The World As We Knew It by Amy Brady

Author:Amy Brady [Brady, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646220304
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

AFTER THE STORM

MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR

“Granddaddy! GET BACK IN THE HOUSE!”

Of all the things I thought I’d be doing on this visit back to Mississippi, yelling at my grandfather in the middle of a hurricane wasn’t one of them. I was home for what I thought would be a one-week vacation between a summer in New York City and my senior year at Oberlin College.

I never thought I’d yell at my grandfather, ever. He was my grandfather, we are Black, and I like having teeth in my mouth. My grandfather never raised a hand to me, but I just assumed that any sort of backtalk would release a giant rock from the sky to smite me.

On the other hand, I never thought I would see a hurricane in Port Gibson, Mississippi, either. We’re no stranger to thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes. But hurricanes? That’s a coastal problem. The “port” in Port Gibson denotes its position on the Mississippi River. We are about two hundred miles from the Gulf Coast. But Katrina went where she wanted.

Maybe that was why my grandfather thought it was a good idea to recover the feeder for his beloved hummingbirds after the wind knocked it down. It was all so unbelievable, so why believe it?

“Granddaddy.” I tried to soften my voice. “It’s a hurricane. The birds aren’t out right now.”

“What do you know?” he shot back. “You not a bird.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

But I didn’t have to. As soon as he got off the back porch, Katrina declared her dominance and knocked him off balance. A man for whom confidence was everything lost it all to the wind. He came shuffling back toward the house, avoiding the concern in his granddaughter’s eyes.

My grandfather was a very proud man. I don’t think I’d ever seen him lower his head or shrink his shoulders. As a Black man who grew up in Alabama in the 1920s and 1930s, served in the military in the 1940s, integrated the schools in Nashville with his own children in the 1950s—he had a lot to be proud of. He passed a lot of that down to me, almost by osmosis. He didn’t talk about it much, but I could feel it in his presence. Something about being near him made you want to stand straighter and speak clearer. Ever since I could remember, I was terrified of disappointing him, and desperate to impress him. It wasn’t easy.

Now he said nothing. He just stumbled back into the house, where my mother had cable news pundits and meteorologists blaring in every room.

Things hadn’t gotten bad yet. The power was still on. The water was still running. And I was in the middle of an ill-advised experiment of steaming okra. I would never try that again.

We were worried for New Orleans, that beautiful, beautiful city in a soup bowl. Our regional jewel. But we also felt relief because, that morning, it had been announced that Katrina had not hit New Orleans head-on and had instead made landfall at Bay St.

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