Audio By Carbonatix
It’s the women who keep ramshackle, decaying Overtown held together as it waits (and waits) for the revitalization promised almost since the day it was destroyed. And nobody works harder or longer than the grandmothers, the elders who remember when Overtown was the premier place for a rich and exciting black culture. On the shoulders of these ladies — some of them barely middle-age but already getting old in body and soul — the weight of the whole community rests.
In 1957 Louise Jones came to Overtown. She was just sixteen and already a mother. Back then Overtown was something special to a little country girl from bucolic Tallahassee. “When I first came here, Overtown was a nice place to live,” she remembers, eyes sparkling behind her gold-rimmed bifocals. “Third Avenue and Second Avenue was just like downtown, with stores for shopping, restaurants, two theaters, and nightclubs.” Louise grins broadly, revealing spaces in her bottom row of teeth; a couple are missing, others crooked. Then her face crumbles and she looks serious: “We don’t have anything in Overtown now.”
Louise lives almost in the shadow of Interstate 95, the concrete-and-steel colossus that — along with desegregation, the exodus of well-paying blue-collar jobs, the drug war, and the War on Poverty — cut the heart out of a community once renowned as the Harlem of the South. Middle-class blacks fled to Liberty City or the suburbs in South Dade and Broward County. The clubs and most of the shops and restaurants closed. The theaters fell into disrepair (although the historic Lyric was restored in 1999).
But Louise stayed and raised six children, who now range in age from 21 to 44, working as a laundress at a nursing facility. She raised some of her grandkids too. “It was hard work,” she allows. In 1972 she signed on to a HUD housing cooperative called Town Park Plaza North, at 1945 NW Fifth Pl., on the east side of I-95 just north of the I-395 interchange. The idea was that residents would help pay into the development’s mortgage over 40 years and would gain equity. But in recent years the place has deteriorated while maintenance fees and mortgage payments have gone up so much some of the original tenants have been forced to move.
Louise, who is 61 years old, pays $470 per month for her four-bedroom home, more than half her $865 monthly disability check, which she began receiving in 1996 after open-heart surgery left her unable to work. On top of that, the electric and phone bills regularly top $200 together, especially during the summer heat. Louise also takes care of her youngest daughter, who has lupus, and her daughter’s two children, a nine-month-old baby and a three-year-old toddler.
Medicaid covers most of her prescriptions, but not the ones with brand names. For those she must pay $20 per month each. She digs a fistful of prescriptions out of her purse and spreads them out on the table, sorting them and tapping a finger on the ones she has to pay for. “That’s $60 a month right there,” she says. “Food stamps is how we eat.”
Sitting across the table from Louise is another grandmother, who lives a few doors down in Town Park Plaza North. Jeanette Kennedy shakes her head at the familiar story. “Lot of people living in Overtown trying to make it,” she begins. “I’ve been eighteen years in Town Park. I’ve got five children and four grandkids in the house right now, a three-bedroom.”
Jeanette was raised not far from Louise, in Madison, Florida, near the Georgia state line. At almost the same time Louise was moving into her new home in Town Park, then fourteen-year-old Jeanette’s mother was moving her entire family to Miami. Wearing a drab brown shirt, shorts, and white sneakers she has changed into after work, 44-year-old Jeanette sums up her current situation, a tired expression on her face. Her eldest daughter, age 27, has a three-year-old and a one-year-old. The next-oldest daughter, who is 25, has a five-year-old and a one-year-old. The son is 24 and about to find his own place. A third daughter is nineteen years old and “she don’t know it yet but she about to be going to the Job Corps.” The youngest daughter is ten and attends Dunbar Elementary.
For twenty-one years Jeanette has worked as a nurse assistant and technician at Mercy Hospital; fourteen of those years she also held a second job (in the Miami Herald‘s mail room) to make ends meet. Of her children, currently only one has a job, part-time. “My eldest daughter cannot find a decent job in Miami,” she complains. “She done tried everything, even the Internet. She’s going to have to go to Broward.” Jeanette herself makes a decent wage, bringing home about $21,000 per year before taxes. But after taxes and health insurance, she says her monthly pay is less than $1100, and that’s a stretch to cover both children and grandchildren. “We making do with the one check,” she shrugs, adjusting her glasses and pursing her lips. “What can you do? You can’t put them outside on the road.”
In 1990 more than half of Overtown’s nearly 12,000 residents were living in poverty, according to a City of Miami report. The median household income was just over $10,000. The school dropout rate was 57 percent.
By the end of the prosperous Nineties things hadn’t changed much in O-town. Just in the neighborhood in which Louise and Jeanette live (census tract 31), the statistics reflect that more than half the households brought in less than $15,000 per year, with most of those making less than $10,000. In 1999 single women with children made up nearly 70 percent of the families living in poverty. Also in this neighborhood, about 30 percent of the grandparents living with their grandkids in 2000 said they were primarily responsible for their grandchildren (others reported they had taken responsibility for them in the past).
Nothing new to Louise and Jeanette. “Every day they ask for 50 cents, or now it’s up to a dollar,” Jeanette sighs. “They think I’m made of money. They don’t know how hard it comes.” That’s another tie that binds these women, as it does all parents. Sometimes their children and grandkids don’t seem to understand the sacrifices of work the way the older generation does. Mother is seen as the bedrock who can always somehow look out for everyone — because she always does.
