The fact that Geneva thought she could tell a body had been brown-skinned from its bare skull messed with my head.

My first reaction was to assume she was full of shit. I mean, how could you possibly tell skin color from bones? Then I remembered the glob of hair I’d pulled off the skeleton, and figured maybe there had still been some skin on it. But when I asked, Geneva assured me the matted gnarl had been pure, unadulterated, flesh-free human hair.

“I know he was black from his skull,” she said.

My internal you’re-a-racist radar pinged like crazy, and I started hating her just a little bit. She didn’t seem to notice. Then again, when it came to the living, Geneva didn’t notice much.

“Skull morphology is influenced by the environment a population evolves in,” she said. “I can evaluate discrete skull characteristics and match them up with typical profiles for geographically distinct human groups.”

Translation: black people’s skulls are different from white people’s skulls.

And she didn’t stop explaining there. “For example, eye orbits tend to be sloped in people with European ancestry, rounded in American Indian descendants, and rectangular in groups from sub-Saharan Africa.”

Ping.

“And nasal openings evolved high and narrow in Europeans, heart-shaped at the base in Native Americans, and wider in dark-skinned Africans.”

Ping ping ping.

But even though what Geneva said had rubbed me wrong in all kinds of ways, I hadn’t had any trouble accepting what creaky old Mrs. Manos taught us in ninth-grade Bio—that the closer your ancestors lived to the equator, the more likely you were to have dark skin. Melanin protects you from ultraviolet radiation. More UV at the equator, more melanin. It was evolution. It made sense. So why was it hard to accept that there might be other differences? Ones that ran deeper than skin?

I’ve got some ideas about that now, but when I walked out of the back house that afternoon, all I knew was that I felt dirty. And since Mom keeps the thermostat pegged at sixty-seven so she can wear sweaters all summer, a long, hot shower in our house feels good even if it’s a hundred degrees outside.

My shower, by the way, has four spray nozzles and an overhead rainfall faucet and is amazing. I stood underneath it a long, long time, steaming away the tension in my shoulders, washing my hair slowly. I rubbed shampoo over the bumps and ridges of my skull, wondering what it would look like after I died and all the skin and fat and muscle were gone.

I traced the bones of my face—the ridges at the tops of my eye sockets, my cheekbones, my jaw. Water cascaded over the brown of my hands, the pinks of my nails, splashing onto the white shower tiles at my feet.

If Geneva had my skeleton on a slab in front of her, what would she see? The white ancestors on Dad’s side who’d left Germany and Ireland for greener American pastures? Or the black men and women from Mom’s who’d been dragged across the ocean in chains and worked to death in Alabama cotton fields?

To be fair, Geneva made a point of telling me things got a lot more complicated after people from different areas started intermarrying. But anti-miscegenation laws in Oklahoma made it illegal for blacks to marry whites all the way up to 1967, which meant there were a lot fewer mixed-race kids in the 1920s than there are now. “Skull morphology is getting less and less distinct,” she’d said. “But the person in your back house died around 1921. And to me, his skull features indicate that he was black.”

I stayed in the shower until my fingers pruned and my skin felt raw, trying to sort out how I felt. In the end, I gave up and decided Geneva could believe whatever she wanted to. Black or white, the man buried in our back house had been smashed in the back of the head with a brick. Knowing he was black might help James and me figure out who he was, but in the end, murder was murder. No matter what his skin color, the dead man deserved to have his killer found.

He deserved justice.

It turned out Mom was actually kind of proud when I told her about the clinic. “I’m on Jackson’s board of directors,” she said. “And Marguerite Woods and I graduated from Booker T. together.”

She was tearing lettuce for a salad. Dad was grilling steaks on the back porch.

“You know who it was named for?” she asked.

I didn’t.

“A. C. Jackson. He was one of the best surgeons in the country, black or white. At least he was until white men shot him down in his own front yard during the riot. He came out of the house when they ordered him to, unarmed, hands in the air. And they shot him dead.”

“Just because he was black, or because he was a doctor?” I asked.

