Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  When slaves of this region finally won their freedom, almost nothing was sweeter than the right to own their homes. In 1865 the head of North Carolina’s Freedmen’s Bureau wrote about this phenomenon: “To be absolute owners of the soil, to be allowed to build upon their own lands, however humble, in which they should enjoy the sacred privileges of a home, was more than they had ever dared to pray for.”9 Buying land did cost money, something most freed slaves didn’t have, and again Princeville proved itself to be an oddly auspicious location—flood-prone land is cheap. Almost overnight, the old slave encampment began to resemble a fledgling town. Cabins were built along spacious streets, and they often had windows and wood floors.10 But even in Princeville many freedmen lived as tenants and squatters. For the Knight family, ownership would remain an elusive dream for the next century.

  Thad grew up in a rickety sharecropper’s house, in which he could see the ground through the floorboards, and sometimes even a pack of hogs that came looking for shelter on cold winter nights. “My father tried to keep the hogs out,” Thad told me. “But it was difficult, so we got used to living with them.” As Thad got older, he dreamed of doing better for himself. “I used to drive by the houses where the white people lived and I would hope that one day I had a house with central heat and a bathroom,” he recalled. Eventually, Thad realized this would never happen unless he quit sharecropping. So, at the age of forty-two, with a wife and seven kids, Thad looked into a new job at the local textile mill. Initially his landlord forbade him to take the new job, but after consulting with a local justice of the peace, Thad determined that he was within his rights to take whatever job he wanted. He soon began working at the mill, where he did the night shift, from eleven P.M. to seven A.M. Then he worked a second job hauling cucumbers from eight A.M. to four P.M. He traded in his vacation for overtime work, and he got by on just four or five hours of sleep a night. After a few years he had saved enough money to take out a mortgage on a house. It was a modern house with central heat, indoor plumbing, and carpeted floors. When the builder asked Thad if he wanted a fireplace, the answer was immediate: No way. “I had central heat,” explained Thad proudly. “Why would I want a fireplace? I never wanted to chop wood again.”

  Together Thad and I leaned up against his house. It was oddly conventional in its appearance, the sort of one-story prefab you’d expect to see in just about any suburban community. Yet the carport really distinguished Thad’s house. Here he had assembled a hodgepodge of odd furnishings—lawn chairs, doormats, blankets, a few rickety tables, and a massive wooden radio that no longer worked—all of it cluttered but lovingly arranged, like the parlor of a tidy castaway. In the carport Thad held court and received guests with elaborate formality, dusting off chairs, filling cups of water, flipping through the Bible for an appropriate passage to set the mood. Thad had transformed this mere parking space into a makeshift home, and together we enjoyed its simple amenities.

  Home-keeping had become the driving force in Thad’s life. Thad told me that after the floodwaters receded he woke each morning before sunup and drove through the darkness toward Princeville. There was no self-pity, no blaming the dike or the government, no hopeless mornings when he hit the snooze button again and again. “I was there every day, rain or shine, watching the road and reading the Bible, like it was my job,” he recalled. Of course, there were unpleasantries. His toilet, for example, was just a five-gallon plastic bucket that he brought with him each day. But according to Thad, anything was better than sitting in that cramped gravel parking lot of the displacement camp, staring glumly out the window, waiting for the next Social Security check to arrive.

  After a week of sitting beside his destroyed house, Thad became convinced that he could handle more. He sought out the government official managing the displacement camp and asked him, “Can you move my trailer back to Princeville?”

  “There’s nothing in Princeville,” the official told him.

  “There is for me,” said Thad.

  “I’ll think about it,” said the official.

  Thad came back almost every other night to inquire about his request. He would drive back from a long day in Princeville and head directly for the manager’s trailer. “You should move your bed in here,” the manager told him jokingly.

