 Fear shows in the
message on a small slip of paper taped to a plate glass window at the front door of
Tarboro High School.
"Missing Person-- If you see
this child, please call Roberta Williams, Executive Inn, Rm. 109, 446-320 or
977-4562."
And with a smiling picture, his name:
"Jarvis Williams Clark, 9 years old. Last living with Lavena Clark."
And another.
"David Jones, please call mama's. Came by to
get you, but could not find you. Call so we will know where to find you. Mildred."
And another.
"Robert Hyman, your sister called."
Please call, please call, please call.
Where are they, all those people unaccounted for
since the nightmare of Thursday a week ago when Hurricane Floyd roared into North Carolina
bringing the worst disaster in the state's history?
The Tar River, snaking through downtown Rocky
Mount and Tarboro and Princeville just across the bridge, rose and rose and rose until
flood waters rushed through streets and up steps and into houses-- the big, old historic
houses, and the new, fine houses worth half a million dollars, and into trailers and small
homes already in need of repair. It rushed in regardless of age or color or financial
condition, seeped under beds and into closets, and the dike gave way. The dike between
Tarboro and Princeville, that historic first town in the United States created by freed
slaves, just disappeared under the water. Caskets buried long ago floated to the surface.
And people, unaware of what more than 15 inches of
rain in a day and a half could do, fled.
But where? Where did they go after they got out?
After that massive aerial rescue across eastern North Carolina plucked 1,500 people
stranded by Floyd's floodwaters from treetops and rooftops and isolated homes?
Where are they now?
With relatives and friends at the water's edge and
beyond, at jammed motels and shelters where home has become a cot pushed close to another
cot, a plastic bag holding a few clothes and maybe some pictures, food from a Baptist
feeding station and a bank of Port-o-Johns in a parking lot.
But not all.
So many are still unaccounted for.
How many? No one knows. Maybe 1,000. Maybe more.
And rumors grow.
Telephone numbers for people who need to report--
or ask about-- a missing person are posted behind the plate glass windows, and you can
feel the fear that rises from the numbers and the notes and the rumors.
Did you hear that 35 bodies (or 139 or 200 or 500)
are being secretly kept on ice at the hospital until they can be identified? And that more
bodies will be uncovered when the water that covers everything but rooftops now in
Princeville and the edge of Edgecomb County goes down?
Some even say there's a body in that dark red
Volkswagen that's been sitting in a parking lot, tied to a telephone pole at the corner of
St. James and Trade streets in Tarboro, ever since the rain started.
Is there?
Not according to official reports of three bodies
found. Probably more will be reported by the time the water goes down. But right now ...
Right now photographer Jon Lakey and I head east
to see what nature hath wrought, and what we find is disaster.
"Of biblical proportions," says one
pastor, but adds quickly, the people won't be defeated. They're reaching for God, adding
their prayers to the chorus of generators and water pumps and electric saws and
helicopters, many of them crewed by Co. E, 130th Aviation, of the North Carolina National
Guard in Salisbury.
And they're saying thank you for the astounding
help they're getting from all over the country.
And today the sun is shining as we pull into Rocky
Mount and pass an open truck loaded with dog food-- pets get hungry, too-- and come to the
first of many barricades that warn that a bridge is out and a road is closed and the signs
of flood are here.
Gray-brown mud-encrusted piles of brush, leafy
green tree limbs, pink insulation, mountains of carpet, mattresses, children's toys,
shoes, sofas, chairs, bulging trash bags -- the flotsam of life gone awry-- line the
curbs. A boat on end nestles in a tree.
But new mattresses are stacked high at a Citgo
station. A carpet cleaner offers a Floyd special. And two helicopters fly overhead
carrying doctors and nurses and flood supplies to people isolated on islands created by
the flood.
At home with the fish
At 35-year-old Tarrytown Mall tiny goldfish are swimming in a sunken stage that Floyd
filled with water. People, the manager says, are still searching through the muck and mud
for snakes that were in the pet store with those fish.
Water rose to 57 inches deep throughout the mall,
and what hasn't buckled yet will, he says. That means the building will have to be gutted,
the stores re-built.
Dawn McGlohon, owner of Computer Connections,
dries computer parts as she talks.
Like everyone else, including her insurance agent,
she had no flood insurance. Mortgage lenders don't require flood insurance, and
traditional policies only cover major structural damage, so only the mall owners carry it
and nobody had worried.