She wiped her hands on the Mother’s Day apron I’d finger-painted for her in first grade. “No one knows if they singled him out or if they even knew who he was. No one knows anything for sure about the riot except that Greenwood burned to ashes.” She traced the outline of a thumbprint flower. “Even though your great-great-uncle on my side disappeared that night, my mother didn’t hear about him or the riot until she was in her forties.”

Mom never talked about her family. I wanted her to keep going, but she stopped and asked me to get carrots from the fridge. She took a sip of wine and started breaking down a yellow pepper. Her knife pattered quick and hard against the cutting board.

“Mom?”

Nothing.

“Why?”

The knife stopped. “Why don’t we know more about that night, or why didn’t your grandmother hear about it for so long?”

“Both.”

She started chopping again. Slowly, with movements as tight and precise as her voice. “I don’t know,” she said.

Mom always had answers, especially to the hard questions. I didn’t like how carefully she measured her words or how she kept looking at the neat pile of pepper slices instead of me. I wanted her to pull her shoulders back, lift her chin, and force everything to make sense.

“I don’t need a perfect answer,” I said.

She finished the pepper and leaned her hips against the sink.

“It’s history, Ro. The messy kind where truth gets stretched out over thousands of unwritten stories. We don’t know how many people died, or even if we should call it a race riot. Riot is convenient, and it’s what most people use. But it isn’t right.”

I leaned onto my elbows. “Why?”

“Because when people hear the word riot—white people, I mean—they picture black people running crazy in the streets, looting stores and homes and burning things. That wasn’t what happened in Greenwood. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying black folks weren’t angry or that none of them fought back. But it was white folks who rioted that night. They looted Greenwood, then burned it to the ground.”

Mom’s voice stayed even, but she was squeezing the knife handle so hard the tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. And the vein in her neck—the one I’ve always used to tell how much trouble I was in—looked ready to burst.

“What’s the right word?” I asked.

Before she could answer, Dad came inside with a platter of grilled zucchini.

“Five minutes on the steaks,” he said, giving Mom and me this look like he knew exactly what he’d walked in on. He squeezed my shoulder, smiled at Mom, and went back outside.

Mom started on the cucumber. “I don’t know what the right word is,” she said. “Some people say massacre, but to me that implies wholesale slaughter. It wasn’t like that—plenty of folks lived and had to rebuild their lives from scratch.”

She stopped cutting and stared down at the board.

“Greenwood burned because white folks—not all of them, mind you, but plenty—wanted to clear the ‘bad niggers’ out of Tulsa. To them, that meant any black man, woman, or child with the audacity to believe they deserved as much dignity and respect as a white person. Only, those white folks failed, because in the end, the survivors went right back and rebuilt what had been theirs from the start.”

I’d never heard my mother use the n-word. It made my lungs feel too small.

She saw, and her face softened.

“Your father and I have done our best to make things easier for you,” she said. “And maybe that was a mistake. But we wanted you to fill up on good things before you had to face the bad.”

I tried to tell her I wasn’t as naïve as she thought, that I knew what code words like thug and uppity and urban really meant, and that I saw the looks some people gave me when they thought I wasn’t watching. Mom closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“I know,” she said. “I do. But there is so much you haven’t learned yet, Rowan. And as much as I wish I could protect you forever, I can’t. So I’m glad you’re working at the Jackson Clinic and asking questions. It’s time.”

Dad whistled outside, making as much noise as he could getting the lid on the grill and closing the grate to shut the fire down. Mom glanced toward the racket and smiled.

“There are things your father will never understand the way you and I do. Things he can’t understand. But he tries, and I love him. I love you, too. So very much.”

She smiled, and the strength I needed was there. Deeper, even, as if the roots she used to anchor our family had spread wider and sunk further as we talked.

“You’re growing up fast,” she said, “and that’s how it should be. Just please, know this…”

I leaned closer, wishing the counter wasn’t between us.

“The lives that ended that night mattered. It was a mistake for this city to try to forget, and it’s an even bigger one to pretend everything’s fine now. Black men and women are dying today for the same reasons they did in 1921. And we have to call that out, Rowan. Every single time.”