Storm Warriors Read Free

things he said I didn't understand.

TWO
    So far, I've seen three dead people. The first was when I was six years old and Mamma's sister, Aunt Stella, tried to birth a baby. She and the baby both died, but she was the only one I saw, laid out in a pine box in the sitting room of her house. That was when we still lived in Elizabeth City, back on the North Carolina mainland.
    The second dead person was the reason we left Elizabeth City. It was two years ago, when I was ten. One summer night, Daddy woke me, Mamma, and Grandpa well before dawn and said we were moving to Roanoke Island, where Mamma had cousins and where there was no Klan. We packed up quick, then shuffled through the dark streets toward Daddy's fishing skiff, carrying our belongings in crates and baskets. I kept asking why we were leaving. “Why, Daddy, why?” I kept after him, until heput down the crate he was carrying and took me by the hand. He told Mamma and Grandpa to wait and walked me past the Presbyterian church, out toward the Baker farm, to a quiet spot where a pin oak spread its branches against the night sky. Swinging from one of the branches, a rope around his neck, his ears and most of his fingers chopped off, was the Ames boy.
    My legs went weak with the horror of it. I clutched Daddy's hand and cried.
    “They don't need half a reason to lynch a man,” Daddy said in a low growl. “Not even half.”
    I didn't ask one single more question about why we'd left our rented house without even telling the landlady, why we ran off in the night, or why we were moving to a place we'd only visited twice to see Mamma's cousins. All I needed to know was what Daddy had already said: we were going to where there was no Ku Klux Klan.
    On Roanoke Island I went to school with the other colored children—the Berrys and Pughs and Bowsers. Miss Ella Midgett was already the teacher at the colored school, so Mamma couldn't get a job there, but Daddy said that was all right because he and Grandpa could just catch more fish.
    That's where I first met the surfmen—the Pea Island crew, who each came to Roanoke Island one day a week on their day off to see their wives and children. Grandpa found out he and Daddy had already met the keeper of the Pea Island station,Richard Etheridge, back when Mr. Etheridge was part of General Wild's African Brigade, which occupied Elizabeth City during the war.
    That's also where I got to know William and Floyd, two boys from school. William was older than me, about fourteen or so, and Floyd a little younger than me. They taught me how to swim in the Croatan Sound, off the west side of the island near where we lived. They were both related to surfmen—nephews or cousins or something—and told me how they both wanted to become surfmen when they turned eighteen. They'd puff up their chests and recite the surfman's motto: “You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.”
    William's family had a rickety old rowboat, and when it wasn't being used for fishing or oystering or taking William's uncle back and forth to his job at the fish market in Wanchese, William and Floyd and I snuck away with it. We rowed it to the northern part of the island, landed where there were hardly any houses, and pretended we were surfmen. “Take life preservers!” William would shout. “Take oars! Go!” We'd shove the rowboat back into the water, leap in, and row furiously out to an imagined wreck, William and Floyd each with an oar and me with a long stick. We welcomed phantom stranded sailors, who were always nearly dead and very glad to see us, loaded them into our “surfboat,” and took them back to shore. Sometimes we practiced capsize drills—took the rowboat out into the deep water and tipped it overon purpose, the way the surfmen sometimes did on Tuesdays during their regular boat drills. We'd swim around and struggle with the boat until we got it righted again and the oars collected.
    All that fun with the boat ended the day Floyd got hit