If We Must Die

"When Berneen O'Brien's mother dies, the seventeen-year-old moves from Wyoming to Tulsa to live with her stern and distant uncle. Berneen secures a teaching position at Liberty Elementary School. When she meets the principal, Nelson Flowers, she is amazed to find that he is a black man. Slowly, as she meets the other teachers, Berneen realizes that she is teaching in a black school. Her worries about being an outcast soon disappear, as the other teachers make her welcome. Berneen, who is of black Irish descent with black curly hair and olive skin, doesn't realize that the school assumes she is also black." "Over stiff and uncomfortable dinners, Berneen listens to Uncle Quinn's accounts of his experiences at the Battle of Argonne Forest during World War I. She also discovers that he is an opinionated racist - and eventually learns that he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan." "Meanwhile at school and after hours Berneen finds herself moving in the world of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood. She goes to clubs and socializes with her fellow teachers, Persephone and Caroline. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to Nelson Flowers, who throws French phrases into his conversation and has a terribly disfiguring scar on his face. Slowly she learns that he too fought in the Argonne - with French troops, since the U.S. Army did not allow blacks as soldiers." "Racial tension is evident as the novel develops, but it erupts into violence when a young white girl accuses a black shoeshine boy of raping her in an office-building elevator. Whites burn Greenwood and storm the neighborhood, shooting and beating black men, women, and children." Berneen is trapped in the school with Nelson Flowers and the teachers when the mob approaches. The story of their desperate attempts to escape is realistic and frightening, made more so by its historical accuracy.

Rosemary Moran - VOYA

When orphaned seventeen-year-old Berneen O'Brien leaves her home in Wyoming to live with her widowed uncle in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she becomes immersed in a culture she never knew existed. Unfamiliar with black history or segregation, Berneen accepts a teaching job only to discover when she reports for her first day that the other teachers and children are black. They accept her as black, too, because of her dark curly hair and olive complexion, inherited from her father's "black Irish" family. Berneen comes to know both worlds in Tulsa-that of her World War I veteran and Ku Klux Klan member uncle, with his empty house and his black cook, Ivory, and the world of everyone at her small school. As she completes her first year, violence erupts, black Tulsa is destroyed by fire, and many black Tulsans are killed or interred at the local fairgrounds by the authorities. Until recently, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was one of the city's darkest secrets. Only now are books exploring this historical event. This well-meaning but somewhat florid and overwrought account details the horrors of that night, when blacks fought whites and saw their numbers dwindle and their homes and businesses burn to the ground. Carr bases her novel on history and embellishes it with fictional details. Her account compares well with the details that are currently available. Although it is not "must" reading, the novel is a serviceable introduction to an episode that has been concealed for too long. VOYA CODES: 3Q 2P J S (Readable without serious defects; For the YA with a special interest in the subject; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2002, Texas Christian University, 168p,