I WAS ONLY FIVE WHEN IT HAPPENED, BUT I STILL REMEMBER May 17, 1980, like it was yesterday. Hell, I’m sure every black person in Miami remembers that Saturday evening. I’ve been blessed with a photographic memory. Sometimes I wish I could forget shit because my memories aren’t necessarily the stuff of daydreams.
It was hot as hell that day. I was in the courtyard playing with my friends while Scoop was telling a familiar story of the good old days, when Overtown was a black man’s “piece of paradise” in Miami.
“Yeah, that was our little piece! You’re damn right it was!” declared Scoop. “Boy, Billie Holiday would come to the Sir John and get that thing jumping!” He had this way of nodding his head real matter-of-fact-like after each declaration. Then he slapped his hand on his knee. Just in case you were misinformed or lacked the knowledge, Scoop gave you Miami Black History 101, his version of course.
“That’s the problem with you young-uns,” continued Scoop. “Don’t know your goddamn history. Walking round here lost.”
“I swear your mouth just don’t tire, does it?” my mother chimed in. “Those babies don’t wanna hear your foolishness.”
We sure didn’t, but Scoop didn’t offer intermissions. He paused for a minute, then delved back into his tall tales. His favorites were always those about the Vietnam War.
When he was sober enough to keep his stories straight, he actually drew a crowd. Like most men from his generation, Scoop was a slave to many vices. Johnnie Walker Black was his poison, his lover, confidant, trusted friend. No woman could have filled the void Lady Liquor occupied in Scoop’s heart. Everyone knew something happened to Scoop in Vietnam. Like a couple of my uncles, the dude just wasn’t right. They say all of those brothers who went over there got fucked-up. He had a constant twitch, as if he was seeing demons and shit in the corners of his eyes. But like I said, when he was sober, his stories drew a crowd. That Saturday he had an audience.
“Boy, I tell you those women were something else!” he yelled. “Not like these wenches over here giving you lip all the time.”
Scoop talked about how he and his buddies “tossed up” those Asian women. Honestly, I don’t think any Asian dude would be happy with the juicy details Scoop gave most evenings on their women’s “love for chocolate.” He went on and on about “chocolate fishing” in “yellow seas.” “Oriental diving” is what he called it. He could have spared us the details about how they loved his anaconda, but tact wasn’t a part of Scoop’s personality. (Actually, his stories of the “comfort women,” as they were called, showed just how much women are abused worldwide. Advocacy groups said the Vietnamese and American military new about the forced prostitution and encouraged it.)
At least Scoop got his rocks off in that musty old jungle. He even claimed he had a kid over there. No one in the hood could have pictured a Chinky-eyed Scoop. Now, that would have been some freaky shit. But he said he was 100 percent sure he had a kid and was stacking his chips to make the trip to go back and never return to this “sorry shithole.”
We knew he was never making that trip, but folks in the hood have a habit of imagining things to look forward to so they can ignore, temporarily at least, the nightmare surrounding them. It was Scoop’s way of coping, I guess.
His next target was the government, Lyndon B. Johnson in particular.
“What a jackass!” he fumed. “I swear to God those crackers go around just pissing everywhere.”
My mother warned him to watch his mouth around us kids, but it was to no avail. Scoop was going to vent as much as he damn well pleased.
“I’m gonna tell you what the most messed part is,” he continued.
A lady Scoop was friendly with jeered, “What is it Scoop? We’ve just been dying to hear it.” The two had a love/hate relationship. They would bite each other’s head off one minute and defend each other to the death the next.
Scoop peered down hard at the ground, then slapped his right hand on his knee. The Betty Boop tattoo on his forearm is still clear in my mind. Most of the other cats that came home from Vietnam had them. He got his inked by a merchant in a village and came down with a case of hepatitis that nearly killed him.
I used to think, “Damn, that’s some cold, hard shit.” But something told me that the tat was more a scar of pain than a badge of honor. It told on the madness of that war, the nightmare that haunted him. He came back with his limbs, but his soul was still wandering along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“Woman, I’ll tell y’all if you’d let a grown man speak! That’s the problem with y’all sisters these days. Gloria Steinman or whatever her name is got all ya’ll believing in that damn women’s rights bullshit.”
He continued, “They sent us niggers to clean their mess up!”
A couple of the older cats nodded in agreement. When Scoop felt us youngsters alongside my aunt and mother weren’t taking him serious, he turned to those old dudes. Scoop and those dudes were always blaming the “man” for getting Negroes to clean up their mess. In the world according to Scoop, all the roads to the world’s problems led to the man.
