Children of Greenwood

Dubois Tate receives a manuscript described to him as an eleven year old black child’s eyewitness account of the killing of her family during the massacre of blacks by whites in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa Oklahoma over the Memorial Day Weekend in 1921. Dubois, a gay, black professor of art history in Detroit, first becomes intrigued and then obsessed with learning the truth of this questionable account. His quest begins in the summer before the 2016 USA presidential election and plunges him, first, into the photographic record of the homosexual adventures of his husband’s father but, then, engulfs him in the mystery of the woman whom he presumed was the author of the Greenwood document. As he struggles to discover the truth of her account, Dubois confronts several of the woman’s black female friends as well as a coterie of his own black gay male friends. The women bonded together to support one another in order to survive the difficult choices their lives caused them to make. The men, of different backgrounds, experiences, and dispositions, became and remained friends and sometimes lovers over several decades from their youth through middle age to senior status. Both groups are affected, directly or indirectly, by the tragedy of that day in 1921 when humans, individually and collectively, forgot their humanity. Read more