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    Katrina's Got Nothing on Max: A Constant Storm (True Stories of Survival)
    Katrina's Got Nothing on Max: A Constant Storm (True Stories of Survival)
    Katrina's Got Nothing on Max: A Constant Storm (True Stories of Survival)
    Ebook149 pages2 hours

    Katrina's Got Nothing on Max: A Constant Storm (True Stories of Survival)

    By Ophelia Greene

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    About this ebook

    Compelling, raw, heart wrenching true stories of courage, strength, and survival in the middle of a constant super storm named Max.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClovercroft Publishing
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9781942587316
    Katrina's Got Nothing on Max: A Constant Storm (True Stories of Survival)

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      Book preview

      Katrina's Got Nothing on Max - Ophelia Greene

      storm.

      Chapter 1

      Max and Hannah: Gloomy Forecast

      GLOOM: PARTIAL OR TOTAL DARKNESS; A DARK OR SHADOWY PLACE; LOWNESS OF SPIRITS: DEJECTION; AN ATMOSPHERE OF DESPONDENCY. [1]

      The Armstrongs lived in a small town in Louisiana, in a particular little area called Terrytown. One of the local preachers held church services, sometimes called tent meetings, in the neighborhood. The church leader was Elder Samuel Prescott. The Prescotts had three sons and two daughters. Hannah Prescott was their youngest daughter. She did not know that her life would change forever when she met Max during one of the church services. The two began spending time together, but always in the company of the adults. The families gathered each Saturday night. One Saturday they met at the Prescotts’ home, and the next Saturday they met at the Armstrongs’.

      Eventually, Max asked Elder Prescott for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Hannah’s mother had died the year before. Mr. Prescott agreed to the marriage, and Max proposed to Hannah. She was eighteen and Max was twenty-one. Hannah was a virgin and he was not, though Hannah didn’t know it at the time. The wedding took place at his mother’s house on a Saturday night in January 1950. Elder Prescott married them. At first, Max’s mother Sarah pretended to like Hannah; but after the wedding, the relationship changed.

      They lived with Max’s mother, and Max provided for his young wife as a committed husband should. He worked hard and kept his money for his new family, instead of giving it to his mother as he always had before; and this loss of control caused Sarah to attempt to manipulate his affections. Max respected his mother, and he loved his wife – at least in the beginning. The couple, young and in love, didn’t anticipate the challenges they would face in the years ahead. Reality set in as Hannah gave birth to their first child.

      In January 1952, Hannah, at age nineteen, gave birth to their first child, a daughter. Later that year she learned that Max had a two-year-old son named Max, Jr. At this point, the forecast became gloomy; and it would remain gloomy and cloudy, producing severe storms, for the next twenty-four years.

      Twenty-one months after the birth of their first child, Hannah gave birth to another daughter. Neither Max nor Hannah knew how to raise a family. They professed faith in Jesus Christ, but they were never intentional about providing spiritual guidance for their children. They were together in the biblical sense as often as possible – sometimes Hannah did not have a choice in the sex department – but after the children were born, it was a struggle to keep food on the table, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads. They were like nomads, traveling from small town to small town, staying in little shacks along the way. Eleven children were born to this couple in severe poverty, and then there was contention with his mother.

      In the beginning, Max tried to protect his family. He didn’t accept any threats to his person or to those under his control. He was big and bad, with a hot temper; and as a result, in his early years, he spent many days in jail. He killed someone in self-defense. While in jail, he asked Hannah’s brother Will to move his family from Louisiana to Wesson, Mississippi, away from his mother. While Will prepared to move Hannah and the children to Mississippi, Sarah put the children on welfare and lied to the authorities, telling them that Hannah left the children alone. She knew that they had actually moved to Mississippi.

      This deception almost led the authorities to arrest Hannah for child neglect. When the court released Max, he came to Hannah’s defense. Max stood up to his mother this one rare time. He always had to contend with Sarah. She was one of the sources of constant conflict for Max’s family. Sarah always wanted to control Max – especially his money.

      Hannah was naïve as she began to notice changes in Max. The changes initially related to the struggle with his mom, and then she began to see the control he constantly exercised in their marriage. Moreover, he was a womanizer. Max was a high yellow, handsome man with a great smile, who loved deep-ebony-skinned women. Hannah was an ebony beauty with bright eyes and an hourglass figure. Because of Max’s failure to honor his marriage vows, things began to go downhill.

      Except for manipulation by his mom, no one was able to hold Max accountable. Most people were afraid of him. There was no spiritual conviction or moral compass to shock him into being a godly man. If he had the Holy Spirit living inside him, he apparently squelched the Spirit. He started disrespecting Hannah by sleeping with other women, often when she was pregnant. He even slept with one of her best friends, which resulted in the birth of another son outside of their marriage.

