From One Miracle to Another (Excerpt)

Susie Dabner’s life began with the miracle of her mother being found alive as a 3-year old in the rubble of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane.

“Galveston TX had a hurricane; these people found her and they raised her. That hurricane destroyed just about everything in the city. The people who found my mother were named Roman, and Mrs. Roman was called “Scrap.” They didn’t know exactly when my mother was born, so they estimated she was about 3 years old. My mother always said she was an infant when they found her,” said Susie Dabner. (Dabner, 2016) Sometime in 1897, a girl was born in Galveston City, a barrier island located off the Texas coastline. Galveston was then one of Texas’ largest and most prosperous cities. Fifty miles from Houston, TX, the population of Galveston was about one-quarter African American in 1900. (McComb, 2016).

Later public records reveal that Susie used the name Brown, and that her birth parents may have been named Ben Branham and Mattie Brown. Although they perished in the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, it seems likely that they knew the Romans, which could explain how Susie retained the name Brown.

The death toll from that storm, estimated at 6,000-12,000 people, remains the highest hurricane death toll in American history. Plucked from the rubble of collapsed buildings and houses that looked “as if the wind had disassembled them,” Susie Brown was raised by the Roman family. That, too, was a miracle.

On the morning of September 9, when the Galveston Hurricane had moved northeastward toward New York, the people of Galveston awakened to thousands of corpses on the island and nowhere to bury them. The City formed “death gangs,” whose members were mostly African Americans forced to gather bodies under threat of bayonet. (Steinberg, 2015) But that may be why the Roman family was in the position to find Susie Dabner’s mother amid the rubble, take her home, and raise her as their own. It was a miracle, too, that the Romans survived themselves: according to one expert, “the hurricane wiped out many families, including parents, children, and relatives-- and black people suffered disproportionately, since they lived closer to the beaches,” where the storm surge hit. (Greene, 2016)

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