The World Might Have Been Different

Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon, “If I Had Sneezed,” speaks to the slender line between one future and another. He was referring to his encounter with a mentally disturbed woman who stabbed him in his chest during one of his speaking engagements. Not sneezing saved his life—because if he had sneezed, the knife the woman wielded would have pierced his heart.

It is not only famous people whose lives can be transformed in an instant or whose futures unfold in completely different directions if not for the long-forgotten actions of others. Mary Lawton, principal of Lawton Associates and who has served as treasurer and accountant for black politicians in northwest Philadelphia for decades, is on this earth because her grandmother was saved f

rom the worst hurricane in American history nearly 120 years ago. It was a rescue that was nothing short of a miracle.

Sometime in 1897, Susie 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.

We only know the details because 116 years later, Susie’s daughter gave us the account of what happened. In September 1900, “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,” recollected 100-year-old Susie Dabner, the daughter of the child rescued from the hurricane, and Mary Lawton’s mother.

Later public records reveal that the child found amid the rubble used the name Susie 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. But that may be why the Roman family was in a position to find Susie Dabner’s mother, 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.”

The situation in Galveston remained precarious for black people. Between the death and destruction of the hurricane, and the dawn of the indignities and hardships of the Jim Crow era, the Romans, with Susie Brown, picked up and moved to Houston.

In Houston, Susie met and married Henry Lyles. They moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to be near his folks. They named their oldest daughter Susie, after her mother.

Little Susie Lyles married Cliff Dabner in Shreveport in 1936. During WWII, they moved their family to Philadelphia so Cliff could find work in the war industry. Mary Lawton and her siblings staged a big 100th birthday party in Philadelphia for their mother in 2016, bringing together generations of family from Shreveport, LA, California, and elsewhere.

If King had sneezed, or if three-year-old Susie Brown had never been found, or if people in her community had not made her part of their extended family, the world would be a very different place.

Every family has ordinary people whose dramatic stories deserve to be known, celebrated, and shared. We are Lift Every Voice LLC, and we do stories. Find out how we can tell your family story at www.lifteveryvoicellc.com

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