Fire in Beulah

Rilla Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat, which was lauded as powerful and arresting by The New York Times Book Review and an extraordinary story by the Boston Globe proved that she was not afraid to tackle big, primal American themes. Her newest, Fire in Beulah, set in the same heartland territory as The Mercy Seat, is a chronicle of race, greed, and moral choice in the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush. At its center is the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside -- an oil wildcatter's high-strung wife who escaped from a hardscrabble childhood -- and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful. Both are caught in the relentless currents of family and violence. Their contrapuntal stories -- and those of others close to them -- unfold against a volatile backdrop of fear, hate, and lynchings that climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which whites burn the city's prosperous black section to the ground. The conflagration of the riot becomes the crucible that melds and tests each of the characters; their story is the American story of race, a tale that declares the simple truth that we are irrevocably tied to one another.