A Measure of Belonging by Cinelle Barnes

Author:Cinelle Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938235726
Publisher: Hub City Press
Published: 2020-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Cast off pages of my first draft of a story float past me, the pages clumping together, my editing marks now illegible smeared ink. Last night, before all of this, I was writing about Princeville, North Carolina. Founded by emancipated slaves, it is the oldest incorporated African American town in the country, and it has been wiped off of the map twice by floods.

After Hurricane Matthew ripped through the town in 2016, the residents were given three options: rebuild everything all over again, hoping the new structures could stand the floods (it is a given that there would be more floods), pick up the entire town and move it all farther from the river, or accept a buyout from the federal government and move somewhere else, abandoning Princeville altogether. For two years I’ve gone back and forth to this little town, sitting in on city council meetings, wondering what the end was gonna be, what the residents would choose. If the dam near the town was raised any higher, it would flood the mostly white established town of Tarboro. So the government keeps building the dam back the same way, with small modifications. The officials over infrastructure won’t return my calls about the dam, and I’m pretty sure after ten voicemails, left weekly, I am deemed a nuisance—the nosy reporter who wants to know what will happen to history, who can’t let things just be, who doesn’t realize that the North Carolina establishment likes the old way just fine. My draft doesn’t have an ending, so before bed I tossed the sheets to the side for recycling. I didn’t expect it to be carried back to me the next day on the water.

I have made my career by crafting stories that highlight the resilience of people living in tense places: a football game after police protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, large powwows near Standing Rock, North Dakota, a roller derby bout at a rink in Flint, Michigan. I collect these stories and figure out what they have to say about our country, and all of the ways in which we are failing our citizens. I write them because I want readers to see all of the ways we can be better, to see opportunities to help one another.

I haven’t turned in the Princeville story because I haven’t figured out how to sum up what Princeville’s trials say about America. I wonder what this Gordian knot says about me. I can’t save my own house. What makes me believe I can save a whole town?

I don’t have the money to fix my drain problem. Contractors say they believe French drains may save our overtaxed established ones, but it is a five-thousand-dollar science experiment. My mind tells me if I had that much money to spare, it might be better to just clean up the place and put the damn thing on the market. In the end this is how we’ll be moved—barely surviving disaster after disaster, until they break our resilience, until we can no longer adapt, and this house and my soul are just a shell.

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