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Fire in Beulah Fire in Beulah is a chronicle of race, greed, and moral choice in the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush. At its center is the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside, an oil wildcatter's high-strung wife who escaped from a hardscrabble childhood, and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful. Both are caught in the relentless currents of family and violence. Their juxtaposing stories-and those of others close to them-unfold against a volatile backdrop of fear, hate, and lynchings that climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which whites burn the city's prosperous black section to the ground. The riot becomes the crucible that melds and tests each of the characters; their story is the American story of race, a tale that declares the simple truth that we are irrevocably tied to one another. "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 "In Rilla Askew's tinderbox of a novel, racial distrust runs deep as marrow in the Oklahoma of the 1920s. Black and white Oklahomans eye one another with deeply embedded trepidation, moving like partners in an uneasy dance where they think they know each other too well, but don't really know each other at all...What clearly compels Askew is that indelible stain on our psyche, the great American dilemma of race that vexes us still...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 "Superb...with great passion and conviction, Askew has turned the story of the riot into a work of compelling fiction that is nevertheless true to the basic facts of an American tragedy." -The Baltimore Sun "Askew has crafted a gripping drama, infusing this novel with the rich details of human dilemmas...There are no pat machinations here...Fire in Beulah touches on the substance of morality and the composition of the human spirit, underscoring the fact that our lives transcend perceived boundaries." -Black Issues Book Review "An unflinching, yet redemptive story of America...Fire in Beulah delves deeply into the troubled history of blacks and whites in America, emerging with scenes so poignant and painfully rendered as to inspire comparisons with the greatest chroniclers of the race line that snakes through our history: Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison." -The St. Louis Riverfront Times "In an arresting examination of race and heritage, Askew mixes historical fact with compelling fiction...[her] prose-rich, leisurely, graceful-engages all the senses and encloses the reader in a bell jar of heat, hate, and budding violence." -Publishers Weekly "Askew is skilled at characterization and description, and the reader viscerally feels the anger, evil, fear, anxiety, tension, grief and love of the characters." -Library Journal Viking |
Rilla Askew Rilla Askew was born in southeastern Oklahoma in 1951, the descendent of coal miners and sharecroppers, bootleggers and Baptist deacons, coon hunters, school teachers, Choctaws and Cherokees, one deputy county sheriff, and a long line of pioneer women, all of whom make their way in one form or another into her fiction. She 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.
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