AVENUE D
1. Men at work
“Man, I wish the ocean would roll over this place and wipe it clean.”
FORT PIERCE, Fl. Newberry is tall and tan with small eyes in a pie-dish face. He extends a slim hand inside the convenience store on Avenue D. On Sunday at 6 a.m., the store’s lone light attracts wakeful beings like moths to its florescent glow. Outside, a dozen men lean against the concrete facade drinking coffee and gabbing. As the sky pales, a silky light floods their brown faces and tips the mango trees with gold. Vans with water coolers bungeed to their bumpers slicker over the dew-wet street, and school busses roll up and down: full, not of children but of men from the neighborhood on their way to pick oranges and grapefruit in central Florida fields.
“This place is unbelievable,” begins Newberry. “There’s no other place like it in Florida.”
In the segregation-era 1950s, in the dusty crop town of Fort Pierce, Avenue D and its outlying streets known as Lincoln Park were “Black Town,” a parallel city. Today, they still are.
“The way they treat these guys is unbelievable,” Newberry says. “The pay for picking citrus hasn’t changed in 30 years. It was 55 cents a crate in the 1960s, and it’s 55 cents now. They truck you out there, and you’re not allowed to touch the fruit until the dew is gone and the fruit is perfectly dry, so you sit sometimes for hours — and there’s no pay for those hours. Even the Haitians don’t want to do it anymore.”
The men outside are cheerful, still waiting for the boss to arrive with his van. When asked, they talk openly about Fort Pierce’s racial stalemate.
“We need Mr. Obama to come over here and see what’s happening,” says one of the men to a chorus of guffaws and “Shit, yeahs.”
“I’m from an old farming family,” Newberry continues. “But the farming is being pushed out. The old-timers die off and their children sell out to condo developers. The land owners don’t farm any more, but they want to keep their tax break. So they lease it to me for $1 a year, and I grow it for them.”
Outside, a pall has fallen over the men. The van hasn’t come for them. There will be no work today.
“Shit,” several of them mutter.
They drift away wearing disheartened expressions.
Waving goodbye from his truck, one worker jokes in parting: “Man, I wish the ocean would roll over this place and wipe it clean.
2. Wilhelmina
“That’s what this is all about. Redevelopment. They want us ethnics out.”
The residents of Reno Rooming House step out in the early morning, scanning the street to see who’s about. Avenue D at this hour is empty except for a woman in an oversized cap on the opposite sidewalk. She might be in her fifties; her hair under the cap is filigreed with gray. She enters an alley where two shopping carts are parked and rummages around.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m Wilhelmina,” she says. “I’m an entrepreneur. These are my buggies. I sell things.” There are Christmas ornaments, blankets, toy tennis rackets and several Willie Nelson LPs.
Wilhemina had breakfast at the soup kitchen on 20th St. and Avenue D run by Plant-a-Seed Ministries, the only establishment serving at this hour. There’s time to kill before the Zora Neal Hurston branch library opens at 9, and she’s glad for our company.
“I came here in 1994 from Detroit with my daughter. She wanted to be warmer. I was a stripper–an exotic dancer, I guess you could say.” Wilhemina nods toward Reno Rooming House: “My daughter’s in there.” As different men come out, she greets them by name but none answer, and cranes her neck as if expecting the young woman to appear.
“I was incarcerated,” Wilhemina says without explaining why or where. She takes a half-cigarette from her pants pocket, raises it to her lips and lights it, drawing pleasurably. Her face is pretty but hard. Suddenly she points to a yellow shuttered building behind us. “That used to be a juke joint. And this building where we’re standing used to be a juke joint. Avenue D used to be full of juke joints.” She walks to an empty lot, motioning for us to follow. “And back here was a rooming house. I know this house. I used to sleep there. Want to see it?” The yard festers with dandelions and sandspurs. At the rear of the house, half the wall is ripped open exposing a dirt floor and piles of trash.
Now Wilhemina sleeps at the Plant-a-Seed Ministries recovery house. Its minister, Al Pigozzi, was once an addict himself.
“I had a vision that I wanted to be in the heart of the mess,” Pigozzi explains. “I needed to be in the middle of Avenue D.”
