North Carolina’s Problem Isn’t Florence, It’s Poverty
The floodplains read like maps of inequality and race
Before the storm, I called Alyeesha — a friend of a friend. She’d stayed at my house a few years ago when she was escaping a bad relationship. She lives Down East, back in her hometown in Carteret County, North Carolina, in a small one-room house that was her grandmother’s sharecropping cabin. She rents the cabin from the man who now owns the land; it is not hers.
I’ve been there once. She had a mattress on the floor, a sofa from a Rent-a-Center, and a picture of her grandmother on the wall. I wanted to let her know that if she was evacuating from the hurricane, there was a sofa waiting for her here.
“Naw, I’m going to ride it out,” she said.
Everyone I know Down East and on the shore is riding it out. For a few it’s bravado, but for most of them, it’s just that they can’t go. There aren’t enough seats in the car, or the car is busted, or there’s no car at all. There are too many babies or too many old folks. There are jobs that won’t be there for them if they miss a few days. There are paychecks that haven’t yet cleared. There are food stamps that ran out last week. And there isn’t enough money in anyone’s damn bank account.
