Promise Read online

  DEDICATION

  For the uncounted, but not unmourned.

  And for Anna, in memory.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Other Storm Story: Author’s Note

  Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Monday, April 6 Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Tuesday, April 7 Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday, April 8 Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Thursday, April 9 Chapter 13

  Friday, April 10 Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  Historical Photos

  About the Author

  Also by Minrose Gwin

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE OTHER STORM STORY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A few minutes after 9 P.M. on Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a massive funnel cloud flashing a giant fireball and roaring like a runaway train careened into the thriving cotton-mill town of Tupelo, in northeastern Mississippi. The tornado was measured as an F5, the highest level on the Fujita scale. Winds were estimated at 261 to 318 miles per hour, leveling 48 city blocks, about half the town.

  The Tupelo tornado wreaked havoc. The dead and dying were strewn about the town, dangling in the sheared limbs of leafless trees, buried under debris, pinned to the bottom of a small lake called Gum Pond, laid out in alleyways and makeshift morgues. Members of a family of thirteen, including a newborn baby, were blown in all directions; none survived. My grandmother found a dead baby girl in a crepe myrtle bush and wrapped her in a dish towel and laid her on the kitchen counter. There are at least five published accounts of flying children, including a girl around eight years old, who was blown from her own home on the black side of town, miraculously sailing through a window and landing dazed but unhurt in the attic of a white family a mile away. Featherless chickens and hornless steers wandered the city streets. Debris from Tupelo was found in the neighboring state of Tennessee.

  The official death toll ranged from 216 to 233; between 700 and 1,000 townspeople were listed as injured, many of them having lost limbs. Based on these figures, the Tupelo tornado of 1936 remains today the fourth most deadly tornado in the history of the United States.

  Growing up in my grandparents’ sturdy four-square house, one of the few left standing on their side of town, I heard these stories and many more. I thought I knew everything there was to know, truth or lore, about the Tupelo tornado of 1936.

  I was wrong.

  What I did not know was that the casualty records for the Tupelo tornado were incomplete and therefore inaccurate: members of the African-American community, one-third of the town’s population, many of whom lived in ramshackle housing on a northeastern ridge called the Hill, were, quite simply, not counted. The death and injury tolls were much higher than records show.

  We will never know those numbers. We will never know the names of all the uncounted.

  A STORY can sometimes tread where history fails to clear a path or when that path has been made too tidy, obscuring a fractured landscape. It is that fractured landscape that I’ve tried to decipher in this work of fiction.

  Events and place names in this story of the Tupelo tornado and its immediate aftermath are from newspaper accounts, oral narratives, and memorabilia: the characters and their stories are entirely fictitious.

  PALM SUNDAY,

  APRIL 5, 1936

  1

  8 P.M.

  Too still out there. Dark coming on and no birds singing good night lady. No squirrels rummaging for last year’s acorns under the big oak out front. The sky bruised, yellow and green with streaks of plum.

  Peculiar smell in the air too: sour, vinegary. Downright peculiar. She knew it but couldn’t place it. Something to eat, maybe? But what?

  Now the wind kicked up in wicked little bursts. Rain or worse. Maybe hail.

  And there it all was, an entire day’s work, flapping on the line like some big white fell-from-the-sky bird: the McNabb wash. Sheets, towels, underwear, diapers, what have you. One sheet wrapped around the line, snagged. The Judge’s upside-down dress shirts white as the driven snow, that much less skin on her knuckles. Her fingertips still burned, slick from the bleach.

  She stood on her tiptoes and peered out the open window over the kitchen sink. Her neck rose in cords above the buttoned collar of her wash dress, which was pocked with pulls and stains and gaping where the button under her breasts had long since popped off and been lost. She wiped her hands down the sides of her dress to dry them and touched her head the way she used to do when she was little and her people got around the table and started telling about how she came into the world with a little cap of hair that looked for all the world like the feathers of a baby bird. She’d had trouble catching her first few breaths and so was a grayish color when her father first saw her. He called her his Dovey, insisted on the name. Her mother had sat straight up in bed, labor sweat still wet on her face. Naming her firstborn after a bird? What you going to name the next one, she’d asked. Pigeon? Crow?

