Angel of Greenwood tells the story of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre through the eyes of two young people.
The story begins on Thursday, May 19, twelve days before the riot. Angel Hill lives on Greenwood Avenue with her mother and her father who is dying. Angel loves to help people as she's certain God has put her on the earth to help others. Angel helps her mother care for her father, and she helps her neighbours including Mrs. Nichelle who has a fussy baby.
Angel recognizes Muggy as the real mean one, whereas Isaiah "was kinder...He simply didn't stand for anything. Isaiah went along to get along..." and that leads Angel not to respect him.
From his bedroom window, seventeen-year-old Isaiah Wilson watches a group of sixteen white boys on the other side of the tracks. Angel Hill, walking towards them is accosted by the group and although she initially stands up to them, she flees. Isaiah wants to stand and yell at them, but instead he hides behind the curtains. Angel leaves behind some kind of walking contraption that one of the boys destroys in anger.
On the following Sunday, Isaiah is hauled to Mount Zion Baptist Sunday school by his mother. But far from being bored as usual, Isaiah is entranced by the worship dancing of Angel Hill.
The next day, while walking to school with his best friend Muggy Little Jr., Isaiah is distracted. Muggy's father owns a successful butcher shop in Greenwood and his family along with many others in the district have helped Isaiah's family since his father's death in the Great War. but Muggy's father doesn't have a good reputation in the community, instead he is considered a "notorious double dealer with both his butcher business and his family". He flaunts women and his behaviour has Muggy beginning to have doubts about his father.
Isaiah knows his friend is not a good person but can't seem to break free of him. He joins Muggy in his pranks, even when he knows those pranks are hurtful and embarrassing to others. During the day, Isaiah follows Muggy out to the back bleacher instead of going to Mrs. Greene's class to write his Latin test.When Isaiah daydreams about Angel, Muggy burns him on his forearm with a matchstick and threatens to tell Angel that Isaiah likes her.
After English Literature class, Miss Ferris pulls Isaiah and Angel together and reveals that she's starting a sort of mobile library. She has a three-wheel bike and she needs someone to ride it and someone to hand out the books. Miss Ferris offers them the job with a pay of five dollars a week. Isaiah immediately accepts but Angel is reluctant because it means working with Isaiah whom she knows is not a nice boy.
However, that changes when Donna Mae Bullock, at the urging of Muggy, steals Isaiah's journal one evening. Donna Mae shows up in Isaiah's bedroom to kiss him, but her real purpose is to steal his journal. However, when Isaiah manages to get Donna Mae to talk about herself she realizes what she's done and gets Muggy to return the journal, but not before Muggy reads to Angel the poem Isaiah wrote about her.
Eventually Angel accepts Miss Ferris's job offer and both Angel and Isaiah get to work on fixing up the decrepit three wheel bike. As love blossoms between the two, storm clouds are brewing over Greenwood, and neither Angel nor Isaiah know just how much life is about to change.
Discussion
Angel of Greenwood chronicles the days leading up to the Tulsa massacre of June 1 1921, through the eyes of two teenagers, Angel Hill and Isaiah Wilson as they fall in love. Author Randi Pink initially wrote a story of two Black teens who fall in love in a neighbourhood where it was safe to do so in peace. According to the Author's Note at the back of the novel, her original story was Pink's "My Wakanda"book. However, in a conversation with a friend, Pink learned that the place she had dreamed of someday existing and had written about, really did once exist in the form of Greenwood, a district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Greenwood, a thriving, close-knit Black community that had become known as Black Wall street, was looted and burned to the ground by white rioters. The riot was triggered by events the preceding day in which a black man was arrested in an incident that occurred in an elevator with a white woman. At the end of the looting and burning, thirty-five blocks that comprised Greenwood lay in charred ruins and over one hundred people were dead. Pink decided to set her story against the backdrop of the Tulsa massacre and it's fortunate for young readers that she did so, because Angel of Greenwood is a remarkable novel.
Most of the novel portrays life in Greenwood prior to the riot. Pink does this through the two main characters and the people they meet in their day-to-day lives. The people of Greenwood are hard-working, God-fearing, neighbourly and not unlike people everywhere else and Pink offers a host of diverse characters to flesh out the community. There is Angel Hill, a gifted dancer, whose father is slowly dying from an unknown ailment. Angel is a hard-working girl, who spends time helping others like her neighbour, Mrs. Nichelle by helping her to care for her little baby boy, Michael. There is Isaiah Wilson, whose father died in the Great War, a good student with aspirations of attending college, who writes beautiful poetry. Isaiah seems unable to break away from his friend Muggy Little Jr. whose pranks humiliate and hurt others. Muggy Little Jr., whose father owns the butcher shop, is a bully and struggling to cope with his father's reputation as a liar and a cheat. There is Miss Ferris, the English Literature teacher who channels Isaiah's abilities into poetry and who starts the mobile book library. There is Mrs. Tate whose husband owns the Greenwood pharmacy and whose son Timothy is attending medical school. She has prize-winning junipers but is not known as a pleasant woman. There is Mr. Morris a kind and patient man whose son George now runs their wood-carving shop and Mrs. Turner with her tiny flower shop. Pink's depiction of Greenwood District and its residents, a community where Black Americans are free to live their lives as they want, makes reading about the burning of Greenwood all the more painful.
