Thousand Secrets of the Tishomingo Hotel (eBook)

A Novel About the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Steven Durham (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
468 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-6260-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Four residents of an old Tulsa railroad hotel, the Tishomingo, are the guardians of secrets about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, secrets. These secrets are dangerous to know, life-threatening to make known. Opposing them is the menacing businessman Asher Dodd, who has a few secrets of his own, one of which directly threatens one of the residents. Who will outwit whom, and how, in this game of wits?

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Four residents of an old Tulsa railroad hotel, the Tishomingo, are the guardians of secrets about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The secrets are dangerous to know, life-threatening to make known. The residents include the sheriff at the time of the Massacre, Solomon "e;Slow Man"e; Pickett; the deputy sheriff at the time of the Massacre, Sam "e;Traveling Sam"e; Key; a storefront preacher, DaVida King; and an embittered community organizer, Brother Sol Reddick. Opposing them is the menacing Tulsa businessman Asher Dodd. Someone will win this dangerous game of wits ... but who? And how?

Textauszug

{2}

DEPUTY SHERIFF KEY

According to the phone book, the deputy sheriff – “Traveling Sam” Key – lived at the Tishomingo Hotel on the corner of Archer and Greenwood streets. Judging from the building number the hotel was on the southeast corner of the intersection, putting it barely in South Tulsa, on the boundary between South Tulsa and north, white Tulsa and colored. I called the number and, through the desk clerk, arranged to meet with the sheriff in an hour. The desk clerk – I later learned his name was Eli Orchenbacher – sounded like I was talking to someone using a comb-and-tissue mouth harp.

If you were to come upon the Tishomingo at sunset, you would see its red bricks glowing fiery orange in the light. Sunset was its best time of day for the place. Sunrise was entirely too intense, and mid-day was depressing. Sunset at least was soft, and soft was what the place needed.

As I approached the hotel from the west, it looked to me like a brick package of Philip Morris cigarettes. The trademark bellhop was painted on that side, calling for Mr. Morris. There was a window where the bellhop’s mouth should be, cupped by a painted hand. The window opened on the hotel office, and on occasion Eli, the little desk clerk, could be seen leaning out of the window, an uncertain tongue in the bellhop’s mouth.

The hotel had three floors, counting the lobby. The second floor was for guests and residents, mostly a handful of residents. In the hotel’s later years, guests were few. There were twelve rooms, and a sitting area across the north end of the second floor, looking out on the Archer/Greenwood intersection, with furnishings and two pole lamps to match the lobby décor. There was a storage room at each end of the floor. The third floor was empty, the windows boarded. It had at one time been intended as a jazz club, but eventually it locked horns with the city over some questionable matters, and was forced to close.

The lobby door was propped open by a brick to let in a breeze – it was warm and sticky for late March, and a storm was brewing – and a screen door kept the bugs out. Ahead and to the left, as I entered the lobby, were stairs leading to the floors above. At the foot of the stairs the lobby desk ran from nearly one side to the other on the south end of the lobby. It fell 12 feet short of covering the complete width, just enough room for the stairs and for a short hallway for customers on their way back to Florine’s Flower Shoppe, after which, in the same hallway, came Eddie’s Tonsorial Parlor for Colored Gentlemen of Quality. They each had been displaced to the Tishomingo from their original site by the 1921 riot.

The lobby was furnished with second- and, probably, third- and fourth-hand goods from Danny’s Hard Working Imporyum (sic) next door, a second-, third- and much more-hand store where goods spilled out on the sidewalk as though a delivery truck had rammed into the place from the vacant lot behind. There were four armchairs upholstered in worn-out corduroy, originally burgundy in color but now faded pink by blasts of sunshine through the lobby windows. There was a sofa covered in the same material, faded for the same reasons to the same color. There was a small end table by the sofa, stacked with ancient and coffee-crisped copies of Life and Sporting News and National Geographic magazines. At the other end of the sofa was an elephant. It was made of ceramic and designed to look vaguely as though it had stepped out of a Hindu parade. It was an ashtray, unique, surely, in all the world. It stood waist-high and lent a stogie stink to the lobby, an olfactory suggestion the hotel had been roasted over a mound of cigars a week before it opened.

Eli Orchenbacher stood behind the desk. He was a thin and short man, no more than five feet tall, with a thin and straight mustache three-quarters of an inch above his upper lip. His mouth was perpetually pursed, which made him look like he were trying to sniff the mustache up his nose. He kept his hair parted in the middle and slicked straight back with enough pomade that you could smell him coming around the corner and down the hall.

