by Rick Bragg
Home, and all the old and new miseries associated with it, seemed a long, long way from this place, where you could sit on Bean Point and watch the lights of the freighters glide under the towering, breathtaking Sunshine Skyway Bridge into the black emptiness of the bay, churning for the Tampa docks. In the daytime I worked in a tiny bureau with just two desks, sharing a rundown office with a middle-aged ad man who had one of the best names I have ever heard, Joe Romeo. On Saturday mornings he would come and bang on the door and take me fishing for trout on the saltwater flats of the bay, and at night he and his wife would cook them up with grits and beets and iced tea.
I lived in a two-bedroom apartment that was two bedrooms bigger than I needed, since I still didn’t have any furniture, but the rent was right and it was less than a block from the beach and the only supermarket anywhere close. I drove a silver 1966 Mustang convertible with virtually no rust. It had a 289 V-8 that scared the pelicans, and a loose front end that scared me. But it was pretty, from a distance.
For supper, on those nights we didn’t fry fish at Joe Romeo’s, there were two choices: a rambling joint for the tourists called Fast Eddie’s that served a good blackened grouper sandwich; and an equally touristy upscale joint called the Sandbar, where you could watch the sunset with your sweetie, if you could find one who was still speaking to you. For breakfast, there was a tiny place called Candy’s right on the water, where you could get a gravy and biscuit and eat it outside. I thought, truly, I was in heaven.
The newspaper gave me time and opportunity to tell stories about everything from poachers in the beautiful, mysterious Everglades to the bizarre case of a woman who had been beaten and brain-damaged by an attacker seventeen years in the past, but it only became a murder case when she finally died from a seizure brought on by her injuries. I wrote about criminals who stalked the elderly, about the last Florida panthers on earth, dying slowly in the Everglades. I wrote about mercury poisoning in the swamps and wetlands, and interviewed a man who married his own daughter and swore, “I didn’t know.” (He also told me that once, when he worked at a bar in Vegas, he used a nail to punch a hole in the belt of Elvis’s jumpsuit, to give the King a little more room to shake it.) But mostly, I was a serious journalist.
I did some stupid things. I believed that because I had grown up the way I did, I was just inherently tougher than my more urbane coworkers, and could get away with more. On the story on poachers, I needed to talk face to face with at least one, to give the story teeth. It is not hard to find a poacher in Florida, just look for a man with an airboat in his driveway. He will know somebody, if he does not have a dozen gator hides curing in his backyard, himself. I arranged not so much an interview as just a quick meeting, a chance to see them, ask a question or two, and then leave. The men I saw were not rustic heroes, just criminals, stealing from nature. They did not see what they were doing as anything wrong; their daddies had been free to take game when they wanted, however they wanted. But they knew they would be fined and maybe even go to jail if they were caught, and I was a risk to that. I was no risk, in my eyes. They did not give me their names. I did not look at their tag number. But as one of them reached behind the seat of his truck and slid out a .22 rifle—poachers like the .22 because it has a softer report and won’t draw the game wardens to them—I thought for just a second that I might die there. I am not trying to be melodramatic. Reporters live for war stories, except the ones who have been so genuinely frightened in so many terrible places that they do not need to scare themselves all over again with their own memories. But for just a second, on that sand road in the middle of the scrub, I knew I had risked my life for five or six paragraphs.
But that was only a second of bad time, lost in the rest. Some people spend lifetimes looking for the perfect fit. I had it for a while, as the South Suncoast bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times. I worked for an editor named Rob Hooker who defended his reporters and had a light hand when he edited a story, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had found a place where I could stay a while. My momma gave me my first home. The St. Pete Times gave me my second. The editor who hired me, Tash, had called it a place where people take their work more seriously than they do themselves. The work was what mattered, not where you went to school. I could do the work, and even as I did it I learned one agonizing lesson that would make me better at what I do.
I have said a few times that I try to lend dignity and feeling to the people I write about, but that is untrue. All you do is uncover the dignity, the feeling, that is already there. I learned to do that there.
In the spring of 1990, we learned that a woman in St. Petersburg had given birth to twins, joined at the chest, what people usually call Siamese twins. My editors sent me to try and convince the family to write about it. I made the mother a simple promise. I would portray her children as two distinct personalities, as little babies with a complicated medical condition, nothing more. I said I would treat the story, their story, with dignity. I kept my promises.
I spent months on what would be a tragic tale. I followed them from their birth, wrapped in each other’s arms, and through their surgeries, and finally followed their young mother and father through two funerals.
It was as heartbreaking a thing, on a purely personal level, as I had ever done. I will always remember the day I saw them in the nursery’s intensive care unit, the first time I had ever seen so many lives so near to death. To me, it seemed that anything, a faint breeze, a whisper, a loud sound, anything, could take them away. And in the middle of all those tiny, delicate, premature babies were the twins. I wanted to make perfect the way I described that place, those babies, and make other people see what I saw and feel what I felt. Almost all the time, you just paint a picture with the words and let people make up their own minds and emotions, but this time I wanted to force them to feel.
