Summary
"A compelling page-turner that will keep readers hoping against hope that everything will somehow, magically, turn out for the best." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With a new Afterword from the author reflecting on the 100th anniversary of one of the most heinous tragedies in American history--the 1921 burning of Greenwood, an affluent black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the "Negro Wall Street"--Jewell Parker Rhodes' powerful and unforgettable novel of racism, vigilantism, and injustice, weaves history, mysticism, and murder into a harrowing tale of dreams and violence gone awry.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. A white woman and a black man are alone in an elevator. Suddenly, the woman screams, the man flees, and the chase to capture and lynch him begins.
When Joe Samuels, a young Black man with dreams of becoming the next Houdini, is accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty mob.
Meanwhile, Mary Keane, the white, motherless daughter of a farmer who wants to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, must find the courage to help exonerate the man she accused with her panicked cry.
Magic City evokes one of the darkest chapters of twentieth century, Jim Crow America, painting an intimate portrait of the heroic but doomed stand that pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the prosperous town they had built.
Jewell Parker Rhodes is an award-winning author. Her books include Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass' Women, Season, Moon, Hurricane, and the children's book, Ninth Ward. She is also the author of the writing guides Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction.
Her work has been published in Germany, Italy, Canada, Turkey, and the United Kingdom and reproduced in audio and for NPR's "Selected Shorts." Rhodes honors include: the American Book Award, the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Outstanding Writing, and two Arizona Book Awards.
Rhodes is the Virginia G. Piper Chair in Creative Writing and Artistic Director of Piper Global Engagement at Arizona State University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
