We are in hurricane season and have recently observed the ways Beryl has done its worst for our family, friends and neighbors in and around Texas. There are many works of fiction that feature some kind of cataclysmic event—floods and tornadoes among them.
Hurricanes also figure in short fiction quite a bit. The late Randall Kenan has a story about a hurricane. It’s called “God’s Gonna Trouble the Water” and it’s from the collection "If I Had Two Wings.
Vanessa Streeter is the protagonist. What does she—as a rather privileged person—stand to lose in this storm or in the wake of it? But what about others who aren’t as privileged? What do others lose—in storms and in everyday life?
The story is set in North Carolina. "Two hurricanes were in the forecast: one headed to Barbados, and one headed for the North Carolina coast. Home,” writes Kenan.
In this story, Vanessa Streeter surveys the wreckage of a hurricane in her small North Carolina town. She comes to think about what is lost in the wake of such storms in these communities.
Who will recover? Who won’t?
Disasters— as Kenan reveals to us so pointedly— don't affect communities in the same ways.
What is an inconvenient, nuisance event for protagonist Vanessa Streeter is something even more challenging and heartbreaking for others.
One of those others is “Marisol,” a cleaning woman who helps Vanessa at her home a few days a week.
“Still no word from Marisol,” says Mrs. Streeter, about Marisol Cifuentes, the housekeeper.
Here’s a scene where Mrs. Streeter is surveying the damage after the hurricane:
“No one was answering her cell. 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 with knew how the tiny huddle of farms and homes had fared, being so low and so close to the river. Many trees had toppled over in the woods on either side of the road. As she approached, she witnessed more and more damage. When she got there, she saw trailers off their mounts, floated into odd and strange configurations; some overturned; many light poles down and wires downed and exposed. Surely the Cifuenteses got out. Surely they were okay. Lord knows.”
Next, Mrs. Streeter searches for Marisol at the small grocery stores that cater to the Latino community in the town—but she finds no answers about Marisol’s whereabouts. Time goes by and Marisol does not return.
Here’s another excerpt from the story:
“Weeks passed. Things got better, bit by bit, inch by inch. Eventually Mrs. Streeter was able to replant her garden with a few items, mostly cabbage and collards and mustard and kale. It being August, the growing season was going to be mighty short. It would start to frost in about six weeks. You could already sense fall coming.”
After some time, a letter arrives for Mrs. Streeter from Ciudad Juárez. It’s from a woman who knew Marisol. She informs her that Marisol’s daughter was lost in the flood and that Marisol returned to her town in Chihuahua. More tragedy has befallen her. She herself didn’t go missing in the storm in North Carolina, but she has gone missing in Mexico–and it’s believed she and her family have been kidnapped or killed by a cartel.
Although Mrs. Streeter has a bad dream, she awakens to a kind of normalcy—the normalcy that she was after in even bothering to search for Marisol. She gets up from bed and surveys the gardener’s work in her backyard and thinks about eating pork chops.
Marisol and those like her whose lives present calamities somehow even more destructive than hurricanes in everyday life, remain a memory—removed, silent, absent—never again part of the routine 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 readers might like include:
- “RG” in the collection Brownsville by Oscar Casares,
- “Waterwalkers” by Bret Anthony Johnston in the collection Corpus Christi
- “Eyewall” is in the collection Florida by Lauren Groff.