"We never had anything like this
before," she says.
But she feels lucky. Now 33, she never had a
savings account like she has now either-- $50,000 earmarked for her Jan.
1 wedding and a down payment on their house.
Her eyes fill with tears, but she smiles.
"We'll get a temporary location," she
says, "and be back in here when the mall re-opens." She'll still start the new
year with a new husband, but the wedding and house money will help her stay in
business. She doesn't want to let her eight employees go or her several thousand customers
to suffer.
So she dries computer parts.
"And mama," she adds, "is cleaning
the bathrooms."
Successful clean-up effort
Paul Woodson, owner of Vogue Cleaners in
Salisbury, opens the door of an upscale beauty salon at the Crossroads Mall in Rocky Mount
which he and hairdresser Phil Yarboro have owned for 23 years. And he's astonished.
He brought water and drinks and tools expecting
disaster.
Instead, the first thing he sees is a hairdresser
combing out a woman's hair. The shop doesn't look like it looked when he saw it last but
dryers and dead fish aren't floating in 4 feet of water either, and that's what Phil found
Sunday when he was able to get in.
But the water went down, and he, his wife and two
employees scrubbed and scrubbed, and Wednesday he started calling customers.
"We're fixing hair," he said, and they
came.
"Floyd tried to close us up," he says,
"but I wasn't about to leave."
D'Ann Wheeler, an employee, admits she
hasn't had a good week. Just before Floyd hit, she found out her brother has cancer. After
Floyd hit, she had to rip up carpets and carry truckloads of debris from her home. This
morning her daughter was diagnosed with cancer.
But tears don't help.
"So I worked this morning," she says,
"and got a tetanus shot this afternoon."
Bringing in fresh water
A constant line of cars circle a former Lowe's
parking lot where members National Guard soldiers from Camp Butner distribute 15 tractor
trailer loads of water sent to Rocky Mount by Winn-Dixie.
"I really didn't think it was going to get
this bad," says Specialist Barbara Taylor, who teaches math at Livingstone College.
"Sunday my partner and I had to man an exit. It's a road, but it looked like a river.
And Princeville looks like a lake."
Church volunteers
Under tents outside Englewood Baptist Church's
Family Life Center more than 100 Baptist and Methodist volunteer groups and 40 Red Cross
vehicles prepare, serve and deliver 8, 000 to 9,000 meals a day.
Inside, more volunteers help people find clothes
and food and household items.
"I got up to go the bathroom," says
Miriam Bame, filling a bag, her voice full of shock, "and I'm in water. The whole
place was flooded. If I hadn't got up ... "
She got the children up, called a friend and they
left.
The memory is still scary.
Troubles in Tarboro
And water lingers on Main Street in Tarboro eight
miles away.
Not as much as in many areas around town where
more than 1,500 people are spending the night at Tarboro High School, one of several
shelters in the city.
Tonight Baptist volunteers from Georgia are
cleaning up after supper, little boys are laughing as they chase each other around the
school, and Nadine Person and her daughter, Larissa, fill a grocery cart with gallon jugs
of water.
"My house is in Princeville under
water," she says. "Thursday morning the police came and said leave, and we
followed the truck out. It made a wake in the water, and we went behind it. We've been
there 16 years, but I've been saying I want to leave that trailer park and get me a double
wide, and there ain't no need to cry. God has bigger and better things for us now."
"The kids have been real good," says Ham
Cary, a retired hardware merchant from Tennessee, who's shelter supervisor for the Red
Cross. "The biggest, most terrible situation happened Sunday night. Three teens were
throwing M&M's at each other."
Getting back to life
By morning the water on Main Street is almost
gone. After more than a week, the street is magically almost dry, and the town with
a population of 12,000 comes alive with the sound of getting ready for business. Music
from a radio floats into the street. A generator produces bright light in the drug store.
Fans whirrrr.
And Steve Cobb, manager of First Citizens Bank on
the corner, parks his car and notices a pigeon sitting on the top. He tries to shoo it
off. The pigeon takes a step or two but won't leave. Cobb gets a stick and prods the
pigeon lightly. It looks at him and finally takes off, obviously suffering a bit of flood
shock.
At Dupree's Shoe Store, manager Mike Everette is
smiling. He just sold a pair of $20 rubber boots.