  “If you don’t get me back to Princeville, that’s exactly what I am going to do,” replied Thad. The manager turned him away some twenty times, but with each rebuff Thad only became more confident that he could really do this. Then one evening in late November, the beleaguered manager finally gave in. He promised to tow Thad’s trailer back to Princeville but warned him that from then on he would be largely on his own. It was an odd victory, a go-ahead on a self-inflicted sentence of exile, but it would also be a homecoming, and Thad said he wanted to see it through.

  The night of the move, Thad’s children drove in from all across the county to help him settle in. A government truck pulled into the driveway, parked the small trailer in the shadow of Thad’s wrecked house, and then motored away. The trailer’s scant battery-powered lamp was one of the only lights in town. It would be another week before Thad had any real utilities. Eventually, he and his family lobbied their local power company (Edgecombe-Martin County Electric) to put Thad’s property back on the grid. Getting running water was even trickier. First Thad had to convince the town of Princeville to turn his water back on, and when it finally came, the pipes at his house were so leaky that the whole building shot off spray like a giant sprinkler. Finally Thad called a plumber to put in new pipes so he could at least have use of his garden hose. On that first night in Princeville, however, he was essentially camping.

  “Dad, I don’t like this,” one of his sons told him finally. His other children quickly agreed that it felt all wrong. “Are you sure about this?” his son asked him again.

  “I’ll be just fine,” he told them. The moment had taken on the semblance of an impromptu ceremony, though no one knew what to do next. “Don’t worry,” Thad said finally. “Just go on home.”

  Reluctantly, the members of the Knight family said their goodbyes. As they readied to leave, Thad stepped into his trailer and locked the door behind him. Moments later, a small convoy of cars backed out of Thad’s driveway and made its way down Greenwood Boulevard toward the bridge leaving town. From his trailer window, Thad watched the many taillights trace a road through the night. Soon a strange uneasiness came over him, Thad recalled, and he could not help but wonder what he had gotten himself into.

  Hours later, as he lay in bed, Thad listened to the strange workings of the night—packs of stray dogs rummaging for food and a distant clatter that he feared was the sound of looters pillaging the town’s empty houses. To calm himself, he recited one of his favorite psalms. He didn’t have much of a singing voice. He rarely sang, even in church, with the support of a full choir—but tonight he sang to himself:

  Come by here good Lord,

  Come by here.

  Somebody needs you Lord,

  Come by here.

  It’s praying time Lord,

  Come by here.

  Oh lord, come by here.

  Thad repeated it over and over, until he finally fell asleep.

  Thad was raised as a strict Baptist, but he wasn’t always so observant. “I used to drink a lot of whiskey,” he told me, with a shy chuckle. “I mean, a whole lot of whiskey.” Apparently, in his younger years, Thad was something of a wild man. “Once I got into a car wreck and they charged me for driving while under the influence,” he admitted. “But with the help of the Lord I got past that.” Basically, he gave up drinking, attended church more regularly, and eventually became a deacon. Yet his biggest religious transformation came after the flood, when he moved back to Princeville.

  “Somehow I felt closer to God over in that trailer,” he told me. Its cramped tin walls formed a dark, intimate space, like a cave or a crypt, and its hot, breathy air was thick with an unending litany of prayers and psalms. When Thad awoke
in the predawn hours he would often talk aloud, casually chatting with God, something he’d rarely done before. Now, in the most unexpected of places, Thad eased his way into a new form of observance, and it heartened him to think that an old man could change.

  During the day Thad sat in his carport, reading a thick, large-print version of the Bible. He knew much of it by heart. He savored his favorite passages: the story of Daniel and the lion, and that of Noah and the flood. Again and again Thad pictured the image of the dove returning to the ark with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its mouth—promising that a new life, on dry land, was just ahead.

  As winter approached, the ground became covered with frost, and later with snow. One morning the door to Thad’s trailer froze shut and he had to boil a pot of water to get it open. Another morning he opened his door to find a pack of dogs begging for food. He said he soon felt like a hermit, alone in the wilderness, battling the elements. Dusk became an eerie, unsettling time when the woods seemed to creep noticeably closer. Nights were long and often filled with claustrophobic dreams. Yet all was set right by those first frosty rays of orange light that reminded him with resounding certainty that he had done it—he’d made it through another night—and it gave him a pioneer’s rush.

