Freesia McKee

Panthalassa Pamphlet
February 2018

Tea & Tattered Pages

We’ve gone swimming almost every day since moving here. The swimming pool outside of the building reaches its
depth at about five and a half feet. It’s sandwiched between the canal and the apartment building and is surrounded by
paving stones and railings.

The pool is too small for laps—just a few strokes and you’ve reached the other side. My girlfriend and I are almost
always the only ones swimming. When there are others, they’re usually children. A pack of 10-year-old girls direct their
attention to their leader, who pulls them around the pool like a bossy lifeguard using the safety ring and its long rope. A
group of teenagers talk and laugh in the water at dusk. They go silent when we walk up.

When there’s no one else in the pool, I like to float with my face up, staring at the flocks of birds passing above, the
herons, the succulent shrubs and trees so unlike those in Wisconsin. I paddle and stare at the canal’s east side, the line of
trees hiding the strip malls and Biscayne Boulevard. I turn west and look at the building’s row of balconies, the chairs
and rugs, water toys and ashtrays, clues that begin to describe each unit’s occupants.

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About six weeks after moving to North Miami, we evacuated for Hurricane Irma. They were saying that it was going to
hit us directly. But you already know how this particular story goes: At the last minute, the hurricane moved towards
Florida’s western coast. Parts of the state were hit hard, but Miami was spared. Hurricane Irma devastated Barbuda and
the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. Shortly afterwards, Mexico City experienced a severe earthquake. A week later,
Puerto Rico suffered a direct hit from Hurricane Maria. As of this writing, the island of Puerto Rico still doesn’t have
power. The president seems to not have known that Puerto Rico is a U.S. Commonwealth. Reports from the ground are
that the island is devastated. Help has been slow to come, and the barriers are significant.

Natural disasters amplify social inequity. After a storm, the lowest-income communities are the last ones to get the lights
turned back on. And the hurricane season is a hot one; what I’d rarely thought about before moving south is what it’s like
to live a week or more without air conditioning in the hottest and most humid parts of the year.

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We attended the March for Black Women last weekend, a national event intending to celebrate and honor black women.
We marched from the historically black Overtown neighborhood to the trendy and gentrified Wynwood. Hundreds of
protesters listened to speeches outside of a beer and art market. Patrons walked in and out through the crowds, some of
them wincing when they realized the event’s purpose, their clothes screaming “wealth,” tipping their heads down in fear
of the disruption of white supremacy.

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What I knew about hurricanes as a fourth generation Milwaukeean came from one reference point: Katrina. As a 17-year-
old, two years after the storm, I travelled with about 20 other people on the train from Milwaukee to New Orleans to do
what some called “relief work,” though I still don’t know what that means; I don’t know what is being relieved. We all
took one train. The tracks hugged the Mississippi River from Minneapolis all the way down.

In the days before we evacuated Miami, I thought a lot about that trip ten years before.

Because we were kids assigned to clean out a house that had been rotting for two years.

Because two years after Katrina, the Lower Ninth had some occupied houses, some empty lots, and some houses largely
untouched since before the flood.

Because I remember a friend walked in the house and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

Because we spent a week gutting the home, removing moldy personal effects like stuffed animals and books and a couch
and a washing machine with clothes still in it.
Because after a week in the house, I hadn’t set foot in the kitchen on purpose, the fridge full of two-year-old food.

Because a dead dog got carried out with a shovel and plastic bag.

Because my friend called the gospel music coming from the pickup truck outside of a church in the Lower Ninth “ghetto
music.”

Because it’s hard to argue that taking young people on that kind of trip is the best use of money; shouldn’t the cost of the
train fares be donated to the homeowner instead?

Because I didn’t know the names of that family even as I carried armful after armful of all their things to the dumpster.
Because who can point to even the articulation of justice.

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Before we knew what would happen, when we thought we knew what would happen, my girlfriend and I evacuated to
Georgia with the cat, the dog, and the turtle in a car full of bottled water, gasoline, clothes, musical instruments, and
books.

I packed my books by Natalie Diaz, Sarah Schulman, Joy Harjo, Roxane Gay. I packed my grandparents’ dictionary, an
English dictionary from the 1970s. I had started taking notes about an essay I would write on that dictionary and what it
meant to me. The dictionary from my grandparents’ house which no longer exists, neither the house nor the home. The
fact that the dictionary was written in the language my schools privilege, the English language I study in graduate school,
the fact that my grandparents owned and were able to own a dictionary. The power and privilege in this.

I packed the first edition Ursula Le Guin I’d picked up at an estate sale in Boston, from the townhouse of a gay man
who’d died recently. He must have been a writer. In the course of his career, he’d reviewed hundreds of books, mostly
mysteries. Advance review copies sat in perfect condition wrapped in plastic on his shelves.

When the estate sale was over, the friends running it said, the townhouse would be gutted by the developer with the
highest bid. Someone will pay a million dollars for this property, they said. He never would have thought it.

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A larger or smaller part of any house is the negative space. The 2007 week in New Orleans is made of empty and full
rooms that steered my path in art and activism, some of the threads that pulled me here to Florida, to writing and
studying poetry, learning how to be a teacher, learning the limitations of where we can learn and how.

The first week of class, two of my new classmates started talking about the hurricane that had hit New Orleans so bad
years ago. What was it called? They asked the mostly empty room. Katrina, I said.

How could you forget? The smell. The sweaty mask, the boots I left at the door of the church we slept in.

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We spend a lot of time at home. Miami can be expensive and lonely. The way the city is spread out can make it hard to
bond with friends who don’t live in your neighborhood. You might drive for an hour or more just to see someone. So we
swim almost every day.

--- --- ---

The acquaintance we stay with in Georgia says she used to have a pool in her backyard, but one day the side burst and
they decided to demolish and put down sod instead. We stay for over a week. I read Blue is the Warmest Color. I read a
Rebecca Solnit book. I read a few pages of Gloria Naylor.
 --- --- ---

After we return to Miami, we attend a party at the home of an acquaintance just a 20-minute drive away.

An hour or two after arriving, we decide to sit in the backyard. I’m on a beanbag chair. A man named Andrew starts
talking to us. Where are you from? He asks. People tend to tell us quickly that they know we’re not from here. Andrew
says he’s originally from Michigan but left at 18, several years ago, now. Miami is home.

I am a few strong drinks in. I stare up at the trees, the black sky, listen to the thumping music from the party inside. I
think about the friends who asked when the hurricane was on its way whether we’d be coming home. To Wisconsin, they
meant.

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I have started to understand something that has been capitalized upon extensively: to those of us not from here, the
landscape of Florida can feel magical. Small lizards run up and down the pool’s railing. Dinosaur-like iguanas sun
themselves on the side of the canal. There are rumors of manatees who head this way when the waters are a little cooler.

A hurricane is a fever, a flu, a catharsis, an ejection. A hurricane can be deadly, but the aftermath, I hear, is deadlier.

Someone in our building said the pool is disgusting. There’s a crack in it, he said. It’s dirty and not well-maintained. Tell
this to the women who visit it everyday like a pilgrimage, a ritual, a duty, a chore. Tell this to the women who rejoiced
when we returned from our evacuation to our home.