It’s 1926 now, five years since the Dreamland Theatre and all the rest of Greenwood burned. Some days it feels like a lifetime. Others, no more than a heartbeat.

I’ve tried to put the worst of it behind me. Problem is, history has a way of sneaking back around. Like last month, when Joseph wrote to say he’d gotten his degree from the University at Buffalo and planned to attend medical school there. And like when Ruby’s letter arrived just four days ago, telling me Joseph had drowned trying to save a child who slipped into the river above Niagara Falls.

It’s that false sense of distance between the present and the past that set me to thinking how our tale deserves telling. Which is why I’ve endeavored to record what transpired in my own voice on these wax cylinders. And besides, facts have emerged since that night that no true account of Vernon’s death can omit. Facts I learned from Mama when she visited last summer, and which she herself learned from a Georgia lawman who’d come around, making inquiries about Vernon Fish. Only it wasn’t me or Joseph he was after. It was Vernon himself.

As the lawman explained things to Mama, Vernon was actually Virgil Fisher out of Decatur, Georgia. A man raised in a sharecropper’s shack by a white father who’d taught him to pick cotton and hate Negroes equally well. What that sharecropper failed to tell his son, though, was that Vernon’s own mama had been a Negress with skin so fair she passed for white, and that he’d sent her and their newborn second son packing after the babe was born dark-skinned. He’d kept Vernon, though, for he needed help with the crops, and company, too. And Vernon passed for white with ease till he was a grown man, never knowing the truth about his mama. Leastways, not until she died and his brother tracked him down to tell him.

Needless to say, the brother’s skin hadn’t lightened any since he was born. And, faced with a truth he couldn’t bear, Vernon flew into a rage and beat his own brother dead with a shovel.

He’d fled to Oklahoma after that, leaving his brother’s body in a dried-up well on his father’s plot. But when his father got kicked in the chest by a horse and killed a few years later, the sharecropper who worked the land after him found the body and reported it to the police. Vernon hadn’t bothered getting rid of his brother’s wallet, so it took the authorities no time to figure out who the dead man was. And at the request of the landowner who’d leased the Fishers their parcel in the first place, Georgia officials were making inquiries as to Vernon’s whereabouts.

Now, I can’t say as I’m worried overmuch that Vernon’s bones will be found. No one knows how many black men were killed during the riot, no one much seems to care. And it’s poetic justice of the grimmest sort, I suppose, that for all his hatred and bile, Vernon Fish ended up just another murdered Negro whose death never merited looking into—or even remembering.

Besides, me and Joseph hid the body well, covering it with quicklime from the mason’s supply and wrapping it in the tarp from the Model T. After that, we pulled up all the planks Vernon and Joseph had bled on, flipped them so the blood wouldn’t show, and set the body on the dirt underneath before putting the planks back in place. When the workmen showed up a few days later, they laid a hardwood floor over top of him, never suspecting they were hammering nails into Vernon Fish’s coffin.

As for me, I left Tulsa soon as Mama got settled with her cousin Margaret in Pawhuska. She forgave Pop for taking Angelina’s family away that awful morning, but she never could forget. They sold their fine new place to an oilman just a few months after it was complete. Pop stayed in the house I grew up in. I moved north to Kansas City and opened a Victrola shop of my own.

All are welcome on my sales floor, and I’ll extend credit to any man or woman who can show evidence of a steady income. I still go by Tillman, though for discretion’s sake, I’ve abandoned the first and middle names given to me at birth. Only my beloved wife, Claire, still calls me Will, and only within the walls of the house we call home.

As for the details of what occurred in Tulsa later that day, June 1, 1921, I can only attest to the few I know. Like the fact that after Pop found the body James and I had picked up on the street, he dumped it onto one of the trucks carrying Negro corpses out of the city and considered the matter closed. And that Angelina’s family was held at McNulty Park until Mama got them out, swearing seven ways to Sunday that their mother was our cook. Their father turned up at the fairgrounds detention center two days later, shaken and bruised, but alive.

Up in Greenwood, Booker T. survived the rioters’ torches and served as a hospital for the wounded. That’s where they treated Joseph, and where he and Ruby were reunited with their mama. And that’s where I delivered Joseph’s Victrola, along with a stack of records for them and the patients and doctors and nurses at the hospital to listen to. I never did ask Pop for permission to make the delivery, and decided on my own that the records should be a donation from him. I did, however, put two dollars and fifty cents in the register to cover Joseph’s finance fee. And every year since then, on June 1, Mama has found a fresh-baked peach pie on her doorstep in Pawhuska, along with a card signed simply, “Love, Ruby.”

In the weeks and months following the riot, Tulsa city government refused to accept any of the emergency funds donated by good souls all over the country to help in the aid and care of those left homeless. Greenwood business owners struggled after their insurance companies denied payment on the grounds that the riot was an act of man, not God. But they rebuilt on their own, proud and strong. Even Mount Zion Baptist Church rose again, despite the congregation owing near the full eighty-thousand-dollar mortgage from the new building they’d been forced to watch burn. Proving, I suppose, that while a body can be burned to ash, the spirit inside it cannot.

But pleased as I am that Greenwood rebuilt, I’ll always remember it the way I saw it first: lights flickering on over the Dreamland Theatre, families strolling along streets they’d built together. For on that warm spring night, it wasn’t just a promise I beheld, but a thing real as bricks and mortar and hope.