  Thad spoke in long, rambling monologues, often losing himself in the details of specific memories, then tapering off into silence for a moment or two before starting again. During one such pause I interjected: “It’s hard for me to imagine feeling this way about any of the apartments that I’ve lived in.”

  This set Thad off on a laugh. “Well, where’d you grow up?” he asked finally. “Where’s your real home?”

  “Buffalo, New York,” I told him.

  “Don’t you want to go back?”

  “Sometimes—but mainly just to visit.” Thad nodded his head; it was clear I was quite a curiosity to him.

  “So you travel around a lot, do you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, quite a bit. This time last year, I was living in Israel.”

  “You’ve been to Jerusalem?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Let me ask you,” he said cautiously. “Do people in Jerusalem still walk around in robes, like they do in the Bible?”

  I thought for a moment. “Yes, some of them do—especially the Bedouin.”

  “Oh,” he said with a nod of his head. He seemed pleased.

  From the distance came the groan of a giant flatbed truck, and its headlights revealed the flat, dry terrain of Thad’s lawn. It was the best ground I’d seen all day. Before I had a chance to second-guess myself, I asked him, “Thad, would it be okay if I pitched a tent in your back yard and slept out here tonight?”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’d be just fine.”

  So I grabbed my backpack and set out to pitch my tent before it got too dark. As I rounded the back of the carport, I noticed something that brought me to a dead halt—graves, hundreds of them. Thad’s back yard spilled directly into the town cemetery. There was not even a fence separating the two. Some graves were just a few paces from the house. I now understood why the flood had left so many coffins on Thad’s lawn.

  The far part of the yard turned into what looked like a marsh, so I stuck close to the house and found a nice flat spot. I’m not a terribly superstitious person, but as I raised my tent, driving stakes into the ground just a few yards from the first row of nearby graves, I had to suppress a creepy feeling. Who camps between a swamp and a graveyard? I felt like the clueless guy who gets gored in the opening scene of a B-grade horror flick.

  Back on the carport, Thad and I continued talking about the flood and many other details of his daily life—from tips on avoiding snakes to the recipe for his favorite bean-based dish called “dandoolies.” Thad was very good-natured about all the questions I threw his way; in fact, all the attention seemed to amuse him. “Do you do this often?” he asked me quizzically.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Camp out in people’s back yards and ask them questions.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re the first one.”

  Thad shook his head and chuckled. “You know,” he said, “there are other folks you can talk to.” Of course, he was right. The story of Princeville was not his alone, and neither was the decision to stay or go. It was a town matter, a question of accepting or rejecting a FEMA buyout, and when it came down to it, Thad was as much a spectator as I was.

  The question of the buyout was resolved on a Monday night in late November of 1999, roughly four months earlier. It was an emotional time; the flood was still fresh in everyone’s memory. Thanksgiving was just three days away, Christmas was around the corner, and the bite of being homeless was starting to make itself felt. Above all, people were tired of waiting. They wanted to know, once and for all, whether Princeville was for sale.

  The vote took place in a parking lot across the river in Tarboro. Here stood a small trailer that served as Princeville’s temporary town hall. Inside was a conference table, a handful of chairs occupied by local officials, and a jumble of reporters and politicians packed in like commuters on a rush-hour train. By the time Commissioner Anne Howell arrived, the parking lot was swarming with television crews and spectators from across the county. In the weeks since the flood, Princeville had become the local media’s favorite human-interest story, and now everyone had gathered to watch the dramatic closing act. As Anne approached the front door of the trailer, people stepped aside. She was a large woman, consummately maternal. For her, the vote came down to family, simple as that. Princeville had always been a special place, not only because it had offered freed slaves a chance to own their own land, but because it became a place where families could finally stay together. “My family has been here for four generations,” Anne later told me. “Princeville holds us together.” It was clear in her mind that a buyout meant dispersion, and the prospect of reunions on freshly flattened softball fields didn’t hearten her at all.

