Our Black Year

by Maggie Anderson

  A plump teenager with large, warm eyes, who I later discovered was the niece of the older gentleman running the stand, smiled at us.

  “Welcome to our urban farm,” she said. “Please look around and tell me what you like.”

  She was tending to an adorable older couple who were dressed alike in jeans and sweatshirts from a family reunion. The woman was huge and huggable, like the mother from the movie Soul Food. Her mate was tall, thin, and very handsome in a Billy Dee Williams kind of way, and he had his arm around her shoulder. I was staring at them, thinking about John. I noticed her glasses were broken and his shoes were worn. Then I scanned the lot and realized my car was the only one in it, aside from a big truck that was parked next to the stand, which obviously belonged to the farm family. Did they all walk here? I thought. I hope these people live close.

  “And look at what I have for you,” I heard someone say.

  The elderly farmer had stepped from behind the stand to greet us. He had two baby pumpkins in his hands for Cara and Cori.

  “It’s Black Santa Claus!” Cori exclaimed. She had softened up, but Cara was still in a funk. The old man, with his white beard and short Afro, bright red overalls, black lace-up boots, and long-sleeved white shirt, did look like the Black Santa Claus from a poster at their day care center.

  I laughed and apologized.

  “She knows better,” I said. “Is this your stand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said proudly, and then he noticed Cara’s sad face. “What’s wrong little cutie? You don’t like pumpkins?”

  “Oh, they’re upset because I wouldn’t let them play over there,” I said. “It’s too far for me to watch them. So I told them we gotta get the produce first. She’ll be alright.”

  I hugged Cara. She took the pumpkin and smiled.

  “Keisha, I need ya’, honey,” he called. The niece came close. “You take the babies to the park over there. Make sure you watch ’em now.”

  She stood in front of the girls and stuck her hands out. Cara and Cori gave me the “Is this okay?” look, and I nodded. Keisha put the pumpkins in her pockets, took the girls’ hands, and they pulled her toward the playground. We all laughed.

  I shopped and got to know the old farmer. He told me he lived near Kankakee, about sixty miles south of Chicago. Jeremiah Wright, our pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, had spoken about the plight of these farmers, who had been working that area since the late 1800s, and how they were losing their land to consolidation by big, White-owned farms and the growth of Hispanic farms. In 1920 there were 820 Black farms in the state; now there were fewer than 50. Our church raised money for the Black farmers, signed petitions, and hosted their stand after services.

  I told him all this, and he thanked me for our efforts.

  “It’s because we don’t have reliable customers looking for us and helping us build a brand,” he said. “The other groups got contracts with big grocery chains. Why they gon’ do business with us, except as a token display of charity from time to time, when they can go to the White farmers they like and the Hispanic farmers?”

  He went on as I held his hand and nodded.

  “We need more Black business in the food industry. We can’t keep fighting for White folks’ scraps. Some of us can’t survive on that. And then, they just don’t want to do business with us. But Trinity and other churches are really helping us out.”

  We had not been to Trinity in a long while. We loved it, but it was far from where we lived. Once the babies came, getting there every Sunday became difficult. We kept saying we were going to start going back now that the girls were older, but we cherished our Sundays at home, especially during the time crunch that was The Empowerment Experiment’s inaugural year. Still, I was proud to be able to tell this noble man that we were Trinitarians and that we created EE.

  He was really excited, which got me pumped again. “Y’all have done so much to let people know that Black farmers is about to be extinct,” he said. “It’s so tough on us now. It was tough before, but at least there was enough of us that we could stand up for each other. Now we just trying to hang on. These weekend markets really help. And what you doing is really going to help us believe in the grocery stores again.”

  I kept turning around to check on the girls, who were just fine, laughing and playing. No other customers had approached, and he offered to help carry my bags to the car.

  It was a bright, enriching EE day, and so was every other weekly Saturday visit there. That farm stand became our produce lifesaver, offering a great selection—beautiful squash, apples, bananas, strawberries, grapefruit, and fresh greens—at really low prices. Apart from that, it was fun. On any given visit the farmers would toss us a couple extra apples and joke around with the girls. But when November arrived the farmers told us they were moving on for the season. This set up an anxious final few weeks for EE.

  Chapter 10

  Our Problems,Your Solutions

  BY EARLY FALL WE’D FINALLY BEEN ABLE TO TRANSFER some of our investment and retirement savings to a Black-owned financial firm, Ariel Investments LLC, where owner John Rogers Jr. is chairman, CEO, and chief investment officer. We encountered so many restrictions on accessing and moving these funds that making the switch took until October.

  At the same time, generating ongoing attention for our cause was proving to be a challenge, at least with the mainstream media. We had received an enormous amount of press, but it did not lead to the groundswell of support or the corporate sponsorship we’d hoped for. Eleven months into the project the media inquiries were fading, in part because we’d decided to focus on the Black community via speaking engagements and events. Between running The Empowerment Experiment on a daily basis, managing our appearances and speeches, and trying to deal with our growing anxiety over Mima’s condition, we were on overload.

