RINGGOLD — Chelsea Black was inducted posthumously into Ringgold High School’s National Honor Society chapter last Monday night, when a cousin walked across the stage to accept her white society stole.
Niki Harden, the society chapter president and a member of the senior class, said before the ceremony it was going to be a sad moment when Black wouldn’t be there to accept the scarflike drape they’ll wear at graduation to signify membership.“When it’s somebody you go to school with and hang out with, it’s a dose of reality,” Harden said.
A tornado smashed into the North Georgia town April 27, one month to the day before graduation, and killed Black and Ringgold student Adam “Tex” Carroll.
The Ringgold High seniors, including Harden, are spending the final month of their final school year getting a sobering extension of their educations. The disaster has taken them places they could not have imagined: to classmates’ funerals; to finishing classes in the shared rooms of cross-town rival Heritage High School, and to seeing classmates left homeless. They’d expected this to be a period of excitement, parties and special events.
“It was a huge blow emotionally,” senior Tirzah Carroll said. “People are like, where do we go from here? There is that sorrow.”
Nearly three weeks later, cleanup crews and linemen still are swarming the affected areas, and plenty of work is left to do.
The twister landed near Ringgold’s I-75 exit, demolishing the McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other restaurants where students hung out and worked part-time jobs. It headed northeast, flattening houses and downtown businesses before hitting the high school, destroying the campus art building that teacher Larry Bunch spent a lifetime building and damaging the main building.
Buildings can be replaced. Lives cannot.
The twister killed six others in and around the town, including family members of Black and Carroll. It was a heavy toll for the mountain community of 2,700.
“Who would have thought that we would have been the ones to get hit by this tornado?” Harden asked.
The losses have made Carroll appreciate the chance to stop and talk to those whom she knew little of before in the school of 1,015, and she has noticed friends in hallways doing the same.
She wistfully recalled last memories of Tex and Chelsea.
“Everybody knew Tex,” she said, giggling at the memory of him pulling up his shirt to jiggle a generous belly at students leaving school, just for a laugh.
“They were just like us, planning out tomorrow,” Carroll said. “I am sure they didn’t know they didn’t have a tomorrow.”
“Every day is precious,” she has learned. “It took away a lot, but it gave everybody more of a social life and made everybody appreciate things more.”
Harden shares that experience. She recalled a last, happy memory of Chelsea.
Harden went to the movies and ran into Chelsea and two other students who had brought with them a practice baby from a home economics class. The plastic and electronic doll is used to teach students about coming real-life responsibility of parenthood by breaking out into crying or demanding to be fed or changed. It burst into wailing continuously during the movie “Where the Wild Things Are.”
“They would run out of the theater, and I would crack up,” Harden said. “That was the best part of the movie. I always remember that when I think of Chelsea.”
Principal Sharon Vaughn, grieving her losses, knew this also was a chance for her students to grow and prove themselves.
“When life presents us with this kind of challenge, it is an opportunity to prove to everyone who we really are,” she told them.
Ringgold High is boarded up and fenced in while repair and demolition crews work on it. In the midst of chaos, school leaders came up with a plan to keep Ringgold’s students in classes and to maintain a schedule of graduation special events that even expanded, rather than shrank. The first step was creating a double schedule of classes to be shared at undamaged Heritage High School.
“Our bitter rivals. Bitter!” Vaughn said with a smile.
“I pretty much asked [the students] to step up and lead this,” she said of the changes she knew were coming.
Heritage students go to class until about 12:30 p.m., when they leave and Ringgold’s students walk into the entry and cross a carpet that was specially made for the event. It has words woven into it that read, “When worse comes to worst, we all come together.”
Heritage’s staff and students welcomed Ringgold, shoving their own equipment aside to make room in offices and on band and sports practice fields, Vaughn said. The storm forcefully brought her kids and those at Heritage together, and they have joined hands with grace and generosity.
The two schools shared a senior day at Lake Winnepesaukah Amusement Park in Chattanooga and a cookout.
“So it still seems like the end of our senior year,” said Ringgold basketball player Matt Dean.
But the tornado still weighs on Ringgold’s seniors.
“We still talk about [the storm]; it’s still kind of fresh,” Harden said. “But we are moving on as well. That’s the only way you can make things work.”
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