NASHVILLE — Adia Victoria huddled with her cat under the covers in the North Nashville home she shares with her mother, her ears popping as a tornado roared across their neighborhood, among the oldest in this booming city.

A few hours later, in the morning light, the damage was clear: Much of their neighborhood — a traditional and important African-American community that has been rapidly gentrifying — had been decimated. Now, Ms. Victoria, an African-American musician and songwriter, assumed that the gentrification pressure would only get worse, that working people would struggle to rebuild, flirt with the idea of selling to developers or simply move away.

“My mom and I woke up, and with this dark-humor laugh were like, ‘Well, there goes the rest of the neighborhood,’” she said.

As this city cleans up from nightmare storms that cut a swath across the central part of the state on Tuesday, killing at least two dozen people across four counties, some residents of North Nashville also worried that the tornado’s destruction would exacerbate the forces that have been diluting their neighborhood’s character and culture.