Book public: Hurricane Stories | TPR

July 13, 2024

We are in hurricane season and recently watched Beryl do the worst to our family, friends and neighbors in and around Texas. There are many works of fiction that feature some sort of catastrophic event – including floods and tornadoes.

Hurricanes are also a common feature in short stories. The late Randall Kenan wrote a story about a hurricane called “God’s Gonna Trouble the Water” and is from the collection “If I had two wings.

Vanessa Streeter is the protagonist. What can she – as a rather privileged person – lose in this storm or in its aftermath? But what about others who are not so privileged? What do others lose – in storms and in everyday life?

The story takes place in North Carolina. “Two hurricanes were forecast: one on Barbados and one on the coast of North Carolina. Home,” writes Kenan.

In this story, Vanessa Streeter surveys the devastation of a hurricane in her small North Carolina town and wonders what these communities lose after such storms.

Who will recover? Who won’t?

Disasters – as Kenan makes clear – affect communities differently.

What is an unpleasant and annoying event for the protagonist Vanessa Streeter is an even greater challenge and heartbreaking for others.

One of these others is “Marisol”, a cleaning lady who helps Vanessa with housework a few days a week.

“Still no word from Marisol,” says Mrs. Streeter about Marisol Cifuentes, the housekeeper.

Here is a scene where Mrs. Streeter surveys the damage after the hurricane:

“Nobody answered her cell phone. The widow decided to take a drive. The small community where the trailer park was located was known locally as Scuffletown. No one she spoke to knew how the small cluster of farms and homes, so low and so close to the river, had fared. In the woods on both sides of the road, many trees had fallen. As she got closer, she saw more and more damage. When she got there, she saw trailers that had fallen from their mounts and were floating in strange and odd configurations; some had fallen over; many light poles had fallen and wires had fallen and been exposed. Surely the Cifuenteses had been rescued. Surely they were OK. God knows.”

Next, Mrs. Streeter searches for Marisol in the small grocery stores of the town’s Latino community – but she finds no answers about Marisol’s whereabouts. Time passes and Marisol does not return.

Here is another excerpt from the story:

“Weeks went by. Things got better little by little, inch by inch. Finally, Mrs. Streeter was able to replant her garden with a few plants, mainly cabbage, collards, mustard greens and kale. Since it was August, the growing season would be quite short. In about six weeks, it would start to freeze. You could already feel that fall was coming.”

After some time, Mrs. Streeter receives a letter from Ciudad Juárez. It is from a woman who knew Marisol. She tells her that Marisol’s daughter died in the flood and that Marisol has returned to her hometown of Chihuahua. She has experienced even more misfortune. She herself did not disappear in the storm in North Carolina, but she disappeared in Mexico – and it is believed that she and her family were kidnapped or killed by a cartel.

Although Mrs. Streeter has a bad dream, she awakens to a sense of normality—the normality she wished for when she bothered to look for Marisol in the first place. She gets out of bed, surveys the gardener’s work in her backyard, and thinks about eating pork chops.

Marisol and people like her, whose lives are ravaged by disasters even more destructive than everyday hurricanes, remain a memory – distant, silent, absent – and will never again be part of the everyday life that Vanessa Streeter can find comforting.

“God’s Gonna Trouble the Water, Or Where is Marisol?” is by the late Randal Kenan. It can be found in the collection If I had two wings.

Three other hurricane stories that readers might enjoy are: