They emerged into a gauntlet of fire and smoke.

The cedar at the corner of the lot burst into hot orange flames and incinerated to scorched branches and twigs in a blink. Oily billows rolled across the sky, and fires roared in every window and door as far as Berneen could see down the street.

They ran by a burning upright player piano. The ivory keys had blackened and peeled, the piano wires had heated red-hot and were twanging apart in the blazing cabinet.

A huge shadow suddenly darkened the street as a thirty-foot wingspan swooped above them, almost tipping the treetops. Berneen stared up open-mouthed as a bi-plane balanced on the smoky currents so low that she could see with exquisite clarity the squared tan metal body, the wooden rudder of the tail piece, the double wings supported by polished struts that gleamed with spar varnish.

It seemed close enough for her to touch the oilcloth covering the lower wing and the ropes anchoring the wheels of cheery red that could have belonged on a wheelbarrow. She could see the pilot's eyes through his goggles as he hunched behind the double machine guns mounted on the fuselage.

The double wings swayed past, and Berneen watched as one of the two bombs attached to the flattened belly of the plane slid free and angled toward the school.

An explosion rocked the street.

The windows of what had been Berneen's and Caroline's rooms blew out, a splash of flame pooled through the schoolyard, spreading like searing lava from the foundation to the boundary of the fence. In an instant the building caught fire.

They ran across brick sidewalks littered with glass, porcelain, and crystal shards that crunched under their feet while they dodged through the smoke around bewildered families herded along by the density of the crowd. Women called children's names, children shrieked for their mothers through the blaze of feather pillows and burning hair.

Berneen knew her veins were ready to pound through her temples, her lungs ready to explode. She knew she'd stopped breathing even while her eyes caught glimpses of beds and smashed tables littering the lawns.

A kicked-in viola lay on the grass with its neck broken.

Red pools on porches and lawns merged with purple and brown stains where blood lay fresh, drying, dried. Parents clutched the hands of screaming children, while lone figures wove through the smoke, keening, cradling shattered wrists and elbows, bones that thrust through the skin. One woman in a blood-stained blue nightgown held her severed cheek in place with her palm.

Some people hurried by in the opposite direction carrying objects they'd grabbed from burning homes. A man in a top hat hugged an enormous silver punch bowl holding wax fruit. Barefoot women in housecoats clung to frying pans and clocks as if they'd saved something precious. A woman in a wool topcoat passed them bundling a child in a length of tapestry.

The air was thick with grease and cinders that paled the sun.

A figure, burned so badly it was unrecognizable as either a man or woman, lay in the center of the street with a charred arm across its blackened skull. It lay in anguished sleep, like someone caught in death by the ash of Pompeii, and Berneen's mind registered the lipless mouth open to rows of gold teeth and one white incisor as Nelson Flowers dragged her past.

An abrupt salvo of shots burped out in quick succession like a rapidly igniting string of firecrackers. The firing was different from the desultory shots in the night and dawn, and the crowd ahead in the smoke fumbled, recoiled, then scattered.

The multiple shots sounded again.

Nelson Flowers motioned Berneen and Caroline down a side street.

But rows of shanties already blazed with the flash of dry kindling, and they had to turn back.

Under the crisped remains of an oleander, a woman lay with a little girl in her arms. They might have been resting, but their eyes were open, and Berneen knew they were both dead.

"It's Vivian!"

Nelson Flowers' hold was stronger than her attempt to pull away from him. "We can't stop!"

They were beyond the child and her aunt in an instant, and as they retreated, another crack of machine gun shots came, one after the other.

"Ah." Nelson Flowers' murmur was hardly more than a sigh.

He loosened his hold on Berneen's arm, and his knees buckled before he pulled himself upright.

"Go on!"

The shoulder of his white shirt suddenly blossomed red as if he'd run headlong into a sack of crimson paint.

Berneen flung her arm around his waist to support him.

"No! Go on!" He tried to stand alone, but as Caroline ducked under his other arm, his legs rubberized.

