Excerpt
The Tulsans

* * *

When Zebbie J.T. Starr married fourteen-year old Rovella Jean

Jackson on June 4, 1943, Zebbie knew from day one that it was not love.

To Zebbie, Rovella was the prettiest little girl in Tulsa, Oklahoma and

she got her womanhood years earlier than other girls her age and despite

the fact she was the town whore, Zebbie knew he had to have Rovella

Jackson.



Zebbie first saw Rovella at the intersection of Sheridan Road and

Frisco over near the tracks in Dawson in the beautiful city of Tulsa,

Oklahoma. Zebbie J.T. Starr and his friend Earl had been at work for

nine hours loading trains for the white man as they did six days a week,

when Zebbie spotted the pretty girl who would one day be his wife,

tongue kissing some star football player from the Tulsa High School

football team. The minute Zebbie saw her kiss that guy with all that

tongue, in Tucker’s Alley, he wished it were he. The girl was very young,

maybe fourteen or fifteen and Earl told Zebbie that girl already had a

reputation, but never paid it no mind. His over pious mother Mattie had

told him to mind his own business; not that of others and that’s what he

was trying to do.



Zebbie saw that pretty girl again three days later at Walter’s liquor

store on Peoria Avenue near Apache, not too far from where Pretty Boy

Floyd got into that shoot out in 1932 with the Tulsa police department.

This was a Friday, and it was a hot day, what they call Indian Summer in

January for Tulsa, too hot to lift crates on those high trains, so the white

man let Earl and Zebbie off work early today. The “pretty girl,” as Zebbie

called her, was standing in the doorway of the store wearing a low cut red,

white and blue midriff T-shirt with some butt tight, cut-off blue Levi

jeans. Seductively, she was biting into the center of a green Tootsie Roll

Pop. To Zebbie, Rovella was looking cute. He walked around the store

pretending he was looking for something more than the beer he came in

to buy. He heard the pretty girl tell the store attendant, Mr. Frank that

she was waiting for her cousin, Joe Bullet who had the money to pay for

the sucker she was eating. Having just left the tracks, Zebbie was tired,

he looked bad and he had only come here to get a beer; not pick up

women. He didn’t smell good, but he wanted to say hi to the pretty girl

anyway, so when he got his nerves, he walked up to her and said hi. At

first she acted like she didn’t hear him, the way women do sometimes

when they know a man is trying to hit on em and they want to pretend

they don’t know. She was flirting with him and rubbing it in. This girl was

good at what she did. Zebbie could feel his eyes smile at her as she

snapped the rest of her green sucker off the white stick.



When she playfully flipped the sucker’s white stick onto the floor,

Zebbie gave her his best smile. Though she was playing along with his game,

to Rovella, Zebbie was just another big ugly greasy looking nigga from the Railroad

Company who was out looking for some good young pussy, but she had

news for him. Rovella, who was still standing at the check out counter

coyly said hi back to Zebbie while staring back at him with her sexy,

green, villainous eyes. Next, Zebbie walked up closer to Rovella. He

then stared directly into her green eyes and offered to buy her another

sucker. Rovella rolled her green tongue at Zebbie in a very grown up

womanly manner and said, “No thank you, sir. My mama said not to take

candy from strangers.” Minutes later in a surprise move, she stuck her

telephone number inside Zebbie’s beer sack. She had written it on the

back of a tootsie roll pop wrapper. When the cousin she had been waiting

for showed up to get her, his face was so scarred, the boy she called Joe

Bullet scared Zebbie ten steps back from the girl. Out of the store, the

boy with the two-toned face gave Zebbie the “don’t even try it with her

look.” He said, “Come on let’s go,” to Rovella. She went. Then he said,

“Mama will have a fit if we’re out too long.” Next, he dragged the pretty

girl right past Zebbie, who was standing in front of his Plymouth staring

at the two of them like he had seen a monster or something.



“You too young to be talking to that ugly punk,” Joe told his cousin, loud enough

for Zebbie to get the message. After seeing this boy’s face, Zebbie knew

if that boy didn’t have, looks, he sure had a lot of nerve.



About a month after that meeting, Zebbie found out that Rovella

Jackson was so grown up at fourteen that her family had been lying about

her age to try and compensate for the womanly things pretty girl was

doing around town. Rovella was a high yellow, shot-short, shapely, well-developed

young woman who at fourteen had the body of a twenty-year

old woman. Rovella was the talk of the town already on the bar scene

around Tulsa. People said she was a slut who had bedded all of Tulsa’s

sons and was working on the fathers. From what Zebbie could tell,

apparently she either lived alone or had parents that were blind or

impervious to her very open ways. Zebbie’s longtime friend, John

Bertman bet him a hundred dollar bill that he’d never get that gorgeous,

high yeller woman, Rovella to say I do to him in a year.” Zebbie said back,

“Why buy the cow when the milk is free, man.” They both had a drunken

laugh behind that one. Zebbie found himself liking the girl, despite her

suspicious reputation, and he had done a little research on Rovella. By

the time he had taken her out a few times and knew her for six months,

he knew one thing for sure. He knew that Rovella would do anything,

even marry him to get away from that aunt her mother gave her to.

Around town, everybody knew that them Bullets wasn’t no joke. And the

last one you wanted to mess with was Rovella’s aunt, Teresa Bullet. She

had her husband Peter so henpecked, he quit coming to the bar a day after

he married Teresa, and that was 25-years ago. Teresa knew everybody’s

business and when her sister Darnetta gave her that bad child, Rovella,

the town just knew Teresa had met her match. But not even Teresa Bullet

could tame this wild child.



Zebbie was a good OLE country boy from Monroe, Louisiana. His

mother Mattie and his father Bo moved to Tulsa in 1912, because Mattie

had heard about how easy it was for black people to get voter registration

rights and they arrived in time for the largest voter turnout in city officers

election. Mattie was at the head of the table when the Socialists

demanded a second election. She said that was what freedom was all

about, “being heard” and exercising your civil liberties.