  But Dovey had always liked her name. When she was a girl, she studied doves: the maternal bulk of their bodies, the way they bobbed their small heads and cooed full-throatedly and stayed low to the ground. How they fussed when she got too near and flushed them. They seemed to her more human than other birds, more willing to stay close, less afraid of a human hand, downright companionable. Sometimes, now, on winter nights when she slept deep and still under a pile of quilts, she dreamed she was one. She fluttered on the edge of something brown and warm, and then, cooing, she flapped her arms, and then, oh glory! She took off into the wide blue yonder, riding the wind. Up Main Street, past Crosstown where the two train tracks made an X like a bull’s-eye in the middle of town, over the churches and steeples, the fancy columned houses up and down Church Street, Pegues Funeral Home, TKE Drug Store, People’s Bank and Trust, Reed’s and Black’s department stores: Whitetown.

  Then, to the southeast, Milltown: a different set of white folks. Skinny as rails and so paper-thin white they looked like you could poke a finger through them. They lived in rowed-up shotguns that sagged and leaned like a stack of dominoes about to go over. They worked twelve hours a day six days a week at the mill, even the children, who were scrawnier than any black child up on the Hill or even down in Shake Rag. Looked like they’d never sat down to a meal of fatback and greens and corn bread. Wormy.

  Then she would turn back north, swoop and flutter up Green Street, rising with the landscape, toward home: Elephant Hill, where her own people lived. She wasn’t sure why they called it that—some called it Park Hill—but the Hill it was, a humped bluff overlooking muddy Gum Pond, also called Park Lake. Perched on top: Carver High, Springhill Cemetery, the faded old school bus where the Davises packed in three large children and a pair of twin babies. St. John the Baptist Church, J. W. Porter Undertaker. Houses that snaked in all directions, having been built onto bit by bit as they filled up with babies and old folks to take care of. Lucille Jones’s garden with its splash of daylilies and black-eyed Susans. At the highest point, the water tower, a monster on stilts, cast a shadow over the whole community.

  NOW IT was coming on dark sure enough. Out beyond the wash on the line, to the southwest side of North Green, where the paved street turned to rutted dirt, stretched Glenwood Cemetery, the chalky gravestones bent over like the broken-down, mostly old white people who now rested beneath them. To the east, Gum Pond, swampy and crawling with muskrats and snakes, not to
speak of all manner of no-count lowlifes, black and white, hanging around out there under those big gum trees all hours of the day and night, smoking that Mexican hemp they sold up at Blue Mountain, up to no possible good. And back to the north, Springhill Cemetery, where her Mother and Daddy lay, with Janesy and Uldine and Blue. Her whole family long gone from the typhoid, leaving her an orphan at eight, forced to live with an aunt who put her to work at the washboard, where she’d been ever since.

  That afternoon when the wash was done, she’d walked over to Springhill, her white head rag bobbing up and down over the high ridge and rolling hills, over the indentions where the graves, marked and unmarked, lay. She sat down next to her family, all five of them there together in an impossibly small piece of ground. The late day sun flooded the western ridge in gold and turned the grass and moss to green velvet. The sun’s rays came in over the graves like the points of a spear, showing up the telltale scallops in the ground where each grave had been dug. When it reached her lap, it fired the faded roses on her housedress to hot coals. There was an old cedar tree at the top of the ridge. Next to it an old-man sycamore bent eastward from years of wind. She pushed herself backward into their shade, sweating a little. Her dead ones, were they at peace? Hadn’t they wanted more of this dear sweet earth? The smells, the birdcalls, the way the light turned slant in the fall? Hadn’t they wanted all that?

