Troubled Waters, page 1
Dedication
For Uncle Harold
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One Lovely Day
Losing Streak
A Watched Pot
Homesick
Tomorrow
Key of Life
Double Vision
Part Two The Ways of White Folks
Down the River
Whirlpool
Lost Souls
Part Three Troubled Waters
Come Hell or High Water
Soon and Very Soon
Educated Fool
Woman Troubles
Part Four Daybreak
Take Me to the Water
Shadows of Doubt
Undertow
After the Storm
After the Word
Discussion Questions
Devotion
About the Author
Copyright
Part One
Lovely Day
December 19, 2013
Even as she typed the last paragraphs of her final paper for the semester, Corinne couldn’t hear the feverish click-clack of the keyboard under her fingertips or the frantic whispers of the other students. She wasn’t in North Ohio anymore, burrowed away in the basement of the massive library at Oberlin College. She was back in Mississippi two springs ago, listening to that eerie stillness as the Mississippi River swelled out of her banks and onto the roads that connected Port Gibson and Vicksburg, quieting the dull hum of traffic. Then, the River had seeped into playgrounds and backyards, hushing children at play and neighbors at gossip. Eventually, the water rose so high, the birds were too confused to sing, and the River silenced the sky. Corinne had lain in her room with the windows open, wary even of turning on the television lest she further anger the Mississippi. There was nowhere to go and nothing to say.
By the time her waters had receded, the River had washed past every watermark on record, even the one set by the Great Flood of 1927.
Earlier in the semester, Corinne had gotten into a bitter argument with one of her environmental studies professors about the causes of the 2011 Mississippi River flood. He’d insisted that it was simply a natural phenomenon.
“Rivers flood,” he’d said with a wave of his hand. “There’s no reason to think it was global warming.”
Corinne, on the other hand, had insisted that it wasn’t that simple. The 2011 flood was an alleged five-hundred-year flood, and so were the 1993 flood and the 1937 flood. The 1927 flood—the one that had haunted Corinne since elementary school when she first learned about those who’d drowned and the horrors of a river unhinged—still held the record for the most destructive river flood in US history. There wasn’t even a century between any of them.
“How was that ‘natural’?” she’d demanded.
Her professor had stood back, crossed his arms, and told her to prove it. So here she was, two months later, with a browser window littered with tabbed articles about deforestation and wetlands, La Niña, and pre- versus postindustrial rainfall levels. She felt even more strongly that, had the River been left to her own devices, she probably would have flooded in 2011, but not so viciously. If the earth’s temperature had held steady, the rain would have fallen, but not nearly as much. The River may have risen, but the wetlands and the forests would have been able to absorb the water. But as strong as her conviction was, she still wasn’t sure she was being convincing enough for her polemic professor.
“Corinne, just send the damn thing so we can be done!”
Corinne looked up from her screen to see Ashley yawning and swaying by the door of the study lounge, her laptop in one arm and a long-empty coffee cup in her other hand.
“I just want to read it one more time,” Corinne muttered before she went back to her screen. “I feel like I’m forgetting something.”
“The whole thing? Girl, you keep on, and you finna ‘forget’ to pass the class,” Ashley snapped, her Georgia accent thickening with frustration. “Ain’t nobody ’bout to fail you over a typo, and at this hour, a stroke of brilliance ain’t coming. Just turn it in!”
Corinne pushed her hair out of her face and felt how dry and brittle it had become since she started her final exams. She hadn’t so much as sprayed water on it in a week. “If you really want to go back to the room, Ashley, you can,” she grumbled. “My professors have run out of sympathy for me this semester, so I actually have to do this right.” She still felt a strange mix of gratitude and guilt for all the extensions her professors had granted her last spring. Most of them hadn’t even asked what, exactly, her family emergency was.
“Girl, first of all, you know I’m not leaving you across campus this late at night,” Ashley shot back. “Second, you’re already past the deadline by ten entire minutes. Third, do I need to remind you that you fly out in the morning? Turn in the paper, Corinne. Better done than good at this point.”
Corinne knew she was right, but she hated even the risk of losing an argument, especially when there was a grade at stake. She took one last look at the final paragraph, couldn’t find a typo, and decided to take Ashley’s advice.
“Fine, we can go,” she said as she clicked the Send button.
* * *
Corinne woke up the next morning to the blare of her phone’s alarm. She thought about flirting with a few extra minutes of sleep, but she hated being late, especially to the airport. Just the thought of having to call Grandma and ask her to buy a new ticket during the Christmas rush was enough to make her jump out of bed and into the shower. She dressed as fast as she could and decided she’d deal with her hair when she made it to Uncle Harold’s house. Before she grabbed the giant suitcase she’d left waiting by the door, she leaned over the bottom bunk.
“Bye, punk,” she whispered.
“Whatever, punk,” Ashley whispered back, and then rolled over. “Text me when you get to New Orleans.”
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you, too, girl.”
With that, Corinne dragged her suitcase down the hallway and out into the damp December rain—that should have been snow this far north in Ohio and this close to Christmas—to wait for the shuttle to the Cleveland airport.
