As Florida counts down the days until hurricane season ends we remember that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the tragic 1928 hurricane that was perhaps best memorialized in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's characters, black migrant workers, travel from northern Florida to Lake Okeechobee to supplement their meager incomes, only to meet their deaths when the hurricane strikes. Nonfiction accounts of the storm include Disasters and Heroic Rescues: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival Florida by E. Lynne Wright which summarizes the events of the storm. "...Radio reports about a storm doing extensive damage in Puerto Rico" reached the Southeast coast Florida. "Some took half-hearted precautions, but mostly people simply remained alert...in the midst of a [radio] announcement that there was no longer a danger to Florida [a radio announcer] broke off in mid-sentence, saying the storm had hit Palm Beach and it was devastating." Wright explains that an already saturated Lake Okeechobee poured into surrounding communities when "dikes being banks of muck from five feet to nine feet high" were no match for the storm. Entire families were lost as they struggled to survive the winds and rains on their rooftops. Wright estimates the death toll between 1800 and 3000.
           Two books chronicle the storm in detail. Black Cloud by Eliot Kleinberg includes a first hand account from Carmen Salvatore, a former soldier and survivor of the storm whose house was ripped up from the foundation during the storm. Robert Mykle's Killer Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 reveals photos of downtown Palm Beach, which was reduced to rubble. All of the books explain that the storm showed the disparity between blacks and whites at the time. While bodies of the whites were buried in a local graveyard, the blacks were thrown into a mass grave. Black workers were instrumental in the clean up. Wright explains that a temporary lift of Prohibition was permitted in the area because "no one, including officers of the law, would deny workers a drink of whiskey if would help them" cope with "the hard physical labor, the heat, the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the stench and sight of decomposed bodies and body parts, the occasional heartbreak of identifying those bodies or body parts of those as belonging to someone they loved..."

       --Susan Parsons

FBR’s Esther Martinez is in Ybor City today attending Deep Carnivale: A Festival of Words.  The summer doldrums are over, and we’re happy to be entering Florida’s season of writer’s conferences, book festivals, and book fairs.  We have many listed on our Literary Links page, but I'm sure there are others we don't yet know about. We ask organizers to send us their notices and materials. (See the About Us page for contact info.)

    —Lynne Barrett