This novel of historical fiction, on the Springfield
race riot of 1908 by Springfieldian Melinda McDonald, is told from a unique
point of view. Sheba Tully, a young black woman, obtains a housemaid
position in the home of Susan Lawrence Dana. Dana is at the pinnacle of
Springfield society, as well as its richest woman, and this allows Tully to
wait on table for Gov. Charles Deneen, his wife, and other Springfield
notables; overhear conversations; and tune in on kitchen gossip.
She’s a good seamstress, and Dana loans her to society friends. Tully
eventually opens a dressmaking shop on a racially mixed street of small
businesses in downtown Springfield, the spring before the riot.
The book opens when Tully, asleep in the room over
her business, awakens to breaking glass, mobs cheering, and fire. Her shop,
with other black businesses, is being attacked. She escapes and creeps
through streets of the “ravaged downtown” to the safety of
Dana’s house.
It’s good that the book lets us know
what’s coming, for it now backtracks two years and we follow
Tully’s life, which could fool readers into thinking that the book is
merely intended to let us know what Springfield’s people and places
were like in 1908, through the eyes of a spunky young woman and also, in
alternating chapters, of a young white reporter whose abolitionist father
owns a popular Springfield restaurant. We meet not only the governor but
also Frank Lloyd Wright, who reproves Susan Dana for changes in
“his” house, and a young Vachel Lindsay, who performs a reading
there. We recognize the Bunns, father and son. We spend time in the
notorious Levee district, at the reservoir, at Mildred Park, the Illinois
Watch Factory, Moonlight Gardens, several Springfield newspapers, the
Badlands, and more. All are real Springfield people and places. Through
these somewhat meandering chapters we can recognize mounting racial tension
and view the segregation and hatred that Tully and other black residents
must face.
McDonald has been a docent at the Dana-Thomas House
for a number of years, so she knows well its history and architecture. She
has researched this book meticulously, using the Sangamon Valley Collection
at Lincoln Library, issues of Springfield newspapers, and oral-history
tapes housed at the University of Illinois at Springfield. She also leaned
considerably on Roberta Senechal’s Sociogenesis
of a Race Riot. Although McDonald’s main
characters are fictional, the rest are not falsified. She uses historical
fiction’s liberty to fill occasional holes, to speculate, to create
conversations.
This is a book well worth reading and reading now.
McDonald writes a clear, readable prose. She handles dialect well and
doesn’t shy from the ugly epithets necessary to this account. She may
be a bit slow getting to the riot, but it’s for good reason, and once
there she provides action aplenty. And you care, for she’s described
characters, real or fictional, that you can relate to. A bonus, in addition
to learning details of a shameful time in our past, is all we learn of
Springfield. This might send us to the Sangamon Valley Collection ourselves:
Is the Mildred Amusement Park now Bunn Park? What reservoir? And whatever
happened to Edwards School, on whose playground one of the lynchings took
place?
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry
editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English
at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2008.
