The Filling Station
by Vanessa MillerSetting: Oklahoma
Genres: Fiction / African American & Black / Historical, Fiction / Historical / 20th Century / General
Published on March 11, 2025
Pages: 384
Format: eBook Source: Library
Sisters Margaret and Evelyn Justice have grown up in the prosperous Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma--also known as Black Wall Street. In Greenwood, the Justice sisters had it all--movie theaters and entertainment venues, beauty shops and clothing stores, high-profile businesses like law offices, medical clinics, and banks. While Evelyn aspires to head off to the East Coast to study fashion design, recent college grad Margaret plans to settle in Greenwood, teaching at the local high school and eventually raising a family.
Then the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre upends everything they know and brings them unspeakable loss. Left with nothing but each other, the sisters flee along what would eventually become iconic Route 66 and stumble upon the Threatt Filling Station, a safe haven and the only place where they can find a shred of hope in oppressive Jim Crow America. At the filling station, they are able to process their pain, fill up their souls, and find strength as they wrestle with a faith in God that has left them feeling abandoned.
But they eventually realize that they can't hide out at the filling station when Greenwood needs to be rebuilt. The search for their father and their former life may not give them easy answers, but it can propel them--and their community--to a place where their voices are stronger . . . strong enough to build a future that honors the legacy of those who were lost.
The Tulsa Massacre should be better known. I didn’t even know about it until it was featured in a TV show a few years ago.
This is the type of historical fiction that I like. It uses real events but puts fictional people in the middle of it surrounded by real people doing what really happened. The Threatt Filling Station was a real place. The Threatts had bought a large piece of land outside Tulsa. They built a filling station where it was safe for Black people to fill up their cars. Sometimes they stayed there if it was too late for them to safely move on. Eventually the Threatts added in other services on the land. In this book the sisters fleeing the massacre on foot find themselves at the filling station. They stay here as a home base while they decide how to move on.
They represent two different mindsets on how to respond to tragedy. Margaret wants to rebuild everything that her life was before. She is dedicated to fixing their house and their father’s business to the point of obsession. Evelyn wants to forget. She never wants to go back to Greenwood. She starts to engage in self-destructive behavior in an attempt to forget her trauma.
These two different ways of thinking pull them apart as they try to figure out how to move on with their lives. You see through excerpts at the beginning of each chapter from actual Red Cross documents the virulent racism that the official response had. Instead of being given clothes, they were given fabric to make their own clothes. They were given building supplies to rebuild houses but no assistance to actually build anything. Then if they weren’t rebuilding fast enough their land was considered abandoned and taken. None of this assistance was free either. They had to work assigned jobs to qualify even if they had other jobs and were supposed to also be rebuilding a house by themselves.
“…the whites in this town had been labeled as the kind of racists even other racists didn’t want to be in cahoots with.”
All this was happening while the justice system decided that the people of Greenwood had brought the massacre down on themselves. No one white was punished for what they did.
This is a good book to remember (or learn) what life was like in the 1920s so we don’t slip ever closer back there.