“Nurses on the late shift called the twins Miracle Babies,” I wrote, “but there never seem to be enough miracles to go around. Most babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at All Children’s Hospital are born too soon, incomplete. Some last for a while and then slip away, like beads off a broken string.”
We are taught in this business to leave our emotions out of a story, to view things with pure and perfect objectivity, but that was impossible on this story. I learned that objectivity is pure crap, if the pain is so strong it bleeds onto the yellowed newsprint years, or even decades, later.
The momma and daddy and one of the grandmas thanked me for it, sometime later, and I didn’t know what to say.
Florida really is a magical place, from the wonders of Disney World, where Goofy is really a sweating freshman from Clemson inside a mountain of plastic, to the dark sorcery of Miami, where the canals clog with the floating carcasses of sacrificed chickens and an occasional headless goat. You see some things there that you just don’t see anywhere else in the world, ludicrous things and frightening things and amazingly sad things. I will never forget sitting on the hood of my car on a spring day in 1990, and seeing a swamp fly. (I do not mean that I saw an insect in a swamp, but that I saw an entire swamp, fly.) The DEA and Manatee County Sheriff’s Office had overestimated the amount of dynamite needed to blast some little islands of ganja to smithereens, and when they pressed the button an entire swamp—trees, dirt, water, gators, snakes, turtles and frogs—rose up into the wild blue yonder. I sat there and watched it all rain down again, careful not to let any moccasins drop into my mustang, and went home and wrote a story about it. The next day I got a call from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, asking me if I was incensed by the inhumanity of it. I told him I felt kind of bad for the frogs and turtles but that, no, I felt no remorse whatsoever for the snakes and, to tell the truth, had once had a very bad experience with gators.
There was only one job in the world I would have traded my own for, and that was the one in Miami. It was a reporter’s nirvana, a place where smash-and-grab robbers stalked tourists with chunks of concrete, wh
ere whole skyscrapers stood on foundations of drug money, where the Tontons Macoute of Haiti reached across the Florida Straits to kill political enemies, and old men with hatred infusing every cell of their bodies played soldier in the Glades, dreaming of the day they could kill Castro.
Our Miami job came open in my second year at the paper, and I begged for it. I didn’t speak any Spanish or Creole, and what I knew about the complicated geopolitical situation I had read in books. I had never even been there. But the editors decided they would rather have a reporter who could write good stories for their newspaper than someone who could sound good at a dinner party and shift languages like a Lexus changes gears.
The editors put the announcement on the bulletin board in the newsroom, and a friend read it to me over the phone. It was written by John Costa, the deputy managing editor. It said, simply, that I was going to Miami.
“… and one of them, Bragg or Miami, will have to give.”
24
Miami, in madness
By Miami standards, it was a popgun riot, a little bitty thing. But I think about it from time to time and I still get a little sick. The terror is a vague thing now, but the shame … I guess it follows you into the clay.
I am not above attempting to enthrall an intern with tales of high excitement. I am not a romantic figure but I have not led a humdrum life, either. I have not done a lot but I have seen some things, right up close, and sometimes there were small risks in that. But one story I almost never tell, because it is personal in a way that leaps well beyond grief, love, hate. It involves fear, and that is nothing to be proud of.
It was June 27, 1991, a Thursday, about 10 P.M. It was hot, the way it can only get in Miami at night. Some places cool after it gets dark, but some nights in Miami it just feels like someone has draped a black cloth over the place. On South Beach, the wind blows off the water and cools it a little, but the ocean breeze never reaches Liberty City and Over-town. It gets hot there and stays hot till November.
My girlfriend at the time, Rachel, was a reporter for the Miami Herald, and said she had to work late that night on the big story of the day. The city was tense, more tense than usual. Black people—in many ways a forgotten people in Miami—were incensed by a court’s ruling that had overturned the conviction of a Hispanic Miami police officer in the manslaughter of two men. In some cities, such a thing would bring out the preachers and pontificators. It would solicit signs and picket lines. Miami is different. In Miami, it meant that the start of the burning, the rioting, was just a matter of time. Riots had raged and burned across Liberty City and Overtown four times in the past decade after white officers killed blacks or were acquitted in killings. Miami was due for another. It was almost tradition.
People were dying in racial violence here long before anyone had ever heard of Rodney King. The most recent riot had been three days of burning, shooting and beatings in January 1989, after Miami police officer William Lozano shot Clement Lloyd, twenty-three, an unarmed black man who was driving toward the officer on a motorcycle. The motorcycle then crashed into a car, killing Lloyd and his passenger, twenty-four-year-old Allan Blanchard. In the rioting that followed the shooting, one person died, 11 were injured and 372 arrested. Thirteen buildings burned.
Lozano was eventually convicted of two counts of manslaughter, and the community was satisfied. But on Tuesday, June 25, 1991, when a higher court reversed that decision to set the stage for a new trial, it was a match scraped across the backs of many black people here. The court had ruled that the trial should have been moved out of Miami because the fear of violence in the black community contributed to the guilty verdict.