  There was a place in the cemetery where she didn’t go. A far corner, backed up to some scrub pines. The small stone she and Virgil had bought now mottled with moss and mold, covered over in pine needles and broken branches. There was a disturbance in the needles; some animal had made its bed there.

  NOW, AS she stood at the kitchen sink, that old whistle shattered the odd quieter-than-quiet, making her jump. Once, twice, three, four, five times. The eight o’clock M&O, its tracks to the northeast, just the other side of Gum Pond. When she was a girl, after she’d lost her family, she used to lie in bed and listen for the eight o’clock, her little chest a turtle’s shell, grown hard from the slow crawl of grief.

  Now she felt the old rumble in her throat, something between a growl and a song that came from a low place, calling back to the train, saying she was sad, sad, she wanted her brother and sisters back. Saying what that McNabb boy did to her Dreama deserved a killing. She would relish it. But how to kill a white man? Well, poison, for one thing. Was there a poison a person might use on clothes? Sprinkle it on like starch and, one two three, Bogeyman’s dead as meat and nobody knows why. Ha!

  Dovey didn’t study white folks unless forced to. Bad enough dealing with their peculiar odors and stains that lingered on sheets and handkerchiefs and underwear. (Did they ever bathe?) Bad enough the scrubbing and bleaching those stains out, only to have them returned to you the next week, nastier than ever. But what that devil did to Dreama was like a tiger sashaying through the front door. You couldn’t not study it or it would eat you alive. She and Virgil had gone to the sheriff and then to the boy’s daddy, the Judge. Nothing was done, nor, she knew in the pit of her stomach, would it ever be, white folks being white folks.

  It would have to be the McNabbs’ laundry out there. She couldn’t help herself, she flat-out detested the whole family, even the little baby, which she knew was wrong, wrong, wrong. But she couldn’t help herself. She knew the McNabbs in the most intimate ways, in ways they did not know one another. She knew that the Mrs. had not once ceased to bleed since that baby was born four months ago, that she perspired so much she wore underarm pads with even her everyday dresses. She knew the girl had broken her left arm; the left sleeve of several of her blouses had been cut off and hemmed. She knew the Judge ate tomato salad every Thursday at TKE Drugs because he splattered it all over his white shirt. She knew that boy didn’t keep himself clean in the private ways a decent person should, which didn’t surprise her in the least. He was lower than low.

  At the sink she shifted from one foot to the other. Her feet, tiny and swollen and gnarled as the bark of an old tree trunk, her legs like a bird’s. You one scrawny little woman, Virgil would say. You near about a midget, girl. He’d come up behind her while she was doing the wash and say, what you know good, girl? Then lift her off her feet and kiss the back of her neck where her scarf was knotted and the hair poked through.

  Tonight her pelvis ached. She’d been at the washtub all day, beating and scrubbing and pushing that roller round and round to wring out the clothes. Her right shoulder felt off in the socket, as though it’d been knocked out and put back wrong. She reached up and rubbed it. Now, thanks to this mess of weather, she was going to have to get in the whole shooting match and be quick about it from the looks of that sky. She would have to bring the McNabbs back into her house; her hands would have to touch their clothing yet again. Everything would still be damp, given the mugginess in the air, maybe even dripping wet. She would have to iron every blasted piece of it dry, the wet starch coating her iron. It would take half the night. She’d have to fire the stove back up to heat the iron, and in this weather. Here it was barely the first week of April and hot as blue blazes. As the train passed through, wheels click-clacking, she went from sad to mad. She could barely catch her breath she was so furious. Pure aggravation, this weather. She’d be up until midnight. What a humbug!

  Some nights she lay in bed and the laundry of the whole town, a grayish mound of white people’s dirt, rose up before her. Then something in the pile of clothes would shift and it would start to slide and bury her, smother her. From time to time she considered maiding, but there was no money to speak of in it, just a lot of leftovers, and working in some white woman’s house, under her thumb. It didn’t appeal, not even on a night like tonight. At least she could stretch her legs, rest when she wanted, go out in the yard and watch the mockingbirds fight. No persnickety Miss Lady breathing down her neck. Saying, day in and day out, now you come, now you go. No good Christian husband and father coming at her from behind, whispering filth in her ear.

