The Flood

Baldwin River Lake flooded when Hurricane Katrina slammed the Southeast. Douglass County had only been hit with the after effects. The properties deep inside of Douglass County had been safe from the flooding but the areas surrounding had been hit the hardest, which also meant St. Jude’s Catholic Church and her cemetery. The flooding brought many bodies to the surface, including my grandmother’s.  

She had floated all throughout the roads and landed in front of Louis Harrington’s house. After a week, she was found, and after two, our family had organized a new service to celebrate her life once again. According to my mother, it would be a perfect time for a redo. She and my aunties organized a brand-new celebration of life in a country, Catholic fashion. Father Connor conducted the funeral mass. He had baptised everyone in my family over the age of fifty and held his post at St. Jude’s for over sixty years.They organized a mass to celebrate the loving mother that they had lost over ten years ago which would be followed by a crawfish boil at my uncle’s house. 

My grandmother had died of a stroke when I was seven and I lost my faith at sixteen, all of this for a bag of bones was just a bag of money being wasted. But at my mother’s insistence, I left NYU where I had spent the past two years studying sociology in hopes of getting my Ph.D someday,  and traveled to Douglass County with my boyfriend TJ who insisted on coming. 

TJ stood for Theodore Junior. He was a light-skinned boy I had met in the library. He had asked me for coffee while shyly kicking me out of the study room. He came from some suburb in Maryland that had big houses and small families. He was old-Black money, and the ninth generation in his family to attend college while I was second generation on my daddy’s side and first on my momma’s. 

Most of the time, he was corny and filled silences with unneeded noise. But TJ aspired to things that I couldn’t ever imagine. He wanted to become a senator which was greater than my plan of getting my doctorate. We had only been dating five months and I could picture the next five years with us together—me supporting him and him going to Harvard Law to be whatever version of great he wanted. 

Only he would believe that a redo funeral was a great time to meet the family.

With him, I found myself doing things that I said I would never do. I skipped my morning classes to be with him. I would stay in his room at his apartment (avoiding his roommates) to wait for him to get out of class. Sometimes when I was tucked into his arms at night, I wondered if I was giving too much of myself away to him. It was hard not to. 

While the news was filled with people stranded on top of their own houses, we left for New York City the night before the funeral.  We stayed at my mother’s childhood home which now housed my widowed and divorced aunties. TJ and I had to stay in separate bedrooms. I slept with my younger cousin Whitney and he slept on the extra bunk bed in an empty bedroom with my brother. Instead of sleeping to the sounds of cars and TJ’s snores, I slept to the sound of crickets and my cousin groaning in her sleep. 

The funeral was packed to the rafters. Three of my aunties spoke, they mostly spoke of the love that my grandmother spread to all those around her. Sister Micheal played somber tones on the organ. Everyone that had known my grandmother called the funeral beautiful. 

“The world is hurting.” Father Connor said. “Our brothers and sisters across state lines are suffering. As Catholics—as a people—we must use this funeral the way Mrs. Gwen would have wanted: to mourn not her but the suffering that permeates the world around us.”  I think my grandmother would have loved his sermon. Despite my mother inquiring if I was going to wear tights under my black dress, I was fine. She wore a girdle under her dress because God forbid, she had a little stomach out at her mother’s funeral.

“Bella, you guys know so many people.” TJ whispered. He leaned forward from the pew behind me because only real family sat in the first five rows. “It’s really amazing.” I wondered if this was his first time in a Catholic church, especially a church so small. 

I sat next to my father at the funeral. My mother let out small sobs as Father Connor spoke about baptizing all Granny’s children, my father and I glanced at each other. Since Granny had died, she had grieved in every way possible. She cried at memories and mentions, there was no end to her tears. After, we walked the trails that led to the edge of the cemetery.  We couldn’t travel all the way to her grave because it still held huge puddles of water. 

“You two look so much alike.” TJ had whispered to me as we fell behind the crowd at the cemetery. His hair was orange in the Alabama sunlight and looked out of place in his black suit. Sweat beaded down the side of his face. It was sticky outside, the sun beat down on us and it was due to get hotter. Hot sweat rolled down my back. 

“Who?” 

“You and your mom.”  I groaned under my breath. I had always imagined that I had looked like my father, someone who had a purpose rather than my mother who had let all her dreams pass her by. She did look like me, umber colored skin that had tanned from her time in the Alabama sun and pressed, black hair that used to go all the way to her waist when I was young but now only went a little past her shoulders. To her disappointment, I got my father’s hair which meant my curls were tight and broke combs. The punishment for my crimes was a hot comb every Sunday where I spent the day flinching and watching Lifetime movies. 

“We’re not that much alike.” It came out harsher than I meant. “My daddy doesn’t even think we’re very much alike.” TJ was about to say something else before we were called back to the car to travel to the crawfish boil. 

The ride there was filled with Daddy and TJ talking about sports, both of their favorite teams were the Bengals. Me and my mother said nothing the entire ride. When we finally arrived at my Uncle Sammy’s house, he and my other two uncles were three beers down and had the crawfish racing each other on the table outside in the backyard. “Them boys aren’t gonna get anything done by themselves.” My mother said. 

