When a tornado ripped through her hometown in Hampton County, South Carolina, it revealed the deep divides in a region that prides itself on hospitality.
By Caroline McTeer
July 29, 2020
On Monday, April 13, Kevin Roberts of Nixville, South Carolina, left for work only to turn around. The weather was bad, and back at home the dogs were acting funny. He woke up his wife, Lorraine.
“We gotta get outta here,” he said. “Something just don’t feel right.” They moved toward the door, but then there was a sound like a train, and they couldn’t get out of their home.
“It’s like something was on the other side,” Lorraine Roberts told me. “A force that wouldn’t let me get out the door, just held us in. We felt the trailer shift. When it picked the trailer up, we went with it. When we came back down, there was nothing there but a million pieces.”
On that same morning, I woke up to dozens of messages from family and friends on the East Coast, each informing me of the tornado that had hit my hometown. One message was from my close friend, Jessi Smith Gifford, who grew up across the street from the Roberts’ home.
She wrote, “My parents’ house is gone.” I sat up in bed and stared at the picture she’d sent: ruins of a house I’d explored down to its secret passages, a house where my friend group had gathered over the years for pool parties, oyster roasts, bonfires, and wedding showers. My heart hurt for Gifford and her parents. Living on the other side of the country, in the midst of a pandemic, I couldn’t do what I longed to do: hug my friend and her family, cry with them, help with the clean-up.
Since I couldn’t go to Hampton County, I decided to be present in spirit in the fullest way I know how: by writing. At first, the narrative structure of my piece seemed clear. I wanted to write about the extended meaning of “home” we have in small Southern towns, where even in disaster we find ourselves surrounded by extended family, childhood friends, land we love, and kind strangers who have time for us.
A few hours after I started writing, I came across a social media post from my home church, Trinity Lutheran in Fairfax, S.C., where the pastor Tim Kneuss, who is relatively new to the area, had listed names of those who died in the tornado. Up to that point, I’d seen many messages offering condolences and requesting prayer on behalf of the Breland family, but on this pastor’s list, I saw two names I didn’t recognize: Alberto Hernandez and Rene Rodriguez. I typed their names into Google and pulled up an article on the deceased members of the Breland family: Jim, Donna and Kayla. Hernandez and Rodriguez were mentioned in one sentence at the end of the article. I knew then that my essay couldn’t just be about my friend’s house and the beauty of Southern hospitality.
Alberto Hernandez and Rene Rodriguez were seasonal employees for a South Carolina company named Nimmer Turf. They were members of the H-2A program, which The Washington Post recently dubbed “the visa program that’s keeping America fed.” Nimmer Turf employees, like people in similar jobs across the country, do the dirty work of beautifying our communities. Before hiring workers from outside the country, H-2A employers must first offer their available jobs to Americans. The vast majority of the jobs don’t get filled by Americans, who aren’t interested in doing the hard manual labor for the pay offered. According to the New York Times, there were 257,667 workers on the H2-A visa in the 2019 fiscal year.
H-2A employers are required to provide housing for employees who can’t reasonably travel back to their home at the end of a work day. In these cases, there are prescribed standards for housing safety, but one wonders why the standards aren’t higher. A person is 15 to 20 times more likely to die from a tornado in a mobile home than in a site-built structure. The Brelands, Hernandez, and Rodriguez all lived in mobile homes.
On the morning of the storm, Rodriguez opened his door, perhaps to catch a mouthful of air that tasted like rain, the sight of the grass in a frenzy on an open field. He noted to his roommates that the storm was moving fast. He tried to close the door, but it ripped from the hinges and took him with it. Hernandez was scrolling through his phone when the tornado came, and he hit his head against the bed frame. Rodriguez and Hernandez were killed instantly, and their four roommates were hospitalized.
I got these meager details from a Hampton local who chases and studies storms as a hobby and wishes to remain anonymous. The day after the tornado, he drove down the storm’s path to the patch of Nimmer Turf’s property where the migrant workers had lived. One of the owners of the company, Bill Nimmer, recognized the storm chaser as an old acquaintance, and offered to walk him around the property. As they walked, Nimmer cried and showed him where they found the men who had died: Hernandez twenty feet from the trailer, Rodriguez about seventy-five yards from it, a few feet from the door.
“Alberto’s boots were there, with a Modelo beer, towels with blood on it, and a vase with flowers in it. I kind of wish I hadn’t seen any of it,” the storm chaser said.
