Interview: Angel of Greenwood author Randi Pink shines light on Tulsa Massacre

Randi Pink’s YA historical novel Angel of Greenwood renders a gorgeous and moving love story amidst the tragic backdrop of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Most Americans have likely never heard of Tulsa, Oklahoma, let alone the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Author Randi Pink’s latest historical young adult novel, Angel of Greenwood, seeks to change that.

For decades, due to the active burial and criminal secrecy of white supremacists and Klan members in Tulsa, no one knew what had happened outside of those who survived and their descendants.

While Tulsa has gained recent attention over the last year, first due to the Tulsa Massacre’s dramatization in the popular and critically acclaimed Watchmen limited series on HBO, and secondly, thanks to hosting President Trump’s first campaign rally during the pandemic on the eve of Juneteenth.

Now, a national spotlight shines on Tulsa, as the local government, for the first time in nearly a century, works to uncover the truth about its past.

All of this historical context underpins the incredible grace and tragedy at the heart of Angel of Greenwood, a historical young adult novel about the Historic Greenwood District in Tulsa in which the Massacre took place.

Angel of Greenwood is primarily a love story in two parts:  about a boy and girl, Isaiah and Angel, and about the love between Greenwood and its residents.

First, Isaiah and Angel:  Isaiah is your classic “bad boy” while Angel is practically perfect. While he formerly took part in her bullying and teasing as kids, he’s pulled to her unrelenting kindness and goodness. On top of this, their chemistry is palpable and grounded in their dreams for the future.

They disagree politically and see the world through different ideological lenses, but beyond their growing attraction and affection for each other, they the most important thing that binds them together is their love of Greenwood.

Pink portrays Greenwood as an idyllic and magical place rarely seen in historical young adult literature at large, but especially due to the dominant white canon.

Whether or not you are familiar with Tulsa and its history, you’ll be swept away by the lush description of Greenwood’s tree-lined streets, ice cream shops, and close friendships among neighbors.

Even as Isaiah and Angel’s love story advances, all of these elements weave together to take us to the conclusion we know must happen, foreshadowed by headers counting down toward the Massacre.

The climax of the book is utterly devastating, tragic, and heartbreaking. Pink reclaims untold stories from the past, giving names and faces to the lives stolen a century ago in moving and vivid detail, while still managing to engender hope and survival, a message that will certainly hit differently for different readers.

Upon the book’s release, and a few months before the anniversary of the Massacre, Culturess sat down with Pink to discuss her timely and incredibly crafted book. Angel of Greenwood is available January 12, 2021 wherever books are sold.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Culturess:  How did you arrive at the structure of Angel of Greenwood, both the alternating points of view and the before and after timeline?

Randi Pink:  I rooted the first portion of the novel before the Massacre because I needed to honor the marvel of the Greenwood District. The miraculous fact that Black folks in the early 1900s, some formerly enslaved, built the impossible – a town rivalling in prosperity any other of its time.

A town where Black children walked tree-lined streets to buy homemade ice cream from the Black-owned parlor sandwiched between the Black-owned barber shop and the Black-owned grocery.

A racist mob set out to destroy something so precious, and I couldn’t allow the destroyers to hold onto the megaphone for the entirety of Angel of Greenwood. I needed readers to understand not only the tragedy of attempting to destroy such a miracle, but also the triumph it took to create it in the first place.

The strength of spirit to rise above in the shadows of a hatred so pure–I needed to honor that spirit by allowing folks to revel in the beautiful, brilliant, whole Greenwood for a time.

I needed Greenwood to be more than the Massacre.

As for the points of view, so many households were lost there in the summer of 1921. So many stories never told. I chose to alternate points of view because I wanted the reader to see Greenwood from multiple sets of eyes.

Sending my characters into history, especially a history as intentionally buried as the Greenwood Massacre, I felt that I was giving a small voice to something long ago lost. I needed that voice to speak as thoroughly as possible. For that reason, I chose voices.

Culturess:  How much research did you do and how long did it take you?

Pink:  When I first heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre, I was so angry that I hadn’t been taught about it in school that I set out to read every book I could find on the topic.

I devoured works by the historian, Hannibal Johnson, including Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District, and also Tim Madigan’s book, The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

I searched and read every article and listened to every NPR story and podcast out there. I dove into the Tulsa Historical Society website, which has been meticulously archived and organized.

My research lasted nearly a year before I felt I’d scratched the surface. Actually, I’m still researching since possible mass graves from the Massacre are just now, one-hundred-years later, being investigated and excavated.

Culturess:  Isaiah and Angel ascribe to differing political perspectives in the form of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington respectively. Can you talk about the role of politics in the book and how it mirrors or differs from today’s landscape?