With an hour still before the library opens — the Avenue D branch offers a comfortable place to spend the day — Wilhemina suggests a walk around the block. The day is turning fine and her mood lifts with the light. She speaks of her boyfriend with whom she’s currently on the outs. When we ask about black and white relations in Fort Pierce, she becomes agitated. She points up the street.
“The waterfront is just over there,” Wilhemina says. “That’s what this is all about. Redevelopment. They want us ethnics out.”
3. Elijah Mack
Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase.
It means no worries for the rest of your days. — The Lion King
The long, rectangle of a rooming house looks shuttered and blank. The front door is wide open, however, and a breeze smelling of laundry soap and cigarettes wafts in. Two women sit in plastic chairs outside blowing smoke from their nostrils, enjoying the sun. A young man wearing short dreads and a sleeveless undershirt makes them laugh.
“Elijah Mack,” the young man introduces himself, flashing one gold and one silver front tooth. His bearing is confident and loose like an athlete’s. In his handsome dark face, the smile and whites of his eyes are almost all one sees.
Elijah shows us to door number two, his room, busted after someone broke in. The room contains an unmade bed, a large amplifier and piles of clothes. Two course completion certificates hang on the wall from the fruit packing house where he works a seasonal job. “They stole the DVD player,” he says. “I getbroken into about once a month. But personally, I have no problems with people. I get along with everyone. I was raised well.”
Excusing himself, he calls the owner of the rooming house on his cell phone. “Dave is all right. He just bought the place. I help him keep an eye on things,” Elijah says.
Dave is Dave Ross, vice president of DL Group. Tanned, brawny, with tousled red-gold hair, he arrives quickly for a Sunday morning, looking more like the local lifeguard than a real estate development and foreclosure exec.
“What we’re trying to do here is turn back the buildings into affordable and elderly housing,” says Dave, rattling off a list of properties he’s acquired. “That word, ‘flip’? It’s a word of the past. I bought 28 units at 25th and I Street for $10,000 that sold in 2005 for $40,000 each. We make them look nice and rent them for whatever their social security checks can cover.
“This place,” he gestures toward the yellow cement block façade, “we’re redoing it as elderly housing. All the migrants are out except him,” he nods toward Elijah who’s out of earshot. “I really don’t want him here but he’s a good kid.
“There’s money to be made in this town,” Dave continues. “That’s why my brother and me formed this company. I’m here five to 10 years. You can’t do it from a distance. The big guns from Miami won’t touch Fort Pierce because they don’t want to live here, but I love it. We live on the beach. The pace is so laid back.
“Between blacks and whites, it’s definitely polarized, and the city is, you know, you have to kiss up,” Dave says. “But I’m okay with that. I can kiss ass all day. Whatever they want, I do it.”
Elijah joins us outside. He waves Dave goodbye, slides a Marlboro out of its box and lights up.
“The thing is, I like it here,” he says softly. “I used to live in St. Lucie, but St. Lucie is lame. Now I walk to work. I don’t have a license but I’ve got a car. I’ve got a girl.” He smiles with pride.
As we leave the rooming house, Elijah says in parting, “Hakuna Matata. No worries.” Standing like a sentinel in the gravel yard, his receding form looks expectant and strong.
4. Overheard
A City Data thread discusses Avenue D
“We used to egg the people at night on Avenue D when I was in high school.”
“Avenue D ‘not too bad?’ Ha-ha.”
“Ave. D: the devil’s avenue.”
“There’s a lot of haters on this board that say FP is crime-ridden. Don’t listen to them. FP’s bad areas are more isolated from the rest of the city than most cities in the U.S.”
“FP’s historical culture is southern. When I lived there as a kid in the ’60s, the schools were still segregated, movie theaters were segregated, and concrete block walls separated white subdivisions from black. Now they’re improving the downtown with cute little lamp posts and brick sidewalks. Of course, they had to do that to Avenue D as well. It does fool an occasional tourist into thinking they aren’t in a dangerous part of town. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“Fort Pierce wasn’t just a ‘nice’ place. It was a beautiful Eden. Unfortunately it is an old city that segregated the town and therefore has a large area where poverty and desperation flourished. People have been allowed to live in that area with no plumbing, electricity and worse.”
