Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  Around midday a relief truck from the Red Cross made a special trip to Princeville to deliver lunch to the town’s one resident. It was usually something cooked, like spaghetti, and Thad savored its smell and warmth. The afternoons were especially empty. Often the only sound was that of wind groaning through the holes in his house. His most dependable visitors were the packs of feral dogs who roamed the town scavenging for scraps of food.

  Thad had survived the worst, this much he knew for sure. That September, Hurricane Floyd enlarged the Tar River and sunk the town of Princeville. The river starts in the highlands north of Durham, then drops a smooth 179 miles toward the coast below. Along the way it builds momentum and grows in size, and during hurricane season it often roars out of control. Two thirds of the way to the coast, the river wraps itself around a boggy stretch of land called Princeville, where it often skids off course—pummeling the town like a runaway truck.

  Princeville is situated smack in the middle of a dangerous floodplain. By today’s standards, the location is far from ideal, but during the height of the Civil War it was a safe haven for a band of freed slaves who squatted there. Their makeshift home was protected by a troop of Union soldiers stationed nearby. Every so often, the freed slaves would gather around the Union camp and listen for news from the warfront. Then one day, in the spring of 1865, a Union officer scrambled to the top of an adjoining knoll and announced that the Confederacy had surrendered. These former slaves were officially freedmen, and to honor the occasion, they hallowed the ground on which the Union officer stood, dubbing it “Freedom Hill.”2

  In compliance with federal policy, the Union soldiers advised the freedmen and women to return to their plantations to work for their old masters, but they refused to budge, opting instead to face the floods. Twenty years later, their weather-beaten refuge was still standing. Sufficiently impressed, the state of North Carolina drew up an official charter, and Princeville became the first incorporated black town in the state and quite possibly the country.* Back then, the concept of an all-black town was novel, yet many whites in the neighboring town of Tarboro quickly accepted it as a necessity—for it kept the former slaves across the river at a safe distance but close enough that they could be hired as farm hands, servants, and artisans. For the next century these two towns functioned symbiotically, facing each other across the river like matching bridgeheads, except for those inevitable occasions when much of Princeville would simply vanish. At least once a decade Princeville’s decidedly lower shores would sink beneath a deep expanse of murky river water, until 1965, when its residents finally erected a large earthen dike.3 The dike kept Princeville dry for more than thirty years, but in the end, it was no match for Hurricane Floyd.

  In early September of 1999, when Hurricane Floyd was still more than a thousand miles off at sea, weather officials were already getting nervous. With its roughly 150-mile-per-hour winds, Floyd was on the verge of becoming a category-5 storm.4 This is the highest possible rating, in fact, only two storms of this size had ever hit the United States in recorded history.5 Floyd grazed the Bahamas, lost a bit of momentum, then tore northeastward on a due course for Wilmington, North Carolina. Panic spread throughout the entire East Coast, and the largest evacuation in the nation’s history commenced, involving some 2.6 million people.6

  On the night Floyd hit, Thursday, September 16, the main concern in Princeville was not the storm but the river, which had become bloated with rainwater. More than a hundred volunteers worked to fortify the dike with sandbags. Princeville’s four police officers shoveled alongside local criminals whom they’d arrested many times before. Sometime after midnight, they received orders to stop. “The dike is about to break,” yelled Captain Fred Crowell of the Princeville Fire Department. “Everyone has to leave as of now!” Crowell then got into the town’s fire engine and made one last drive through town. In some places, where the dike was already crumbling, Crowell encountered more than four feet of water. “If I had opened my door, water would have rushed in,” he later told me. Still he plodded onward, navigating his half-submerged fire engine through the town’s murky streets, blaring his siren and honking his horn as he went. It was a last warning—like a sinking ship, Princeville was about to go under.

