Hurricane Harvey swirled out of the Gulf of Mexico onto the coast of Texas on Friday, August 25, 2017. It moved over Corpus Christie and then inland twenty miles to Victoria and sat through the night, twirling Kali, the Dark Mother, the Hindu goddess of creation, preservation, and destruction. Kali sent waves of rain and wind along the coast, shape shifting from hurricane to tropical storm flooding Houston, Dickerson, Galveston, and Santa Fe. It rained from Friday night, through the next week, off and on heavily, before finally moving up the coast.
In the wake of Harvey, my family home, the one I grew up in from twelve to eighteen was destroyed. The roof leaked falling in on the dining room table that my family and I sat around during the Holidays, first just my brother and me, then with our families. This was the table that my mother bought when we moved into our new house.
We moved to the next to last street in the black community. The last street was Jackson — Stonewall & Jackson Streets were the last bullock of the white community. We were the first ones to be allowed into the white school. We left the black school, fittingly called Lincoln High School, and walked through the white neighborhood into another country and another life. This school was three times as large as the black one, and better equipped to prepare us for college. I settled into this new environment, with only one goal, to go to college in order to leave Texas, and especially La Marque behind, but like a cat with cans tied to its tail, I dragged my small black community with me, tangled up with all of the emotional elements of dos and don’ts during that time.
Now Kali, dancing in the eye of Harvey, has destroyed my ancestral home, I realized that she has been with me and my kind since the beginning of time. We are the blue ones. The ones the color of dusk and dawn, the ones betwixt and between. She comes for us, in our dreams. I remember being in a starched white dress with ruffles, wearing black patent leather shoes with white lace around my socks. Maybe ten years old, I was walking down a neighborhood street, and a vicious dog started barking and it began running after me. I am running on a freshly tarred street, when one of my shoes gets stuck. I continued running. I believed until now that it really happened. But now know that it was a dream. Kali dreaming me. Even though I wasn’t told that I wasn’t safe, the deepest part of me knew. Instead of turning and calling the name of the predator, racism, I turned and called it mother and begun fighting against my mother’s confining rules. This is when the Dark Goddess entered.
This trauma stayed with me throughout and appeared in dream after dream. In one of my later dreams an African American youth shot his white dog in its hind left leg. Where the bullet pierced the dog, there was a universe, the night sky with stars. The dog, unharmed, looked at me as I looked at the universe inside of him. Finally, I began to understand that the healing is in the wound.
Now I am writing a story or maybe the story is writing me about a little girl, Esperanza, living in northern New Mexico, Half-Sephardic Jew and Half-African. She has come to me to protect her and to tell her story. So far she has been kept relatively safe, and allowed to develop into a special little girl. In this community, her uniqueness is protected and nurtured and honored as sacred. This little one shows me how to create worlds and to look behind the veil of life honoring the images and the things that we find there. As I walk with this little girl, she takes my hand, navigating us between my real childhood traumas and those of this imaginary realm, real in its own way. As she honors her ancestors at ceremony, my ancestors come streaming in to be honored and renewed. As I learn to protect myself I protect her, allowing her room to stretch and grow. She becomes a medicine story for us both.
It has taken Harvey, and a few psychological revelations, to finally untangle me — to finally free me to bury the past. How amazing that this violent storm, which wreaked havoc on Texas, a storm worse than Katrina which destroyed New Orleans ten years ago, is showing me the way. It is amazing that this Destroyer, this Kali, has wiped away materials goods of the wealthy and the poor, forcing us all to bend the knee to her fearsome power, leaving us alone to deal with our ghosts and memories.
I am flung against the smooth sandy Gulf Coast’s dark warm water slicing against my psyche shores, churning up childhood memories. Memories of spending Sundays in Galveston, playing along the sea shore, nappy haired from waves grabbing hands full of hair. Little brown body sat in water pissing into the foam, laughing, having fun, as the tides carried my little girl’s pee onto the white beach. It wasn’t until I had left Texas, and went away to college, ultimately settling in California, did I realized that the beach was segregated. White people did not fit into my world and as a result, did not matter to my young self. They were aliens, non-natives that occasionally bumped against my world.
It wasn’t until California and the movements, black, brown, women’s’, gays’, veterans’, and disabled, did I learn consciously that I was an “Other”. The safe world that was crafted for me during my childhood was deconstructed.
When Kali-ma, mother of us all, rose up and came to shore, she held the waters of the unconscious, primordial birthing waters. During this turbulent time, I turned away from my mother as the one that confined and repressed me, and turned to her as ancestor. Even though I still miss her, I turn to her for strength and guidance. I turn towards my mother’s land, Texas, and embrace those who have walked before me, asking for them to walk beside me as I rebuild the family home and myself in a new light.
My heart cracks, letting the light in, and as I am mended I am filled with respect and understanding, knowing that in the mist of Kali’s destruction something is created.
Now I whisper my ancestors’ names, softly like a lover, calling them to me, we weave new lives, ours. Those lives in the future and in the past, where we sing our own song, and create visions for our own lives, instead of being shaped like clay for other’s use. It is the medicine that we women carry of my African line, the ability to shape and shift to protect and care for the souls of those smaller and younger than ourselves. It is what I learned with Harvey, the force of destruction brings new life. After all flowers do grow where Kali steps!