Divine Violence In Wacoan Tornado Essay

When black Wacoans tell God, they tell the weather and the land. On May 11, 1953, divine violence upset the natural weather patterns in the central Texas landscape. Mary Denkins recalls in detail her father rushing to pick her up from the all-black Moore High School. She remembers hearing on the radio the threat of a massive tornado. When Mary arrived home, her mother gave a cautious, deliberate prophecy to her and her siblings: “God is fixin’ to work, so you all be quiet.” Late afternoon, the tornado touched-down on the site where Jesse Washington had been lynched nearly four decades earlier, ravaging buildings and downtown structures to rubble, resulting in the death of over one-hundred people. In the wake of this disaster, a chronicle of the tornado picked up where Mary’s mother’s prophecy began: the violence of the tornado was nothing other than divine. The terrain itself testified to this: the tornado (was said to have) revisited the scene of Jesse Washington’s subjection, retracing exactly the path his body was dragged through the city’s center to …show more content…
Considering this storytelling tradition is important for a number of reasons: as a communal memory, it attests to what Karen Fields has illuminated as the fact that memory succeeds. And, as a kind of vernacular theology, it represents an ethical response to loss and ongoing white supremacist terror which may be situated within other mid-century black freedom movements. Moreover, the frame of memory broadly parallels studies in religious ethics which interweave knowledges of racial terror through morally- and politically-inflected notions of mourning and melancholy, and leverage them to undermine triumphal narratives of modernity and