They managed to hold him up and reach another corner. Berneen saw his house, the green spring lawn, the Norwalk in the driveway. The block hadn't been touched by fire yet, but smoke from the next street already obscured the tops of the oaks.

"You two go. Back the way we came. Stay away from Standpipe."

Berneen was as calm as if she'd been her mother in a hospital emergency room, and she raised her voice next to his ear. "You'll burn up inside the house in a few minutes--if you don't bleed to death first." They stumbled forward together, and she shouted to Caroline,

"Put him in the car. We've got to get help."

"Can you drive?"

She didn't have the breath to explain that she could. She merely wrenched open the car door, and they struggled to get him up the running board into the high backseat.

"Lie down on the floor. We'll cover you with this lap robe and try to get you to a hospital."

"Oh, Berneen, the hospital's beyond Standpipe Hill."

She didn't explain she wouldn't try for the black hospital but intended to take him uptown. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

Nelson Flowers didn't argue as he lowered himself to the floor below the seat. She unfolded the robe and threw it over him.

Smoke poured down through the oak leaves as if coming through a sieve. A crack of falling timber reverberated close by and screams echoed from the next block.

Berneen scrambled in the right side and slid across the seat to the steering wheel. "All right, Caroline, I'll work the throttle while you crank. The minute the car starts, jump in."

Caroline shook her head. "I've got to go home, Berneen. You have to take Mr. Nelson on alone." Her hair hung in strands over her silver earrings, and a streak of ash like war paint barred her hooked nose. "I've got to go see if my family's all right."

Berneen nodded.

Then she set the spark and throttle levers in a clock position of ten-to-three, found the loop of choke wire, and signaled for Caroline to grab the crank.

Caroline turned the handle once, twice, again, while Berneen shoved the levers to twenty-five of two, the way Mac had shown her the few times he'd let her drive his car.

"Again!"

Caroline leaned into the metal strut and whirled the crank hard around once more.

The motor sputtered. The car shivered.

Berneen clamped her teeth on her lower lip.

The engine choked off.

Cries of children and women spiraled into the abrupt silence.

"Oh, Berneen! We can't do it!" Caroline raised her head over the hood and shoved at her hair.

"Try again." Berneen reset the levers.

Caroline bent over the crank again.

The engine turned over.

Caroline revolved the handle hard again. Berneen quickly moved the levers.

The motor perked on, held. The car vibrated with a hum that drowned out the fire sounds.

Berneen pulled off the hand brake and pressed the reverse pedal. She backed the car rapidly down the driveway.

"Be careful, Caroline!"

"Good luck, girl!"

Caroline turned and ran toward the back of Nelson Flowers' house, and as Berneen pushed her foot against the low-speed pedal, she saw the white flash of Caroline's dress disappear beyond the red geraniums.

Smoke now filled the yard like a hot settling fog.

Berneen lifted her foot off the pedal and let the motor rev into the next gear.

She sat high above the surging people, but the men and women tugging children by the hands or running with babies in their arms didn't look at the Norwalk. No one seemed aware of her as she accelerated the car down the middle of the street. It was as if they existed in a nightmare of flames, smoke, ripping, cracking sound with no words, no notice.

She tried not to see them either as she bit her lower lip and determined that if she turned onto Elgin, she could possibly cross the tracks and get onto Main before the mob reached that end of Archer. Standpipe Hill with its machine gun lay directly in front of her, and the flames on both sides were already too fierce, too hot for her to try the back alleys or Greenwood Avenue.

She could only hope that Nelson Flowers would still be alive when she got to her uncle's.

Which was the only place she could think to take him.

She turned the next corner and the car wobbled with the effort as it picked up speed. A flume of smoke curtained the houses to the corner, and she shuttered her lashes over her eyes to filter out the haze and see the street.

She swerved the car onto Elgin.

The mob was there ahead of her.

Excerpt from If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot Copyright © 2002 by Pat Carr. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.