Stormwitch (17 page)
Authors: Susan Vaught
He looks from Ray-boy to Leroy. “Damn, Frye. This is a mess.”
“Ain’t my problem,” the bigger Frye growls. The little Frye, Ray-boy, gives me a guilty look and walks away, toward a big heap of sand.
Officer Bolin doesn’t do anything for a long, long time. I wonder if he’ll arrest Ray-boy, or Ray-boy’s daddy, but I figure he probably won’t. For a minute, I fear he’ll change his mind and arrest us.
What he does is more and more of nothing, except stare at Leroy Frye, who stares back as hateful as ever.
Finally, Officer Bolin dons his hat and glances at us. “Shelter’s inland, thirty miles or so. If y’all go to an aid station, they’ll transport you.”
“Even though we’re black?” Grandmother Jones asks.
Officer Bolin frowns, and I see a touch of red creep into his cheeks. “Yes, Mai—er—Mrs.—um, yeah,” he finally manages, then clears his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”
Leaving him behind, we soon find an aid station and catch a bus. Mixed. Integrated. And everyone seems too
tired or beaten to care. Sand stands on the bus floor, several inches deep. The inside smells like the beach at low tide, sour and half dead.
On the way to the Red Cross tent, we pass a pile of concrete blocks where the Richelieu should have been.
“Lord,” whispers Grandmother Jones, surveying the wreck.
“I heard people talking about that. Those folks, they all died,” says an old white woman with wet gray hair hanging to her shoulders. “All the people who stayed, save for one girl who floated out her window and held on to couch cushions and a tree. The wind and the water nearly beat her to death.”
When the bus stops, the old woman seems confused. Disoriented.
“Come with us,” Miss Hattie says, and she takes the woman’s hand.
We climb over stones and boards to a tent, where we huddle until another bus carries us to a white school north of the coast. Even this place is coated with sand, but at least it smells bleached and clean. When the wind blows, more sand spits and trickles through any crack. Even the tiniest opening.
Hours pass in the shelter. I’ve gotten dry clothes now, a brown dress, not sewed well like Grandmother Jones can do.
My throat feels near parched, because the water from the tap runs red and black and brown. Some of it stinks like sewage. Grandmother Jones tells me not to drink, says it’s all contaminated. The shelter workers tell us they’ll bring us fresh water as soon as they can find some. And food, and medicine for people with cuts and sickness.
News of the storm filters in across that day and the next.
“Gulfport and Biloxi are gone,” says one man.
“Over five hundred miles of road impassable,” says another.
“One hundred thousand tons of debris,” announces radio news.
When we have power and when it works, the television shows pictures of barges and navy ships thrown miles inland, and destruction from tornados and floods all the way to Tennessee, and threats of more floods across the Blue Ridge Mountains, all the way to the East Coast. Hundreds are thought dead or feared dead, maybe as many as two hundred and fifty, plus three in Cuba.
I record these things in my journal, on pages now brittle after drying out, and I write to myself instead of Ba.
I’m sure she won’t mind.
It feels good to look at what is, what might be, instead of always at what was.
“Pass Christian is just about gone except for the old Maritime Academy,” Miss Hattie tells us over a bread and bacon dinner half an hour after Crazy Sardine arrives. His leg is stitched from a flesh wound where the bullet grazed him, and he seems very happy Ray-boy was a rotten shot.
“They say the wind was over two hundred miles an hour,” he says. “And they got sand pushed miles up Highway 90 from that thirty-five-foot storm surge.”
“That witch was evil,” says Gisele.
Crazy Sardine laughs at her. “What are you talking about, child? Camille was a hurricane, not a witch.”
The adults go on talking.
Gisele and Clay stare at me, and I shrug.
“Why don’t they remember?” Clay asks, almost under his breath.
“People see what they need to see,” I tell him. “It’s up to us to remember the truth and do right by it.”
Gisele raises her hand and twists it, and sings some words from my storm chant. A little breeze blows across the top of my water, and I shake a finger at her. “Not inside. Never conjure wind inside, unless it’s an emergency.”
Clay laughs into his hand.
“What we going to do, Maizie?” asks Miss Hattie, breaking bacon onto her bread.
Grandmother Jones sighs. “Go home when we can, I suppose. Rebuild, like everyone else.”
“Zashar gonna come back?” Gisele asks where only I can hear her.
“No,” I say. “She’s gone for good, I think. But we’ll do what we can to help tame the winds when they blow again. We’ll always have storms to fight.”
“I’ll be ready if my turn comes,” she swears, and she opens her palm. Etched on her hand in crude ink I see a blue lump with teeth. An Amazon crocodile.
I smile at her and make a crocodile mouth with my fingers, and I snap the jaws shut.
She grins.
“Y’all stop that alligator nonsense,” says Grandmother Jones. She doesn’t quote Dr. King or anyone else, and her smile comes quickly.
“
Oui, Grand-mère
,” I answer, and she kisses the top of my head without even correcting my French.
I would like to express my gratitude to Victoria Wells Arms and Jennifer Ward for their patient teaching, shaping, and guidance; to Erin Murphy, my agent, for her skilled marketing and belief in the story; and to my critique partners, Debbie Federici and Sheri Gilbert, for sharp eyes, tireless readings, and equally tireless encouragement. Much appreciation to my grandfather, John Vaught, for instilling in me my love for the Gulf Coast. Thank you to Gisele for your love and patience. Last but not least, thank you to my children, Gynni and JB, for always waiting for the next chapter.
Hurricane Camille.