      Some of his other women were bold. They would call his mother’s house and ask for him, and she would send one of his brothers to tell Max he has a phone call. For a number of years, Hannah and Max lived within walking distance of his mother and stepfather’s house. Max grew meaner as he tried to control Hannah by making her feel as though she were the guilty one. He had a jealous nature, coupled with anger issues, which led to severe brutality and abuse of those closest to him. He would unjustly lash out at them many times. Some days it was like having a tornado touch down in the middle of a bright, sunny day. It didn’t make sense. He became a batterer, a child abuser, and a betrayer. He was a brute, bully, tyrant, perpetrator, black sheep, coward, and control freak; but deep down inside he was a broken man who never knew how to love.

      Living with Max was like trying to survive a hurricane, when debris was flying from everywhere and there was no way to escape. It was like being pelleted by baseball-sized hail, as he constantly pounded Hannah and her children to maintain control over them. He attacked Hannah many times in the presence of her children; as a result, they all had a deep fear of him and were disgusted by him. If Hannah raised any concerns, he would hit her, throw ashtrays and other objects at her, or beat her with a black leather belt. A few times after he attacked and beat her badly, she left him, leaving him totally alone to care for all the children. However, Max was a sweet talker; he would make promises, and Hannah would believe him and return home. Each time she came back after a separation, she got pregnant again. They never discussed or even thought about birth control.

      Hannah once told her second daughter, Venice, the reason she didn’t object to being pregnant so often: while she was pregnant she had peace, as she didn’t have to have sex with Max. Physically, Hannah was strong and healthy; thus, she bore her last child at age forty without pre-natal care. Her one doctor’s visit during the entire nine months was to the hospital to give birth.

      Eventually Hannah and Max were divorced, and they each married someone else. Hannah was forty-one when they divorced. Max, with his vindictive nature, did not allow Hannah to visit the children. Later in his life, Max revealed to one of his brothers that he only wanted to keep the children so Uncle Sam would give him money back. The children were just a tax write-off to him. What he didn’t realize when he made that statement was that one of his children overheard their conversation. The point is, he did not want to pay child support. He just wanted to claim all the children as dependents so he could get money back from the IRS. He put Hannah’s children through a constant storm – for money and control.

      For twenty-five years, the children lived in a super storm as they witnessed Max’s cruelty, including physical and verbal abuse. Their stories will reveal more details about how they weathered the constant storm. Max killed two men and severely cut another, all in self-defense. The weight of the killings took a toll on him, because one of the men he killed was his uncle (his mother’s sister’s husband). Max defiled his marriage bed many times, producing a crop of boys outside of his marriage. Most of them never knew him. He would drop his seed whenever a willing dark-skinned woman would allow. There were eight boys born outside of his marriage to Hannah, all to different women. He never provided any child support for those boys. In addition, there were three other children born to him during his second marriage. He married a woman who was twenty-one years his junior. In total, Max was the biological father of twenty-two children, and he never properly raised one. In the words of the 1972 hit by the Temptations, Papa was a rollin’ stone. The babies were not conceived in love – it was lust, even in his marriage to Hannah.

      In 2003, one of his daughters asked him a question: Dad why did you have so many women? He said, Whenever your mom left me, I needed someone to help me with y’all. This is just a glimpse into the mind of Mad Max and the horror ten folks endured as they rode out the super storm and lived to tell their stories.

      What you are about to read through the remainder of this book are the details of some of the devastation that surpassed Katrina; but like the aftermath of Katrina and similar super storms, there are heartwarming stories of survival. This book not only captures some shocking details of life in the constant storm called Max, but it also reveals the human spirit.

      The author changed the names to protect the identity of the people she interviewed for this book. Emma, the eldest of Hannah’s children, encouraged her siblings to tell their stories. Each story is presented in birth order. Emma’s experiences are captured in story format rather than first person. Now you are about to enter their super storm.

      For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

      (Colossians 3:25, ESV)

      Chapter 2

      Emma: A Storm is Brewing

      STORM: A DISTURBANCE OF THE ATMOSPHERE MARKED BY WIND AND USUALLY BY RAIN, SNOW, HAIL, SLEET, OR THUNDER AND LIGHTNING; A DISTURBED OR AGITATED STATE OF EMOTION; A TUMULTUOUS OUTBURST. [2]

      IT WAS A COLD, crisp January morning in 1952 at Lallie Kemp Charity Hospital, as Hannah lay in her bed ready to deliver the first of eleven children. She had not prepared well. In fact, she had not even given much thought to a name for her baby. As she lay in bed resting and waiting for her baby to be born, she would have been alone had it not been for her ward mate. She did not know whether she was going to have a girl or a boy.

      When she gave birth and they told her she had a six-pound girl, she named her daughter Emma, after her ward mate. She had

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