No one else wanted to think of it that way, but Luther knew there were two Greenwoods, just like there were two Tulsas. Which one you found yourself in depended on whether you were north or south of the Frisco depot. He was sure white Tulsa was several different Tulsas when you got under the surface, but he wasn’t privy to any of that, since his interactions with it never got much past “Which floor, ma’am?”

But in Greenwood, the division had become a whole lot clearer. You had “bad” Greenwood, which was the alleys off Greenwood Avenue, well north of the intersection with Archer, and you had the several blocks down around First and Admiral, where guns were fired on Friday nights and passersby could still catch a whiff of opium smoke in the Sunday-morning streets.

But “good” Greenwood, folks liked to believe, made up the other 99 percent of the community. It was Standpipe Hill and Detroit Avenue and the central business district of Greenwood Avenue. It was the First Baptist Church and the Bell & Little Restaurant and the Dreamland Theater where the Little Tramp or America’s Sweetheart ambled across the screen for a fifteen-cent ticket. It was the Tulsa Star and a black deputy sheriff walking the streets with a polished badge. It was Dr. Lewis T. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, and John and Loula Williams who owned the Williams Confectionery and the Williams One-Stop Garage and the Dreamland itself. It was O. W. Gurley, who owned the grocery store, the mercantile store, and the Gurley Hotel to boot. It was Sunday-morning services and these Sunday-after-noon dinners with the fine china and the whitest linen and something classical and delicate tinkling from the Victrola, like the sounds from a past none of them could point to.

That’s where the other Greenwood got to Luther most—in that music. You only had to hear but a few bars to know it was white. Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms. Luther could just picture them sitting at their pianos, tapping away in some big room with polished floors and high windows while the servants tiptoed around outside. This was music by and for men who whipped their stable boys and fucked their maids and went on weekend hunts to kill small animals they’d never eat. Men who loved the sound of baying hounds and sudden flight. They’d come back home, weary from lack of work, and compose or listen to music just like this, stare up at paintings of ancestors as hopeless and empty as they were, and preach to their children about right and wrong.

Uncle Cornelius had spent his life working for men like those before he’d gone blind, and Luther had met more than a few himself in his day, and he was content to step out of their path and leave them to themselves. But he couldn’t stand the idea that here, in James and Marta Hollaway’s dining room on Detroit Avenue, the dark faces assembled seemed determined to drink, eat, and money themselves white.