Fire in Beulah - by Rilla Askew (Paperback)

About the Book

During the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush of the 1920s, Althea Whiteside and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful, are caught in the relentless currents of family and violence. Their stories unfold against a backdrop of fear, hate, and lynchings that climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which the city's prosperous black section is burned to the ground.

Book Synopsis

"A haunting, engrossing portrait of two families - one white, one Black - whose lives are woven together and then shattered" (The Washington Post) by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Oil-boom opulence, fear, hate, and lynchings are the backdrop for this riveting novel about one of the worst incidents of violence in American history. Althea Whiteside, an oil-wildcatter's high-strung white wife, and her enigmatic Black maid, Graceful, share a complex connection during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush. Their juxtaposing stories - and those of others close to them - unfold as tensions mount to a violent climax in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, during which whites burned the city's prosperous Black neighborhood to the ground. The massacre becomes the crucible that melds and tests each of the character in this masterful exploration of the American race story and the ties that bind us irrevocably to one another.

Review Quotes

Praise for Fire in Beulah:

"A haunting, engrossing portrait of two families - one white, one black - whose lives are woven together and then shattered . . . Askew's final hundred pages are a cinematic, apocalyptic denouement, as all the characters are swept up in the terrible racial tidal wave."
--The Washington Post

"Askew's tinderbox of a novel is suffused with an almost unbearable tension . . . a moving, troubling story . . . Askew nails as well as any author in recent memory the claustrophobia of racism, the devastation of hate and the way it sucks all the air out of the world."
--The Boston Globe

Compelling, intense and frightening . . . recalls and recreates a devastating if largely forgotten historical event in order to explore the awful consequences of human failure."
--Chicago Tribune

"A devastating story of greed, violence, and destruction . . . Askew's novel is riveting and remarkably relevant."
--The Portland Oregonian

About the Author

Rilla Askew is the author of Strange Business, a collection of stories, and of the novel The Mercy Seat, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award and winner of the Western Heritage Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002 and was chosen for Oklahoma's statewide reading program in 2007. Other titles include the novels Harpsong and Kind of Kin and a collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place. Askew's essays and short fiction have appeared in AGNI, Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. In 2009 Askew received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.