The same Hampton local visited one of the surviving roommates — who I’ll call David Tovar — in the hospital. My contact said of Tovar, “He’s lonely and scared and wants someone to talk to.”
Just as my storm-chasing friend wished he hadn’t seen the blood-soaked towels, I almost wished I could unhear of Tovar’s loneliness. I knew I couldn’t turn away from this story, no matter what hard truths emerged. But still, I feared what I might find at the center of the workers’ plight when I peered closely. There was such a grim disparity between Tovar’s experience and that of other Hampton residents, who were surrounded with support.
Clara Mickens, a resident of Varnville, experienced damage to her house that made it temporarily uninhabitable. While Mickens stayed with her daughter Cynthia Riley, some people in the community donated money to help her children repair her roof. In addition to helping clean her yard, Mickens’s neighbors brought plenty of food in the tornado’s aftermath.
Mickens said, “Somebody brought me some okra and tomato soup. I called all my children that day and said, ‘Get down to the Piggly Wiggly! They have some good okra and tomato soup on today.’” A sense of joy and longing shot through me, and I could almost taste the air at Hampton’s Piggly Wiggly (a bright little store that smells like bread). The night before my conversation with Mickens, I had tried to describe okra to a West Coast neighbor, but failed to conjure an appetizing description of the slimy, prickly plant. I pressed my ear harder to the phone.
“How long have you been in Hampton, Miss Clara?” I said, adding the “Miss” on accident. I felt as though I’d been whisked back to my childhood.
“All my life, darlin’, and I am eighty-five years old.” She told me about moving to that piece of land in the forties, and helping her father “set out” a little oak in the front yard that grew to be “the prettiest little tree” though it had been damaged in the tornado. Mickens reminded me of my dad, who knows the stories behind all the trees in his yard, who is just as pleased as Mickens to live in Hampton County, in the house he was born in and his father before him.
“I’m from Hampton, too,” I told her.
“Okay!” Mickens said excitedly, sounding tickled that I shared her good fortune.
In a town full of people who were out from dawn to dusk clearing branches from the yards of strangers, why didn’t the men who worked for Nimmer Turf receive the same attention? About a year ago, I was at a cookout in San Diego (where I live currently) and met a man a little younger than me who lived in Hampton for a few of his high school years. He has one Mexican parent from California and one white parent from South Carolina. When he lived in Hampton, he was the constant victim of racial slurs and bullying from the white kids. He told me about a time after shooting hoops at Lightsey Park when a group of white classmates jumped out from behind the bushes and attacked him. The next day, he got some of his friends together and retaliated at school. He was in trouble after that, and so were his Black friends.
It took living away from Hampton for me to realize how alive racism is there.
According to 2010 census data, Hampton County is a little more than 50 percent African American, a little more than 40 percent white, and about four percent Hispanic. Although the Black survivors I spoke with — Kevin Roberts, Clara Mickens, and Carolyn and William Bornum — felt so cared for by the whole community after the storm, I heard stories of specific people who didn’t feel the same sense of unity in the tornado’s aftermath. They also chose not to speak with me for this article — probably because the stakes are still too high in calling out racism, especially in rural parts of the South.
One of the rumors I heard was that one of the Baptist churches in Hampton providing food and supplies to tornado survivors had turned away a Black family seeking assistance. The family had been told they weren’t in the right zip code. They lived close to the church, but apparently not on the right side of it. One of the people who’d heard complaints — Tammy Thaxton Donehue, the director of Hampton County’s Recreation Department — did not share the names of the people who’d made them and wasn’t entirely sure the incidents were legitimately about race.
“Here at the Rec Department,” Donehue said, “we’ve had people calling, saying, ‘Can I come up and get food?’ And they just wanted food. They weren’t affected by the tornado whatsoever. And everybody wanted to help the tornado victims, not just a Joe who needs to eat.” (The problem of hunger in the community was only exacerbated by the pandemic. Conservative estimates place 18 percent of Hampton’s population beneath the poverty line.)
Outraged by the rumors of the church turning people away, Donehue appointed another person to temporarily take over her usual work at the Rec department. Then she called her lifelong friend, Tonya McQuire.
“Tonya,” she said, “I need you to come. We’re going to hit the ground today.” By that time, McQuire had heard the story, too — via an angry phone call in which a local asked how she could be a leader in the Black community, and still volunteering on behalf of the whole town of Hampton when her people were being mistreated. She’d heard from friends and family who lived minutes from the church that they wouldn’t be going there for support, because they didn’t feel welcome.
