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NOVL Excerpt: Dreamland Burning

— Rowan—

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.

But today my car is totaled and I have an eleven- thirty appointment with the district attorney at the county courthouse. So I walked.

Mom and Dad wanted to come home and pick me up after their morning meetings. I convinced them the walk would help me clear my head, and it did. Especially when I got to the place where he died.

Honestly, I’d been a little worried that being there again would mess me up. So to keep myself calm, I imagined how things must have looked the night Will and Joseph and Ruby tried to survive. There’s this old map of Tulsa online, and the streets I walked along to get here are on it. In 1921, the Arkansas River cut them off to the south, just like it does today. But back then they ran north into trees and fields and farms. There aren’t any farms now, only highways and concrete.

It was probably quieter a hundred years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean better. I understand now that history only moves forward in a straight line when we learn from it. Otherwise it loops past the same mistakes over and over again.

That’s why I’m here, wearing one of Mom’s knee- length business skirts, sitting on a bench near the court- house, waiting to tell the DA what happened. I want to stop just one of those loops. Because it’s like Geneva says: The dead always have stories to tell. They just need the living to listen.

Everything started the first Monday of summer vacation. It was my only chance at a real day off, because the next morning I was supposed to start the internship Mom had arranged. It was the kind of thing that would look good on college applications and get me recommendation letters from people with MD after their names. I didn’t especially want to be locked up in a sterilized research lab all summer, but I never bothered to look for something better. The way things stood, I had one day all my own to sleep late, eat Nutella with a spoon, and send James a thousand texts about nothing.

Only I didn’t get to do any of that.

At 7 am on the dot, a construction crew pulled into the driveway and started slamming truck doors and banging tools around. Hundred-year-old windows do a crap job of keeping things out, so even though the men spoke quietly, I could hear their murmurs and smell the smoke from their cigarettes.

After a while, the side gate squeaked open and the guys carried their tools to the servants’ quarters behind our house. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, that sounds a lot more impressive than it is. I mean, yes, we have money, but no one in my family has had live-in servants since my great-great-grandparents. After they died, my great-uncle Chotch moved into the back house. Years earlier, when Chotch was two, he’d wandered out of the kitchen and fallen into the pool. By the time the gardener found him and got him breathing again, he was blue and brain-damaged. He’d lived, though, and was good at cut- ting hair. Dad says he gave free trims to all the workers at the oil company my great-great-grandfather founded, right up until the day he died. That was in 1959.

The only things living in the back house since then have been holiday decorations, old furniture, Uncle Chotch’s Victrola, and termites. Then, last Christmas, Mom decided that even though there are three unused bedrooms in the main house, we needed a guest cottage, too.

Dad fought her on it, I think because he’s a nice liberal white guy weirded out by the idea that the back house was built for black servants. If it had been up to him, he would have let it rot.

Mom was not okay with that.

Her great-grandfather had been the son of a maid, raised in the back house of a mansion two blocks over. He’d gone on to graduate first in his class from Morehouse College and become one of Tulsa’s best-known black attorneys. Mom went to law school to carry on the family legal tradition and ended up owning a back house. For her, it mattered.

“I won’t stand by and let a perfectly good building crumble to dust,” she’d argued. There had been some closed-door negotiations between her and Dad after that, then a few days where they didn’t talk to each other at all. In the end, Dad started referring to the back house as his “man cave,” and while he shopped for gaming systems and a pool table, Mom interviewed contractors.

That was six months ago. The renovations started in May.

I lay there listening to the workmen’s saw, figuring I had maybe three minutes before our grumpy neighbor, Mr. Metzidakis, started banging on the front door to complain about the noise.

Only he didn’t have to.

The saw stopped on its own. The gate creaked open.

Equipment clunked against the truck bed. And the men talked so fast and low that I could only catch four words.

Huesos viejos. Policía. Asesinato.

Which, yes, I understood—thank you, Señora Markowitz and tres años de español. And which, yes, was enough to get me out of bed and over to the window in time to see their truck back out onto the street and drive away.

Something strange was going on, and I wanted to know what. So I snagged a pair of flip-flops and headed for the back house.

It was a disaster inside. A week before, the workmen had demolished the ceiling and pulled all the toxic asbestos insulation. After that, they’d hacked out big chunks of termite-tunneled plaster from the walls and ripped the old Formica countertops off the cabinets. A gritty layer of construction dust coated everything, including Uncle Chotch’s old Victrola in the corner. At least they covered it with plastic, I thought, stepping around boxes of tile and grout on my way to the fresh-cut hole in the floor at the back of the room.

Only once I got there, I forgot about the Victrola completely and understood exactly what had sent the workmen running.

Huesos viejos. Policía. Asesinato.

