Mukoli

My late mother was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on October 27, 1921, and although she never spoke about it, or is it possible she didn’t know?—I’ll never know—I suspect that the Greenwood (Black Wall Street) Massacre (May 31–June 1, 1921) that exploded into mass killing, terrorism, looting, and the cremation of a prosperous community of Black people also exploded my family with such force that the trembling has continued two generations into the future.

I am grateful that the centennial of the event two years ago brought to current news this abomination that was never recorded in Oklahoma school books and certainly did not make its way into my white high school history classes in suburban New York in the 1960s.

For several years prior to the centennial, I had been futilely researching the Greenwood Massacre after learning about it in Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone (Riverhead, 2019). I read everything I could Google, wrote to various people and organizations who never replied to my questions about the location of my grandfather’s jewelry store — he was an iconoclastic white Jew who died long before I was born, but from the little I heard, it would have been in his character to have had a business in a Black district. 

I am a journalist and had written about well-researched inherited trauma among mothers who had been pregnant during 9/11 as well as children of Holocaust survivors. DNA markers formed at the time of trauma passed from mother to child, programming children whose stress is triggered to respond in ways that are probably informed by trauma they have not experienced. (For example, trapped in a stuck elevator, the child of Holocaust survivors may feel desperate, terrified, fearing death in a way that people without their DNA markers would not.) Could the Greenwood Massacre have been the start of trauma that grew branches into my childhood?

Shortly before the centennial of the massacre, I learned about the publication of Tulsa 1921 by Randy Krehbiel (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), a dense and sprawling history that is certainly not light fare, but I dove into it like a starving person, searching for information that would inform my family experiences.

Although I found nothing that located my grandfather’s store, I learned enough to have a visceral imaginary experience. The fact that the riot and destruction began in the white business district (where I recently learned my grandfather’s jewelry store was located; more about that in a minute), pales in comparison to the whole story and what followed:

A Black janitor was accused of an assault (that may or may not have happened) by a white elevator girl (who he may or may not have had a relationship with) when they argued and he grabbed her arm. She yelled and all hell broke loose. He was arrested. Quickly the news spread and a group of vigilante white men charged the prison, intent on… well, you can surmise. The sheriff held them off, protecting the prisoner, and in a fury, they decided to take out their rage on Greenwood, a prosperous “Black Wall Street” founded when smart, skilled Black veterans returned from the war, began to build businesses, including banks that made loans to the community, and gradually, the population increased to the point where there was an enclave of upper-class Black citizens, living in beautiful homes, sending their children to good schools, and living the American dream. The vigilantes were eventually joined by the Sheriff’s department, and they all invaded Greenwood, breaking into homes, looting and burning them down, sending Black citizens into the streets—many of them young children who had never known anything but their comfortable community. 

Even without television and internet, rumors about what was probably an innocent disagreement between two people spread like a virus, morphing into a two-day terrorist attack, founded in hysterical fear—for whites, that the Black people they had historically killed and suppressed with impunity were finally striking back—fueling one of the ugliest events of mass killing (more than 300 citizens) and destruction (more than 1,400 homes and businesses burned; 10,000 people left homeless)—complete with machine gunfire and an aerial fire-bomb attack—in our American history. And how quickly this was erased from taught history is an illumination of systemic racism that cannot be denied.

History, unacknowledged and unhealed, repeats itself and the only mitigating circumstance today is cell phone video. It caught a white woman who made herself hysterical out of her denied racism as she accused a Black bird watcher of something he didn’t do and had no intention of doing. And it caught a white police officer slowly murdering a disabled Black man as he pled for his life.

Sensational lies and the resultant fear morphed into violence then in Tulsa and now in Washington, D.C., in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that attempted to overturn an election result.

But the reason history repeats itself is that it doesn’t just happen and go away—no matter how people may try to ban written accounts. Unacknowledged, it travels in DNA, informing its unwitting carriers’ confusion, fears, and furies.

Both of my parents believed that they could cut off their roots and invent a new family; I suppose I believed some version of that as well. But that simply doesn’t work.