Donehue and McQuire, along with other community members, went door-to-door in predominantly Black neighborhoods hit by the storm, asking each household how many members it had, what clothes sizes were, and what they needed specifically. They were able to fill most of the needs with what had been donated to the Recreation department, but there was one local who needed specific things for their baby.
For that, McQuire went to the church she and Donehue had heard complaints about. The people there were perfectly kind to her. “They greeted me and said, ‘Come right on in.’” Thankfully, her story is not an outlier. Kevin and Lorraine Roberts, an interracial couple, received help from the same church, and William Bornum said representatives of the church had come to him directly, with a flyer and an invitation to come eat.
The accusation of racism at the church seemed so tenuous that I would have chosen not to write about it — if this wasn’t my hometown, and if I didn’t have a gut sense the rumor was grounded in truth, or at least that the feeling of being excluded based on race was well-founded. My parents’ best friends left the Baptist church in Hampton where they had been members for decades, because their congregation refused to let an African American couple get married in their chapel.
A couple of weeks after the tornado, I spoke on the phone to a former classmate of mine: Alanna Hollingsworth, an African American who is now the social worker for our old school district. Hollingsworth had heard rumors in her social circles that the supplies being donated to the Recreation Department were not being distributed equally among communities.
“I volunteered out there one day,” Hollingsworth said. “And there didn’t appear to be any discrepancies about where the supplies were going, but I think the culture that has been developed here over time cultivated mistrust long before the storm got here.”
It’s understandable that African Americans in the area would default to mistrust of the community. The high school we attended — Wade Hampton High — is, like the town of Hampton, named for one of the South’s largest slaveholders. Wade Hampton’s mascot is now “The Devil,” but Hollingsworth told me that before integration, the school’s mascot was “The Rebel,” and she pointed out to me something I’d forgotten: the school’s yearbook is still named “The Rebel.” Hollingsworth and I talked about white peoples’ silence in the aftermath of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, and white peoples’ continued hesitancy to simply claim, “Black Lives Matter.”
“When we don’t speak up,” Hollingsworth said, “we condone what is happening.”
Silence is one way to inadvertently perpetuate injustice and racial inequality. I didn’t find out that Hernandez and Rodriguez had surviving roommates from the news or from social media, but rather, from a cousin who no longer lives in Hampton. She was concerned at the lack of attention their deaths had gotten in the news and it was through her prying that I heard their stories.
Another way to maintain the unacceptable status quo we have in the South is to be complacent with our separation from each other — a social distance from the people we’re geographically close to. When we don’t intermingle socially, it’s impossible for us to have equal access to the same systems of support. Even though I live in California, on the day of the tornado I heard about a local community relief fund that was gaining traction. The young woman behind the fundraiser was floored by the amount of money she eventually raised: it exceeded her modest expectations, and she rolled it into other tornado relief funds contributed by businesses and individuals in Hampton. Eventually, the money will be distributed through an application process, by a recently appointed board. The board has five white members, three Black members, and no Hispanic people. Both the co-chairs are white.
Before my interviews with community members, I wondered if African Americans in Hampton might have a mistrust for the community relief fund, whether they’d question the fairness of the application and distribution process. Instead, I was met with something worse: among the Black people I interviewed who’d been affected by the tornado, no one had even heard of the fund.
“Where’re we supposed to go to apply?” Cynthia Riley said. For the first time in the conversation, she sounded anxious. Her mother had mentioned moments earlier that the ramp in the back of her house still needed fixing.
The fact that Mickens and Riley didn’t even know such a fund existed is one example of how even access to help and knowledge of resources is tied up with racial privilege and the lack of it. Hampton’s Emergency Management Department placed resources on their website for anyone displaced or in need of shelter in the aftermath of the tornado, but the website doesn’t have a Spanish language option. It is crucial for the town — the whole town — to have access to information.
“We gotta get out of our own bubbles,” Hollingsworth said, when I asked her how Hampton could sow trust and unity where there’s a lack of it. “It’s a family community, but people stay within their own family.” She laughed. “No one crosses into other families that much. Though I do think with the storm, more people did get involved with people they don’t typically talk to.”
