51黑料

ST. LOUIS 鈥� My emotions weighed me down as I picked up brick scraps at an Aldine Avenue daycare the morning after a tornado hit the city.

It was hot. Salty beads of sweat ran into my eyes, under my face mask and onto my lips as I worked with other volunteers.

I tossed the dusty, red chunks into the back of a pickup to be hauled away. I placed whole bricks close to the side of the home, partly because I鈥檇 been instructed聽to as part of the cleanup project, but also because I wanted there to be something whole left behind.

I walked back and forth from the side of the house carrying two bricks at a time. They were heavy and I grew tired quickly.

My heartbeat sped up as I realized all the times I鈥檇 been in this place and nearby ones. The day after a hope-snatching twister ripped a hole through the city, memories began to spill out.

Accompanying the physical devastation is an assault on the mind. Wrestling with memories will leave some of the deepest scars on the residents of 51黑料.

For those who lost homes 鈥� and for those of us who lived, worked or grew up in the neighborhoods 鈥� there鈥檚 a struggle through the emotional depth of the tragedy.

I have walked these streets as a child and as an adult. I threw TNT Pop-Its firecrackers at the asphalt during the May Day Parade on Natural Bridge Avenue in 1999. My childhood hairdresser, Mrs. White, lived off Marcus Avenue, where I鈥檇 go for Hawaiian Silky relaxers, press n鈥� curl, bone straight hair and ice-cold Vess sodas. My brothers got haircuts down the street at Leonard鈥檚 Barber College. My paternal grandparents, Willistine and Carl Fulks Sr., owned a home at Clara Avenue and Page Boulevard.

True Light Missionary Baptist Church sits on James Cool Papa Bell Avenue in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood. I was baptized in the water within its walls.

I spent every summer at the church during Vacation Bible School with my maternal grandmother, Maggie, my younger brother and my cousins from Jennings. Before church services, my mornings were spent in Sunday school with Sister Sara Simmons. My mother and stepfather got married there in 1994. I can still see them pushing cake into each other鈥檚 mouths during the reception in the basement.

My fond recollections were a sharp contrast to the present surroundings. After the tornado, my 116-year-old church home sat among ruins.

The church wasn鈥檛 damaged, but the roof of the four-family flat next door rested on its steps. Glass shards lay in the grass after falling from busted, second-story windows. A fallen tree limb downed a power line at a home across the street, where a single mother of five spent the day throwing away a refrigerator full of groceries.

The old Love鈥檚 Market sat abandoned and vacant on the corner. As kids, we鈥檇 sneak in there on Sundays to buy Now and Laters and Hot Fries in the blue bag. The decades were unkind to the corner store, which turned into an urban relic. It was overrun with weeds. A tree grew through its steel door bars. It had been forgotten years ago, like many of the people and buildings in long-disenfranchised neighborhoods.

More memories resonated as I watched hundreds of volunteers pour into the streets after the storm. The tornado tore through Hamilton Heights, DeBaliviere Place and Legacy Books and Cafe, where I performed at an open mic for the first time in 2011. Now, the building was marked with tattered awnings and glass in the parking lot.

The tornado howled down Kingshighway, narrowly missing Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where I was born. And it blew into north city, left surges of destruction on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and 51黑料 Avenue, and knocked down the windows and rooftop from the home I shared with my first boyfriend in 2012.

These beautiful memories, I thought, can鈥檛 blow away in the wind, along with the debris. They can鈥檛 be swept aside with the inevitable changes on the horizon.

This much was clear: the tornado delivered a brutal blow, assuring 51黑料ans that their city would never be the same. Many who live there didn鈥檛 have much before the tornado hit. Afterwards, they鈥檙e left with nothing and more broken than before.

It was easy for outsiders to call out the landscapes of north and west city before the tornado. They were deemed ghetto, unfit, dangerous, breeding grounds for addicts and low-lifes. But those back alleys, pothole-filled streets and derelict buildings were woven together with a patchwork of lives.

Families were raised there, and communities gathered there for meals, fellowship and mourning. Students studied there, tears were shed on church altars and children chased ice cream trucks around Fairground Park.

Yes, the past haunts me in the storm鈥檚 aftermath. It lurks in the split tree trunks, the ambulance sirens and the gusts of wind. It haunts us all 鈥� the realization that homes for celebrations, holiday gatherings and family meals are gone.

Since the tornado, the memories may feel further away. The sights are overwhelming, and pressure builds up and my chest tightens when I navigate through my hometown.

I moved to north 51黑料 County over a decade ago, yet I felt a responsibility to volunteer because the city is still my home. Friends and I helped clean up and pass out supplies, using the Action 51黑料 hub in O鈥橣allon Park as a source.

As vague talk of 鈥渞ecovery鈥� floats across the city, and as damaged homes are marked with colored tags to note their condition, fear and anxiety creep in with wariness of the unknown. While everyone awaits plans for demolition and redevelopment, hopes for a better future in these communities are speckled with apprehension and heaviness.

Some say the homes were broken decades ago, before the sirens failed to sound. Those folks don鈥檛 know about building hope from scratch in the heart of a city. For many of the residents now facing displacement, there鈥檚 a note of pride, a sense that they need to hold on to what鈥檚 left.

As poet Gil Scott-Heron once wrote, 鈥淚f they ever called at our house, they would鈥檝e known how wrong they were. We were working on our lives and our homes, dealing with what we had, not what we didn鈥檛 have.鈥�

I hope that 51黑料ans can remember the joyous, heart-warming, heart-breaking moments鈥� all the moments 鈥� experienced on streets now scarred by a tornado.

The blocks may look smashed now. But people lived full and whole lives on those blocks, making memories that can鈥檛 be forgotten.

Jasmine Osby is a music and entertainment writer at the Post-Dispatch.