Tragedy Hits Close to Home

Johnette Howard

September 12, 2001

Nothing immediately suggested something unspeakable had happened just outside my window, just seven miles away. All I heard was a muted boom. Then the Venetian blinds in my Brooklyn living room shuddered ever so slightly.

"What the heck was that?" I said to a friend seated next to me on my couch. We stopped, waited a second and heard nothing more. We resumed talking. It was shortly after 9 a.m. yesterday, and I was telling my friend, one of three Canadian house guests staying with me, that I was heading to Madison Square Garden in an hour to talk to some New York Rangers. And my friend spoke of perhaps visiting some Manhattan landmarks - maybe the Empire State Building, maybe the World Trade Center.

Then the telephone rang. It was my mother, who lives near Somerset, Pa. - another dateline that soon would be in the news for the same deadly reason.

"Someone blew up the World Trade Center! Are you all right?" my mother blurted.

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When I turned and looked out the windows of my third-floor Brooklyn apartment - from my living room and kitchen, there's a clear view of the lower tip of Manhattan, including the World Trade Center - slate-gray smoke was gushing out of both towers. "Oh my God ... I can see it," I told my mom.

Then my stomach tightened. I felt sick.

It would have been horrific enough had the World Trade Center been the extent of the tragedies. But the horrors just kept coming. Within an hour, preliminary word came that another plane went down in Somerset County, the rural, southwest part of Pennsylvania where my parents live. Soon I was frantically trying to call them. Word came about another hijacked plane that hit the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., where I lived just before moving to New York 2½ years ago. Word came that two of the doomed planes originated in Boston. A friend of mine was traveling back from Boston yesterday.

Soon the New York TV stations had experts on air fretting that perhaps biological warfare had been used. There were stories of rescue workers having to dig themselves out of waist-deep silt to save themselves and scenes of people frantically running down streets of Manhattan as a rolling, snowballing cloud of smoke came rushing down the avenues behind them. A soot-covered man who said he escaped from the 82nd floor of one of the World Trade Center buildings was asked on camera what he saw in the stairway as he ran out.

"You don't want to know," he said over his shoulder as he abruptly walked away, clearly disturbed.

The explosion I heard in my home yesterday came from the second plane, which hit the World Trade Center's south tower. Before long the TV stations had news footage of that crash, and they were replaying it over and over like some sports replay, the surreal sight of that large plane with its left wing dipped slightly down plowing right into the midsection of the building. Then a huge, red fireball bursting out the building's other side.

Of all the disturbing images the TV networks have shown us over the years, nothing - not that sight of the gutted Oklahoma City building that Timothy McVeigh bombed, not the sight of the Challenger space shuttle exploding in mid-air - compared to yesterday's scene here. Nothing matched this for brazenness. For devastation. For the psychological scars that are sure to endure. The only thing that comes even close, in my mind, is the old footage all of us have seen of the mushroom cloud left when a nuclear bomb goes off.

Yesterday, even the president of the United States concluded it was not safe to go home to Washington. He headed to Louisiana, then a war room in Nebraska, before returning to the nation's capital.

And outside my window? Some of my Brooklyn neighbors eschewed watching TV to stand on their rooftops and stare toward the city to watch. By mid-morning, the air in my neighborhood was tinged with the faint smell of smoke. Flecks of dust were fluttering down. A few people on bicycles went pedaling by wearing surgical masks. Restless for something to do, my friends went to a nearby hospital to see if we could give blood and were told it was too soon. Come back in three or four hours.

"Oh my God," my friend Brenda said. Three of us were again watching the TV coverage, which had gone back to showing the news studio. But Brenda was sitting on the window sill in my apartment, and faster than the TV station could switch back to a live picture, Brenda said, "One of the towers just collapsed! I just saw one of the towers go down!" Fifteen minutes later, the other tower collapsed, too.

As I write this, that world outside my window, that world-famous skyline, is almost indistinguishable from any other mid-size city now that the Twin Towers are gone. If I didn't know any better, it could be Columbus or Toledo or Wichita. Not Manhattan.

While a lot of people will say yesterday's terrorism struck closer to home because it happened here in New York City, that would, of course, also be wrong.

This struck home for every American. This will resonate to every corner of the world. It hit everyone who's ever looked to America as someplace exempt or special or somehow immune from this sort of thing. Yesterday, much of America stood still. The days ahead could be even more frightening as we wait to see the tenor of our response, the depth of our anger. And how or where this ends.