* * *
By the time she made her way through the security check, the sun was beginning to peek through the clouds. Corinne chuckled to herself as she remembered when the Cleveland airport—with its four terminals and multiple baggage claim carousels—had overwhelmed and fascinated her.
Two and a half years ago, she’d arrived here with her entire life packed into three bags to start her college career at Oberlin—the school Grandma hated without ever laying eyes on it. During her freshman year, when she flew home, she would sit up by the huge window panels to marvel at the giant planes as they took off and touched down. Back then, her only frame of reference had been the tiny airports in Jackson or Baton Rouge, or the itty-bitty ones in Vicksburg and Natchez that seemed only to host little jalopy jets. She hadn’t yet suffered through layovers in Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, or Detroit during her eight-hour pilgrimages back to Port Gibson. After a while, she’d gotten stuck in enough blizzards to learn that when she had a connecting flight, she needed to get as far south as possible on the first flight. And since it seemed she was the only person in Ohio who flew to Mississippi on purpose, she’d started flying straight to New Orleans. It was a good excuse to visit her uncle anyway.
In the beginning, the flights had been exciting. Now, all she could think about was how her jet fuel was melting the ice caps. When she looked at the planes taking off the tarmac, she saw blood leaking from their wings, like crop dusters. She imagined the bodies of the unborn, untold generations in the baggage compartment. She heard their screams in the wind. And while everyone around her carried on as normal, she could smell a gas leak so strong it made her stomach curdle. She’d already promised herself that when she graduated in a year and a half, she would never set foot on a plane again. She didn’t dare tell Grandma, though, because she’d start pressuring her to transfer to a school in the South immediately.
But Corinne liked Oberlin. Sure, the first two years had been rough—she’d never even seen that many white folks, for one thing. And it was her first time being a “minority” as a Black woman and as a Southerner. She had no idea what to say when her classmates asked, “What’s it like down South?” like they were asking about life on a different planet. And then there was the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling winter. But by the end of the first year, she’d bought a warmer coat and made her community with the other Black students, some of whom were from the South, too, like Ashley.
She made her way through the hassle of Christmas travelers to the Cinnabon stand and gotten the sloppiest cinnamon roll they had and a black coffee. It would be the first taste of dairy she’d had in months, but she figured she might as well start building a tolerance now. There was no way her new diet was going to be able to stand up to Grandma’s Christmas cooking. She figured she could renew her vegan vows when she got back to Oberlin in February. Besides, she found a strange comfort in the guaranteed stomachache she’d get as her penance for flying in the first place. I might as well set the ocean on fire myself, she thought. She sat at one of those sterile-looking white tables with black plastic chairs to eat her guilt. The warm icing had melted her thoughts far away when her phone blasted “Thriller” loud enough to startle the very-important-looking men in coats rushing from gate to gate. One of them walked away a little s
“Hey, Uncle!” Corinne sang into her phone.
“You made it to the airport, baby girl?” Uncle Harold’s voice boomed into her ear, and even this early in the morning, she could hear the cigarette hanging out of the left side of his mouth. No matter how fast he talked, it never fell, like he had it under a spell.
“Yeah, I made it. Y’all oughta have more faith in me.” Corinne tried to put on her grown-up voice, but just hearing Uncle Harold’s voice was enough to take the rocks out of the pit of her stomach.
“Why would we do that? You know we know you, girl.” He chuckled. “Now, what time you get to New Orleans?”
“I’ll be there about 1:00 p.m. your time. Can’t wait to see y’all!” She wasn’t lying, but she still had to force the excitement into her voice. She wanted to be there but hated the hassle of getting there.
“All right, well, you call me when you land, you hear?”
“All right.”
“And you make sure to call your grandmama before you get on that plane.” His voice grew stern. “You know how she gets.”
“I know, I know. I’ll call her.” Corinne felt a tightness at her temples as she thought about Grandma’s uncanny ability to jump to the worst possible conclusions at the slightest silence. So many times Corinne had called her only to learn that she’d been beside herself imagining her granddaughter dead or kidnapped. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Uh-huh . . . You need me to meet you at the baggage claim, or can you walk out to the curb?”
“I’ll meet you at the curb.”
“Oh, so you done finally learned how to pack?” he teased. “All right, look for the new truck. Orange Chevy. Bye, Niecey.”
Corinne hung up and looked down at her sad little black coffee and the melted goo that was left of her Cinnabon, and decided she was done with punishment. She tossed it in the trash and walked to Starbucks for coffee with coconut milk. After all, that cinnamon roll wasn’t going to offset anything.
After she got her new coffee, Corinne settled in at her gate with her back to the windows, only to freeze in her seat when she realized exactly where she was. Right across from her was the gate where, seven months ago, she’d waited for the last flight she’d taken out of this airport. Her grief snaked out of the ground and covered her like a vine, smothering her in her own memories.
