Dead Letters: The Storm

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

I was sent to Palm Beach County in September 1928 to cover a hurricane. Not the hurricane itself — by the time I arrived, three days after landfall, the storm was gone and what it had left behind was not weather but consequence.

The dike on the south side of Lake Okeechobee had given way on the night of the 17th. The water rose twelve feet in an hour. Over two thousand people drowned, most of them black migrant workers who had been picking beans on the muck farms along the shore. They had nowhere to run. The roads were poor in good weather and impassable in bad. Many of them did not have cars. The bossmen in the big houses had told them the seawalls would hold. The seawalls did not hold.

I will not describe what three days of Florida heat does to the dead. I have seen things in my career that I chose not to write about, and this is one of them. I will say only that the white bodies were being tagged and prepared for burial in the city cemetery in West Palm Beach, and the Black bodies — over six hundred of them — were being put into a trench.

I was there to write about the trench.

That is where I saw her.

She was standing at the edge of the recovery site with a notebook, talking to a man who was sitting on an overturned crate with his hat in his hands. She was not a reporter — I knew every reporter on the scene, and she was not one of us. She was not a relief worker. She was not a nurse. She was a black woman in a cotton dress, and she was listening to this man with an attention I have never seen before or since — the kind of listening that does not interrupt, does not nod, does not reassure. She was taking down everything he said, and she was watching his face while she did it, and I understood, even at the time, that she was doing something I did not know how to do.

I was close enough to overhear her ask him what the lake sounded like before the water came. The man closed his eyes. He said the lake had been grumbling all night, like something big turning over in its sleep. She wrote it down.

I watched her move through the site for the better part of an afternoon. She spoke to four or five people. Each time, the same posture: notebook open, pen still, eyes on the speaker. She left in the late afternoon. She walked to a car parked on the road beyond the site — an old Ford, dusty, with a canvas bag and loose papers visible through the rear window. I did not get her name. I did not try.

Nine years later, in 1937, I read a novel called Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. In it, a woman named Janie Crawford and her lover Tea Cake are living as migrant workers on the muck when a hurricane hits Lake Okeechobee. The lake wakes up. The monster begins to roll in his bed. Begins to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble.

I put the book down. I had heard this. I had heard a man on a crate say these words — or words so close that the difference didn't matter — to a woman with a notebook, nine years ago, at the edge of a trench. She had written it down. And now I was reading it, in a novel, and the dead were finally speaking in a voice that was equal to what had happened to them.

Hurston died in 1960 in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was broke. Her books were out of print. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery called the Garden of Heavenly Rest. The grave sat in a field of weeds for thirteen years until a writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce, found the cemetery, and bought a headstone. The stone reads: "Zora Neale Hurston — A Genius of the South."

I stood eight feet from genius once, at the edge of a trench in Palm Beach County. I was a man whose job was to see, and I saw a woman with a notebook, and I walked away.

I never got the quote. But she got every one of hers.

— F.M.
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.