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MONSTROPOLOUS BEAST by Danny Floyd

Part 2 of 7 from Essays on Weather for a Post-Katrina Society

"All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion." Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

In a town called Belle Glade on the shores of Lake Okeechobee in Florida, a small statue stands near the public library. Three figures – a man, a boy, and a woman with a baby in arm – run while looking back in fear, bracing against wind which blows strongly on their antiquated clothing. They are ostensibly white. Waves lap at their feet. This statue, unassuming in its placement, commemorates one of the deadliest events in American history, the true toll of which will never be known for sure and is still disputed today.

Around the turn of the 20th century, much of Florida was still uncharted territory. For better or worse, the state's burgeoning population was a testing ground for new forms of post-Reconstruction economies which unsurprisingly came with all of the racial tensions of the era. An unsustainable society steadily arose; inequitable economic systems set in an alien landscape with a severe climate were the makings a worst-case scenario waiting for a moment of rupture to bring it to the forefront. One of the worst hurricanes in recorded history finally provided this rupture in the fall of 1928. The disaster happened in only a few hours, but the crisis it unveiled was forming for decades and continued for some time after, and to some, it has never been settled.

This hurricane, often called “The Great Okeechobee Hurricane,” because this was before the time of hurricane naming, was meteorologically extreme; most devastating hurricanes in the US are compared to this hurricane at some point in reports by agencies the the NOAA or the Red Cross or even sites like WikiPedia. In the meteorological community, it is a touchstone, but the social crisis it foregrounded is largely forgotten. Few firsthand accounts remain, or at least they are filtered though people with the privilege of warning or safety. Few of those who suffered the most survived to recount the story, and those who did had no voice in their society to begin with. The most detailed account of the storm comes from two migrant farmers named Janie and Tea Cake. Unfortunately, these figures never actually existed; they are fictional aggregates pieced together from many oral histories of the storm collected later by Zora Neale Hurston during the field research for her acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. This book may be the only entry point that many Americans have to one of their nation's worst crises.

The secondary histories of the storm prove more convoluted than expected, full of hearsay, conflicting accounts, missing voices, blurry statistics, and worst of all, deeply disturbing and saddening details of immense suffering. As a researcher, I feel a conflict between a sincere responsibility to memorialize the event and a lack of a clear, trustworthy entry-point into discussing its history. There is no easy way to talk about role racial and class violence played in the devastation this storm caused. I will follow Hurston's story of Jane and Tea Cake and use their experience as a guide, taking advantage of a history in disguise, allowing fiction pull the lid off of a side of reality that is difficult to admit was true, much like this hurricane revealed a perfect storm of social inequities that could not continue forever without a major consequences. The fictional protagonists of Their Eyes provide a beginning-to-end portrayal of the whole crisis that reality cannot. They tell a story without the fragmentary voices left behind in history.

But first, the The Okeechobee Hurricane at a glance was what meteorologists call a “Cape Verdean Type,” meaning it organized off the coast of Africa and moved across the Atlantic before reaching its height in the Caribbean. It followed the Lesser Antilles and Bahamas up to Florida sustaining Category 4 status most of this time, while briefly reaching Category 5 over Puerto Rico. (33) Reports are unclear and disputed, but over the course of its 5000-mile track from the Caribbean to Canada it likely killed as many as 7000 people in two weeks. (34)

Janie was a black woman living in Florida in the 1920s. She was the child of rape and her alcoholic mother ran away leaving her in the care of her grandmother. Throughout the book, Janie found social mobility through her exceptionally light skin, reflecting the common socio-racial climate of the era. Their Eyes recounts her life more or less in three parts, each centered around a marriage. First, her grandmother arranged Janie to marry a much older man, Logan Killicks who treated her as a personal servant. She ran away to Eatonville with Joe Starks, who she later married and who became the mayor. Eatonville is a real town in south central Florida. Hurston claimed she was born there, though it is widely believed now that she moved there at the age of three from Alabama. It claims to be the first all African American town in the United States, formed during Reconstruction when a group primarily made up of freed slaves wanted to separate from the nearby town of Maitland and pooled their money to buy 112 acres. (35) Eventually widowed, Janie, facing the townspeople's jealousy and suspicion of her success and light skin, joined Tea Cake, a migrant farmer on his way to the Everglades to find seasonal work in “The Muck” near Lake Okeechobee. At this point, Their Eyes begins to reflect the the true story of the Okeechobee Hurricane, not just in geographical, chronological, and descriptive terms, but also in the way Hurston presents the pre-existing social conditions that the storm aggravated.