Pink:  While conceptualizing Angel of Greenwood, I toiled with how to address the post Reconstruction Era debate of Black folks moving forward after hundreds of years of enslavement.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, that was front of mind for Black citizens, and I couldn’t set the novel in that time without discussing the active presence of politics. Then, I read Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois, followed directly by Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington and I immediately had my answer.

After reading their works, I realized that W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington were seeking the same destination, but butting heads along the way on how to get there. Angel and Isaiah are reflecting this conflict.

DuBois, like Isaiah, believed in raising his fist in protest, while Washington, like Angel, believed in a slower, steadier path toward eventual change. Neither is wrong. Neither should be dismissed. Both are required to hammer away at something as embedded in the landscape of history as human enslavement.

In the moment, such debates look messy and uncomfortable, but when history looks back on them, they were healthy and necessary. For an institution as multidimensional and complex as slavery, there must be more than one idea on how to move forward.

I tried very hard to get this concept across through Angel and Isaiah — Black folks are not, and never have been, a monolith.

As for how this mirrors our current political landscape, there is nothing new under the sun, is there? Well, maybe Twitter. God help us.

Culturess:  Muggy is a fascinating character, a sort of shifting symbol within Greenwood. Without spoiling anything, can you speak about what you were trying to accomplish with his role in the story?

Pink:  Many years ago, I was told about the Three Second Test. Here’s how it was explained to me:

“Randi, life is about entrances, and you only have three seconds to make an impression upon someone new, after that, it’s too late. They’ve already sized you up.”

I’ve received thousands of nuggets of advice over the years, but for whatever reason, that one stuck. As I wrote Muggy, I reflected on that. Without giving too much away, we size up Muggy as soon as Isaiah mentions his name.

We believe we know who he is. We silently encourage Isaiah to keep distance from him. We assume that Isaiah, the poet and avid reader and lover of the sweetest girl in town, would be better off without troublemaker Muggy as a best friend.

Every community has a Muggy. A kid with an exterior so thick and seemingly impenetrable that they instill fear into anyone near them. But typically, kids like Muggy are the most sensitive among us. We would never know that though. He would fail miserably our Three Second Tests.

Culturess:  In your author’s note, you mentioned you originally came up with the idea for the novel by envisioning your own Wakanda and then discovered the history of Greenwood.

What role does historical fiction, and specifically historical young adult fiction, have in shining a light on history that has been purposefully buried?

Pink:  To me, history is a point of passion. I want to know why things are the way they are and I’m willing to dig, dive, and investigate until I figure that out. But even I recall some history courses being unbearably boring.

Historical fiction, however, can be a fantastic jumping off point toward lively discussion. Especially now, when in-person school models are shifting to hybrid or home-based or who knows what’s next, kids need more than assigned chapters to read and memorize.

And what better way to introduce them to the writings of DuBois and Washington and the Greenwood Massacre than to read an immersive story such as Angel of Greenwood?

As for the history of the Massacre, I hope that Angel of Greenwood encourages readers to learn more about what happened there in 1921. The Tulsa Race Massacre has been intentionally omitted from our history books for too long and it will take all of us to bring it back into the light of history.

Culturess:  Near the end of the novel, Isaiah says, “It was not our homes or our businesses that the white men were trying to steal away that fateful night. No, it was the knowing they saw building up within our bodies.”

This echoes a similar argument about the violence of white supremacy in Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me:  “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

This May will tragically mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. What truth do you most hope (white) readers will recognize about racism that has been ignored over the last century?

Pink:  The social acrobatics that Black people go through on a daily basis is an unexplainable thing. I will try my best, but I will fall short:

I love to walk. I walk so much that I walk holes in my shoes. I walk to work out impossible questions and ideas. I’ve actually walked contemplating this very thing–my hope for white readers–and I struggle with a succinct answer.

Maybe, as an entry point, I can share a complex example of something that happens on those walks.

Two people pushing strollers on a skinny sidewalk can create a strange game of social chicken. We spot each other from a distance, size up the width of the walkway, and the closer we get, the more awkward this interaction becomes.

For me, pushing the stroller towards a white mother though, a conflict happens on the inside. In the past, the expectation would have been for me to step aside and allow the other mother to pass. Bow my head, tip my hat and call her ma’am.

Flash forward to today. If I pull my stroller to the grass first, which I usually do, I wonder if I’ve done this as a result of some deep-seated, long held social expectation or am I simply being courteous? How are my son and daughter viewing this? How is the other mother viewing this?

I hesitate to share such a thing because I can imagine eyes rolling upon reading it, but these tiny, seemingly forgettable interactions happen hundreds of times per day in the lives of Black people.

The past lingers whether we accept that or not.

That’s one hope I have for white readers–to understand that our past has shaped us in ways that cannot be adequately articulated.

Angel of Greenwood is available wherever books are sold.