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Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah, The

College Literature, Fall 2007 by Hada, Kenneth

Historically, the Southwest has been a place where cultural tension exists between the extremes of assimilation and outright genocidal conquest. Such tension has proved to be fertile ground for both fiction writers and historians, who continue to reconstruct these cultural interchanges by positing what can be known of the real past. Fiction writers like Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Dagoberto GiIb, Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, M. Scott Momaday, William Humphrey and others, to some extent undermine the mythical assumptions of a great open Southwest territory, destined to be a newfound paradise for the white race. To do so, these writers understand the interpretive potential of historical analysis, frequently using it to subvert the sentimental notions of white supremacy still hung over from the days of Manifest Destiny. These writers create realistic plots, employing authentic dialogue, violent scenes and venerable references to the timeless landscape.

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A relatively new Oklahoma writer, Rilla Askew, follows the lead of fellow southwestern and western novelists who demythologize the assumptions of white power structures on the frontier. Her themes of racial and ecological tension are commensurate with similar issues found throughout American history of the southwest. Askew, a native Oklahoman, has set her first two novels, The Mercy Seat (1997) and Fire in Beulah (2001), in the Oklahoma landscape, a landscape that in no small way determines the actions of her characters. The Mercy Seat is set in pre-statehood, Indian Territory while Fire in Beulah is set in 1921, fourteen years after statehood, its plot climaxing with the historical event of the Tulsa race riot. In various interviews, Askew has made it clear that one of her purposes for writing is to convey a sense of accuracy about the shameful racial past of Oklahoma in hopes that a reconciliation between white and non-white peoples might occur. For example, she tells Brad Gambill:

My perspective on history has changed tremendously. Part of what has happened in this nation, especially for us as whites, is that we have tried to shut the door on all that. We have tried to say that it's in the past. Why don't they get a life? Why can't they let that go? What's happened is that we have never owned it, we have never dealt with it. In biblical terms, we've never repented of slavery and genocide, the slavery and genocide with which this nation was formed, and until we do, we can't talk about this. We can't get past it. Things won't change. (Askew 2001, 113)

Additionally, she has said, "Oklahoma is a microcosm of the nation. Our state history is a microcosm of what's happened on the whole continent. We can't separate it from the past" (2001, 114). In a yet-to-be published essay she explains:

In language and history and culture, Oklahoma is such an extreme distillation of what has taken place on this continent over the last five hundred years that it is nearly unrecognizable to the rest of the nation. Too Southern to be Midwestern, too Western to be Southern, too Midwestern to be purely Southwest, Oklahoma has kept the secret of its identity as a chameleon does. To the degree we've been seen by outsiders at all, it's been in stereotype-Curly and Laurie, the Joads, tornadoes and trailer trash, cowboys and Indians, dust: worn one-dimensional sketches which we ourselves have been too willing to adopt." (Askew 2005, 4)

Askew sees the implications of her fiction reaching farther than just a local story.

Askew's philosophical assumptions are Christian, and this somewhat sets her apart from many other contemporary writers of literary fiction. She overtly uses the terms "repentance" and "sin," yet her story is neither sentimental nor evangelistic. She weaves these Christian terms into a realistic narrative that challenges any presupposed notion of their efficacy. At the end of the novel, it is still unclear to what extent repentance occurs within the main character, Althea. Askew's imaging of the evil inherent within the racial conflict, however, clearly establishes the need for individual and collective repentance. While her prose is lyrical, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy, her plots and dialogue are harsh, though not as consistently graphic as McCarthy's. What she primarily has in common with McCarthy and others, however, is the virtual undoing of the supposed ethics of a dominant white race that encounters pre-existing cultures within the American frontier.

McCarthy, for example, routinely places young, somewhat naive, good-natured, American males who follow their codes of conduct in no-win, cross-cultural situations where their codes are revealed to be irrelevant and their heroic responses are rendered meaningless. McCarthy's characters suffer at the hands of Mexicans, suggesting the apparent futility of border crossing and the resulting existential wandering in a wasteland. Askew's characters are also depicted realistically with their existential burdens, but her authorial purpose is to raise the question of possible redemption and to keep alive the ideal of shared social space. McCarthy may personally have a similar goal, but if he does, it is disguised in the art of his compositional style (critics read him on a spectrum from nihilism to spiritualism). McCarthy's style is more ironic, certainly more pessimistic, on its face, than Askew's. Also, Askew, like McCarthy, has a workable sense of history on which she relies to fulfill her plots. I read Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy's most obvious example of relying on historical data,1 as a challenge to Enlightenment ideals. The deplorable actions by the Judge and the murderous Americans in that text are justified on the basis of material commodification, the characters paying lipservice to the vague notion of the greater good. They assume a right to capitalize at the expense of others, to exterminate indigenous groups while making legal and religious pronouncements that echo outdated notions of biological difference. As in Askew's Fire in Beulah, it is the educated, religious, economically prosperous members of the white society that either terrorize the under-classes, or at least refuse to intervene and prevent exploitation.

Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah, The

College Literature, Fall 2007 by Hada, Kenneth

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