Angel of Greenwood
Randi Pink’s brand new YA historical fiction, Angel of Greenwood (2021), weaves a moving, powerful tale of two teenagers, Angel Hill and Isaiah Wilson, coming of age in the successful Black community of Greenwood (abutting white Tulsa, Oklahoma). It is the year 1921 and the novel opens with both Angel and Isaiah wrapping up the high school year, arranging summer work, and facing the sadness of losing a father on their own. The scheme of the fantastic high school English teacher, Miss Ferris, which involves a three-wheeled bicycle and the use of her extensive, personal library, brings Isaiah and Angel together.
For all the similarities between them, Angel and Isaiah are wildly different as well. Pink’s novel is one-part love story, but also one-part ode to both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. In Angel of Greenwood, these giants of Black American history and writing take up their place alongside literary works like Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden. Written word, and its power to inform, inspire, and connect people, punctuates Pink’s novel, and creates complicated and thought-provoking layers to this teen historical fiction.
At its heart, Angel of Greenwood, is the story of two teenagers finding themselves and each other as summer vacation beckons. These fictional characters live in the historic, vibrant Black community of Greenwood, known then as Black Wall Street, because its businesses and families thrived in the post-WWI years. The freedom with which Isaiah and Angel access education, medicine, and love, demonstrates Greenwood’s success. Then, on June 1, 1921, all the success and happiness of Greenwood burned as white residents of Tulsa rioted and destroyed thirty-five city blocks in twenty-four hours. In addition to the destruction of businesses and homes, building and institutions, hundreds lost their lives, and countless more were left to mourn their dead friends and family members. This isn’t fiction; this is fact.
Perhaps the most severe tragedy is that the Tulsa Race Riot, as it has been termed in the last twenty years, went entirely unknown for eighty years. Anyone growing up in my generation never heard mention of Greenwood, Black Wall Street, or the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 in our American history classes. It wasn’t even mentioned in my seminar-level American Social History classes at university. I knew nothing of Tulsa’s tragic riot until books like Red at the Bone began to hint at that dark history. And now, nearly exactly one-hundred years after Greenwood’s tragedy, books like Randi Pink’s Angel of Greenwood, will teach new generations the truth of Tulsa’s 1921 Race Riot. It will also teach them, no doubt, the power of mercy alongside truth, as we Americans attempt to make a more equitable, just, and antiracist future for our own children—Black, Brown, white, and mixed race.
I applaud the craft, the message, and the history that is the soul of Randi Pink’s moving novel, and I encourage everyone to spend time with this book. After the novel’s close, Pink includes an author’s note and acknowledgements section, in which she lists thirty “Black people” who came before her and “dreamed of their own versions” of “a simple, self-sustaining Black community where two Black teens got to freely fall in love” (285, 283). She concludes this list by goading others to write their stories, or warns she’ll do it (a promise I sincerely hope Pink makes good on). The book ends with a “Facts of the Attack” section in which Pink provides the history of what happened in Greenwood and Tulsa, in late May, early June of 1921. She also and the ways this history is beginning to be explored, investigated, and shared.
A Few Great Passages:
“‘Mercy and truth,’ he said as he balanced his lemonade between his frail knees. ‘No such thing as mercy without truth or truth without mercy. God granted them both to us all. And they work together like a bird on a breeze’” (1-2).
“‘My fight is nearly done, Angel, my love,’ he said with a bouncing, quivering grin. ‘Yours in beginning, and for that, I am sorry. I wish for you mercy. I pray for you truth. I long for you the peace of sitting on a porch swing beside a man who loves you more than life itself. But I sense trouble on those winds. We’ve been dodging it for a time just like the swift in the soapberry. It’s coming dear, child. I’d swear it is’” (2-3).
“The hardest of truths was that the conflict inside him was placed on him by humanity, and the deepest weakness was he wanted to succumb to it. To give in tot eh perception of what society thought he should be — more like Muggy Little Jr. — interested only in the pleasures of now and uncaring for the steadiness of his people’s future. He wasn’t like Du Bois at all. He wasn’t even like Booker T. Washington. No revolutionary cared so much how they were seen within the flawed world. They only cared for repairing it. They would lay down their lives to make an attempt at valuable change, not tease tears in a tiny toilet over kissing a girl” (77).
“‘I can already see that you may well believe every word from Du Bois’s lips was placed there by God himself, and to that, I caution you. He is just a man. Which means he will disappoint you’” (99).
“High school was a tricky place, after all. A place of confusion and judgement. A place of endless searching for oneself but never quite finding the destination” (108).
“She held Up From Slavery in the air. [. . .] ‘This is no book. Not in the same way Du Bois presents a book, it’s not. This is a diary — both extremely personal and woefully terrifying in its raw honesty. Washington present the world as it existed for a boy born property to a mother likely taken against her will [. . .] No boy should have to know such evil exists so early in life. Or worse, be descended from it’” (131).
“Then Angel looked at her father. He was smiling at her. His was a smile that could light up a dull room and bring joy back when there was none to speak of. The same smile she’d seen on every Sunday afternoon when her mother set his heaping plate of food in front of him. The exact same one Angel had seen when she sat for hours listing to his philosophies and wisdoms. The smile that gave her hope when the whole world seemed to think she was too strange to exist” (219).
“‘They brought us here’ —Isaiah stood over them like a father among sons—’to build a country from nothing. To work the lands, shepherd the sheep, and, dear God, to breed. They did not, however, anticipate us’” (278-279).
“‘Savior. Teacher. Leader. There are not enough words to describe such a woman. She will never allow herself to be defeated by anyone, not even me. She is what our future looks like — brave and brilliant and still holding tight to the powerful forces that only come from one single source, love’” (280).
Bibliography:
Pink, Randi. Angel of Greenwood. Feiwel & Friends: 2021.
