Back Porch Tom Rankin Click for larger view View full resolution Lumberton, NC, 2016. Photos courtesy of the author. In october 2016, my wife, Jill McCorkle, and I drove our Tacoma pickup filled with cases of bottled water and other essentials to her hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina. Hurricane Matthew had made landfall at McClellanville, South Carolina, just north of Charleston, and then drifted northeasterly into North Carolina. An eight-mile stretch of I-95 went completely underwater, and by October 10, just two days after the hurricane came ashore in South Carolina, the Lumber River rose to over twenty-two feet in Lumberton. Roads, yards, and first floors of many houses were underwater. As Lumberton resident James Robinson told the Raleigh News and Observer, “All that water got to go somewhere.” Where it went was into the homes and businesses throughout Lumberton, over-taking [End Page 142] the city water treatment plant, leaving most residents with either no running water or water too contaminated to drink or use at home. The rains of Hurricane Matthew drenched a Robeson County that is perpetually one of North Carolina’s poorest, with over one-third of the population living in poverty in 2016.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Lumberton, NC, 2016 The irony of driving a truckload of water into a flood zone is all too obvious. We picked our way from Hillsborough in the Piedmont through the Sandhills to avoid flooded roads, arriving in a Lumberton community that held far too much water and yet no potable water, awaiting deliveries such as ours. Excess and scarcity in the same place and time, profound and dire forces perpetrated upon those with the least resources, those living in public housing and on the lowest land most vulnerable to flooding. Throughout covid we saw vividly the realities and challenges of the digital divide as so much school and work moved to virtual platforms. A similar divide, along familiarly recognizable maps, is evident during floods and the all-too-common water crises. We might call it the water divide, a cousin of the digital divide, where drainage can be destiny and neglected infrastructure leads to [End Page 143] unhealthy and undrinkable water. Class and racial divides are visible, too, around impacts from climate change, floods, and lack of clean water. One need look no further than the case of water infrastructure in Jackson, Mississippi. In August 2022, relentless rains caused the Pearl River, which flows through Jackson, to flood. The Pearl River has flooded Jackson before, most notably in 1979, when a historic flood brought massive destruction. The recent 2022 flood damaged a water treatment plant which, combined with a malfunction of pumps at the treatment plant, led to no water in Jackson. Prior to that, there was a boil water requirement for the city. “Unfortunately, what is central to the endgame of the Jackson water crisis is power,” wrote Ralph Eubanks in an eloquent piece for cnn. “Power lies at the core of the politics of identity being played by Mississippi’s Republican politicians. What all the parties involved in getting clean water to Jackson’s citizens should be seeking is knowledge and truth, rooted in a shared meaning of Mississippi’s past, even the ugly parts of it that make us all uncomfortable when we look at them through a deep, dark, truthful mirror. Until Mississippi begins to see the connection between the Jim Crow past in its present—and see it clearly—the Jackson water crisis will never be resolved.”2 Click for larger view View full resolution Estill, MS, 2021 ________ FLOOD STORIES ARE VERY OFTEN TOLD with an emphasis on an aftermath of rebuilding and rebirth, the proverbial theme of newness that runs through so much mythology and folk narrative after the high waters recede. Traditional full-immersion baptism draws much meaning from the symbolism of being buried and reborn, going under water, then rising from a watery grave. In my documentary fieldwork through the years, I have often heard sermons, delivered on the bank of a lake, that beautifully articulate the meaning of baptism as death, burial, and resurrection, the long-held ritual signaling a...
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Sep 8, 2024
David Karol + 1
Open Access