A Story for 776
New York City doesn’t rain without a wave of articles coming in about the disproportionate impact of flood damage on people of color the next morning. Because often by the next morning cars sit vacant stranded on highways, people are trapped in their homes and lives are even lost from this heavy rain, not in places like Tribeca or Dumbo but in Flatbush and Jamaica. They will tell you climate change is causing intensified rain, among every other horrible thing it causes, and how Black and Brown communities face the highest risks when it comes to storms. But I don’t need an article from Forbes to tell me that. I knew at ten years old. In 2011 Hurricane Irene’s water whisked me away from my childhood home for nearly a month. And the home I knew before I left never did return.
The days leading up to the hurricane were some of the scariest. My sisters and I huddled together in the attic hypnotized by our tube TV turned to the local news. My sister was freaking out, paralyzed by the fear of not knowing what was to come. Though I wouldn’t tell her, I was scared too. When the storm came into town through the night, trees fell, the water in the river in my backyard swelled uphill, the power went out and the water stopped running.
In the days following, life looked like the apocalypse. My parents got the three of us together and told us we had to leave. When I vacated the house my eyes immediately fixed on the cherry blossom tree that sat as an quintessential fixture of our backyard landscape, with long brown branches that seemed to climb into the sky. A thick rope tied where the branches met the trunk and a big ole tire at the other end. For the first time it had become unrecognizable, snapped in half taking the form of a hand carved shiv, branchless and leaning to one side. I still remember what it was like to be ten. To lose my tire swing and want to melt into a puddle and cry for the rest of time. But I didn’t, I could feel the sense of a greater loss occurring simultaneously.
My parents drove my sisters and I down to my grandma’s house. Her apartment building was equipped with a generator who’s constant buzz was the only noise cutting the haunting silence of outside. It also kept the building’s residents glued to stairwells lit with a warm lull of emergency lighting and powered with electricity strips, our only power source since the lights went out.
We were out of school for weeks after the storm. My grandma would drive us around, we’d wait on long gas lines to pass the time. I remember sitting in a fast chinese restaurant. With my phone plugged into the wall. I remember the beach. I remember the drive to the beach and how everything looked like the end of the world. And how warm it was. I remember wondering if this was how it was always going to be.
When my parents eventually brought us home there was a stench in the basement. I can still smell it if I close my eyes and imagine being back there. Lights out. Projection TV unplugged (it’s still there and it’s still unplugged), sectional pushed far from the wall, damp. Eventually, black, gray, white splotches crawling up the wall. That smell.
Going to school after that was weird. My friends described their time away the way some of us lookback and describe lockdown from the COVID pandemic. They told me about sitting in their house bored with nothing to do. How their generators were loud and their mom’s cooking was bad. How they missed school.
I didn’t tell them about crying on the beach about the tire swing, or putting on talent shows for the kids in my grandma’s apartment building who were confused beyond measure and in the dark without power, or charging my phone in the chinese takeaway spot. The way my basement smells and how they couldn’t come over anymore.
Growing up I was constantly confused about how my life was always so different from theirs. At 10 you don’t know the word “socioeconomic” but the socioeconomics of this country explains everything. You don’t know the words “environmental racism” either, but I wish I could’ve broken it down for little me. That way she wouldn’t look down at the color of her skin and feel shame because it’s hard not to think that I had the wrong skin color because my skin looked the way that it did and thus so did my life.
Only in college did I come to learn about the socioeconomic divide when it comes to storm relief and rehabilitation. How storms will get worse over time due to climate change, and how people of color and low income communities will continue to bear the brunt of displacement due to climate change. The moment I did the puzzle pieces clicked into place as to why my sisters and I spent days wrapped in every blanket we could find inside by grandma’s silent, still apartment while my friends were back home watching TV in front of the fireplace.
It made sense as to why that was the case every single time thereafter. So, every year the storms got worse, the water would rise in the basement with the mold in between the wall paper, and we could never get it off.
We never got the tire swing back, could never get the walls scraped clean, couldn’t buy a ledge for the house to sit on so the rain making the river crawl into the basement couldn’t reach us anymore. But for now, I can only imagine how flat on our backs we would’ve been had we lost the house completely. I’d develop a cough but would always have a place to live.
As the hurricanes get worse maybe one day a kid who grew up like me will know, and I really don’t think I could bear to live in a world where they do.
