The Death of Judgment
A Family Grapples with Its Tragic History
It was May 25th when I rolled into Tulsa after being stranded overnight in Dallas by thunderstorms. I had planned to arrive on the 24th, my birthday, because I was coming home for the first time to the place that forged my paternal family history. The travel mishap had rattled me, and I wanted to settle down in my hotel quickly to steady myself for the rest of the days I would be in town. I had come to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, and would be speaking at some of the planned events and giving interviews about my and my great-grandmother’s book. But my unease sprang from a place beyond the solemnity of the occasion that beckoned visitors to Tulsa this year, or even any nervousness about my public speaking plans. I was afraid of the ghosts that I would find.
My father’s mother, Florence Mary Parrish, was seven years old on May 31, 1921 when she stood at the window of the apartment at 103‑1/2 Greenwood Avenue that she shared with her mother, Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish. Her mother had dismissed the secretarial class she taught in the evening — in addition to her day job teaching at the Hunton Branch of the YMCA — and was reading to relax. The young mother had barely opened her book when her daughter alerted her to a commotion outside on the street. Mary Parrish shushed little Florence Mary, but the little girl was insistent. “Mother, I see men with guns.”
Those words heralded the events of the next 18 hours, which would destroy a whole community and pulverize the foundations of the little girl’s safety and security. Their dwelling was at the mouth of Greenwood — also derisively called Little Africa, although there is no shame in the label — the well-known Black Wall Street where African Americans had built a thriving, though segregated, community at the north end of Tulsa. Spurred by the call from the Tulsa Tribune for a young Black man, Dick Rowland, to be “nabbed” for allegedly attacking a young white woman, Sarah Page, a mob of white vigilantes rampaged through Greenwood shooting, looting or burning people and property. The catastrophe resulted in 10,000 African American homeless, an estimated 300 dead, and millions of dollars in property destruction. Upheaval landed on Florence Mary like the charred bricks that remained from what had been a thriving part of the greater Tulsa metropolis.
That night, the little girl ran with her mother out onto the street to escape the mob — arsonists, drive-by shooters, and machine gunners — who focused their deadly intent on any Black person they came across or hunted down. Mother and daughter also had to avoid the looters who tore through the homes and businesses of their district with larcenous intent, grabbing anything they valued and burning the rest as Black people, fearing death, abandoned their homes without gathering their belongings. On the street, little Florence Mary witnessed the sights, sounds, and smells of war — the nighttime light from the fires, the impact of turpentine bombs and dynamite sticks hurled from the open cockpits of thunderous, low-flying planes, and the burning smell that choked the air. Senses overwhelmed, she ran north with her mother, who wrote, “I took my little girl by the hand and fled out of the west door on Greenwood. I did not take time to get a hat for myself or baby, but started out north on Greenwood, running amidst showers of bullets from the machine gun located in the [granary] and from men who were quickly surrounding our district.”
Growing up in San Francisco, I would overhear my mother and her mother talk about the fact that Granny Florence drank. Drank. The word itself was an indictment that pegged my paternal grandmother as someone unworthy, someone to be shunned. She wasn’t one of the pious, churchgoing Black women who dressed to the nines every Sunday, some of whom clearly derived a certain self-regard from sneering at the “lesser” Black folk. I observed all this, but I loved my Daddy and Granny, who both drank. My mother, raised to abhor drink, feared it and was stingy with permitting us to be around them as kids. My brothers and I spent more time with them as teenagers, my older brother visiting Granny’s care home with our dad, and me visiting with her at Daddy’s house in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood when she came for a visit. She would ask Dad for a drink.
Later, the first time I used the word, Daddy corrected me. He insisted that Granny Florence did not have alcoholism, saying instead that she was a good-timey girl. I was puzzled that he thought it reflected more favorably to say that someone was drawn to good times than to say that person was addicted to alcohol. He wanted to shape what I thought of his mom, but it was he who carried memories that made him defensive. Judgment was not part of my thinking. He was pushing back against something that was not there. My generation had learned that addiction was a disease, and because I wasn’t struggling against past demons, it was a statement rather than an accusation. I did not anticipate his sharp reaction; I simply wanted to know more about my grandmother. The only other time I remember him correcting me so sharply was when I wanted to learn more about his father, who died when my dad was eight years old and his younger brother was six. I prefaced my question with what I thought I knew — that my grandfather was killed in action in Burma in WWII. He said, “He died of a disease,” and I don’t remember much conversation after that. I think he mentioned hydrocephalus, but I was chastised by his agitation and retreated from finding out what I so wanted to know. I did not realize that he probably wanted nothing more than to talk about it, but that he had never acquired enough emotional distance between his adult self and the little eight-year-old boy who lost his dad; he could not speak about it calmly. I let it rest. He socked away those memories, and I did not know how to pry loose from him what he knew and felt.
As for Granny, in my memory, she floats on the periphery rather than the center like my other grandmother who helped raise me. I see her sitting in bed eating saltines and remember crawling in with her and feeling cracker crumbs under the covers. Daddy would take us to gather blackberries from the overgrown backyard at her house at the top of one of San Francisco’s signature hills, and she would sugar each bowl-full for us messy-mouthed kids, my brothers and me.
Granny fled to San Francisco in the 1940s, leaving Tulsa behind as a young woman in her twenties. She was following her husband, my grandfather, who had joined the U.S. Army and would soon deploy to the Pacific theater. Granny Florence secured a job with the San Francisco Unified School District. They were both college graduates and had worked as teachers in Oklahoma, but they each had something they wanted to leave behind. The weight of Tulsa was heavy for them, from family pressure to the burden of the massacre. Florence Mary was raised by her mother to expect a secure and independent life, but all that was snatched away one spring night in 1921. She followed her husband to faraway California, and, ultimately, he died far from home, with his remains languishing abroad for several years before being returned to San Francisco for burial. Today, they rest together at Golden Gate National Cemetery.
This year in Tulsa, I stood on the pavement in front of the address where my grandmother and great-grandmother lived the night the massacre began. I imagined their terror as they heard the mob approaching and wondered what to do. At that moment, my family’s future was uncertain, our existence hanging on our foremother’s decision. She prayed for guidance and ran out onto the street on the spot where I stood. Of course, the building I stood before was not the original structure where they lived. Every edifice was destroyed except Booker T. Washington High School, a sturdy brick building that did not succumb to the flames. The precariousness of my forebears’ situation weighed on me, and I thought about my Granny and the harsh judgment she bore just as she bore her tragedies — the little girl who became the woman who made her way to California and the promise of a new life. She was loving and hardworking, but that was not enough to spare her from the sting of judgment, even as she endured more tragedy than should be heaped on one person. Her survivor’s spirit made my life possible.
I had recent a conversation with my mother, one of those who judged my Granny so harshly, and who had been neither insightful nor compassionate in her assessment of my father’s family. The resurrected story of my family history caused her to murmur, “Quite a background.” I knew in that moment that her harsh judgment had died. Tulsa is marked by an unknown number of dead who rest in unknown graves, but my journey unearthed profound gratitude for my very existence. I thank my foremothers on whose shoulders I stand.
