HBM Continues as an Independent Podcast

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For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW.  And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint.  

However, moving forward, HBM will continue as an independent production, and no longer be distributed through the KCRW feed.

This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded.  So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community sponsors.  We’d love to promote your business or project or just say some words that are meaningful to you.  Become a sponsor of HBM today.  

Please note that the release date of Season 9 is currently unknown.  Probably early 2021. 

We’ll be transferring our feed off of KCRW’s servers in the coming month.  If we do it right, you won’t have to do anything on your end.  If you’re experiencing any difficulty with the feed, please send us an email or tweet at us. 

💗 Thank you so much for your endless support. 💗

 

The Eras of Here Be Monsters (HBM). Infographic by Jeff Emtman. Click to enlarge.

HBM140: The New Black Wall Street

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A man surveying the damage of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 with a sun rising and pillars of smoke billowing. Original image from the collection of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Digital collage by Jeff Emtman.

 

There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T. Washington called it “Black Wall Street.” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” 

Content Note: Descriptions of racial violence, several mentions of a suicide, language.

In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chapter of the KKK was starting to form. 

In the Spring of 1921, a Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was brought into custody for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Over the coming night and day, a huge mob of white Tulsans burned and looted and murdered in Greenwood and the surrounding areas. Dozens or possibly even hundreds of Black Tulsans died, thousands became homeless. 

But authorities never held anyone responsible. In fact, they detained many Black residents, some for up to a week. And insurance claims made in the aftermath were denied, as the insurance policies did not cover “riots.” 

 
 

In the decades that followed. Records of the event went missing, some fear they were destroyed. The mass graves have yet to be found. And many Black Tulsans believed they could face retribution for speaking out about the event. It wasn’t even taught in school until recently. 

As a result, a lot of Tulsans still don’t know the history of Greenwood. 

Local rapper Steph Simon was one of them. He grew up near Greenwood, and he went to middle school there. But it wasn’t until his 20’s when he stumbled upon a documentary about the massacre on Youtube. From there, he became obsessed with learning more about the true story of Tulsa. And in 2019, he released an album called Born on Black Wall Street where he reintroduces himself as “Diamond Dicky Ro” in homage to the young shoeshiner whom white mobs tried and failed to lynch on that night in 1921. 

In 2011, an Oklahoman journalist named Lee Roy Chapman wrote an article for the publication This Land. Chapman’s story, The Nightmare in Dreamland, was a devastating re-telling of the life’s story of an Oklahoman legend--a “founder” of Tulsa named Tate Brady. Brady was well known as an oil tycoon and hotel owner who ran in the elite circles. However, buried by history was Brady’s legacy of violence and racial animus. He was a defender of the Confederacy, he was credibly accused of tarring and feathering some IWW union members, and for part of his life, he was in the Ku Klux Klan. And on the night of the massacre, Brady was there, acting as a night watchman. He reported seeing several dead black people in the streets in or around Greenwood. 

With these revelations, a movement started to remove the Brady name from Tulsa. That movement succeeded partially, but the Brady name is still a part of the Tulsan landscape. 

When Steph Simon shot the cover image for Born On Black Wall Street, he wanted to incorporate the symbolism of Tate Brady. So he went to Brady’s former mansion—a house modelled visually after the house of Robert E. Lee’s, with murals of the Confederacy painted inside and big stone columns out front. It sits on a hill overlooking historic Greenwood. And he stood on the front steps of the mansion only to see a childhood friend driving by. It was Felix Jones, an ex-NFL running back. The two grew up together. To Simon’s surprise, Jones revealed that he’d just bought the mansion. And he invited Simon inside. 

 

 

Together they thought up ideas on how to transform the legacy of the house from something hateful to something loving. So Simon invited about a hundred Black kids to come have a party on the lawn while he filmed the music video for his single “Upside”. 

After that, Simon and Jones started throwing concerts there, drawing huge crowds and starting the slowly re-contextualizing the house into something positive. They renamed the house “Skyline Mansion.”

As this transformation took place, another local DJ and producer, Stevie Johnson woke up in a cold sweat one night. He’d had a dream about rebuilding Black Wall Street, figuratively and literally. He opened his laptop and wrote down his ideas frantically, trying to remember his vision. And soon after, he started to act on it. 

His first step was Fire in Little Africa: a commemorative rap album to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, featuring nearly sixty artists from Oklahoma. And over the course of a weekend in early 2020, rappers and community members and businesses filled Skyline Mansion to record dozens of tracks for the album. 

Fire in Little Africa will be available in February of 2021. Their podcast is out now. They’re also curating spotify playlists of the featured artists, and they’re accepting donations via the Tulsa Community Foundation. 

 
 

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Taylor Hosking visits the former Brady Mansion to talk to the musicians who are looking to build a new Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Taylor also published an article in CityLab called Avenging the Tulsa Race Massacre With Hip Hop.

A lot of people and organizations helped make this episode possible. We’d like to thank Steph Simon, Verse, Stevie Johnson, Keeng Cut, Written Quincy, Bobby Eaton, Felix Jones, Dan Hanh, Mechelle Brown, Chris Davis, Shruti Dhalwala, Brandon Oldham, Ben Lindsey, John DeLore, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Oklahoma Historical Society, and The Woody Guthrie Center. 