We kids certainly didn’t understand why my parents were so crazy—why the slightest adventure into new territory transformed my mother into a trembling, terrified blob of hysteria, lost and falling through a dark hole; why both she and my father were essentially children in grownup bodies who self-medicated to blunt their pain. But as I learn more specifics of particularly my mother’s history, pre-birth and pre-an itinerant existence, I believe I understand what happened.

I recently received a news account of my grandfather’s jewelry store, courtesy of a cousin who I didn’t know until a couple of years ago because of the fractured history of my mother and father and my own consequent estrangement. Apparently, my grandfather, Mo, was a fighter. My mother had told me that as a young man, he explored the world, buying antiques, which he spent the rest of his life selling—traveling from place to place to buyers. The information I got from my new cousin tells a slightly different story:

Before he moved to Tulsa in 1918, Mo had a jewelry store in Long Island, New York, where his customers had a habit of not paying their bills. In frustration and in preparation for closing his store and moving across the country, Mo threatened to publish the names of his debtors if they did not pay up. They paid. He then took out an ad saying they’d paid and he was abandoning his jewelry business to farm pigs in Oklahoma—just the kind of dark sarcasm that I grew up with.

Three months after Mo had procured a 10-year lease on a new store in downtown Tulsa, the landlord began to harass him to leave—ostensibly to charge more and/or get a more acceptable (whatever that means) tenant—employing increasingly violent tactics. After fighting for three years, Mo liquidated his stock at a loss, vacated the premises, and sued for damages, a case that went up to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where he lost in 1923 for failure to file a brief.

Why? My guess is that all this harassment—in Tulsa and Long Island—had roots in antisemitism. The decades of resentment aimed at this flamboyant Jew with a decidedly “ethnic” name exhausted the man. So by 1923, now with a wife and two small children, he’d had enough. And by the time a court filing was due, he was long gone from Tulsa and well into his peripatetic life style—becoming the proverbial “wandering Jew.”

Likewise, the Black citizens of Greenwood filed lawsuits, but neither they nor their heirs have ever received restitution from a government that kept changing the rules, and as of July 2023 an Oklahoma judge dismissed with prejudice the case of three remaining survivors, aged 102 to 109. On October 10 of this year, the 102-year-old, Hughes Van Ellis, died, leaving two 109-year-olds with one last chance to go before the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

When the authority keeps changing the rules to obtain justice, there is no way to keep up, let alone win. Eventually people get worn out and simply cannot fight anymore or die, and that is exactly what the abusive authority is counting on. And, unabated, the trauma continues.

My mother claimed that, as a child, she never knew where she was, what school she was attending, or how to get home from that school. Her brother, one year older, became her caretaker in that regard, and as adults, their relationship was a closed system that nobody else could truly penetrate—fraught with the kinds of pathology that are listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). 

As far back as I can remember, I clung to the notion that if I could just survive the insanity that surrounded me and become an adult on my own, I’d be okay.

I survived but it took years of therapy to even approach okay, and it is only now, at age 72, that I and my formerly estranged older sister are connecting the dots of our tumultuous upbringing.

It is my belief that those dots begin more than 100 years ago, as the world around my pregnant grandmother exploded, flooding stress hormone into my in-utero mother, just after my grandfather had lost his business, leading the family to flee Tulsa and imbue in my young mother a shattered sense of home and no idea how to get there. Having experienced the craziness and anger and hypervigilant stress that are this legacy’s repercussions, I can testify to the fact that choices and decisions and lies have an impact that travels like the concentric circles of a boulder thrown into water. 

In her September 17, 2023, “Letters from an American” newsletter, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Republican administration’s barring a whistleblower’s complaint from reaching Congress and the consequent Trump impeachment hearings: “The question at the heart of the four years since then has been whether the rule of law on which the United States of America was founded will survive.”

The only thing that can heal historic and very personal trauma is acknowledgement, truth, and justice—all of which must inform the law.

Postscript: The case that had evoked the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre—a 16-year-old white girl’s accusation of a Black janitor—was eventually dismissed when the white girl requested he not be prosecuted, and subsequently there is no record of the janitor or the elevator operator, as they disappeared—together as boyfriend and girlfriend in an inhospitable world, or as two more lost souls adrift in the wake of the explosion? We’ll never know.

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