Tea Cake described their destination to Janie, “Oh down in de Everglades round Clewiston and Belle Glade where dey raise all dat cane and string-beans and tomatuhs. Folks don't do nothin' down dere but make money and fun a foolishness.” (36) Janie was amazed by what she finds there, a big, untamed wilderness at the shore of the Lake full of fertile, sexual energy:

To Janie's strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new. Big Lake Okeechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big everything. ... Dirt roads so rich and black that half a mile of it would have fertilized a Kansas wheat field. Wild cane on either side of the road hiding the rest of the world. Wild people too. (37)

Though wild and rich, the area between Belle Glade and Clewiston on the southern shore of Okeechobee is not exactly natural. Florida historian Eliot Kleinberg wrote one of the most comprehensive second-hand histories of the hurricane, one of the only complete histories that exists. He writes that after the Civil War, given Florida's natural isolation from the rest of the South exacerbated by the Union’s destruction of many supply lines, the small population in Florida faced economic devastation. In an attempt to alleviate the trouble, several investors up through the beginning of the 20th century underwent canal building and wetland drainage projects around the lake, in the hopes of creating more supply routes and also more fertile farmland in the Everglades. It is now clear that these entrepreneurs and politicians did not recognize the danger that populating this area would cause. In fact, one early investor, Hamilton Disston, boasted that decreasing the water level of the entire 730-square-mile lake by a foot and a half removed any danger of flooding forever. But as Janie observed, Lake Okeechobee is gigantic. Even though it is only 21 feet deep at its deepest, Kleinberg notes it “holds enough water to give 300 gallons to every living person on earth.” Only a flimsy dike held all of this water back form unnaturally low farmland populated by migrant workers. (38)

Tea Cake knew that he and Janie would have to arrive early to The Muck in order to claim a job and a place to live and that the beginning of the growing season would bring droves of drifters looking for work. To kill the time, Tea Cake taught Jamie to shoot, and they sold furs and teeth of animals they hunted to the wealthy, white people in nearby West Palm Beach. They watched as the workers descended:

Day by day now, the hordes of workers poured in. Some came limping in with their shoes and sore feet from walking. It's hard trying to follow your shoe instead of your shoe following you. They came in wagons from way up in Georgia and they came in truckloads form the east, west north and south. Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans. Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Despite the hardship, they brought with them an air of excitement as well. “Blues made and used right on the spot,” Hurston writes. “Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting like ants.” (39) By the time of the hurricane, Kleinberg writes, “what was emerging was a collection of larger farms owned by big business and worked by black migrants from the Deep South and the Caribbean.” Many workers came in boats from the impoverished islands of the Caribbean, particularly the Bahamas, but even the nonimmigrant workers were undocumented. “Pay was in cash,” Kleinberg writes. “Many workers were known to their bosses only by first name. If someone died he might not be counted if no relative was looking for him.” Tea Cake was right to arrive ahead of the growing season, because historically, housing was not guaranteed (nor any labor rights). “Workers lived in community houses, some provided by the growers. Some lived in rickety shacks or shanties thrown together with scrap wood. Some pitched tents. Some lay down at the end of the day on the side of the road or under a stand of trees.” (40)

These racial, socio-economic conditions represented the general situation of Palm Beach County in general. To the east of Belle Glade past a large, empty stretch of what is now a wildlife reserve is West Palm Beach, then an up-and-coming vacation spot lined with mansions and summer homes owned by rich elites from all over the East Coast. “The coast was full of people who never got dirt under their fingernails,” Kleinberg writes. “To them, the interior was an unknown place full of faceless blacks and poor, uneducated whites.” A general lack of interest in this area, in the place from where so much of the region's food came, led to the abandonment of many drainage projects and the construction of a 47-mile earthen dike only 5 feet tall completed in 1925 with no flood control support from Congress. Plans to increase the size of the dike in 1927 stagnated in the state legislature and went nowhere despite the lone voice of engineer Fred Cotton Elliot who would write weeks after the storm, “It is indeed unfortunate that through almost trivial and in some cases, prejudicial legislation, plans for the construction of work essential to the safety of life and the protection of property can be thwarted or so long delayed.” (41)