Old bones.

Police.

Murder.

— William—

I wasn’t good when the trouble started. Wasn’t particularly bad, either, but I had potential. See, Tulsa in 1921 was a town where boys like me roamed wild. Prohibition made Choctaw beer and corn whiskey more tempting than ever, and booze wasn’t near the worst vice available.

My friend Cletus Hayes grew up in a house two doors down from mine. His father was a bank executive muckety-muck with a brand-new Cadillac automobile and friends on the city council. For that reason alone, Mama and Pop generally let Clete’s knack for mischief slide. He and I got along fine eighty percent of the time, and kept each other’s company accordingly.

One thing we always did agree on was that misbehaving was best done in pairs. Plenty of the roustabout gangs running Tulsa’s streets would have taken us in, but I always figured the two of us 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. That’s why Clete and me kept to ourselves. We weren’t angels, but we weren’t hardened or hollow, either. Of course, even fair-to-middling boys like us veered off the righteous path from time to time. Some worse than others.

I was only seventeen, but had the shoulders and five- o’clock shadow of a full-grown man. More than one girl at Tulsa Central High School had her eye on me, and that’s the truth. None of them stood a chance, though; Adeline Dobbs had stolen my heart way back in second grade, and the fact that she was a year older and the prettiest girl in school didn’t dampen my hopes of winning her in the least.

She was a beauty, Addie was; slim and graceful as prairie grass, with black hair and eyes like a summer sky. I dreamed about that girl, about her clean smell and the peek of her lashes underneath her hat brim. And I loved her for her kindness, too. Boys followed her about like pups, but she always managed to deflect their affections without wounding their pride.

For years I loved her from afar, and spent no small amount of energy convincing myself it was only a matter of time before she started loving me back. Maybe that’s why what happened at the Two-Knock Inn that cool March night tore me up so bad.

I was on my third glass of Choc and feeling fine when Addie arrived. Clete was there, too, dancing with a pretty, brown-skinned girl. For when it came to the fairer sex, a sweet smile and a pair of shapely legs were all it took to turn him colorblind. Not that it mattered at the Two-Knock. Jim Crow laws may have kept Negroes and whites separated in proper Tulsa establishments, but in juke joints and speakeasies out on the edge of town, folks didn’t care about your skin color near so much as they did the contents of your wallet.

The Two-Knock was a rough place, though. A place where girls like Addie didn’t belong. Even so, the sight of her coming through that door took my breath away. She was a vision: crimson dress, lips painted to match, eyes all wild and bright. Clete saw her, too, and made his way to my side after the song ended and poked me in the ribs, saying, “Lookee who just walked in!”

I didn’t have breath enough to respond, so Clete jabbed me again. Said, “What’re you waiting for, Will? Go talk to her!”

I wanted to. Lord, how I wanted to. But Addie was too good for the Two-Knock, and I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with her being there.

When I didn’t move, Clete rolled his eyes and socked me on the shoulder. Said, “This is it, dummy! If you don’t go over and buy her a drink, you’re the biggest jackass I know.”

To which I replied that Addie didn’t drink. And Clete snorted, “We’re in a speakeasy, knucklehead. She didn’t come for tea.”

I shrugged. Signaled the bartender for another glass of Choc and slugged most of it down soon as it arrived. Then I looked back at Addie and asked Clete if he really thought I should go over.

“Hell yes!” he said.

So I puffed up my chest like the big dumb pigeon I was and got to my feet. Which was when the front door opened, and everything changed.

The man who walked in was tall and handsome, muscled all over, and browner than boot leather. Something about him shone. Drew your eyes like he was the one thing in the world worth looking at. He only had eyes for Addie, though, and she gave him a smile like sunrise when he sat down beside her.

I dropped back onto the barstool.

“You better chase him off,” Clete said. But my throat was tight, and I only just managed to mumble, “Nothin’ I can do.”

“You kiddin’ me?” he said. “That boy’s out of line!”

I stayed quiet and stared at Addie’s pale hand perched atop the table. She and the man were talking. Smiling. Laughing. With every word, his fingers moved closer to hers.

Hate balled up inside me like a brass-knuckled fist. And when he slowly, slowly ran his fingertip across her skin, every foul emotion in the world churned deep down in the depths of my belly. Glancing sideways at a white woman was near enough to get Negroes lynched in Tulsa. Shot, even, in the middle of Main Street at noon, and with no more consequence than a wink and a nudge and a slap on the back. And God help me, that’s exactly what I wanted for the man touching my Addie.

I wanted him dead.

Thanks for reading the first two chapters of Jennifer Latham’s thought-provoking and powerful new novel. Like what you read? Be sure to check out Dreamland Burning when it releases on Tuesday, February 21, 2017!

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