— this essay appeared in the Birmingham News print edition April 27, 2012
Out here in the grove of broken trees between Amory and Sheridan roads in Pratt City, Alabama, the wind hurries through, pushing at the new green. But the vines of wisteria and the suddenness of dogwood leaves have yet to overtake the large oak and pine trunks snapped off by last year’s tornado. They still stand like upturned hands of splintered bone, still point at the sky for answers.
On April 27 Pratt City along with other Birmingham suburbs, and towns in southwest Alabama, in Mississippi and, in Georgia were hit by massive tornadoes that took apart people’s neighborhoods, took away far too many lives. Afterward, the familiar refrain was said with urgency, “We will rebuild.” As one leader put it at a town hall meeting, “This is your home and you should be allowed to come home.”
So the streets were cleared of electric wire and plaster and wood. You no longer smell gas from broken lines. A number of new homes have gone up, too, with other lots ready for construction. And if you look up the long hill of Hibernian Street, where some of the worst damage took place, you’ll notice the new Alabama Power poles strung with fresh black wire.
Two Sundays ago, next to the buried poles and white and purple flowers blooming, there was too much familiar debris. The same clothing and cotton strips of fiberglass hung from branches, and many houses remained a collapse of rubble or simply stood cut in half, unchanged since the storms and people left.
Walking along Hibernian was like walking through an open air museum of what tornadoes leave in their wake—a ghost town always in the midst of recovery. I say always because Pratt City has been hit by tornadoes before and will be hit by tornadoes, again. It is this geography where warm and cold fronts mix together in deadly proportions, where tornadoes come into being and where they track.
Then last week, the recovery went into overdrive, and most of the ghost houses were pushed down. In their place blue dumpsters sit like coffins on the lots holding the last remains.
One house on the corner of Sheridan is still only a first floor of toys and broken glass, an over-turned fiberglass shower among pieces of wall. The white living room carpet is full of plaster and water and twigs from last week’s rain. The coffee table near where the front door used to be waits for someone to come home and place the mail down with the car keys, waits to be made useful again.
In this section of Pratt City, one house stands rebuilt among the ghost homes. I asked the owner if more people were going to rebuild. He said, “It’s what you see,” gesturing around him. Last summer Ms. Kaye told me she would not come back. Her house remains empty, it’s roof still cratered, the number seven painted on the outside wall.
The new homes have been made with strong as hell blue siding and red steel roofs riveted in. You want to believe in their invincibility, but the history of tornadoes tells you something different.
Ray Hill, who sits every day near a bus stop off Avenue W to watch the sunset, and he’s been doing this for years, pointed to a new apartment complex and said people are working to bring this place back. “It’s happening,” he said with a strong nod, with so much optimism, you had to feel optimistic, too. And everyone I talked with echoed his sentiment—Pratt City is on its way back.
Along with the green, you’ll find kids roaming now. On Hibernian, a group of boys played with a plastic bag. They let the wind fill the bag’s empty belly, then let it go like a kite set free, so they could chase it down before it hit the earth. Behind them stood a house fallen in, it’s red shingle roof capsized and angled against Ray Hill’s setting sun. “People here just live with the reality of tornadoes,” Destiny Whatley, who works at Jasmine’s café, told me and shrugged, and I see that, how these broken homes and groves of broken trees have become places for kids to walk by without any shock.
But I cannot shake my uneasiness. It is April and tornadoes keep touching down in the Plains. At some point, the fronts will come and mix here—maybe not in Pratt City this year, but somewhere close. It is always there in your head whirling. And there is something else, too. One year later, you can sit down in all this destruction that still exists, try to dream it back together, never make it whole, try to dream a way for this to never happen, again, but like the house cut in half on Hibernian, the closet door is still open with the same dress hung from a year ago, still waiting for someone to take the dress from its hanger and put it on.