mann directly for fear of what would happen if his rage boiled over. Once, a young nephew noticed the pale scar that ran the length of Uncle O. B.’s little finger.

“What happened to Uncle O. B.’s pinkie?” the boy asked his father, who was one of O. B.’s older brothers.

“Have you asked your uncle about that scar?” the father replied.

“No,” the boy said.

“Good,” the father said. “Don’t.”