For one night, then two, nothing happened. Black leaders walked the streets calling for peace, begging for it, telling the angry people there how senseless it was to burn their own neighborhoods, again. The peace held, but it was a rubber band stretched just a little too tight. The Miami Herald reporters were on constant watch, and I told Rachel to be careful. Riots will hurt you, faster than anything.
The St. Pete Times, not being the local paper, did not have to be so vigilant. I know how coldhearted it sounds, but the fact was, I had the night off as long as the city did not burn. With my girlfriend gone, with time to kill, I did what any man would do. I invited my friend Sean Rowe over to eat a steak and watch The Wild Bunch.
I forgot all about the possibility of a riot until the phone rang, and an editor at my paper told me I might want to stick my head outside and see if I smelled smoke. He told me that the worst possible thing had happened. A Miami police officer had shot a black man, and if the city had not erupted already, it surely would.
By early evening, a crowd of people had stormed a city bus, dragged out the driver, a woman, and beat her bloody. A police officer was run over by a car as a film crew watched, and whole city blocks of people were hurling rocks and bottles as scores of police moved in, standing vigil in bulletproof vests and helmets. They stood back to back in some neighborhoods, frantically scanning the rooftops for snipers, deflecting rocks with plastic shields.
I am not a brave man, but I do my job. I had heard of reporters who covered riots from their television sets. I may lose my nerve someday and do it myself, but at the time I knew I had to get close.
My Mustang had died on me the year before—actually the brakes failed and I crashed through a parking meter and into a palm tree on Biscayne Boulevard—and I had bought a burgundy 1969 Firebird convertible that would run most of the time. It was a good car to cat around in here, but a bad car to drive into a riot. It would be a magnet for attention, and when you drive around in a neighborhood where people want to hurt anyone whose skin is white, you cannot afford attention. My friend Sean, a former reporter for the Herald who was now an investigative reporter for New Times in Miami, told me he would drive us in his wife Lois’s Toyota. He grinned.
He is one of those rare people who thinks that the more absurd life is, the more it’s worth living. But he is also what we call in Alabama a capable man. If you insult him, he will fight you. He once rode a tramp freighter from Miami to Haiti with a crew of cutthroats and thought it was amusing that the raggedy, barely seaworthy freighter lost power halfway through the trip and, its lights dark, went drifting broadside through one of the most traveled shipping lanes in the Atlantic. He had serious guts, and while I knew that he wanted to cover the riot for his own paper, the real reason he went with me that night was so I wouldn’t go alone in a car that screamed, “Here I am. Hit me with a rock.”
The police were handling this riot differently from ones in the past, when they just cordoned off large areas and let the violence and the fires rage. This time they seemed determined to quell the violence, and moved into violent areas. That created, instead of a well-defined line of violence and defense, pockets of it. Some blocks were safe, some were not. We were unlucky enough to drive through one that was not.
There is a feeling that comes over a place in a time such as that, or maybe it just comes over you and you project it onto the dark buildings and broken streetlights around you. You can get killed dead in broad daylight in Overtown and Liberty City in the calmest of times, by people who only want your car or your wallet. But I had driven all over those neighborhoods, day and night, and never felt this kind of menace.
That night, as we weaved our way through the neighborhood, I was afraid of it. Now and then we would see people running. I remember one man carried a length of chain. Sean and I didn’t talk much; I guess we were afraid our fear would show too much.
It happened on Third Avenue Northwest in Overtown, in front of a small housing project. There seemed to be a lot of people out in the street, but they were quiet, lining both sides of the road. There were men and women and some children, and we slowed down to a crawl because some of the children were running back and forth across the street.
The next second, the air was full of rocks and bottles and curses. Some banged into the car, one smashed a side window and one hit me under my ear
, where my jaw links to the rest of my skull, and for a second I didn’t know or feel anything. Sean told me later that I screamed when I was hit. I just remember rocks and curses flying, as a young man without a shirt on came running straight up to the now open window and threw something inside, point-blank, but missing me somehow, missing Sean. As frightened as I was, I managed to mumble, “Whatever happens, keep moving, just keep moving.” Then I saw something that made me sick with fear.
As we rolled slowly between the rows of people, trying not to hit anybody, I saw a long black car, a junker, roll out from between the buildings and block the road. There was no one at the wheel; people were pushing it out there to block the street. Instead of panicking, Sean whipped the steering wheel to the left, hard, taking the car up onto the sidewalk, off the road completely, and somehow missed the trees, the parked cars, the people. Somehow, we got around it, we got away.
I do not want to believe it, but I think we might have died there, if he had lost his nerve, if he had stopped, if he had stomped hard on the accelerator and run over someone. People say all the time, with trite and silly melodrama, that someone, by their actions and clear thinking, saved their life. It may be that this time, he did save mine.
We made it to a block that the police had more or less secured. Some jackass television reporter tried to interview me, and I said no, I don’t think so. There were other people there who had been through the same thing, and they were black. In the dark, in their anger, people had thrown rocks at anything that moved. I was a little fuzzy-headed, but fine. I went looking for a phone, to call in the story.