  Thad Knight woke to the sound of his daughter knocking on his bedroom door. Frantically she told him about the dike, and together they stood for a moment on his front porch, listening to the distant clamor of the fire engines. As the sirens receded, their low-pitched yawns gave way to a steady hissing. At first Thad mistook this sound for the rustle of strong wind, but soon it grew fuller, like the distant roar of a waterfall. Then he felt it—a sweet, misty chill in the air. Finally he knew without a doubt: The river was coming. Princeville was about to flood. Not knowing how to swim, Thad quickly got into his car and drove toward higher ground.

  As floodwater crested the top of the dike, Mayor Delia Perkins remained in the town hall, telephoning officials at the National Weather Service, pumping them for every last detail about the storm. Sometime between eleven P.M. and midnight, the phone went dead. A short time later, Mayor Perkins drove down to the river and saw that it was hopeless. The town was going to flood. Wearily, she returned to the town hall for a few more hours to coordinate a final evacuation effort. At last, she could stall no longer. Perkins got into her car and drove toward dry land. Eventually she pulled into a parking lot and killed the engine on her car. It was a moment of realization, Perkins later told me. Finally she allowed herself to think of all the things she had not done—like grabbing her family photo albums, her collection of jazz records, or any of many things she had accumulated over several decades in Princeville.

  Soon heavy black water was roaring into town, crashing through people’s windows and bowling over tin trailers. Those who missed the fire engine’s warning climbed into their attics, and when the water met them there, they punched holes between the rafters and climbed onto their roofs. Even as the water lapped against the rain gutters, some people refused to budge. One old man had to be hoisted out through a hole that rescuers drilled in his ceiling. By the following day, Princeville lay beneath twenty feet of water. Giant, frothing whirlpools spun through town, and rescue boats sped across them, looking for survivors.

  Many of those who escaped gathered in the parking lot of the Tarboro Kmart, and there they waited through the night. Shortly after sunrise, one of the town’s commissioners, a woman named Anne Howell, contacted the police to see if it was safe to go back. “What’s going on in Princeville?” she asked. “Commissioner Howell,” said the officer awkwardly, “I don’t know how to tell you this, other than . . . there is no more Princeville.”

  The town had all but vanished. One of the only remaining traces was the top of a church steeple, the tip of which poked through the surface of a sprawling river. Initially, many local residents speculated that Princeville would remain under water forever, slowly decomposing among the fish. Thad Knight, who was staying at his daughter’s house during this time, doubted he’d ever see Princeville again. “I know how high the churches are in this town,” he later told me. “And when I turned on the TV and saw that one steeple just barely coming through the water, I figured Princeville was gone.” Yet just eleven days later, the Tar River receded and uncovered its damage. Houses were destroyed, as if whipped apart in a blender. They were cracked down the center, hemorrhaging limp, soggy strips of insulation and severed electrical wires. Many were swept entirely off their foundations, and one had actually been dumped onto the hood of a car. The insides were gutted; furniture, clothing, appliances, pictures, and books were strewn over lawns and across bushes. Even the air was marked, hung with the stabbing odor of rotting pig carcasses and busted septic tanks.

  When Thad finally returned to his house, he found a dozen or so unearthed coffins sitting on his front lawn. They had been uprooted from the local cemetery, a wildly overgrown place where freed slaves were buried. Thad’s house was also wrecked, coated in mud and bits of de
bris from other houses. Moving back was not an option, yet Thad hated the thought of burdening his daughter any longer, so he joined the rest of the town’s survivors in a giant displacement camp twenty-five miles west of town. There, several hundred trailers were assembled on an enormous field of gravel next to a women’s prison. Thad agreed to sleep there, but not to live there, and each day he awoke before dawn and drove through the darkness back to Princeville. There he sat, alone beside the remains of his destroyed house—through October, November, and December—starting each day by watching the sun rise like an orange pyre over the town’s broken rooftops.

  As Thad single-handedly manned the town of Princeville, the town’s officials bickered over a massive buyout proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It was an all-or-nothing arrangement: Everybody stayed, or everybody left. There were to be no partial deals. If FEMA was going to spend millions of dollars, it wanted the situation fixed once and for all. In this case, “fixed” meant bulldozing the town into a series of softball fields or something similar. For many former residents, this was an abhorrent thought. As one of the oldest black towns in America, Princeville was more than just a place, it was a piece of history. But in truth, it was a calamitous history, and now the government was offering an end to the town’s torments.