But then, for younger African Americans in Miami, local work seems even harder to come by than it used to be because there are fewer jobs and more people every year to fill them. The City of Miami itself calculates that more than 40,000 jobs left town in the Eighties alone. By 1990 the unemployment rate in Overtown was more than ten percent. Just in the small neighborhood around Town Park Plaza North, the unemployment rate recorded ten years later is almost nineteen percent (the picture’s a little better in other parts of Overtown). “Jobs,” reflects Jeanette. “When you get one you got to hold on to it, even if you don’t want to. I never thought I’d be at Mercy 21 years. I was going to quit every year, but I didn’t. My mother worked 29 years at the Jackson nursing home. Francis Hall is her name. Seven kids she raised on that one job and never got welfare. I learned from her.
“The reason I took two jobs was because I had to raise my niece and nephew,” Jeanette continues. “Their momma was on drugs and I didn’t want the state to take them. So I kept them until they was teenagers and she took them back.”
Louise nods understandingly. “I got stuck in that same situation in 1989,” she recalls. “I took in four of my grandkids. I couldn’t get both a [welfare] check and food stamps, only one or the other. In the early Nineties I went in and they gave me a check for four dollars. Four dollars for four kids? They said I made too much money because I was working at the laundry. At the laundry! I’ll never forget that. I took that check and I never went back. I raised six children of my own. All my life doing this — don’t you think I deserve a break now?
“My house like yours,” she tells Jeanette. “I have a daughter is sick, so she receive Medicaid and food stamps. She has lupus and her fingers swells up so bad she can’t do much for the kids sometimes. But she can’t get disability even though she can’t work. And the rent just seem to go up.”
“Don’t even talk about rent,” Jeanette harrumphs. “We pay $486 a month for the three-bedroom. Plus $200 a month for the light bill and $165 for the phone. I don’t know why it’s so high. The phone company can never seem to tell me when I ask.”
Louise shifts in her chair. This is a subject — paying too much for too little — that’s near to her as well. She circles back to the topic of Town Park, where residents are engaged in a protracted battle with their own board of directors over the finances and generally poor management of the 169-unit complex. “I’ve lived in Town Park for thirty years and it took me four years to get them to put some cabinets in there,” Louise says. “The mortgage was supposed to go down over the years and be paid off at 40 years. But now they telling people it’s just begun to be paid off.”
The women say their homes are deteriorating and in need of repairs. Three years ago an army of local do-gooders from the United Way and other groups descended upon Town Park, painting the exteriors of the housing complex, landscaping, sodding, and installing playground equipment, basketball courts, picnic benches. This was great for the residents, but didn’t fix the problems inside the homes — plumbing and electrical woes, or in Jeanette’s case air conditioning. “They keep raising the mortgage but my air conditioning doesn’t work,” she says. “I complain but it doesn’t do any good.”
Town Park was cited by HUD in 1998 for some $600,000 in needed repairs, so the maintenance fee was increased by $100 per housing unit per month. “It’s the same structure, same people living there, so why it keep going up so much?” Louise asks. “I was paying $138 a month in 1972 and that included the light bill. Then in 1976 we started having to pay the light bill, and the rent has started going up from there. A lot of people had to leave. And this is in Overtown, right?”
By that Louise means it’s the ghetto, where affordable rent means having to share the neighborhood with drug dealers and the random violence fostered by poverty. This is a place where people rioted in the streets several times in the Eighties after the cops killed black men. A place where children walk past wasted junkies and small-time hoods every day on the way to school. It’s hardly a place you could imagine Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, or Dinah Washington packing the clubs, as in the old days. “It was fine to live there then,” Louise says. “But you know, you afraid to come out your door now.”
“Please,” Jeanette interjects. “You don’t even come out your door.”
Repeatedly Overtown has been targeted by the city and its elected officials for projects that were supposed to bring business, jobs, and life back to the historic black center. But progress has been murderously slow and needlessly complicated by politics. “They went and tore down a lot of buildings and don’t put nothing back,” Louise says with annoyance. “Art Teele took that [Community Redevelopment Agency] money and built two little old parking lots where nobody parks. It’s terrible.”
“Something is going on and nobody is telling us,” Jeanette comments darkly.
This is a rumor that has been making the rounds of Town Park, and Overtown in general, for years. The idea is that Miami’s power elite wants to gentrify Overtown and make it a fit place for Anglos and Latinos to live — by displacing poor black families. At Town Park some sense a nefarious plan at work: Raise the rents to get people out, then sell the land for more profitable housing developed by the downtown business crowd.
Residents see signs of renewal here and there, but they don’t yet see a place for themselves in it. Will they be the ones getting the new jobs? Will they be the ones living in the new homes? Many doubt it. “We need something back here,” Louise grumbles. “We used to have furniture stores. We need a hardware store. You gotta go down south or up to Aventura just for a movie.”
“The money runs through Overtown, but it never stops here,” Jeanette laments.
Louise is more optimistic. “You have to keep hope alive,” she says. “That’s all you can do.”
But Jeanette will not be mollified. “It’s never going to change,” she says.
Louise concedes: “As long as there’s politics up in here…”
Jeanette interrupts: “Miami is going to be Miami.”
Louise nods her head gravely: “It’s going to be Miami.”