Janie and Tea Cake received only cryptic warning of the hurricane. First they saw a large party of Seminoles heading east. One told them, “Going to high ground. Saw-grass bloom. Hurricane coming.” (42) Kleinberg confirms that people used saw- grass as method of detecting hurricanes, though not accurately. During the depression, the WPA sent writers to document life in various locales in America, and The WPA Guide to Florida clams that atmospheric conditions cause the grass to disperse their pollen and that Seminoles will spot the bloom first and flee. Kleinberg is vocally bothered by Hurston's perpetuation of this unreliable detection method that also stereotypes the Seminole people. (43)

The only other warnings Janie and Tea Cake received were groups of animals heading east in herds and a rumor of a hurricane warning in Palm Beach from a Bahaman friend: “Mah uncle come for me. He say hurricane warning out in Palm Beach. Not so bad dere, but man, dis muck is too low and dat lake liable tuh bust.” As he drove off, he hollered back, “If Ah never see you no mo' on earth, Ah'll meet you back in Africa.” But Janie and Tea Cake stayed. “Still blue sky and fair weather. Beans running fine and prices good, so the Indians could be, must be, wrong. You couldn't have a hurricane when you're making seven and eight dollars a day picking beans. Indians are dumb anyhow, always were,” and when the weather did begin to get rough overnight, they still held out hope: “The bossman might have the thing stopped before morning anyway.” (44)

As the storm began approaching the islands of the Lesser Antillies on September 11, meteorologists began relaying messages with whatever data possible before instruments and communications devices were damaged and destroyed. The severity of the storm became clear quickly. On the French colony of Guadeloupe, some 900 were believe killed and almost the entire remaining population were without shelter. (45) In Puerto Rico, the US Weather Bureau clocked winds in at 160 mph, and many who were killed were sliced into pieces by the common zinc plated roofs as they flew off their buildings, including the remains of a woman ostensibly holding her two children in Cayay. Some 700,000 were homeless. (46)

The communication between islands and the United States mainland also demonstrated the first clear signs of the hidden legacy of racism that this storm carries. A document not declassified until 1960, and starting with “I have the honor to report that...” from the American Consul in Martinique, one of the first islands hit, reassured the US State Department that the only houses destroyed “were negro huts of no particular value,” and that many crops were damaged, but the rum was ok. (47) In Guadeloupe, the American Consul William H. Hunt was prepared to receive a $10,000 donation from The American Red Cross, when a US State Department official with illegible initials warmed him:

In view of the rottenness of local politics on the island, it might be inadvisable to hand such a large sum of as ten thousand dollars to the local gentry who range from cafe au lait to cafe noir in complexion.... The governor of the island, a white Frenchmen form continental France, would seem to be the appropriate person to handle the money. According to the Consul's latest report, he is a man of integrity and long service in the colonial career. (48)

Warning came too little too late. After it passed Puerto Rico, meteorologist Richard Grey in Miami observed that the hurricane took a turn northeast, and he believed the curve would keep it off the coast of Florida. In truth, this turn contributed to maintaining the storm's strength because it missed the mountain of Duarte Peak in the Dominican Republic, which has historically obstructed and weakened hurricanes before they reach Florida. Grey issued a warning on Saturday the 15th to be safe for most of the eastern Florida coast, but continued to report to the papers that he was optimistic that the storm would continue east. Official warning in West Palm Beach did not come until 10:30 am the next day and because it was too late for the morning papers, only came by radio and warning flag – a red square with a black square in the middle, one for tropical storm, two for hurricane. The second square did not go up until that afternoon. As Janie and Tea Cake experienced, the interior only received warning via word-of-mouth. The storm ran ashore that night. (49)

Lawrence E. Will wrote the only lengthy eye-witness account of experiencing the storm and its aftermath in Belle Glade. (50) He explains that escape from Belle Glade would have been treacherous even with proper warning. “There were two possible escape routes,” he writes, “on north to [the town of] Sebring [Farms], which necessitated skirting the shore of the much feared lake and bucking the gale head on, or east to West Palm Beach. Those choosing the latter route ran the risk of arriving in the city (if arrive they could) dead into the eye of the storm.” (51)

As they watched their Bahaman friends leave, Janie and Tea Cake stayed not wanting to leave the land and not wanting to leave each other. As Hurston describes the coming storm, she also notes how the migrant worker “folks” had only the word of their bosses and the rich “people” of West Palm Beach to rely on:

It woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble. The folks in their quarters and the people in their big houses further around the shore heard the big lake and wondered. The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles were safe, the cabin needn't worry. Their decision was already made as always. Chink up your cracks, shiver in your beds and wait on the mercy of the Lord.