Though it was common at my high school for students to self-segregate their closest friend groups according to race, there were moments of camaraderie and warmth between different friend groups — and some sense of connection that has remained with the class of 2008 in the years since graduation. In the aftermath of the tornado, one person suggested on our Facebook page that we take up money for the members of the 2008 class whose families were affected by the tornado. He — and the members of the student government who oversaw the fundraiser — were all African American. As it happened, all the people in our class affected by the tornado were white. My gratitude on my white friends’ behalf was mingled with a smidge of discomfort and surprise, since people of color in and out of Hampton are often in a more financially vulnerable position than white people due to structural racism. I asked Hollingsworth if that moment was strange for her.
“It doesn’t feel strange to me,” she said. “You find that African American groups, we do show up for other people. When you know what [suffering] feels like, you can empathize…You know what it’s like to be a step behind...I think historically, you see that. We tend to show up for other movements. Partly with the hope that they would show up for us too, but we tend to notice that doesn’t happen as frequently as we would like for it to.”
“I grew up in this town not feeling that there was a huge racist divide,” Tammy Thaxton Donehue said. “Some of my really close Black friends have said maybe I just wasn’t aware. And I do agree with that.” Donehue spent her childhood in Hampton, but then lived in Salt Lake City for thirty years. She said she’s seen things since returning to Hampton that have made her question whether it’s 1920 or 2020. She herself has experienced religious prejudice in Hampton as a Mormon. She asked some “big wigs” from her church to come down and help with tornado relief; they were turned away after explaining who they were. “I love Hampton,” she said. “But I’m grateful for the experience of living in a larger city, knowing this is not how things should be.”
At the time I interviewed them, Lorraine and Kevin Roberts were staying in the next county, at one of Kevin Roberts’ boss’ rental properties. The house, Lorraine Roberts said, was in ways nicer than the home they lost in the tornado and right on the water. Nonetheless, she was eager to get back to her plot of land in Hampton. She had coworkers ask her if she’d considered moving to Beaufort, a bigger town, where at the very least, she’d be closer to her job at Great Clips. Roberts told them she liked the peaceful drive between work and home.
I understood exactly. I always loved the drive down the quiet, rural roads from my house to Jessi Gifford’s. The Thursday after the tornado hit, Gifford sent our friend group a video message of herself on her parents’ land.
“It’s surreal,” she said. “Just seeing dirt where the house was.” For Gifford and her brother Cole Smith, the smell of the dirt triggered memories of when their parents first bought the land, which they loved for the old oaks that dripped with Spanish moss. In the video, a pink and honey-colored sunset hung low in a colorless sky and wrapped around my friend like a band. Because of the storm, the trees were broken and bare, but it reminded me of the stripped-down beauty of Hampton in winter. I used to always go to Gifford’s house on the evening of December 27 to celebrate her birthday, and the video reminded me of how the surrounding area looked on those drives, in that time suspended between day and night.
“There’s nothing like — I know this sounds crazy — little old Hampton,” Lorraine Roberts said. “You can go in Piggly Wiggly, and you know the workers...Everyone has their differences on Hampton. I know it’s a small town and people gossip. Everybody knows everybody and everybody’s business, but there’s something about that little old hole. It doesn’t matter. You can’t get rid of it. For a lot of people, you blink and you miss it. For us, it’s one little place. One little area, where you know: that’s life right there.”
It was odd, hearing my unspoken feelings on Hampton vocalized by a stranger. But then, Hampton is a place where even new relationships feel like old ones: in their intimacy, their depth, their trove of existing stories. When I became friends with Jessi Gifford in middle school, I’d already met her many times: at softball games and birthday parties. The sight of her house at the end of that long drive — a beautiful brick home with cream-colored siding and dark green shutters — came to feel like a promise that the best things in life would hold still.
When I first heard the news of the tornado, I felt sure my friend’s family would want to rebuild on their same plot of land. I realized later I had projected my own desire for permanence onto Gifford and her parents. The Smiths are open to making a home elsewhere, and good on them. Change is life’s one constant, and when we resist it, we tend to cause pain for ourselves or someone else. (That is true for humans in general, and perhaps Southerners in particular.)
Sometimes change comes fast. Nothing throws our world’s impermanence into such sharp light as a natural disaster. The question now is not whether Hampton will do the work of changing and rebuilding: it must. The question is how it will rebuild, and who will be recognized as neighbors.
Caroline McTeer lives in San Diego with her husband and cats. She has been published in Litro, Sojourners, edible Upcountry, and TOWN.
