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

Another example of crossing barriers occurs when Althea finds herself in the office of a black newspaper in Greenwood. It is here that she encounters professional blacks who are unmoved by her histrionic behavior, yet they are obligated to help her given the nature of Jim Crow society (Askew 2001, 156ft). Shortly thereafter, Althea finds herself at Graceful s house. Uninvited, she simply barges into the empty home, showing little concern for the fact of individual ownership or privacy. Yet it is in this crossing, as Althea pokes around in the home of Graceful's mother, that she begins to recognize that Graceful is a person with a "history" rather than a dehumanized object that exists to serve Althea 's whims (167). By the use of crossing scenes such as these, Askew seeks to undo the master-slave hegemony operative within Althea as representative of the white power structure.10

Shared pain is another strategy that Askew uses to crumble the hierarchy that objectifies blacks. Pain is an equalizer. Physical pain of child birth is graphically displayed as is the emotional pain of unwanted births that are the result of rape. Askew develops three birth scenes in the novel. These suggest both inter and intra-racial violence with the accompanying emotional pain of regretable individual histories that characters futilely try to repress. Both Graceful and Althea share the same last name (Whiteside). Both are trying to make sense out of their inherited familial dysfunction, and both are intimately aware of problematic births occurring under mysterious circumstances. Askew s depiction of emotional and physical pain serves to unite the characters in a shared world where survival is more important than social hierarchies.

Each of the novel's three birth scenes may be seen in correlation to different periods of ethnic history in Oklahoma. The first suggests the transition from slavery to a chaotic freedom within the new territory that is supposed to be promised land. The second would then suggest the Jim Crow society in early statehood. The final birth scene occurs in the midst of the riot, in chaos that attempts to destroy the pride and progress of black entrepreneurship and commerce in Greenwood and places the survival of black society in jeopardy. Taken together, these imply that Oklahoma's heritage is mixed, and that the painful transition to a new status, from migration to statehood, has been a difficult, bloody path for non-whites to say the least. Angie Debo, in And Still The Waters Run (1980), writes about racial tension as the realization of statehood grew imminent:

It is doubtful if any other people ever longed for that magic goal [statehood] with the intensity of the white inhabitants of the Indian Territory. A white population very much larger than that of any state at the time of its admission to the Union had been living under conditions of political dependence never experienced before by a frontier settlement . . . the new government was established without their [tribal leaders] participation. The vigorous young commonwealth that came so lustily into the Union soon realized its ambition of dealing with its own problems of Indian administration. (Debo 1940, 159)