Patricia Bellis Bixel

Having a good point does not make a good book.

You might be able to tell that just from the title, which is about as pedestrian as it can be. The classic book on the Galveston Hurricane and Flood is John Edward Weems's A Weekend in September. By telling the individual stories of a number of Flood victims, it brings the Flood home. But Weems doesn't always tell the whole story. Case in point: After the storm, there were so many corpses on Galveston Island that people had to be forced by armed soldiers to gather up the bodies.

What Weems did not say was that the people who were forced, by armed might, to do the cleaning up, were Black.

Similarly, there were charges of looting. What Weems does not say is that most of those charged were Black, even though there is every reason to think that all races were involved -- both Blacks and whites had lost their homes, and they did what they had to to survive.

So Bixel and Turner draw back the curtain on the horrid injustices in the wake of the Galveston Flood. And that is good. But they're so earnest that the result is just plain dull. And not really helpful. How bad was the storm? How many were the casualties? Where was the damage greatest and least? Some -- not all -- of that information is here, but it's much easier to get it from Weems. In Bixel and Turner, the story of the Flood feels like a footnote to the story of the injustice -- a useful corrective, but if you don't know how bad the disaster was, you don't really know how bad the injustice was.

And it's a dreadfully flat read.

Apart from the racial aspect, the best part of this is the coverage of how the city changed its governance system (from elective to appointive) to get the repair work done, plus the coverage of the rebuilding. Plus there are many, many photos of the city before, during, and after -- as a picture book, this is great. But I'd rather have the facts.

There is a racial tragedy here, and it ought to be told. But this book, between its intensity and its monotony, fails to tell it convincingly.… (más)