I sat at the kitchen table while my aunts and mother moved around the kitchen. Aunt Angie (married to Uncle Sam) and Aunt Claire (the second after my Aunt Zelda) spoke about what to do with the leftover crawfish. Crawfish etouffee with rice, crawfish etouffee with grits, or be dangerous and try to put it in a gumbo. I chewed absentmindedly on the potato chips Whitney had poured on a napkin before leaving to go play outside with Uncle Sammy’s chickens.

The August sun beat through the windows and despite the AC, I was sweating again. The backdoor swung open, TJ semi-lumbered in. “Lord, it’s hot outside.” He had taken off his suit jacket and sweat through the undershirt. He plopped down next to me at the table. “I don’t know how you guys live like this.” 

My mother laughed, “TJ, there’s some Cokes in the freezer.” She turned to Auntie Angie and said, “He’s not from the South, he’s never known heat.” TJ glanced at me before smiling at my mother. 

“I’m made for the snow. My mom’s from South Carolina though.” TJ didn’t get the chance to stand up because Aunt Claire had already swooped in and got him a Coke from the freezer. 

“Oh, is she?” My mother sat a bright red, plastic bowl next to him with all the ingredients to make a crawfish dipping sauce. She began to squeeze the mayonnaise, Louisiana Hot Sauce, and ketchup into the bowl. There wasn’t any need to measure because you could always just add more.

“Yeah, she is. Charleston.”  TJ laid the Coke on his forehead. 

She began to beat everything together in a circle. Midway, she tasted it before adding more ketchup. “Why didn’t you go to school there?” 

“I wanted something more and I wanted a better chance to get into law school.” I had heard this conversation multiple times when I went places with him and he struck up a conversation with somebody. I began imagining how nice the plane ride back to NYU would be. 

Aunt Claire sat next me, fanning herself with a paper plate. She was a light-skinned Creole woman from New Orleans who always wore a crucifix around her neck. “What law school are you thinking of?”

“Harvard.” Maybe I would get a small bag of Cheez-Its on the plane and splurge on a Pepsi. 

“Oh, Harvard? You got big dreams!” Aunt Angie exclaimed, she squeezed in the seat next to my mother. I would sleep on TJ’s shoulder and ignore his questions about my mother and grandmother. “You know, before Selma met James, she wanted to go to law school too.” 

That ripped me out of my thoughts. “Wait, what? You did?” I had imagined her as a woman who didn’t even dream when she slept at night.

My mother smiled sheepishly at the sauce that she was making. “Yeah, I had got into South Carolina, Louisville, USC. But your dad wanted to move to Oklahoma, so I became a teacher and then a mom.” 

“What did you want to do?” TJ asked, as though he wanted to test if she had a plan or was just the country girl who wanted to make it big. He looked at me and fixed his posture. I wonder what my face looked like. 

“Well,” she chuckled, leaning on the table. “I read a couple Derrick Bell books my freshman year of high school and then got it in my head that I was going to be a civil rights lawyer like Thurgood Marshall.” 

Aunt Claire laughed. “You should’ve seen the way Mrs. Carter reacted to that.”

My mother’s face twisted slightly before she went back to mixing the sauce. “That woman didn’t like nothing if it didn’t get married and sweep.” 

“Don’t hate on Momma, especially on the day we’re honoring her.” Aunt Claire got up to stand in front of the fan that was going next to the doorframe. “And she wanted to go to college before she had Zelda.” 

“She did?” My mother and I asked. She had never said anything like that about Granny. I was only told that I should never want to be like her. How did one do that? How would I ever know? 

“Yeah, she did, she wanted to go to Spelman, I think.” Aunt Angie said, she stopped fanning herself and began fanning me. “When we cleaned out her closet after she passed, she still had the acceptance letter in a box on the shelf in her closet.” My mother made a hmm sound before mixing in more hot sauce. Aunt Angie stopped fanning me to look out the window. “Lord, it looks like everybody’s here.” 

I glanced out the window to see that some had already made their way to the beer as Uncle Sam began to pour the first pound of crawfish on the table. “Come on, boy, I’ll introduce you to everybody.” TJ grinned as he got up from the table and followed her outside, leaving his Coke on the table. I stared at it, imagining what I would do if I got pregnant now like my mother and Granny. Would I drop out of school and let TJ finish his dreams? Be a future senator’s wife? Give birth to his kid? 

The plane ride home was going to be much different than what I imagined. Perhaps the whole time, with Cheez-Its drying out my mouth, I’d think about a bird in a gilded cage, just like my mother and grandmother. 

“Bella,” My mother’s voice said, holding a spoon in front of my face. “Taste it.” Any other time, I wouldn’t have but this time I licked the spoon. “You like it?” 

She smiled at me and I smiled back. “It’s perfect, Momma.” 

Bradley Price is from Lexington, Kentucky by way of Natchitoches, Louisiana, and studies at the University of Louisville.

SISTORIES PROMPT

Write in your journal or respond in the comment section below.

1. Interview an older woman in your family. Ask them what dreams they had as a young woman and if those dreams were realized. Write a short story loosely based on what they shared with you?

2. In a world beyond the confines of capitalism, what might your ancestors wildest dreams be? As a future ancestor, what are your wildest dreams for your descendants?

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