"We kept the water out," he says. Well,
all but 6 inches. That was enough for one fish to come in, but the Dupree brothers, Jimmy
and John, and their employees moved all the shoes to the second floor and sandbagged the
whole place. A squeegee is still leaning against the front door.
And this day-- after a week with seven hours of
sleep-- John has gone home to bed, Jimmy is getting a tetanus shot, and Kathy Williams is
at work.
"I live 10 minutes away," she says,
"but I had to drive 57 miles to get here."
She lost everything. "The house isn't
livable," but she's glad she has work to do.
And so is Cathy Coley, sitting on a chair on the
sidewalk, a low table beside her, in front of Glenoit Corporations headquarters, waiting
for a switchboard. Inside the rug is wet and contaminated. Renovations are coming, but she
can answer the phones out here. And does, as soon as the switchboard is plugged in to an
extension cord.
"Glenoit Corporation," she answers.
"I'll page him for you." And the caller never had an inkling that she and her
telephone were on the sidewalk on Main Street.
A few doors down in Sheila Burns' antique and
jewelry shop, her husband, the Rev. Robert Burns, Presbyterian minister who's friends with
Salisbury's Rev. Mayo Little and was at Duke University with Elizabeth Dole, is on his
hands and knees scrubbing the floor in a dimly lit back room.
He stops to talk.
"I went to hear Clinton," he says.
"By accident. I got trapped there. It was a small crowd. About 300. Almost
embarrassing. Some guy had a placard that said, 'Hurricane Floyd, Bill Clinton-- two
national disasters.' "
And he isn't sorry Clinton came.
A personal disaster or not, the president focused
the attention of the world on North Carolina, and North Carolina needed it.
"We sandbagged and duck-taped before the
flood," Sheila says. "We just went to work and did what we had to do."
And she's confident that's what they and the town
will keep on doing. "The government will do some things, and the people who can will
open their pocket books. There's never been a time here that people haven't done
that."
Family made it; car didn't
In a neighborhood a few blocks away the water is
finally down enough on his street for Joseph Sessoms to check on his house. It's not what
he hoped to find. The water came up at least 3 feet, maybe more, and the floors are
buckled, the upholstery wet.
But he had to do something, so he started cleaning
up, hanging wet things on the clothesline out back and making up the beds they'd left in a
hurry the night of the flood when he and his family were awakened and told to evacuate
because the dike had broken in Princeville. But his mother-in-law lived in Princeville, so
they went to get her.
"We barely made it back," he says. And
his car didn't. It stalled and it's still there, under water. A friend brought them and
others out in two loads.
"He had to leave two men over there," he
says. "They didn't want to leave. A lot of old folks didn't want to leave. It was a
nightmare. People were in the trees.''
He looks across his backyard.
"See my garden," he says. "I don't
have no garden no more."
He'll go back to work Monday, but right now, with
the water down, he's got to take care of his family-- "get tetanus shots, go to
Social Services for vouchers, clean my house."
A house should be clean, even if a lot of work has
to be done before they can live in it again. Even if he's got to look for another
place to live, at least for a little while.
"Hey," shouts Crystal Mays, happily
carrying clothes to her car. "How you doing?"
She and Deborah Benbow, who are staying with
friends, came to check their houses out, too.
All those unaccounted people will turn up, Crystal
says. "I've talked to people they told me were dead. That count reflects people who
found places to stay and didn't report to anybody."
And it could be worse.
"We needed a reason to reconstruct and clean
up and get rid of some old things," she says.
Hallelujah to God
And they need to pray and sing.
That's why the Staton brothers-- Wyatt, the
musician everyone calls The Boss, and his brother, the Rev. Darrell Staton, associate
pastor of Light of Peace Missionary Baptist Church-- will keep coming to the music room at
Tarboro High School.
"Look up! Look up!" the preacher urges.
"Whatever's in your heart, whatever's
troubling you, tell God about it. Talk to him. Tell him what you want. Tell him what you
need. He's listening. He's listening to everyone at the same time. And shout,
'Hallelujah!' "
They shout, "Hallelujah!" and sing with
the Boss, and the room erupts with tears and laughter and hope.
"I've got a feeling everything's gonna be all
right," they sing.
"Gonna be all right.
"It's gonna be all right.
"God will make it all right!" |
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