Despite their fear, they had to trust that their system of living would still be there in the morning because they had nothing else. “It is so easy to be hopeful in the day time when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night and stayed night.” (52)

Photograph of Zora Neale Hurston

During the lull of the storm's eye, lasting about 9:30 to 10:05 pm, (53) Janie and Tea Cake decided they are just as well off making a break for higher ground. Many people made this decision or thought the storm was over, left their shelter, and did not survive. They watched as the storm surge breached the dike. “A huge barrier and the makings of a dike to which the cabins had been added came tumbling forward.... The monstropolous beast had left it's bed. The two hundred miles an hour winds had loosed him from his chains. (54) He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters.” (55) With little energy to proceed, they found shelter near a bridge, but were refused. “White people had preempted that point of elevation and there was no more room.” (56) They were left to ride out the night facing not only the elements but also wild animals everywhere, and consequently, a rabid dog attacked Tea Cake.

“One word describes it. It was Hell!” Will writes in his memoir,

A raging inferno of rolling, swirling waters, of shrieking, demonic winds, of lashing rain and of darkness, black and absolute. There were no atheists on the shores of the Okeechobee! Then for those still living, came the second phase of hell; the phase of desolation and despair; of searching in the flooded woods and marshes, in elder clumps and sawgrass for the horrible remains of family and friends and neighbors; of loading them into trucks by unending scores; and finally burning them in heaps and dozens when they could no longer be transported. It is hard to know which hell was worse. Those who have experienced both have endeavored to erase the recollections from their memories. (57)

As the entire Everglades region began to grapple with the damage, Kleinberg explains that the victim-blaming and shifting of responsibility had already begun. He points out that in the official US Weather Bureau reports to follow, “at no point are forecasters found ever conceding that the information they were distributing was, up until the eleventh hour wrong.” Richard Grey, the Miami forecaster who reported until the last minute that the hurricane would miss Florida, denied having forecasted this afterwards. Jacksonville-based forecaster Alexander J. Mitchell wrote to his Washington bosses mournfully that the hurricane's “fury converted peaceful communities into shambles, and contented firesides into morgues.” But when pressured about the lack of adequate preparations, he went on to blame those very communities, mostly poor or of color, for their own demise. “Warnings of the storm were widely disseminated to the profit of all;” he wrote to Washington, “and many who lost their lives on Lake Okeechobee was [sic] due to ignoring the information in possession of all.” While Kleinberg admits that the forecasting technology of 1928 was rudimentary to what we expect today, he holds that their lack of “humility and pragmatism” was still to blame, and that “Mitchell must have known that such information was of value only to the few people in 1928 who would have the means to receive it, through radios, newspapers, and telephone.” (58)

These very same “peaceful communities” would bear the extremely disturbing cleanup tasks which Will describes of not only rebuilding but burying and burning the dead. While he equates the “hell” of the cleanup to the nightmare of actually experiencing the storm, Will dismisses the troubling role the African American survivors played in the cleanup. In a simple, condescending phrase, he sums up their contribution thus, “Several local negroes, despite their race's traditional fear of the dead, rendered valuable assistance.” (59) When he writes that those who experienced the cleanup “endeavored to erase the recollections from their memories,” he also erases one of the worst racial injustices of the era from collective memory, a suspension of slave emancipation that by this forgetting became relegated to the realm of fiction.