“Almost every city has an area that is, shall we say, disadvantaged. Fort Pierce has such an area. Stay away from that area, and you will be no worse off than anywhere else.”
“It looks like a bomb went off.”
“All I see is dope dealers, hollowed out buildings and chickens running in the street. Matter of fact, someone was shot and killed there last week”
“The residents in that area are reclaiming their neighborhood and just want to be left alone.”
“They put in big lights all around Ave D and blasted classical music to drive out the drug dealers. Personally, I’m impressed when I go back.”
“It’s almost a 3rd world city.”
“It’s changed, it’s changing, and it’s gonna change a lot more.”
“One day they will clean it up and the beautiful ghettoness of it will be gone.”
5. Food
“It’s huge. It’s beyond my imagination. I never, ever imagined this day would come,”
Out on ML King Boulevard, people are lining up for the biggest parade in years. Today is Martin Luther King Day. Tomorrow, America’s first black president, Barack Obama, will be inaugurated. Families fire up their barbecue smokers on the front porches. The Purge and Praise Temple of God posts a whiteboard menu of fried fish, pork barbecue and souse with pig’s knuckles in a tomato base.
Children lick the rainbow sprinkles from vanilla cupcakes and suck cherry red juicicles, while a farm stand vendor lops off the top of a green coconut and offers it for $1.
“When I was young they called me Young Blood. Then it was Good Blood. Now, just Blood. It means you’re family,” Al Black is saying as his order of eggs, bacon, tomatoes and silver dollar pancakes arrives at Allen’s Diner. Tall and ruggedly handsome, he wears a sky blue shirt, a gold chain, and, special for the occasion, a white golf cap emblazoned with “Mission Accomplished: Obama.”
In the Jim Crow 1950s, Al was repairing typewriters in Fort Pierce when some kids from the ‘hood started painting landscapes and selling them on Florida’s byways from the trunks of their cars. Later they would become known as the Highwaymen. Soon the demand for their work was so great that they needed salesmen. Al gave art sales a try. “I had five paintings in this hand and five in that, and I sold all I had,” he recalls. “There’d be a sign outside, ‘No niggers or Mexicans,’ and I’d walk right in. I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, you see, so I knew how to act with white folks. I knew if I said ‘good morning,’ I could get in the door. It ain’t so different today.”
“More coffee?” asks the waitress.
Al painted, too, doing much of his work in a Florida prison where he was incarcerated and where his murals are preserved. Now, he pages through a book about those murals while the waitress looks on.
“Wow, you really captured it beautiful,” she says appreciatively of a sunset scene. “What are you doing livin’ in Fort Pierce? You could go anywhere.”
Outside, the drummers, trumpeters and cheerleaders of 24 school bands march down ML King Boulevard cheered by hundreds of well-wishers. The floats belong to schools, churches and social services groups. Every one is emblazoned with pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and the words “Change is coming” or “Change is here!” Only one local business, a citrus packer’s, is represented. Among the few white faces, a man driving the Fort Pierce City Commission’s car demurs, “No, I’m not a commissioner, I’m just driving it for them.”
“This recipe came from the Arawak Indians,” says Vincent Barnett, stirring a pot of brown stew at Avenue D’s C-N-C restaurant while old footage of civil rights marchers plays on a giant plasma screen. “In Jamaica, we make it with fresh pimento leaves, scallions, garlic, ginger and thyme.” A pot of oxtail soup bubbles on another burner. A woman and her toddler son sit at a table mopping up mash and gravy with white bread.
At Reno Rooming House, someone is defrosting chicken breasts in the communal kitchen.
On a strip of grass, men are eating take-away from Styrofoam trays under a giant kapok tree.
“In prison they used to bring me the same food the wardens ate,” says Al Black over a last cup of coffee. “I lived better there than outside.”
“What they’re doing is working,” says C-N-C’s owner Mary Jackson of her neighborhood’s redevelopment. “The migrant jobs are over. It’s about tourism now.” We all steal glances at the plasma screen where Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech replays.
“It’s huge. It’s beyond my imagination. I never, ever imagined this day would come,” Mary says.
The air feels pitched with emotion.
Everyone seems happy. Everyone seems ready to cry.
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#Florida #Artists #BlackHistory #Highwaymen #Obama #race #segregation #JimCrow
