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

College Literature, Fall 2007 by Hada, Kenneth

The fiction of Askew and McCarthy, then, seems to have similar ends in mind. Both serve to undermine assumptions of the past which could govern our understanding of the present. Their fiction is as demanding as any reading of history or cultural poetics.

In Tlie Sense of An Ending, Frank Kermode suggests a society's contemporary view of itself is linked not only to its mythical past, but to its mythical future as well (1967, 18, 23, 26, 31). In other words, society has the power to determine its future, but such determination is frequently simply perceived to be a tragic, apocalyptic projection of the present disorder that finally gives way to chaos in the imagination of the masses. Or to say it in the vernacular of present-day fundamentalists and other apocalyptics: if one desires Armageddon, believes in it strongly enough, such catastrophe could be created.2 Fictional endings, likewise, tend to follow mass cultural imaginings. The anxiety a society may feel about apocalyptic endings is related to fiction writers, who also must shape the endings of their texts to have some sense of "compliance" (63) with imagination and reality, however perceived. Kermode writes, "it is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers"(64). Fictions "live" or "die" based on their ability to speak to a society's sense of chaos, and living fiction is distinct from myths, which lack the ability to speak to a contemporary society concerned with its future (64).

Askew's fiction is not apocalyptic in the popular futuristic sense; her vision for the present is optimistic. Her sense of an ending, though prominent, is secondary and therefore complementary to her primary vision for the present which she believes could alter popular notions of catastrophic, end-time endings. Her desire is for real reconciliation to occur between races in the present, but her sense of realism within her fiction suggests that the troubles of the past, which she accurately unearths from a suppressed history, must be accounted for. To fail to do so, is to move society one step closer to whatever cosmic disasters narrow, racist people can imagine. If the fiery culmination of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot could occur and its consequences be so largely ignored for so long, then who is to say what the future could hold if patterns of racial intolerance are not broken? Interestingly, Scott Ellsworth quotes an editorial from Challenge Magazine, October 1919 (two years before the riot): "Then when the mob comes, whether with torch or with gun, let us stand at Armageddon [italics added] and battle for the Lord" (1982, 24). Askew also writes apocalyptic language into the novel, in the warning voice of [the main character] Althea's husband on the day of the riot: "Dear God, can't you understand me? It's a race war! The coloreds are shooting white men, whites are breaking into pawnshops, they're arming themselves like it's Armageddon. She [Graceful] can't come up here, it's a battlefield all over downtown!" (2001, 301). Apocalyptic visions often imagine racial warfare.