Tea Cake, beginning to succumb to the effects of rabies, experienced a more realistic account of what really happened. As he and Janie reemerged from the wreckage of the storm, two white men with rifles approached him and forcibly conscripted him into the work of cleaning up bodies. “Git on down de road dere, suh! Don't look out somebody'll be buryin' you! G'wan in front up me, suh!” (60)

Klienberg drops the neutral tone of a historian in favor of emotionally moving language when he discusses how The Palm Beach Independent, a local paper with ties to the Klu Klux Klan, widely advocated for forcible conscription of African Americans, “And in the kind of condescending, self-righteous, pseudo- benevolent racism prevalent at the time, a pageful of commentaries in the paper that day included a call that only the proper authorities, not just private businessmen, had the right to conscript area blacks for cleanup work.” He notes that the only reason they made such a concession is that their own janitor had been kidnapped and forced to work without food or pay. But most importantly, they called for this practice to occur on the institutional level, which in this case was the National Guard. (61) The men who threatened Tea Cake would have been guardsmen, but he may not have even known that.

The threat of death that the men with rifles issues Tea Cake was a real threat. Through reports by African American relief organizations, family histories, newspaper clippings, court reports, and death certificates, Kleinberg pieces together the story of Coot Simpson a migrant worker who changed his name while escaping law enforcement long before the storm and came down to West Palm Beach looking for work. National Guardsmen rounded him up with other African Americans in the area and forced him to help clean up the dead. He worked for a few days without being able to tell his wife Juanita where he had gone. When he decided to leave, a guardsmen named Knolton Crosby shot him in the abdomen and he died on the spot. His death certificate reads his cause of death as “jury verdict: gunshot wound inflicted by soldier in discharge of his duty.” Cosby later drank himself to death in 1947 and was buried with military honors in the same white cemetery where the white Palm Beach victims of the hurricane laid. (62)

The cleanup of bodies was horrific, demoralizing work. “Corpses were not just in wrecked houses. They were under houses, tangled in shrubbery, floating in water, hanging in trees, drifting in wreckage,” writes Hurston. (63)

“Some bodies came in with skin and hair gone, their eyes swollen until they'd burst, and tongues protruding” out the size of one's hand, writes Keinberg. (64) “Some bodies had to be fished out of the standing water with hooks. Sometimes they were so deteriorated that there was nothing strong enough to grab onto or the bodies simply fell apart. Often workers had to use nets.” A medical crisis ensued, and Kleinberg concedes that the pressure on health officials to act promptly certainly fueled the institutionally racist methods of finding the labor. (65)

But even the dead faced prejudices. Coffins were too scarce. “Just who ended up in a coffin and who in a funeral pyre depended on the availability of a coffin, a passible road, and a vehicle.” Klienberg writes, “And no coffins were wasted on black victims.” (66)

Integral to the process of identifying the dead was separating the races out for burial. Will, who remained nonchalant about this practice even decades later when he published his memoir, wrote that this distinction was not always easy.

“After the first few days colored and white were indistinguishable. All had lost their skins. It was not a pretty sight.” (67) After the next few weeks, the unidentifiable bodies were sprinkled with lime and dumped into mass graves or burned by the dozens in large pyres lit with driftwood and crude fuel. On September 26 alone, workers burned 267 bodies, 87 of which in one fire. (68)

Tea Cake, becoming more and more agitated by the growing symptoms of rabies, remarked on the futility of segregating the dead. “They's mighty particular about how dese dead folks goes tuh judgement,” he says to the man working along side him. “Look lak dey think God don't know nothin' 'bout de Jim Crow law.” (69)

White bodies were usually on display for 12 to 24 hours for identification. Trucks eventually took them to a mass grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach, eventually holding 69 bodies. Most black bodies were immediately taken to mass graves unless someone serendipitously identified them along the way. Many locations of these mass graves are still unknown, though the primary grave on Tamarind Ave. in West Palm Beach holds 674 bodies. In the Everglades, a monument stands for a mass grave in Port Mayaca lamenting 1600 bodies, and while historians believe the official death toll for the storm is certainly low, this number is surely a gross exaggeration. (70) As in life, in death, they were undocumented.

