BLACK WALL STREET BURNING

In Kemp’s new historical novel, a young girl’s coming-of-age story provides a window into Tulsa’s Black community in the early 20th century.

Olivia Truluck is born to a family of Black farmers working their 41 acres in southwest Missouri. She spends much of her time talking to her imaginary friends and dreaming of a more exciting existence in St. Louis or Kansas City. Ten-year-old Olivia gets the chance sooner than she expected, however, after the Ku Klux Klan burns down the family house, sending the Trulucks looking for a new home. Along with a few other Black families, the Trulucks follow a former slave–turned-preacher known as Brother Sin-Eater, who had a revelation that God wants the community to strike out into the wilderness for the land of milk and honey. The Trulucks do end up finding a promised land of sorts…over the state border in Tulsa. Olivia’s mother starts a thriving grocery business, and the Greenwood District—as the city’s Black neighborhood came to be known—quickly grows into a prosperous community, attracting the likes of Booker T. Washington. Unfortunately for Olivia and the rest of the Trulucks, the same forces that drove them out of Missouri lurk on the edges of their new home as well. Kemp’s prose, as narrated by Olivia, is lively and textured. Here Olivia describes her feelings about finding a boyfriend: “Hogs are sometimes defined as being selfish when it comes to food they eat, and they live in squalor. Even though the image of a boy going ‘whole hog’ on my body made me want to vomit, it didn’t deter me from trying to find out what all the hubbub was about when it came to courting.” The book does an admirable job balancing the good and bad of history. While the reader comes to expect atrocities, there is also a lightness and optimism to the novel. The richness with which Kemp imbues Olivia, her family, and her community elevates them beyond the purely tragic and into something more eternal.

A well-crafted historical novel with a plucky protagonist.