Two terrified dogs, a then-husband and I hunkered down in a basement closet. Just before the lights went out (and stayed out for several weeks), the husband cooked a few hamburgers on a hot plate. He’d had too much to drink. We were exceptionally fortunate that he didn’t set the house on fire as the hurricane passed overhead.
Outside our ancient pecans ached and shrieked in the 125 mile-an-hour gusts. We would lose the two 150-year-old trees which sheltered and shaded the south side of the house. The rending, sorrowful cries of those lovely sentinels as the wind claimed them broke my heart. As Hurricane Fran’s eye approached overhead, the water surge rose in our yard in tiny Cerro Gordo, North Carolina.
That night I received the last of the calls on my cell phone just before the towers went down. Christine Brown, my adopted Black mother, was calling from Winter Haven, Florida. She was on her death bed, surrounded by family. My family, my second family. It was the last call she would make. She had insisted on calling her “white daughter” one more time. Christine, the last child of a 76-year-old plantation slave, had been suffering from diabetes and cancer. As the hurricane force winds whistled next to my duct taped windows, I struggled to hear her weakening voice. Her daughter, and my Black sister Jackie, who would die of…