The disaster was natural and sudden, but the crisis was building and building. In some ways, it continued into the 2000s. The official death toll in Florida issued by the Red Cross and public officials remained at 1836 until 2003, when for the seventy-fifth anniversary, the National Hurricane Center updated the number to 2500 whereby it became the second deadliest natural event in American history. Many historians still say the death toll exceeds 3000 and toll of the the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Kleinberg points out that this day very likely could have accounted for the most deaths of African Americans in one day in history, though no one seems to know it. “One has to wonder,” he writes, “had a storm drowned 3000 white businessmen in downtown West Palm Beach, or smashed a black-tie affair on ritzy Palm Beach,... might it have received more attention?” (71) Along with the bodies of these nameless workers, the history of an unprecedented crisis was buried, marked only by a work of fiction.

To reiterate, there is no easy way to discuss what happened amid the Okeechobee Hurricane, and indeed the traumas I describe are not exhaustive. It is difficult to look back on not only what happened to Florida's people, but also what they did to each other, and believe that it was real and accept it as part of the history of our country. Can we at least pull a valuable lesson, if only a bleak cautionary tale, from this incident? Are we assured that this event helped prevent its own replication?

Return for a moment to a detail from Their Eyes which gives this lengthy history particular contemporary resonance. “Still blue sky and fair weather. Beans running fine and prices good, so the Indians could be, must be, wrong. You couldn't have a hurricane when you're making seven and eight dollars a day picking beans. Indians are dumb anyhow, always were.... The bossman might have the thing stopped before morning anyway.” (72) Notwithstanding the lack of reliable escape routes as Will points out, Janie and Tea Cake stayed in the storm because their home was the source of all of their well-being. By leaving The Muck behind, they risked losing the already tenuous economic system sustaining their lives entirely. They could either stay and face dangers only substantiated by rumors or leave and surely lose everything.

After Katrina, our nation grappled with the difficult question of why people stayed in New Orleans, particularly the Ninth Ward, despite the warnings, and too often the public discourse responded with harsh victim-blaming. During the aftermath, I regularly heard comments in casual conversation to that effect. Even in 2012, an Oscar-nominated film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, tackles the concept of justifying those who remained behind in New Orleans. Though the audience is expected to sympathize with the people who stayed, they are given little reason to. The fictional protagonists remain in their low-lying home and violently reject any forms of assistance, even crucial medical assistance, out of xenophobia, stubbornness, and stupidity. This reflects the stereotype of the Hurricane Katrina victim which true sympathy would avoid. Only from a point of short-sighted privilege can we assume that these factors actually play a role in the decision to brave a storm – as opposed to a lack of thorough understanding of the risk, lack of resources need to make the move, or deep economic ties to the area which would spell a different disaster if broken. Cinema theorist Joshua Michael Demaree described the film's relationship to prejudicial post-Katrina attitudes in a review of the Oscar-nominees of 2012:

The overwrought narrative consisted of contrived (and yet somehow still unclear) metaphors, questionable racist undertones, and a problematic revisionist history. [By comparison, Quentin] Tarantino’s bent for revisionist revenge history is playful, righteous, and appropriately retrospect. [Director] Benh Zeitlin re-imagines one of recent history’s most horrific disasters and, further damning the underprivileged, places blame on those most deeply affected by Hurricane Katrina. As much as I wanted to enjoy his unconventional filming techniques (16mm and never looked at dailies) I just couldn’t overlook Beasts problematic narrative to really appreciate the movie as a whole. (73)

Certainly, Tea Cake, Janie, and many of the real people who did not evacuate before the Okeechobee Hurricane could not easily sever their economic connection to the land. Many had sacrificed everything to get work in a place where the Great Depression was starting early, and there was no measure of the risks of staying against the risk of leaving everything behind. We cannot assume that things were too different for some of the most disenfranchised populations in New Orleans. Nor can we assume we would not make the same decision if the circumstance called.

Like Their Eyes, no matter how much it resembles history, Beasts is indeed fiction. But it would be irresponsible to dismiss the problematics of the film as just fiction, thereby exempt from treating the struggles of real, nonfictitious people unfairly. The stakes of fiction, especially so closely tied to dire histories, are still too high. Some evolutionary theorists like Dennis Dutton argue that artistic production and appreciation is a trait inherent to the thriving of Homo sapiens. He does not believe that it is an instinct that makes us merely animal, but an evolutionary trait that makes all people distinctly human. He theorizes that many forms of art we see today are a complicated and nuanced extension of one of the earliest forms of creative production – fiction and oral history. “The ability to imagine elaborate scenarios and states of affairs not present to the direct consciousness must have had an adaptive power in human prehistory as it does today,” Dutton writes. “Imagination allows the weighing of indirect evidence, making chains of inference that for what might have been and for what might come to be. It allows for intellectual simulation and forecasting, the working out of solutions to problems without high-cost experimentation in actual practice.” (74) It is one of many ways that human beings gained their prominence intellectually over more physically tough and brawny species. Like any evolutionary trait, fiction is integral to our survival.

