Hurricane Song

We are trav’ling in the footsteps
Of those who’ve gone before
We’ll all be reunited on a new
and sunlit shore
When the saints go marching in

There weren’t any soldiers at the front of the line for the bathroom. So anybody who could flex enough muscle just pushed their way past. My uncle and me stood in line for almost an hour, with Pop staying back at the seats to eagle-eye our stuff.

“Look at them crumb punks!” Uncle Roy said as a whole posse of thugs shoved through. “That’s how they was raised up. It’s a reflection on their family—treatin’ their own people like dirt! I hope they meet up with some other gang, and they beat the crap outta each other.”

I stood there with my bowels ready to bust, thinking about how I’d snuck onto that food line. And that this was some kind of cosmic payback.

There was a guy walking up and down the line, talking to people on the low. I thought he was hawking weed, but he wasn’t. Instead, he flashed a box of pills, like you’d buy in a drugstore.

I looked at him like he was crazy. He wanted ten dollars for a single pill, but Uncle Roy traded him a brand-new pack of cigarettes for one.

We finally got inside the bathroom and waved through a thick cloud of smoke. I could smell the weed mixed with cigarettes, and after a minute, my head started spinning. I felt sorry for some little boy whose father had his hand cupped over the kid’s nose and mouth.

Uncle Roy kept watch outside the stall while I went in to do my business. Then I did the same for him. Only people had already robbed all the toilet paper. I guess so they’d have it for themselves later, or to sell. So I just pulled my pants up, and didn’t let myself think about it.

On the way back, I found that guy and bought two of those pills, for Pop and me. I had mostly fives and singles, so it probably looked like I had more money than I did. People saw that roll in my hand and some of them eyed it good. That’s when Uncle Roy got up on me close to show we were together, and I put a grill to chill on my face, advertising that I wasn’t a herb.

There wasn’t a clock you could look at anywhere. But I had on the wristwatch Mom got me. It was a little after five o’clock, and I was trying to get comfortable in one of those stiff seats. I kept thinking about that bastard kid who’d stole my football. Then I took out that damn drum. I spun it around in my hands and wanted to throw a perfect spiral with it from the stands and see it smash into a thousand pieces on the field. But that wasn’t going to fix anything. So I pulled back and left the drum sitting on my lap. Then I pounded on it, like I could put my fist straight through the skin stretched across the top.

“Your father’s bringin’ you where? To what motel?” she started in, still half asleep. “You tell your father and uncle to drive you up here to Chicago. I want you where it’s safe.”

My stomach rumbled and I started beating on that drum dreaming of all the things Mom cooked best. I could taste her macaroni and cheese, pork ribs, and meat loaf with mashed potatoes when Pop said, “That noodlin’ almost sounds decent, son. You been down to the Crossroads without me knowing?”

“The Crossroads—that’s where you learn to play your ax without havin’ to sweat over it,” Pop said. “The devil shows up and makes you a deal. You trade him your soul and he gives you the power to play. So you got to choose one road over another—the easy one or the rough one that might never get you there.”

“I went there one time but the devil never came. Guess I had nothin’ to trade. Jazz had already snatched up my soul,” said Pop, picking up my drum. “It’s the only way I can say what I feel, and I’d be less than nothin’ without it.”

Then Pop grabbed the drum and used just his fingertips to beat a rhythm off the top of his head. It cut straight through all the noise, like it had something to say just to me. And I wondered how long Pop suffered on the rough road to make a drum talk that way.

The preacher’s name was Culver, and at around seven o’clock that night he stood up on his chair and said he was going to hold a service. Lots of people got up to move closer, and Uncle Roy even unzipped his clothes bag to put on a suit jacket.

I hadn’t been to any kind of service since I started living with Pop. My uncle and him played every Friday and Saturday night. That’s when I could get work bussing tables, too. So Sundays were mostly for sleeping late.

“Know that Katrina’s not some kind of punishment, ” he preached. “That’s not God’s way. I’ll tell you this storm is a test. It’s a test of character, and a chance to prove what’s really important to you in this life— faith, family, and the brotherhood we all share.”

I could tell parts of that speech were written out beforehand. But sometimes Preacher Culver would go off sideways to answer somebody’s question, like, Why does God have it in for poor people? He’d pull words right out of the air to come up with an answer. And that’s when Culver sounded to me like he meant it the most.