Hurricane Camille was the first Category 5 storm to hit the United States in modern times. As depicted in the story, Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast late on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Wind gusts reached more than two hundred miles per hour. The “storm surge,” or waters pushed in by the tropical depression and fierce winds, reached twenty and thirty feet, obliterating whatever the winds failed to destroy. Huge boats were tossed inland like toys. Pieces of straw were driven through trees like arrows. Houses, businesses, hotels, docks, and bridges were erased as if they had never existed. An estimated five hundred miles of roads were blocked by more than one hundred thousand pounds of debris. Pass Christian, Mississippi, saw the highest water levels, over thirty-five feet in some places. Cleanup from this storm took months, and even today, the scars of Camille can be seen along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
The Kingdom of Dahomey, the “Real” Amazons, and African-African Slavery.
Africa’s Kingdom of Dahomey was, arguably, one of the first societies in modern times ever to grant status to women. All men in power were required to have a
kpojito
, a female “double” to advise them on every decision made. Women could inherit property, serve as head of household, and occupy cherished positions such as bodyguards to kings centuries before women obtained such rights in American society.
For all the legends about fierce women in battle, only the war women of Dahomey have verified basis in historical fact. As early as the 1700s, European visitors to this complex African nation called them
Amazons
. Reports of the Amazons continued until 1892, when better-armed French Legionnaires defeated the forces of King Behanzin.
Dahomey’s Amazons lived in palatial fortresses as large as four miles square. Girls entered service in childhood, severing ties with their birth families. Even children of slaves were eligible if they demonstrated strength and courage enough to impress the older Amazons. Amazons were considered wives of the king, and would fight to the last woman to defend him.
The Amazons were Dahomey’s “front line” army, and the sight of them often terrified enemies into retreat. They did shave their heads, file their teeth, and soak and
shape their fingernails into near daggers to increase their fearsome appearance. Preferred weapons were clubs, machetes, and muskets. Only the youngest Amazons used the bow and arrow, and arrows were usually tipped with poison.
Most legends and stories concerning the Amazons, their dress, and their customs related in this story are as accurate as possible, based on available historical documents; however, it was sometimes difficult because of the racist and ethnocentric (“my culture is better than your culture”) views of the Europeans who recorded Amazon feats.
King Agaja indeed closed Dahomey’s slave trade for a time, and some believe he did this in protest of the practice. Others believe he did this to gain control of the market. Almost all identified West African societies participated in the practice of enslaving each other, and in selling black slaves to New World traders. Before the interference of white society, however, this practice proceeded between tribes much as it did between Native American tribes in the United States. Slaves were captured as “spoils of war,” and many were brought into the tribal folds and made “family,” eventually living as full, equal, and productive members of that tribe. Slaves were often used for exchange, barter, and even treaty making.
With white traders came the profit motive for slavery,
and more important, guns. Better weapons made for better warfare, and African leaders soon engaged in a deadly struggle to arm themselves against increasingly dangerous neighbors. Tribal customs were rapidly destroyed. By the mid-1800s, slavery in many West African nations was as brutal, oppressive, and deadly as it was in the United States.
Would African-African slavery have come to this had whites not interfered? Would Africans have resolved their internal conflicts and slave practices on their own? These are questions that can’t be answered, but they remain the subject of healthy debate.
The “Climate” of 1969 and Today.
Freedom Summer in 1964 was a multigroup, multicultural effort to break through racial barriers in one of America’s most closed societies: the state of Mississippi. Their misson was registering people to vote. Hundreds of volunteers trained for weeks before arriving. Training topics included how to protect themselves during a beating, how to handle themselves if arrested, and how to operate in chains and pairs to avoid being separated and killed. And even with such training, volunteers died. Volunteers were beaten, maimed, and harassed. Both local and non-local workers risked life and limb every day to fight for changes they believed were right and moral.
Historical Sources
Alpern, S. B. (1999).
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey
. New York: New York University Press.
Bay, E. G. (1998).
Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey
. Richmond: University Press of Virginia.
Edgerton, R. B. (2000).
Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the Nature of War
. University of California (Los Angeles): Westview Press.
Erenrich, S. and the Cultural Center for Social Change (1999).
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
. Montgomery, AL: Blackbelt Press.
Payne, C. M. (1995).
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
. University of California (Los Angeles): University of California Press.
University of Southern Mississippi Libraries (2000). USM McCain Library and Archives: Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive.
Weather Channel Enterprises, Inc. (1995–2000).
Storms of the Century: Hurricane Camille
Part I–Part IV.
Copyright © 2005 by Susan Vaught
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Published by Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children’s Books
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published by Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children’s Books in January 2005
Electronic edition published in December 2012
www.bloomsburyteens.com
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury Children's Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vaught, Susan.
Stormwitch / Susan Vaught.–1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes historical notes about events and topics mentioned in the story.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
Summary: In Pass Christian, Mississippi in 1969, sixteen-year-old Ruba, trained by her Haitian grandmother in both voodoo and Amazonian warrior tactics, uses her skills to fight against racism and the African witch Zashar, now coming ashore in the form of Hurricane Camille.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58234-952-7
[1. Voodooism–Fiction. 1. Hurricane Camille, 1969–Fiction. 3. Racism–Fiction. 4. Civil rights movements–Fiction. 5. Haitian Americans–Fiction. 6. African Americans–Fiction. 7. Hurricanes–Fiction. 8. Pass Christian (Miss.)–History–1969–Fiction.] I. Title: Stormwitch. II. Title.
PZ7.V4673St2005 [Fic]–dc22 2004054681