Survival is the task Hurston's fiction sets up for Janie and Tea Cake. By employing one of humankind's most ancient techniques of predicting the future via invoking the past, Hurston side steps the profound silence history has cast upon the black victims of this calamity, giving the event a voice that must shout disparately to contemporary ears. In leu of history, Hurston's story can save us from ourselves if we read it thoughtfully.

While they affect the writing of history and create historical moments, hurricanes are not themselves historical. Hurricane season happens every year no matter what, and the severity of each season is essentially arbitrary. Because historical memory is always most vivid with the current generation, it is all too easy to consider Katrina an unprecedented anomaly, but nature indicates that the disaster can happen again, and the history of the Okeechobee Hurricane demonstrates that a similar crisis has happened before.

Okeechobee has not flooded to this degree since because of the new dike built in response. Perhaps this is why the hurricane is remembered mostly as a natural disaster, not a cultural crisis, because even though hurricanes do not change, our ability to cope with them presumably has, making this storm a horse of a different color and thus a situation inconsequential to contemporary life. Kleinberg cautiously believes that the hurricane has lead to such changes and preparations, but he wrote his book in 2003, before the game changed completely. Many comments in his book which probably read as passing statements then, jump out of the page after 2005. First, he writes “While [in reference to hurricanes] North Carolina and Texas come to mind, it is by far Florida which hurricanes punish the most. Of 158 hurricanes to strike the United States between 1900 to 1996, 57 – more than one- third – struck Florida.” (75) It is a simple and accurate statistic that just reads as so out of touch after the punishment that New Orleans received and manner in which Katrina has reshaped our understanding and expectations of hurricanes now.

Kleinberg also compared the Okeechobee Hurricane to 1992's Hurricane Andrew, one of the worst in a generation's memory. He notes that despite half a million people experiencing it in one day and the extensive property damage, only 15 people died on account of improved infrastructure and warning methods. He wonders, then if so many people would die in the Okeechobee Hurricane today. “Probably very few,” he writes. “Today people would be warned and evacuations would be ordered. The lake now has a towering, presumably trustworthy dike.” (76) The exact opposition between this statement to the events of Katrina is uncanny and chilling. All of these systems failed the lower economic class of New Orleans, particularly the “presumably trustworthy” levee, and the resulting death toll was comparable, only slightly lower than the Okeechobee Hurricane. (77) Even considering physical damages, Kleinberg's predictions overlook the ticking time-bomb of low- lying New Orleans. Kleinberg cites Colorado State University professor William Gray who “is uncanny in his hurricane predictions” as claiming that Florida would continue to be the main sufferer of hurricane because of similar climate conditions as 1931-1965, a period of heavy inundation of Florida. Gray also points to Florida's position and the “law of averages” to claim that it has the “greatest potential for catastrophic economic loss.” (78) Currently Katrina is the most economically costly Atlantic Hurricane on record. (79) This is not meant to criticize Kleinberg as shortsighted, but to demonstrate how quickly public understanding can change and how the unexpected is still possible. We can only predict the weather in broad strokes. It is important that certain, sensitive areas and marginalized populations are not relegated to our scientific blind spots.

Certain details in the history of the Okeechobee Hurricane – particularly the account of weather officials who denied the flaws in their forecast and in virtually the same breath blamed the people near the lake for their own devastation – demonstrate that we still have cultural blind spots in our weather culture. As I read through these details, I thought back to a day in September 2005, when I was working as a lifeguard at a pool in an upper-middle class suburb of Atlanta. Two middle-aged, white men were wading in the pool, and I listened to their conversation. One asked the other if he had heard on the news about all of the looting going on New Orleans. The other replied he had and he thought it was just sick, “I mean, I understand if you have to take something that need for you family to survive, but breaking into Walmarts and stealing Nike shoes and big screen TVs at a time like this, there is never and excuse for that.” At that moment, I realized that Hurricane Katrina was not just a total disaster, but a cultural crisis, one that at its worst exemplified our capacity for victim-blaming and and inability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Katrina happened to New Orleans, and blaming the impoverished population it hurt the worst does nothing to heal that. The similarities both statistical and cultural between the Okeechobee Hurricane and Katrina show that as long as we have the capacity to entirely forget the great crises of our society, and they have the capability to repeat themselves.