Cyrus sat there stone quiet with his eyes fixed on something in front of him. Then close to the end of Culver’s sermon he hollered out, “How ’bout some singin’, preacher? It’s not a service without a hymn!”

Culver called up two of his own kids who had tambourines. He looked at me and asked, “Young brother, can you come up here with that drum, please?”

Then Preacher Culver asked if anybody else had an instrument they could play. Only Pop and Uncle Roy stayed blank on him and never moved a muscle. When I got up front, I stood there looking at them. They both had big grins on their faces, like the joke was on me.

Most everybody in our section joined in, and there were voices coming from other directions, too. And for a minute, the loudest sound in the Superdome came from that song, and everything else faded out behind it.

“See, now your first gig was in a shelter, too,” said Uncle Roy, smirking. “Your trio was tight. I didn’t hear a single clam in that whole piece. Maybe all you need is the right nickname to crash the big-time. How about ‘Chic’ for all them years you spent in Chicago?”

“That’ll hype him good,” laughed Pop. “Two generations of Shaws—Doc, Chic, and just plain Roy, bringing down the house.”

I couldn’t figure why, but on the inside, every part of me was tingling. I felt like I’d made it past something. It wasn’t anything corny, like that Crossroads story Pop told me. But it felt like something I could never lose, even if Katrina did us all dirty and blew everything else away.

Late that night, I was sound asleep in a straight-back seat when my stomach woke me. My eyes focused slow, and I saw the empty football field. At first, I thought it was some kind of dream. That’s when the sound of a baby crying jumped between my ears, and every second of being stuck inside the Superdome came roaring back.

Uncle Roy was sitting with Cyrus’s daughter. They were both smoking cigarettes on the sly after a soldier made them stop before. And my uncle was puffing smoke rings for one of her little girls who was still awake. I thought those two girls had been taking turns holding a teddy bear. Only this time I saw it move in her arms and knew it was a guinea pig. They must have snuck it in, because when we first got here, I saw those soldiers turn away a lady with a dog that small.

More and more people were filling up the stands. New families were scouting around for someplace to settle. It must have been raining buckets outside now because every one of them and their things were soaked ten times worse than when we first got to the Superdome.

Dunham and Cain came walking through the corridor, and I sank down low into my chair. But they spotted me anyway and started waving their arms for me to climb the stairs to where they were. So I turned my back on our stuff.

I reached the top step and saw they had two other guys with them I didn’t recognize. Those guys weren’t on the football squad, but they were wearing red shirts, too.

“This where you been holed up?” Dunham said. “Damn! We coulda used you, Miles. We had a stare-down with some other dudes over who owned a whole section of people. They had us outnumbered five to four, so we had to blink.”

“Forget that shit. Niggers was poor in those seats anyway—welfare cases, straight up,” said Cain. “Miles, what do people got in them bags where you are? You see anything with dollar signs on it?”

“Nothing like that,” I answered. “It’s mostly old folks, women, and little kids. There’s even a preacher and his family.”

Then somebody saw the candy machine in the corner. Cain watched for soldiers, and a huge heavy dude, who was big enough to play the whole offensive line on a football team by himself, pulled out a switchblade and pried open the coin slot. There was a flood of silver on the floor, and they were all stuffing their pockets with change.

Dunham came back to me and said, “Go tell that preacher to take up a collection for us. That we’ll be his protection from any thugs on the loose. But people gotta pay up first.”

“That’s why you should do it,” said the dude with the knife, in a thick bass voice. “You wanna see them safe, right?”

“Come on, Miles. People are scared to death in this joint,” Dunham said. “Even if everybody where you are coughs up a dollar—that’s fifty, sixty bucks, easy.”

When Cain saw I wasn’t going for it, he tugged at his red jersey and said, “No wonder he ain’t wearin’ his colors. This ain’t no charity, Miles. This is business. If you ain’t down with us, you’re against us.”

“I don’t know what this is all about, boys, but I’m not walkin’ away,” said Culver, with some real fire to his voice.

I thought about the knife that dude had, and Pop’s story about his mama. So I took out my money. Then I counted out half and stood up in Cain’s face.

“Just so you know, you can’t never get another one,” Cain said, ripping the cash out of my hand. “You off my squad forever.”