Producer: Taylor Hosking (Instagram) (Twitter)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: Steph Simon, Verse, (see embedded YouTube playlist 😀☝) The Black Spot

Also heard on this episode: recordings from Black Lives Matter protests made by Neroli Price of Seattle, Washington; Bryanna Buie of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Bethany Donkin of Oxford, UK. 

More About the Tulsa Race Massacre:

- Official Report from 2001 which describes the events of 1921 in detail and with context. 

- Educational comic about the massacre published by the Atlantic and sponsored by HBO’s Watchmen. 

- Riot and Remembrance By James S. Hirsch

 

HBM136: Jacob's Lost Biography

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Image by Jeff Emtman

 

In 2012, Jacob Lemanski started writing his autobiography a few words at a time when he signed his name on the digital card readers at the grocery store. He read somewhere that the credit card companies keep the signatures on file for seven years. He thought he might report his card stolen in 2019 so that some grunt at Mastercard would find the story of his life...or…more likely he thought it was a project destined to evaporate and never be seen by anyone. 

His inspiration came from an email forward containing a certain Kurt Vonnegut quote about making art for the sake of making art—whether it’s singing in the shower or writing bad poems. Vonnegut argued that art is one way to make the soul grow. 

Jacob considered turning this into a lifelong project. At the time that he and HBM producer Jeff Emtman first talked, he was four entries into the project. On this episode, Jeff checks back with Jacob about his grocery store autobiography. 

Jacob is a retired ant farmer living in Boulder Colorado.

Also on this episode, voicemails from listeners, who share stories about their bodies, sounds from the world around them, and the things that make them feel guilty. Call us anytime (765) 374-5263

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot, August Friis 

 

HBM135: Dying Well

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3d image by Jeff Emtman. Cloth Texture by Simon Thommes’ Weavr.

 

We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Content Note: Language

Amanda is a death doula, someone who provides practical, emotional, and spiritual support to people who are about to die. Sometimes this means that Amanda helps dying people and their families sort out their end-of-life paperwork and advanced care directives; Sometimes she helps dying people plan their own memorials. And sometimes she sits with people as they die. She says the tasks she performs are different for every person, but that her goal is always the same: to advocate for the wishes of the dying.

Amanda says that, in her experience, death is often harder for the loved ones to accept than it is for the person who is dying. “It’s almost like, in Western culture, it’s not OK to die… Like we guilt the dying person into trying to keep them here longer, with medicine and medical procedures because we, the survivors, are not capable of letting go of that person.” Because of this, Amanda recommends that people grieve by holding and touching the bodies of their loved ones after they die. She believes that talking about death openly will help people be less afraid.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness

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David Denton, Bethany’s father, pictured in his Air Force uniform with the reflection of two of his children visible. Photo illustration by Jeff Emtman.

 

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store.

At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood.  They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time with his cousins. He used to love playing outside with his cousins, and hear stories about the land around them. One of his favorite places to go was The Heart of the Monster, a landmark that is sacred to the Nez Perce people. They also made the trip to the Denton family plot at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Kooskia, so that Bethany and her brother could visit their Grandpa Bill’s grave. Bethany’s grandpa was Bill Denton, a sportscaster for KREM-TV in Spokane. She never met him, he died years before she was born.

Audio from the Heart of the Monster site courtesy of Nez Perce National Historical Park, used with permission.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM128: Seeing Auras

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Graphic by Jeff Emtman and Colby Richardson.

Graphic by Jeff Emtman and Colby Richardson.

 

Colby Richardson’s mom got leukemia when he was young. He has trouble remembering her. Soon after her death, Colby and his siblings wound up at a house in Hope, BC where he met Santo, a childhood friend of his mom’s. Colby remembers that Santo’s voice to be soft and extremely calm. 

Santo told Colby that he had a beautiful, green aura, a glow that surrounded his body. Back when his mother was alive, Santo had been able to see her aura too, the same green, but with a deep purply violet mixed in. 

That afternoon, Santo and Colby sat in a living room with their eyes closed. Santo led him in a visualization exercise where they breathed slowly together until a door emerged in their minds’ eye. They opened the door and let light shine down. And when Colby opened his eyes, he could see auras floating around too. 

 
 

Colby only saw Santo that one day, but it made an impression. In middle school and high school, Colby would sometimes stare to see the moving shapes of light around people. Eventually the ability faded. 

But even today, Colby still sees clouds of green and purple before he falls asleep. He says it makes him feel connected to his mom, like she’s watching over him. But he also worries that he was tricked into believing in magic while he was in a susceptible state, grieving the death of his mother. 

So, these days, Colby is uncertain about how to reflect on that afternoon in 2003. In the intervening years, he’s thought about getting in touch with Santo, but never found the right time.  Just recently, he finally reached out. He found that Santo’s health has degraded, and he may have missed his chance to get clarity about his experience with auras.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot

 
Colby Richardson and his two cats in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

Colby Richardson and his two cats in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Photo by Jeff Emtman.