Kleinberg poses the question as to whether or not we can proceed forward confident in our safeguards and writes a statement that I believe could never be published post-Katrina: “Could another 1928 disaster happen? The easy answer is no. Now, in the 21st century we receive days of warning that a storm may be coming our way. We can brace our homes and run like hell. A giant dike surrounds the lake.” But he still has his doubts. “Could a hurricane still bring great loss of life? Sure.” The easy answer is no. But there are no easy answers.

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Danny Floyd is an artist and educator based out of Chicago. His primary fields of critical research include cultural approaches to music, climatology, and photo-mediated phenomena.

Title photo from Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik.

Notes:

33 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Historical Hurricane Tracks” <http://csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/> NOAA, Washington, DC, 2013 34 Kleinberg, Eliot. Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, NY 2003 Amazon Kindle eBook Edition, Loc. 497 35 Ibid., Loc. 2589-2597 36 Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. New York, NY First Perennial Classics Edition 1998 (original 1937), p. 128 37 Ibid., p. 129 38 Kleinberg, Loc. 115, 129-181. Kleinberg also notes that a cyclical dry season may have been the actual cause of the lake's volume. 39 Hurston, p. 131 40 Kleinberg, Loc. 231-238 41 Kleinberg, Loc. 237-253 42 Hurston, p. 154 43 Kleinberg, Loc. 329, 2563 44 Hurston, pp. 155-156, 158 45 Kleinberg, Loc. 548 46 Ibid., Loc. 652, 695 47 Ibid., Loc. 509 48 Ibid., Loc. 562 49 Ibid., Loc. 742, 799, 894 50 Though his account of the storm has been crucial to historians, because no others are known, I use it with caution because Will, himself a white man, is dismissive of “negroes” throughout his book, despite the fact that they were the majority population and suffered the most casualties even by Will's admission. This perpetuates the problem of the unheard voices in this crisis. 51 Will, Lawrence E. Okeechobee Hurricane and the Hoover Dike Great Outdoors Publishing Co., St. Petersburg, FL Third Edition 1971 (original 1961), p. 81 52 Hurston, p. 158 53 Kleinberg, Loc. 1355 54 This figure is an exaggeration, though it is believed winds reached 150-160 mph. 55 Hurston, pp. 161-162 56 Ibid., p. 164 57 Will, p. 9 58 Kleinberg, Loc. 1522-1535 59 Will, p. 155 60 Hurston, p. 170 61 Kleinberg, Loc. 2015 62 Kleinberg, Loc. 2313-2385 63 Hurston, p. 170 64 Kleinberg, Loc. 1912 65 Ibid., Loc. 2813 66 Ibid., Loc. 1759 67 Will, pp. 154-155 68 Kleinberg, Loc. 1900 69 Hurston, p. 171 70 Klienberg, Loc. 2645-2658, 2823 71 Ibid., Loc. 50-59 72 Hurston, p. 155-156, 158 73 Demaree, Joshua Michael. “Considering the Oscars” <http://fnewsmagazine.com/wp-2/2013/02/24/considering-the-oscars/> f Newsmagazine, Chicago, IL February 25, 2013 74 Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure, and Human Emotion Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK 2009, pp. 105-106 75 Kleinberg, Loc. Emphasis added. 76 Ibid., Loc. 1742 77 This comparison in of just deaths in Florida in 1928 against deaths on the Gulf Coast during Katrina. The deaths outside of the US should not be ignored; I am sensitive to the problematic tendency to only count American deaths. But the comparison is made to question the awareness of institutional preparedness in this country and in our major urban coastal areas. 78 Ibid., Loc. 2800 79 It is possible as more data is assessed that Hurricane Sandy could surpass this figure, which would still reinforce the notion that, even given today's advancements, the geography of hurricane destruction is still only predictable to a point.

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