“I’m Josiah Thibodeaux,” I said to Eli, “from the Tulsa Sooner. I called you about meeting with Deputy Key.”

“I can arrange that,” Eli said, “if someone will just watch the desk while I go and get the deputy.”

“Well, I guess I could do that,” I said.

“I’ll just run up and get him, and be back in a jiffy,” Eli said. “Just sign in any guests who arrive while I’m away”

I was shocked by the request but then Eli winked and said, “Don’t worry, we won’t get any.”

While Eli was upstairs, I inspected the front desk. There was a guest register, sitting beside a candlestick rotary telephone, and I started to check it out to see whether in fact the hotel had had guests recently. But then I caught Eli out of the corner of my eye coming lightly back down the stairs, followed by a clumping set of larger, heavier feet.

The man behind Eli was at least six feet tall and built like a pear, narrow in the shoulders but bulging at the hips. I was startled by his appearance and stared, despite my best efforts not to.

“Mr. Thibodeaux?” Eli said. “Deputy Key.”

Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Samuel Key looked like he had been shot in the back of the head with a 12-gauge load of turkey eggs, so big and bulging were his eyes. His gray fly-away hair looked concussed right out of his head. He smiled a purely horizontal smile with such intensity that it alone could have bulged his eyes out. He wore a tan duster, and in fact every time I saw him, for as long as I knew him, he wore that duster, weather notwithstanding. He held a sweat-blackened Tom Mix Stetson hat. He always wore that hat, too, and he had removed it strictly as a gesture of being pleased to meet me. He carried two pearl-handled Colt.45s stuck in the waist band of his khaki trousers. From the weighted sway to his duster I guessed the pockets were loaded with fists full of cartridges.

Was it an omen of things to come, that with Sam’s appearance in the lobby a furious thunderstorm broke out? The thud of nearby thunder by itself might have been responsible for the deputy’s hair.

“Ye wanted a word with me,” he said, smiling straight from side to side so hard I thought his eyes would shoot out of his head.

“Yes sir, Deputy Key, I do. May we sit over there in the corner?”

“That suits yer fancy, why that’s what we’ll do.”

I walked us to the corner of the lobby farthest from the desk, to where two armchairs were located, one on either side of a lamp. We sat and I looked the sheriff in the eye. He was no longer smiling.

“I’m a reporter with the Tulsa Sooner.”

“So I heared.”

“And my editor wants me to interview you on the occasion of your sixtieth birthday.”

“Well son it pains me to disppoint ye but I ain’t Sheriff Perkins.”

“Oh I know! I’d like to interview you!”

“Ye would.”

“My editor is interested in this. And yes, I’m interested as well.”

“Ye are.”

“Would you be willing to let me ask you some questions about your life, including your time as deputy sheriff?”

“Ye gonna ask me about the rat?”

“Rat?”

“Nineteen and twenty-one. When I was depty sheriff. The race rat.”

“Oh, that. Well, as a matter of fact my editor said not to go into that beyond just saying you were deputy at the time. He said it’s okay to mention it. Just not go into it.”

“Then what’s the point young man? I ain’t done nothin else worth talkin bout. Hell I ain’t really done nothin then either. It was all Sheriff Perkins.”

“Well, Mr. Goldfarb, he’s my editor, he’d say you’re well-known to Tulsans just because you were one of the first deputy sheriffs, and because you held that office during the riot, and so an interview with you would make for interesting reading.”

“Just because.”

“Well, because of how you are well-known. Two times a deputy – holy cow, you must have made quite an impact on the sheriff himself!”

“Did ye know about me before ye got this here assignment?”

“No.” I squirmed in my chair. It felt like the deputy had turned things around and suddenly I was being interviewed. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even know about the riot before I got this assignment.”

“Thibodeaux. Y’all’s from Loosiana.”

“As a matter of fact I am. Originally. Little town of New Iberia. My name gives it away, doesn’t it.”

“So’s yer accent, gives ye away.”

“Ah!”

“From Loosiana, it figures ye ain’t heared nothin about the rat. But then again, ye could be from right here, Tulsey Town, and never heared nothin. It’s the biggest goddamn thang in all creation don’t nobody never talk...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.11.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-6260-8 / 1098362608
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-6260-7 / 9781098362607