  Plus, as the harvest season ended, the farmers’ markets disappeared, which meant once more we were having trouble finding decent, nutritious food at Black-owned stores. Facing our own version of a food desert, we resigned ourselves to completing this journey right where we’d started: J’s Fresh Meats. It was dreadful, yes, but it was relatively close and we basically had no other choice.

  One morning I hopped in the truck and headed for the West Side. About a half block away from the store I slowed down, scanning ahead for a parking place as close to the door as possible. The sidewalk and curb were clear. There were no unsavory characters or cars—just space. I pulled up right in front and then I saw why. J’s was closed, and not just for the day.

  I jabbed the button for the hazard lights and peered inside the store. No lights. No people. Nothing on the shelves but a few six-packs of what could have been applesauce, fruit cocktail, or pudding. Whatever they were, they were probably expired long before J’s did. The dust-caked ATM looked right at home. I didn’t see a “Closed” or “For Rent” sign. Why would I? No one cared that J’s was gone, and no one was rushing to rent the space. Just to be sure, I called J’s phone number and was greeted by the all-too-familiar EE refrain: “The number you have reached . . . ” Another one of Austin’s sorry, Black-owned grocery stores was gone.

  Of course, I thought. It’s just so fitting that this place closed. This is what our businesses had come to—a dilapidated, poorly run convenience mart that, inevitably, was doomed along with the battered, forgotten neighborhood around it. That deserted, forsaken store said it all.

  And it’s part of an ongoing trend. According to a 2007 article published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the probability of a Black-owned business closing is nearly 30 percent, compared to less than 23 percent for White-owned businesses. In addition, average sales for Black-owned businesses are often only 25 percent of the average sales for White-owned businesses.

  Here are a few other unsettling findings reported in that article:—Only 13.9 percent of Black-owned firms had annual profits of $10,000 or more, compared to 30.4 percent for White-owned firms.

  —Nearly
40 percent of all Black-owned firms operated in the red.

  —White-owned firms hired nearly three times as many employees as Black-owned firms, and median sales for Black firms were one-half that of White firms.

  The reasons for that dismal scenario, according to Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb, authors of the study, are the lower education rates among African Americans compared to Whites, the scarcity of resources—meaning money—in Black homes, and the much lower rate, compared to Whites, of Black business owners who had worked for a family member’s business before starting their own.

  The authors also cite US Census Bureau figures from 2005 showing a household net worth gap. According to these data “the median level of net worth for black households is $6,166 as compared to $67,000 for white households.” As staggering as it may sound, more recent figures indicate the gap is widening. In 2009 median net worth for Black households was $2,200. For White households, that figure was nearly $98,000.

  These statistics bring to mind another fraction: our status as three-fifths of a man during and right after the era of slavery. Almost 150 years later our wealth remains ridiculously low compared to our former owners. We were worth more as slaves.

  Figures like these not only demonstrate why we can’t start businesses, but they also show why we so badly need our businesses to succeed: so that we can economically empower the community with better jobs and higher salaries.

  But research highlights the sorry conditions for Black start-ups. Consider that the survival rate for non-minority-owned businesses was nearly 73 percent from 1997 to 2001, compared to 61 percent for Black-owned companies. Business expansion rates for Black-owned businesses during that period also were disheartening. About 26 percent of Black-owned businesses expanded from 1997 to 2001, the lowest expansion rate of all ethnic groups. The highest was Hispanic, at 34 percent, followed by 32 percent of Asian- and Pacific-Island-owned businesses and 27.4 percent of non-minority-owned businesses. Key factors for Black-owned businesses continue to be less access to capital and less management and technical training.

  Further, Black-owned firms trail well behind White-owned firms in that important category of start-up capital. In general, businesses perceived as having a greater potential to succeed can generate more of those essential funds. According to the article in the Journal of Labor Economics, just “8.1 percent of Black-owned businesses required at least $25,000 in start-up capital as compared to 15.7 percent of white-owned businesses.” Don’t let the word “required” throw you; the salient fact is that far fewer Black-owned start-ups were viewed as potentially successful compared to their White-owned counterparts and thus fewer Black entrepreneurs received crucial start-up capital, even though they still needed it. These differences, Fairlie and Robb write, “explain a substantial portion of the black-white gaps” in the success and failure of small business ventures. “Clearly lower levels of start-up capital among black-owned firms are associated with less successful businesses.”

  Experts note the absence of role models within Black families and posit that the lack of family business experience may contribute substantially to the sorry number of Black-owned businesses. Research shows that 12.6 percent of Black business owners had worked for a family member’s business, whereas the rate for White business owners was 23.3 percent. Experts call this “restricting [the black business owners’] acquisition of general and specific business human capital.” In other words, as Black people living on the West Sides or South Sides of America can tell you, we view each other as workers, not owners. Only Whites, Asians, Indians, or those from the Middle East are perceived as business owners capable of powering a family enterprise. It’s so damn discouraging.

  When I speak around the country, I don’t need to cite these statistics or detail what the experts have discovered because people in the Black community witness these phenomena every day. There is nothing revelatory about the fact that most young Black kids do not have family members or neighbors in business—aside from the in-home day care proprietor, barber shop, or braid salon owner.

