An Empowering Short Story from John Lewis’ Memoire on Saving His Aunt’s House (and How We Might Save Ours, Too)

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Excerpt: In this powerful story, John Lewis recounts a time when a terrible storm threatened his aunt’s house and how he and those around him saved it.

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The following short story is shared in the late John Lewis’ memoire. It recounts a time when he confronted a terrible storm as just a young boy and how he, the other children he was playing with, and his aunt, came together to save his aunt’s house from being ripped up by the storm.

It’s an empowering short story of unity, courage, and leadership that transcends the winds he remembers facing in his childhood and couldn’t be more relevant in the world today. It paints a picture of how we might confront the terrible winds of hate, division, and malevolence that will come to challenge our house as a society today and again tomorrow.

It’s a story about coming together so that our “small bodies” may have an ever larger impact. It’s about identifying and moving towards the fear, challenge, controversy, and injustices that challenge the structure of our house rather than turning, running, hiding, and distracting ourselves from its happening. And it’s about how together, today and tomorrow, we may continue to see the worst of it through.

A house divided, will fall. A house united, will stand even through the hardest of times. Let’s come together and move towards the sides of our house that are faltering from the storms that be (and will surely come) and let’s keep the foundation of our house as solid as we can manage.

Not only for our protection, but for the protection of those who will come after us. For that is our fundamental duty as those who have come before. Nothing should be more important. And as always, united, is how that house will stand. I hope this story finds you well and please, let us know what you thought in the comment section below. Enjoy.

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Walking with the Wind: A Short Story from John Lewis

[A]bout fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified…

Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside.

Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. The wind was howling now, and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared.

And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.

That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.

It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.

And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.

And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.

But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again.

And we did.

And we still do, all of us. You and I.

Children holding hands, walking with the wind…

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