Kim Sykes

He started to laugh because everybody knew Mama couldn't drive.

And then he'd take us home.

Sitting out on the levee watching a hurricane approach must have been looking into a mirror, like looking into a mirror for my father.

They tell me, my Aunt Evelyn told me,

that his anger, silent and intense like an oncoming storm, would then burst forth violently at my mother and older brothers and sisters, destroying everything in his bath.

My Aunt Evelyn told me that while trying to save her life, one day my mother picked up a pair of pinking shears and stabbed him in the chest, nearly killing him.

But I never saw any of that.

And he never hit her again.

Back at my house, aunts, cousins I never even knew, uncles all came to my house when the hurricanes would come.

They all agreed that it was the only time the housing projects was the safest place to be.

The kids all of us sat in the living room under covers and blankets, telling ghost stories, scaring each other half to death, while the adults sat in the kitchen listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes.

Betsy was maybe an hour, hour and a half away,

but outside you can hear the rain and the wind screaming, screaming down the street, big chunks of metal and wood clinking and crashing.

The adults would run into the living room, peeking out the curtains, trying to look past the tape and the wood that was boarded over the windows, and they'd be whispering things to each other, trying not to scare the kids.

You're already half scared to death.

By the time the eye of the hurricane hit,

Everybody was in the living room.

The radio was going.

All the lights had gone out by that time.

We'd listen to some crazy newsman or weatherman who they'd sent out to the eye of the storm.