Two nights before that flight, she’d looked at her buzzing phone at 12:03 a.m. and seen the words Uncle Harold. He never called that late. Her heart had begun to thump as her mind raced. Was there a tornado? Did Grandma have a heart attack? Instead, Uncle Harold told her that the oil boat that her brother, Cameron, worked on had gotten caught in an electrical storm outside of Lake Charles, and there’d been an accident. His boss had called Grandma and told her that Cameron was involved, but hadn’t told her what that meant. Uncle Harold promised to tell her as soon as they knew.
Corinne remembered going limp and falling to the floor with the phone still clutched. Ashley, who had been reading on her bed with headphones on, had to pull her to her bed where she curled up like a possum. She slept fitfully, between nightmares and crying spells. She kept seeing Cameron’s angular, mahogany face swirling above her and hearing Uncle Harold’s words: “We don’t know yet.” When she finally woke from her trance, her mouth was on fire and her eyes were dry like she hadn’t blinked in hours. She had to concentrate just to breathe.
Corinne had tried to tell herself that he was only twenty-four, and no god was that cruel. She had wanted to call Grandma, but she could barely lift her head. So she waited with her hands on her heart in a desperate attempt to keep it from breaking.
After the gray, early morning light faded, Corinne had tried to get out of bed, but nothing worked—not her arms, not her neck, not her legs.
It wasn’t until around 10:00 a.m. that the calls had come one after the other. First Uncle Harold, then Grandma, then Grandma again. Repeat. If it was good news, she thought, they would have texted me when I didn’t answer the phone. And at that point, she knew, but she didn’t want to hear it.
Ashley had climbed out of her bed and stood eye level with Corinne in the top bunk.
“Cori,” she whispered as though they weren’t the only ones in the room. “I could answer for you, but they need to hear your voice. Not mine.”
But when Corinne still didn’t move, Ashley took the phone from her limp fingers and answered it. One look at her face and the frog that had lodged itself in Corinne’s throat leapt out, and she screamed so loud her skin crawled.
Two days later, she was drifting through the Cleveland airport on her way to Jackson, clutching the bottle of Xanax the college nurse had given her during her emergency appointment. The flight had been booked so hastily, she’d had two connecting flights in North Carolina alone.
Now, more than half a year later, she still carried a bottle of Xanax in her purse because her grief came and went, but when it came, it was ferocious. Everywhere she looked—from the stove to the gas station to the plane she was about to board—she saw oil and knew it was the same nasty business that took her brother while setting her world afire. She hated how numb the pills made her, though. If she was going to watch the world fall apart, wasn’t it the least she could do to feel it? How could she mourn otherwise? But as her throat tightened as she looked at the gate across from her, and her spine tingled at the thought of the poison planes behind her, she began to imagine how much more terrifying a panic attack in the sky might be. She decided mourning could wait and swallowed a pill.
While she waited for the medicine to kick in, she pulled out her almost-full notebook to sketch the characters flocking to her gate. There were two men in full army gear, heavy boots and flimsy hats, who looked like they were ready to go into combat at any moment. There was a white family with four small children—the father glued to his phone and the mother trying her hardest to keep her children’s squabbles quiet. There was an old Black woman in a wheelchair who never looked up from her crossword book.
When her fingers began to tire and she ran out of room on the last page of her notebook, Corinne thought again of the paper she’d handed in last night, which reminded her of one of her favorite things about going back home, next to cooking with Grandma and laughing with Uncle Harold: seeing the Mississippi River again.
Corinne didn’t remember the first time she saw her, but she remembered the first time she feared her. It was in the second grade when her teacher—bored with her job and her students—showed them a documentary on the Great Flood of 1927. Corinne had sat horrified as she learned about the thousands of people who’d died and their gruesome, gruesome deaths by snakebite, gunshot, and hypothermia in the cold snap after the deluge. So many more simply drowned. She knew by then that she—like most of the other children in her class and nearly everyone in her life—was Black. The suffering people in the documentary were, too, and the narrator made it clear that that wasn’t an accident.
Corinne started having what Grandma called “premonitions.” She woke up in the middle of the night to visions of the River crashing through her windows or rising through the floor. She started drawing the pictures she saw in the documentary—huddled Black masses atop the levees in the Delta, in tents at the makeshift camps at the Civil War battleground in Vicksburg. Sometimes she caught glimpses of them out of the corner of her eye, their faces long and their backs slumped. Only Black people went to the camps; white folks went to homes and hotels. Black folks were refugees, while white folks were guests. The camps were more like prisons, with fetid conditions, little food, forced labor, and copious poisonous snakes. Corinne’s picture of hell.
Grandma had been the only one who hadn’t mocked her or shooed her off when she talked about the ghosts she saw. She listened as Corinne described the fear in their eyes, their tattered clothes, their arms swollen from mosquito bites. Corinne had even told her their names, when she knew them. When she finished, Grandma would bend her face down to hers, cup her plump, seven-year-old cheeks, and say, “You know not all ghosts are bad, right? Sometimes people just want to be remembered.” Corinne would always love her for that.