  Perhaps the worst moment for Anne came several months earlier when her sister-in-law’s casket was reported missing. She helped her husband fill out the seven pages of paperwork, detailing what his dead sister looked like. Miles away, in a warehouse filled with washed-up bodies, officials worked all day to find matches based on distinctive features: missing fingertips, a gold tooth, green shoes, a left breast prosthesis, a butterfly brooch, even the serial number on a pacemaker.11 When nothing turned up, Anne tried to remain thankful that her eldest son was still buried. Several years back his coffin had partially unearthed in another storm, but somehow it had managed to remain buried during Floyd. Determined to focus on the positive, Anne snapped a picture of his intact plot.

  As it neared time for the vote, Anne took a seat around the conference table with the mayor and the town’s three other commissioners. “I was sitting there and sweating,” she later told me. “Even in the depth of winter that trailer was hot, and I think everybody was very tense.” There was a great deal of speculation about the vote. Nobody knew exactly how it would go. Anne felt most certain about Commissioner Linda Worsley, who was a telephone worker at Sprint and a lifelong resident of Princeville. “I felt very confident that she was with me,” recalled Anne. She suspected that the two other commissioners, Milton Johnson and Frank Braswell, were going to vote for the buyout. This left Mayor Delia Perkins. “I knew she would have to be the tiebreaker,” said Anne.

  Mayor Perkins sat at the far end of the conference table, a small woman with a broad, serious face. So much had happened since that night when she sat in the town hall, talking with officials from the National Weather Service until the line went dead. When Perkins first returned to Princeville, it was by helicopter, hovering above a maze of flooded streets. It was a surreal experience, Perkins later told me. From her airborne perch she watched the Coast Guard round up a small navy of floating coffins. Days later FEMA offered its massive buyout, and this appeared to be Princeville’s coup de grâce. But then, most unexpectedly, Princeville’s history finally start
ed to do the town some good. Local and regional newspapers began to pick up on this story of history verses nature. Soon even the New York Times was running headlines like “Landmark for Ex-Slaves Felt Brunt of Storm” and “Town with Fabled Past Facing Uncertain Future.”12

  Around that time, Princeville was visited by an assortment of public figures. First was Jesse Jackson. He ushered a large entourage into the waterlogged town hall, hoisted a dank American flag, and publicly demanded money for the town. The next day a photograph of Jackson hugging Delia Perkins hit the newspapers. Not long after, Al Sharpton arrived and alleged that the FEMA buyout was a racist sham. “If this was Valley Forge, imagine what America would be doing,” declared Sharpton.13 Soon there was a steady stream of visitors, including delegations from the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and the Nation of Islam. Money poured in from celebrities like Prince, Evander Holyfield, Tom Joyner, and Queen Latifah, not to mention sports teams like the Charlotte Hornets and the Carolina Panthers. President Clinton visited and formed the President’s Council on the Future of Princeville, chaired by the secretaries of defense, agriculture, commerce, labor, health and human services, and transportation.14

  Despite all of this support, Mayor Perkins still had one major concern. The Army Corps of Engineers had made it clear: Dike or no dike, at some point in the indefinite future Princeville would flood again. This was the unavoidable reality of living in a floodplain. Now it was up to Perkins to weigh all of these factors. Finally, she called for the vote, asking all those in favor of rebuilding the dike to raise their hands. Milton Johnson and Frank Braswell sat motionless. Anne Howell and Linda Worsley raised their hands, and, a moment later, so did the mayor. It was settled: Princeville was rebuilding. There was a great deal of commotion, followed by a barrage of questions from the press. Mayor Perkins kept her comments brief. “Rebuilding is staying with your heritage,” she told one reporter from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “We plan to stay.”15