Preventing Unraveling: After Tornado, Neighbors Step Up to Crisis While in Crisis Themselves

On Sunday, April 15th, a tornado tore through the poorest communities of Greensboro North Carolina. Here is how people responded.

*******************************************************************Last night, I grabbed my chainsaw and headed to Trina’s house, where her home was unscathed by the tornado, but a tree had blocked her car in and she had missed work. One more missed day and she will lose that job, so we figured since we can’t lift the car, we had best cut up the tree.

Streets were shut down all over the east side, downed power lines, debris and trees.There was a van clear flipped on top of itself on English. It took me forever to get to Trina’s, and by the time I arrived her neighbors had chopped up that tree. I feebly busied myself stacking up the remaining wood on the curb.

We sat on her steps looking out over her street where vinyl siding was peeled off houses like half pulled bandaids and pink insulation was caught in trees. A group of little boys were busy piling up broken limbs into a lean-to against a Buick.

“My God,” she said. “My God,” she kept saying, My God.” She wasn’t finding the words.

But there is really only so long you can wait for the words to come — and communities like this rarely have that sort of time.

I don’t know what it is about tornadoes and floods and hurricanes but they always seem to plow through the poor parts of town — the places that are hardscrabble and hurting and trying to keep things together the best they can. It’s like the eye of the storm can see the yellowed tape we use to hold things together, and see it fraying at the edges and can’t resist giving it that last tug.

Or maybe it’s just that there are so many poor places in our rich towns that if you throw a rock you are just gonna hit one anyway. Or maybe our rich towns aren’t so rich after all. Maybe it’s just the people who draw the maps and name the places and put up the statues and say all the things…maybe it’s just them who can afford to go out for a beer. We know we can’t.

But I guess a tornado sucks off your roof no matter who you are or what side of town you rest your head. It’s going to pull your mattress out the window and lay it on the lawn, stripped of its sheets, no matter where you came from. A tornado is going to carve a four mile trail through this city in 10 minutes flat — giving it 10 minutes of equality it might never see again.

But after that 10 minutes, everything is different again. Segregated again. Here, on the east side, where life is precariously balanced between service sector wages and eviction notices and repo coming to get your damn rented sofa set, here an Act of God marks the beginning of a great unraveling.

Trina’s tree didn’t even hit anything — it wasn’t laying across power lines or her roof like the other trees on her block — but it was just as serious as if it did. That tree was blocking her from getting to work. And Trina doesn’t get to work jobs with paid days off and an understanding employer: she knows she is as replaceable as you can get. And her job is means everything to her. Not only does it house her and feed her, it’s the way she is getting back her kids. Her children live in foster care across town — they are safe, praise Jesus, she whispers — because Trina tried and tried to leave her abusive ex but became homeless everytime she did. Finally, the children were removed from her care, and she needs to be employed for three months in her own home alone before she can have them back with her.

If she can’t get around that tree, the unraveling begins.

Even on sunny days, traffic tickets and unpaid court costs unravel lives here. Suspensions and criminal referrals for school fights that in a different era and with a different skin color were down right James Dean-esque unravel lives here. Missing a utility payment or losing the meat in your freezer unravels lives. Cars breaking down unravel lives. Employers downsizing unravel lives. But nobody comes for Acts of Man. Just Acts of God.

You have to be from here to understand the unraveling. That is why you see the community respond like it has in Greensboro. As I tried to get to Trina, the corners were full of small church groups handing out bottled water and hot meals; families were set up with bar-b-ques going, grilling meat before it spoiled and sharing with passerbys. Calls were put out on social media for donations to be dropped off at this house or this parking lot or the steps of that little cinder block church with the name written in red paint right there on the door, the one that has the gravel lot and the fish frys on second Sundays.

The big charities will come later. Many of them will help tremendously, bringing wealth and help and access that these communities are rarely afforded when they are not being struck by an Act of God. But right now it is us just Trina and her neighbors, the church up the street, the local activists, Black Lives Matter and the neighborhood clinic, knowing that they must tie up this knot quickly to stop the great unraveling and that they must shore up their self-worth, remind themselves of their autonomy, and to revel in their own power and greatness before becoming the objects of charity as the weeks wear thin.

No matter how messy, no matter how hard, no matter how round-about and inefficient and even incorrigible it may sometimes be, my heart will always belong to Trina and the cinder block church and the neighborhood clinic, the activists making sandwiches, the librarian collecting cans, the neighbors with the chainsaws and the kids building a magical place out of debris.