As Black teenagers coming of age in the early 20th century, Angel and Isaiah want to live their lives like white teenagers in America do, having the same rights as their white counterparts. Their belief as to how to achieve these rights differ. Isaiah favours the ideas of W.E.B. Dubois while Angel believes in Booker T. Washington's ideas. The two men, born in the middle of the nineteenth century became influential leaders in the civil rights movement in the early 20th century. However, they were at odds as to how to achieve equal rights for Black Americans. Washington felt that economic independence was key to Black rights while Dubois championed education and civil rights activism. Dubois' book, The Souls of Black Folks was critical of Washington's approach. Dubois eventually was involved in the formation of the NAACP in 1909 while Washington's influence waned. He died in 1915.
Besides being a novel about a largely forgotten event of racial hatred, Angel of Greenwood also explores the coming of age of Isaiah and Angel and to a lesser extent, Muggy. For Isaiah and Muggy it is a journey to redemption.
Isaiah experiences a transformation from a neighbourhood troublemaker to the person he aspires to be. Isaiah is under the influence of Muggle Little Jr., boy with mean streak who delights in playing humiliating pranks on others. Isaiah knows he shouldn't follow Muggy's lead but he can't seem to stop. Isaiah wants to be different but feels his family is indebted to Muggy's family. "What was he to dare do? Challenge Muggy? Never. If he did, there would be hell to pay."
Isaiah hides the things that matter the most to him from Muggy: his love of poetry and books and reading. He hides the fact that he is in the top tenth percentile and that he has a secret plan to leave Greenwood. And for years he's gone along with bullying Angel Hill and many others. But when Isaiah sees Angel dance at church, his eyes are opened and he begins to change. From this point on, his attraction to Angel is the impetus for change.
It is only when Muggy steals Isaiah's journal of poetry and his college letters of intent to Morehouse and Howard, and in effect Isaiah's plan for success, that he is stirred to confront Muggy at his house. Feeling freed from Muggy and his bad influence, Isaiah wants to be a better person for Angel but the prospect of him having to be responsible for his own behaviour is daunting. "Behave in ways she longed for a man to behave. With Muggy, he was mean. With Angel, he assumed, he would be better, kinder, and more empathetic. But without either, Isaiah was floating along with no leader to lead him. Secretly terrified to lead his own self."
But Isaiah discovers he is able to lead himself, when Muggy hurts Mrs. Tate by revealing something about her son Timothy. He punches Muggy in the face, knocking the bully to the ground and gaining the respect of the community. This event leads Isaiah to make a serious decision about his life, deciding not to be selfish, lazy or unworthy. Isaiah comes to realize that Greenwood is a "... beacon of hope for his people..." and that he would use this gift to help his own people. From this point on, Isaiah begins to redeem himself, and ironically leads Muggy into doing the same.
For Angel, the journey is also about finding herself. Angel believes she has been put on Earth to help others. But as the days pass, she finds herself increasingly wanting something more for herself. These thoughts are stirred by the offer from Miss Ferris of working on the book mobile. Besides helping her parents, there "...was a selfish longing to get away from it all....When she was very small, Angel dreamed only of taking care of others. For the first time, she wanted a few hours per day to do only the thing she wanted to do."
Both Isaiah and Angel struggle with their separate beliefs as to how Black Americans can achieve full civil rights. They debate the ideas of W.E.B Dubois and Booker T. Washington. While debating why a man would return to bondage and slavery at Miss Ferris' over dinner, their teacher explains what the Black community of Greenwood understand compared to Blacks living in the rest of America and what it means to white America.
"We all get one life to live. One chance to make something beautiful of ourselves or to not, that's what we know to be true here in Greenwood. That's the difference between us and them, nothing else. We are no better on the inside. We simply know a Black life can be transformed from that of servitude to that of unmatched intelligence, resourcefulness, creativity, triumph...It's the immaterial knowledge that we, Black people, can be even better that whites if we want to be. And furthermore, much to their dismay, we don't need them to survive. Everyone should possess this knowledge, but the men who stayed in bondage didn't."
Angel of Greenwood is a remarkable novel, well-written, and offering plenty of themes and ideas to further delve into. The tragedy of the Tulsa massacre forms the climax of the novel. With the centenary of the massacre having just passed, Angel of Greenwood is a timely novel offers readers that opportunity Pink supplies her readers with a wealth of sources used in the writing of her novel, as a starting point. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 should be remembered not only for the crime it was, but because as Pink writes, "Inside of every Greenwood home burned that day in 1921, there was a story. Few who experienced it are alive today. Many of those stories will never be told..." Angel of Greenwood does just that.
Book Details:
Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink
New York: Feiwel and Friends 2021
295 pp.
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