Kim Sykes - Daddy Hurricane

 

 

I was saying yesterday that I think I'm the only Southerner who doesn't have an accent. [audience laughter] And that's because I think I spent the first 20 years of my life trying to erase everything Southern about myself. And then, of course, I'm spending the next 20 years of my life trying to remember it all [audience laughter] to get it all back. [crosstalk] Should I repeat what I just said? [audience laughter] Here's a memory. 

 

When Hurricane Betsy was coming to New Orleans, my daddy, he took me and my brothers and sisters, all seven of us, eight of us actually, and my mother, out to Lake Pontchartrain to watch Betsy arrive. My daddy, he sat on the levee and he liked to look out at the sky and the lake. The sky, the longer we stayed, got blacker and blacker. And the lake looked like a sheet of black granite. It was so still, you could almost walk on it. 

 

My mom, she was so angry. She wouldn't get out of the truck. She sat with her back to my father in the lake, refusing to come out. She turned around every once in a while, and said, “Willie, it's time to go home.” And he'd say, “In a minute, Violet,” and he'd sit right where it was. The kids, all of us, were too busy having fun and wanted to go home. We ran around the decorative fountains that would shoot water up into the air, and the lights would change the water to colors like blue and then yellow and then red. 

 

My father, he didn't want to come home, but my mother finally grabbed the keys and she says, “Willie, I'm taking these children home” and she headed for the truck. He started to laugh, because everybody knew mama couldn't drive. [audience laughter] And then he'd take us home. 

 

Sitting out on the levee, watching a hurricane approach must have been looking into a mirror for my father. 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 path. 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. [audience laughter] 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 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. They'd be whispering things to each other, trying not to scare the kids. We were 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 listened to some crazy newsman or weatherman who they'd sent out to the eye of the storm. He'd be yelling, “The wind's really blowing hard. There’s lots of rain.” [audience laughter]. We’re laughing [unintelligible [00:44:52]

 

By the time Betsy had come and gone, I'd fallen asleep, thank God. We walked out the next morning, and the first thing I thought was that it looked like a war, except minus the bodies. Trees had been snapped in half, and cars turned over and dragged down the street. On TV, we watch families and kids who were stranded on the top of their houses, because the water had risen so high. But we were safe, just like I was safe from my father's brutality. 

 

I never saw the worst of my father's violence. I saw a man who was kind to me and affectionate. I saw a man who would sit me on his knee and sing, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” A man who would take me with him to take my mother to work. And my mother in her clean white uniform would get out of the truck to go to the house that she had to clean, and she'd walk towards the door, and the door would open and these two little white kids would run out and their arms stretched, running to her. They'd grab her around her knees, and she bend down and grab them. Oh, God, the pain and jealousy and hatred I felt for those two kids and my mother, God. And my father's hand resting on my shoulder and on my knee. And he knew how I felt. 

 

[0Every day I struggle with the memory of those kindnesses and the history of his abuse. I can't hate him, but I've given up liking him. My father planted trees and flowers for the city of New Orleans on city owned land. He planted all the trees in the projects. We had a big fat oak tree right in front of our house. Our backyard looked like a little small English garden. It had roses, and hydrangeas, and daisies and petunias, you name it, we had it. He'd bring home sod too, and he'd lay the perfect green little squares in the front and back yards. We used to lie on the grass and make angels like the kids up north did in the snow. It smelled too good. But there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about Willie and Violet, my parents. 

 

My father's been dead for almost 20 years and my mother for about 10. But every time I look in the mirror, I think of them. My mother's eyes and smile and her gestures. I keep looking for Willie. I wouldn't know him if I saw him. I never knew him really. But when I see a tall oak tree with that gray, brown, cracked trunk, I think of my father's hands and how he used to bring home flowers from my mother's garden. Thanks.