Poverty.
Disease.
Crime.
Somehow that white guy living in his pad beyond the bay over there in Coral Gables, Pinecrest, or on Sunset Island was playing a part. In Scoop’s opinion white folks were genetically disposed to getting over on their colored neighbors. Hell, given the way blacks ended up over here in the Pork-n-Beans, it’s hard for anyone to disagree.
In the early days, blacks weren’t allowed to own businesses in downtown Miami. After working all day at the white-owned businesses, black workers headed across the railroad tracks to Colored Town. The neighborhood was a shantytown. With no running water or proper sanitation it reeked of rats and disease. Nevertheless, the residents turned something out of nothing. Kind of like the way slaves used to sing those Negro spirituals to get them prepped and primed to pick cotton for hours in the grueling sun, folks in Colored Town turned a negative into a positive. We’ve been doing that ever since we got dragged here from across the Atlantic. We somehow turn our pain into joy, our cries into smiles, then get the world dancing.
Look at the blues. B. B. King looks like he’s going through hell on that guitar, but go into any swanky spot like South Beach’s Prime 112 or Rue 57 in Manhattan and look at the smiles on those rich folk’s faces as they wash down filet mignon with cabernet while King plays in the background.
Hell, even Caribbean black folk turned their songs of struggle into a cross-cultural celebration. You ever wondered why the song “One Love” gets played more than “Crazy Baldhead”? They even rock to “I Shot the Sheriff!” Bob actually sings that he put a cap in some cracker’s ass for not letting him grow his weed, but they shuck and jive away to it! So it was in Colored Town.
The folks there somehow turned that rat-infested shithole into a piece of paradise. D. A. Dorsey was one of the main movers and shakers. He used his skills as a carpenter to build homes for blacks much like E. W. F. Stirrup did several years before. Stirrup left the Bahamas at fifteen and soon started mixing in real estate and ended up buying out a white dude he worked for. He rented the homes he owned to newly arriving Bahamians so they could get their foot in the door.
Dorsey took it further. He started buying land throughout the country, even some close to Fisher Island. A brother living close to the ocean was unheard of in those days. Blacks weren’t allowed to go to the public beaches, so Dorsey brought it to them. He even opened a hotel, bank, and school for blacks on his way to becoming the city’s first black millionaire. Colored Town’s main strip was booming.
In the 1930s folks called it Little Broadway. Northwest Second Avenue was what people called the center of the “Harlem of the South.” All the greats from Billie Holiday to Count Bassie flocked there after finishing their shows down on Miami Beach, where blacks weren’t allowed to stay at the hotels. They got to rocking and grooving right there in the shadows of downtown. The soul food cafés and jazz lounges made Northwest First Court from Second to Twentieth streets the place to be. But the real VIPs hung at the Sir John.
The good times wouldn’t last long. Officials decided to run the I-95 expressway right through the heart of Overtown for a faster route to South Beach. Thousands of folks were forced out when the place was flattened. Many moved to Liberty Square, but those white folks in Liberty City saw us coming and freaked the hell out. They built a wall at the south end of the projects to keep us out of their section. Other folks moved to Scott-Carver Houses. Harlem died. In place of those famous nightclubs, crack houses now stand. Homeless folks sleep on flattened cardboard boxes in the vacant lots.
Those events landed my family here, in the Beans, forced to listen to Scoop’s foulmouthed narration of that history each and every evening. But damn, could you blame him? The truth is folks in Miami never got along. It’s what happens when you pack a whole bunch of different people on a patch of land and tell them to work it out in the hot sun.
Most recently, Scoop’s anger and that of most of black Miami had turned toward people who looked like us, but in a lighter shade.
The thousands of Cubans who came over during the 1960s had formed their own little thriving city within a city. Hell, our mayor, Xavier Suarez, was Cuban. Now, it’s true the government helped them gain their foothold, but it is what it is. The mansions in Coral Gables speak for themselves. They acquired power. Mucho power. Even other Caribbean immigrants who came to Miami around the same time, who were treated even worse than the Cubans, started moving past us. But the consensus in the Pork-n-Beans, the Swamps, Chocolate City, the Blues, and other African-American projects in Miami was that those “exotic niggas with strange accents” are coming over here taking the goodies King and Malcolm died for us to have.
“They can all go back on the tires they washed up on,” folks would say. “Got the nerve to call me nigger in the county my granddaddy built and his granddaddy built.”
Miami was on fire long before we lit the match that Saturday.