  All through supper, some corn bread and beans and buttermilk, and then the washing of the dishes, she’d looked forward to the moment when she could put on her nightgown and sink into bed, pull the quilt just so over her aching legs, turn her body to curl around Virgil’s, taking on his shape, adjusting the timing of her breath to his. She looked across the room at him, already in bed in the corner and dead to the world. Flat tuckered out, like always. Millwork, but not really millwork. That was left to the whites—mostly Milltown women, and the girls and boys who rode the looms with their bare feet like monkeys. The adults made twelve dollars a week, good money. He made less than a quarter of that sweeping the cotton lint up and down the long aisles, the only Negro allowed in the mill. White fluff, mountains of it. He brought some of it home in a croker sack for stuffing the mattress when it got beaten down, and sometimes for pillows or a new quilt. The rest of the time he was glad to be shuck of it. He never stopped sweeping, he told Dovey; he swept in his dreams, woke up every morning with the broom in his hand. Nights he’d come home with aching shoulders and a crotchety back, all covered in white fuzz. Look like Old Saint Nick, he’d say. The joke got old fast. Better let up, she’d say, you no spring chicken. No old man neither, he’d say back, then come for her to prove it.

  The cotton compress was the largest in the state so the mill flourished, producing “Tupelo Cheviots, the cloth with a million friends.” The work was steady. When the bales were spun into fabric, the fuzz went every which way. It’s snowing every day over there, snowing white money for white folks, Virgil would say, just one big old snowstorm. When he’d get home at night he’d go around back and take off his shirt and overalls and hand them over to Dovey on the back stoop. She’d shake them off and pin them to the line. Every Saturday night she put them in her washtub for a good soak. He’d stand behind the house in his underwear, white from Dovey’s bleach, and run his hands through his hair and over the hair on his arms. He kept his handkerchief to blow the fibers out of his nose. Dovey would come back out and han
d him what they called his house clothes, a soft flannel shirt and some old cast-off pants. He’d take a few swipes at his shoes and come on into the house where she had him a cup of warmed-up breakfast coffee waiting on the kitchen table. He’d have his coffee, complain it was strong enough to walk out the door. Then he’d take off his shoes and read the paper while Dovey got their supper on.

  He sneezed and sneezed. Sometimes, in bed at night, he woke up gasping for air and she would have to get out the Mentholatum and rub down his chest.

  On Sundays, when the mill was quiet and Dovey busy, like she was today, with the never-ending wash, Virgil worked on the house. He’d built the house himself, a dogtrot on top of one of the Hill’s several ridges. He’d gotten only one side finished by the time they moved in as a young couple and he was always working on the other half, a task that seemed more pressing now that the baby was almost ready to sit up. It wouldn’t be long until that one was on the move. Then, Katy bar the door, Promise would need more room, and so would the rest of them. The work had taken years because Virgil used wood scrap he gathered piecemeal around town, usually behind Leake & Goodlett Lumber, plus he was busy with other business. He was big in the Negro Elks, always going to meetings and fixing things at other folks’ houses. People came to him for advice and favors. He never turned anybody down. You always got to be the busiest man in town? Dovey would complain, but secretly she was proud of the way folks counted on him, proud that he was a man who couldn’t say no.

  AFTER THE eight o’clock rumbled through, Dovey got her basket and started out the back door. She stopped at the door to take off her sweater. It had been chilly this morning on the porch when she started on the day’s wash, but now it was like an oven outside, the sky still moving into dark. And, Dreama and Promise, where’d those two get off to? They ought to be home from church by now. Dreama went to church every time the doors opened, not what you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old girl. Virgil said she got more religion than God Himself got.