Wednesday afternoon, a cloud of smoke hung over the intersection of Seventh Avenue North and 19th Street, but its presence did not signal cause for alarm.
In the four days since an EF-3 tornado ripped through Columbus, paying particular attention to some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, something very Southern has been happening on the city’s North Side.
As utility crews continue their work to restore power to the isolated pockets where service still hasn’t been restored and city public works trucks crawl down the streets loaded down with limbs and branches and chain saws whir in the background, columns of smoke dot the horizon.
We all know what that means. In the South, when disaster strikes, the cooking commences.
In white neighborhoods, it’s casserole time.
In black neighborhoods, it’s time to fire up the grill.
The smoke alone identifies which neighborhoods are most affected.
Early Saturday evening Johnny T. Hampton, known in the neighborhood simply as “Johnny T,” watched the tornado pound its way down Seventh Avenue toward his neighborhood and saw it turn north only a few blocks from his home. The next day, Johnny T set up his grill, deep fryer, tent and folding tables on a vacant lot on the corner of Seventh Avenue North and 19th Street, the neighborhood he grew up in and where he still lives today.
Along with his brother, Tony, and more than a dozen neighbors, Johnny T has been cooking meals each day since Sunday.
“Sunday morning, when I realized how bad it was and that so many people didn’t have electricity, I called some of my fraternity brothers from Rust College and told them we needed to do something,” he said. “So we’ve been out here every day. A good hot meal, man, that can make a big difference. FEMA and churches and other groups can come in and do things and that’s great. But we know what the people around here need. They are our people, our friends. This right here comes from the heart.”
Thursday, the menu included two thousand hot dogs, a thousand hamburgers and vast quantities of french fries.
On other days, it’s been spaghetti or ribs or chicken.
“We try to mix it up so it’s not the same stuff everyday,” Johnny T said.
For Johnny T, providing the meals is not just a way to reach out to the community.
It’s also an act of defiance.
He’s fighting for his neighborhood, for what his neighborhood was when he was a child.
“My grandmother used to sit on that front porch swing all the time. She wasn’t afraid of anybody,” he recalled. “When I was a kid, if you messed up, there were four or five grandmothers keeping an eye out. You might get three or four whippings before you even got home.”
When Johnny T returned from four years in the Army, he was stunned by the change.
The grandmother who sat on the porch and kept the kids under a watchful eye now had seven locks on her door.
“The people she’s scared of are the kids of people my age,” said Johnny T, 58. “It’s sad. Some way, we dropped the ball. And it’s up to us to do something about it.”
That’s why he’s been out here on the corner with his gill and deep-fryer. He’s making a statement.
Johnny T has a good job at Steel Dynamics and could easily choose to live in a safer, better neighborhood.
But this is his home, his people. He’s chosen to stay and fight for his neighborhood.
“There is a lot of crime, a lot of drugs and alcohol. But we can’t give up. It’s our neighborhood. So we’re out here, like my grandmother used to say, angels with dirty faces.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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