  The decision was left in the hands of Mayor Perkins and Princeville’s four town commissioners. Each of them had a vote. Usually the decisions they made were routine matters of civic life: whether to adjust property taxes, approve a town fair, or test a sewer line for leaks. Suddenly the very fate of Princeville was on their agenda.

  From the start, Commissioner Anne Howell wanted to rebuild Princeville, but she knew it wouldn’t be easy. If the town accepted the buyout, FEMA would write everyone a check for the market value of their property; if they turned the money down, they would get nothing but a lot of dirt with which to rebuild the dike, one more time. The seriousness and finality of this decision weighed on Anne greatly. Sometimes in the evenings, as she stepped out onto the sprawling gravel parking lot of the displacement camp, she stopped for a moment to look eastward. Strange as it seemed, Princeville was just twenty miles away. If she could climb the roof of the nearby prison she might even be able to see it. The flood had washed away almost everything, but Princeville itself remained a fixed point on the horizon.

  Meanwhile, back in town, Thad Knight continued to sit patiently beside his ruined house. He was the town’s sole keeper, and it seemed like a strange role for him to be playing. Thad had lived an inconspicuous life, attending church, providing for his family, just trying to get by. As a young boy he once stole a quick drink from the “white” water fountain, eager to see how delicious it might be, but was quickly disappointed by the familiarity of its taste. Almost from then on, Thad did what his family expected him to do: He dropped out of school to help his father break even as a sharecropper, and he continued tilling the fields even as all eleven of his brothers and sisters moved away. “I just want one Knight by my side,” his father had said. And so Thad stayed, building a small house next to his father’s on the edge of town.

  As time passed, everyone seemed to slip away. Thad’s seven children grew up, his marriage dissolved, and his father died early one winter morning. Now Thad was seventy-two years old and alone. No one was counting on him anymore, and he found himself following some strange inner compass. He would not live in a parking lot next to a women’s prison. He would not be forced to leave his home.

  I first met Thad while looking for a place to sleep. I’d spent the day walking around town, creeping through dank abandoned houses and wildly overgrown yards, trying to get a better feel for the place. Very little had changed since my first visit for the magazine. Debris still hung from the trees like strange ornaments: the head of a doll, a washboard, even a snorkel and mask dangled from twiggy limbs. It was now April of 2000—roughly half a year had passed since the flood—and still the town lay in ruins.

  My plan was to find a dry stretch of flat ground and pitch a tent amid the vacant houses. Technically I was on vacation, and I figured that a bit of the outdoors would be both a cheap and refreshing reprieve from my cubicle life. Of course, my coworkers were baffled. “Princeville? Didn’t you already cover that story?” someone asked me. “You’re vacationing in a ghost town?” another inquired. In truth, I had been catching flack over Princeville ever since my first visit. Back then, my editor couldn’t understand my reluctance to endorse the FEMA buyout. “Why should they rebuild, if they’re just going to get washed away?” he asked me rather exasperatedly. This was a good question, and though I failed to come up with a decent answer and did not even know if there was one, I remained determined to have a closer look.

  So one Friday afternoon in mid-April, I left my office in Washington, hastily packed a bag full of camping gear, and headed south toward Princeville. I could hardly wait to get going, though in my haste I had forgotten a few things. I had a tent but no ground tarp or sleeping mat. I brought books to read but no flashlight to read them with. Most regrettable was my food situation. By the time I reached Princeville, all I had left was a mangled piece of beef jerky and half a bottle of Hawaiian Punch. It was a sorry set of supplies, but the way I figured it, I needed some toughening up. How else was I going to make a good impression on all the diehards I wanted to meet?

