Investigative Memoir (in progress)
Flood City
Flood City examines how identity was engineered in Johnstown, Pennsylvania—where proximity, silence, and civic myth shaped race, kinship, and belonging across generations within a single four-block radius.
OVERVIEW
Johnstown, Pennsylvania is known nationally as “Flood City,” a place defined by catastrophic floods and an enduring civic narrative of resilience. Yet the forces that shaped identity within the town were not only environmental. They were social, spatial, and deeply embedded in everyday life.
​
Within one alley, my mother, father, and biological father grew up as neighbors and friends. Their families lived across the street from one another. Years later, my parents purchased a house across from their childhood homes and beside my biological father’s family.
​
Through adult DNA testing, I uncovered concealed Black paternal lineage and misattributed paternity within my own family history. The discovery extended backward across generations.
​
As I began tracing these histories, additional stories surfaced nearby—adoptions concealed, paternity misattributed, knowledge unevenly distributed across families and streets. Rather than treating these as isolated secrets, the project asks a broader question:
​
How does a community silently organize identity in plain sight?
FORM + METHOD
Flood City blends archival research, oral history, and personal narrative to examine how identity was structured within a tightly bounded geography.
The book expands outward from a single four-block radius to examine the institutional systems that organized belonging in Johnstown, including:
-
flood infrastructure and civic narrative
-
IQ testing and educational tracking in public schools
-
census categories and racial designation
-
neighborhood networks
-
contemporary DNA databases
Sensory memory operates as a counter-archive, grounding systemic inquiry in lived experience. Rather than unfolding chronologically, the story is examined through material objects present in the author's life and within the construct of the town: concrete, hair grease, flood water, dirt, paper, sugar, gravel...
​
In the work, the narrator serves as both subject and investigator. Personal narrative is placed in direct conversation with municipal records, school archives, demographic data, and oral histories.
Central Question
If identity within Johnstown was engineered through proximity, classification, and silence,
what happens when those systems begin to erode?
​
Economic decline, demographic change, shifting political identity, and the destabilizing force of consumer DNA testing are exposing histories that once remained contained within family and neighborhood boundaries.
​
Flood City treats memoir not only as personal testimony but as a form of civic excavation, examining how communities construct belonging—and what remains when those constructions begin to fracture.