  I’m grateful that some government, philanthropic, and academic institutions have explored the reasons behind Black business failure and have responded with lending assistance and training programs. But we need to pay more attention to the cyclical, interrelated, and interdependent nature of the problems the Black community faces. Difficulty obtaining capital, lacking family business experience, and lower educational attainment aren’t only causes; they are also effects of centuries of racism, exploitation, and sabotage.

  That’s one dark place we hoped EE would illuminate. Sure, we want more consumer support of Black businesses, but we also want to spark real conversation about the reasons behind the reasons, and we want to do something concrete about those core issues, not tinker at the periphery.

  Not that any of this information would save J’s Fresh Meats, obviously, but it did suggest that the place was probably doomed from the start. What the data did not explain was why Farmers Best suffered the same fate. If anyone could defy the statistics, it would be Karriem. For a while after his store closed, I thought that Black business owners had no way to succeed unless they were rap stars, super athletes, corporate sensations, one of their offspring, or just plain lucky. John saw things differently. He felt that KB was proof-positive of our original point—that many quality businesses exist and are critical to rescuing our community, but they are dying solely due to a lack of support.

  Either way, I still needed groceries.

  In my files I found a default grocer of sorts, Community Mart, another Black-owned store a little over a mile from J’s Fresh Meats. Our friend Terry Dean, a reporter from the Austin Weekly who wrote about EE early in the year, had been sending us articles about local Black businesses. One of those featured the headline, “Corner Store Teaches Youth about Business: Minister Operates Grocery with a Sense of Mission.” That was Community Mart. From the picture in the article I could tell the store was pretty small. In fact, it was really nothing more than a convenience store like J’s, which meant that it, too, probably resembled something out of a postapocalyptic minimart.

  Community Mart was in Austin, the same distressed neighborhood as J’s, but the church next door, New Philadelphia Christian Ministries, owned it, and they also operated a soup kitchen and homeless shelter. To the hardworking people of the West Side, New Philadelphia’s pastor, Bobby Butts, was a true hero. He took in drug addicts, at-risk youth, and felons, and he helped them change their lives for the better. I really wanted to believe in the place and would have spent more time at Community Mart just to support Pastor Butts. But too many raggedy, unsteady-looking men always hung around the store and the area in general. John was so concerned that he wanted to inspect it before I went there by myself. After stopping at Community Mart on his way to an appointment downtown and checking out the men hanging around the store, John declared it a danger zone.

  “Baby, if they were sitting on a bench reading a paper, or even waiting on a hot and a cot, that might be different,” he said. “But man oh man, when I got out of the car, they were sizing me up.”

  I went anyway because I had no choice. One afternoon in the late fall I drove there to buy a few basics, but the milk cooler was empty. The cashier, a hulking teenager, said the delivery guy had missed last week’s drop but was supposed to come today, except that he hadn’t. We got to talking—him, mostly—and the kid told me about his life. He had been an abused foster child turned gangster until the pastor gave him a second chance. The story wasn’t the only thing that stole my heart; he was so anxious to tell me about it. So when he said the milkman would probably be there in the next few hours and that I should drop by later that afternoon, I gave him my cell phone number and asked him to call me either way. Then I reached in my purse for a credit card to buy the couple of things in my basket.

  “Cash or Link,” the cashier mumbled. “Cash or Link.”

  I sighed and reached into my wallet for a few dollars. />
  About four hours later I drove back to Community Mart. At this time of year it gets dark pretty early, and I questioned my decision to go trekking back as the sun set just for a jug of milk. I knew John wouldn’t be happy about it either. But I wanted to support an honorable venture and a fragile kid, and we needed milk.

  I walked in and found no milk. My shoulders slumped. I sighed as I stared at that refrigerator case and thought about Pastor Butts, the church, the men outside, Karriem, John, the girls, and driving home without milk, past all those clean, well-stocked stores. I cursed under my breath. I was about to walk over to the cashier to scold him for not calling me, but he was a long-winded kid and I just didn’t have the energy for an extended encounter. I was done.

  Then I remembered I had a Citgo gift card with some money left on it and that there was a Citgo station with a small convenience store a couple blocks away. I drove over there.

  By this time it was dark, casting a fairly frightening aura over the place. I could taste the gas fumes. Like so many of these stations, unsettling characters were drifting in and out of the store and through the half-lit parking lot. The second I stepped from the car, some shabby, elderly guy hobbled over and started hassling me. He was shorter than me, missing teeth, and had an extreme, almost exaggerated limp. I could detect a fairly strong odor of what I thought was vomit. I felt sorry for him, thinking maybe he was a lost vet. But at that point, even if he was one of the Tuskegee Airmen, I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wasn’t in the mood. Please, oh Lord, I thought, please don’t let him bother me.

  “Fittee fuh twunee,” he sputtered. “Fittee fuh twunee.”

  I looked at him like he was speaking Mandarin. For a few seconds I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was saying. Then it dawned on me.