Foreverglades_Valiente2019

196 BELLE GLADE FROM SW AMP TO SUGAR BOWL
silent with fatigue ( or wine), others are laughing, flirting,
hugging or squabbling, for as the negro author, Zora Hurston,
said of these bean pickers, they "work all day for
money and fight all night for love". At street corners some
huddle around fires in trash barrels for a modicum of
warmth. Lunch rooms, pool halls and jook joints are jammed.
Dark figures sip wine at the bar in front, tables in
the rear are well occupied by card players at their games
of "skin" and the piano bangs loudly for a few dancing
couples, and everybody is having fun, I reckon.
Long after midnight the mob begins to drift away,
some to their dingy rooms, others, after waiting until the
places close, stretch out on benches and floors in pool
rooms and jooks. One time I remonstrated with a labor
contractor, himself a negro, that the jook joints should
close earlier so those poor bean pickers could get more
sleep, but he replied,
"Mistuh Will, dese nigguhs picks beans all day, and
dey jooks all night. Dey don't neveh git no sleep. De best
bean pickers in Belle Glade don't never sleep from N ovember
until May!"
And I reckon he was telling the stomped down truth!
GLADE FROM SW AMP TO SUGAR BOWL
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Harvest of Shame
You, I reckon, like most folks, just because it's in print,
believe everything you read in the papers and magazines,
and if you see a "documentary" on the television you know
blamed well it must be gospel truth. So now let me tell you
about a documentary that was filmed right here in Belle
Glade! On November 25, 1960, mililons of people in the
United States watched a documentary film called "Harvest
of Shame". It was on the TV network of Columbia Broadcasting
System. It was made by Edgar R. Murrow and it
was sponsored by the Philip Morris Cigarette Company,
and so naturally you would believe every word of it.
This broadcast was made to show the sad predicament
of migrant agricultural workers, mostly negroes, whom it
called "slaves" in the "sweat shop of the soil". A horrible
indictment it was of our farmers and citizens here who
allowed such terrible conditions to exist.
I saw only a part of this broadcast, but the Palm Beach
Post on February 8, 1961 published a 20-page supplement
which exposed the half truths and the outright lies portrayed
in this show. While in West Palm Beach I had stepped
into a store in time to hear the name Belle Glade on
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HURRICANE OF '28 133
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hurricane of '28
Life in these Everglades wasn't easy in those early
days, what with floods, freezes, muck fires, mosquitoes and
thieving buyers in New York. These things could be right
unpleasant, but they were not calamities. But we did have
one calamity. Oh brother! And that one was a humdinger!
It like to have wiped Belle Glade, Chosen and South Bay
off the map, and killed nearabout 2000 people. I'm speaking
of that Big Storm of September 16, 1928. Y'all have
heard tell of hurricanes and you've heard of tidal waves,
and you know blamed well that they are no trifling matters.
We were hit by the dead center of this hurricane, and
we had a right good imitation of a tidal wave as well.
Water surged seven feet deep in the streets of Belle Glade
in the black darkness of that September night.
The books tell us of a hurricane in 1900 which drowned
five or six thousand in the island city of Galveston, and
you can read of the 2200 who died when a mountain dam
broke at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Well, for loss of life
in a peace-time disaster our hurricane ranks right next
to them. More died here that night then even in the sinkings
of the Titanic or the Lusitania. I was right spang in
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, but he had made his way to the hotel,
that the other three had drowned.
water we all hastened to the hotel where we relapsed wet­
Jy to sleep on the floor until a murky day revealed the