  Now dusk was approaching, and I still hadn’t spotted a single decent campsite. Most of the ground was shrouded with dense vegetation, so thick I’d need a machete to clear the way. The few open spaces were nothing but rich beds of black mud. So I kept going, and eventually I came upon a trailer next to a giant rubbish fire. Twenty paces away sat an elderly man in his carport, thumbing through a book, apparently waiting out the last bit of light. He wore a thick pair of reading glasses, and their plastic arms flexed around the sides of his gleaming bald head. Even from a seated position, it was clear that he was a large man with a powerful build. His dress was formal: polished shoes, pressed slacks, a button-down shirt, and a pair of suspenders that barely fit around his barrel chest. As I made my way down his driveway he gave me a welcoming wave.

  “How are you?” I asked awkwardly.

  “Well, I’m still here,” he said with a quick flick of his eyes—two enormous pupils, greatly enlarged by the thick warp of his lenses. “At least for now,” he added, carefully prying off his glasses, then gently massaging the marks they’d left.

  “You’re just about the only person I’ve seen all day,” I told him. This brought a smile to his face.

  “Oh yeah? Well, sometimes folks ask me why I’m here. They say: ‘What are you doing over here? It isn’t going to change anything.’ And then I remind them: I’m enjoying myself.” He paused to wipe his brow of sweat. “Here, hand me my stick,” he said, pointing toward a rusted three-footed cane sitting on the chair next to him. I handed it to him. “Good,” he said. “Now you can sit down.” Then he patted me once on the shoulder in lieu of a handshake and told me his name was Thad Knight.

  I took a seat in the green plastic lawn chair next to him, and he took off his baseball cap, as if to be polite. It was a blue denim hat with a large piece of duct tape across the front. Later, Thad explained that he’d gotten it free of charge from a lumber store in the neighboring town of Rocky Mount. The store’s name was stitched across the front, so Thad had covered it with duct tape because he didn’t want people to know that he’d been shopping “out of town.” He liked to keep his money within the community, but the flood had limited his options.

  Together Thad and I sat in his carport and gazed out on a collection of pulverized houses, which were surrounded by sprawling beds of sludge that used to be lawns. The front of each house was now marked with a giant spray-painted “X,” indicating that it had been searched for dead bodies. For good measure, stapled to the front of each door was a sign reading, THIS BUILDING IS UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION. THE USE OR OCCUPANCY OF THIS BUILDING FOR HUMAN HABITATION IS PROHIBITED AND UNLAWFUL.


  “Are you thirsty?” Thad asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Thad pulled himself up, walked down to the end of his carport, and picked up a container of bottled water. Apparently tap water was still not an option. During the flood more than a hundred thousand dead hogs and nearly a million dead chickens and turkeys had sat for weeks in a sea of stagnant water, and even now the groundwater wasn’t reliable.7 Thad uncapped the canister and filled both of our glasses with water.

  As we sipped our drinks, I asked Thad why he wasn’t in the displacement camp with everyone else. He looked at me like I was crazy. “That’s no place to pass time,” he said. Thad explained that the camp was so jam-packed with people that there wasn’t a moment’s rest. The noise was ceaseless. At night, strangers strolled and chatted outside his trailer, right beside the window where his head was resting. “I didn’t do much sleeping there,” he told me. During the day the camp buzzed with a din of quarreling over food handouts, secondhand clothing, and government-issue propane tanks. Thad said he had worked his entire life to escape this sort of squalor; in fact, so had generations of Knights before him. His great-grandparents had grown up in the cramped, dingy cabins of the slave quarters, which were somewhat infamous in this region. When Frederick Law Olmsted made his tour of the South for the New York Times in the 1850s, he described some typical quarters in the Carolinas: “The Negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had seen—I thought not more than twelve feet square inside. They stood in two rows, with a wide street between them. They were built of logs, with no windows—no opening at all except a doorway.” The more luxurious dwellings (e.g., the sort that poor whites might also use) offered better ventilation, but the cost was privacy: “Through the chinks, as you pass along the road, you may often see all that is going on in the house; and, at night, the light of the fire shines brightly out on all sides.”8