Foreverglades_Valiente2019

CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Politics in the Swamps
Hurricane of '28
Trying to out figure the workings of politics is about
like when you're in the piney woods fishing with a hooked
wire in a gopher hole. (A gopher is a dry land turtle, in
case some of you pink-eared Yankees may not know. He's
right good eating, too, if you can't find nothing better.)
So you're fishing in that gopher hole, but you never know
whether you'll pull out a tasty gopher, or a pesky rattlesnake.
Politics can work that way in Okeechobee's swamps
as well as under the capitol dome. So if'n you want to
learn what a well organized minority can do, you'll be right
smart amused when I tell you how Belle Glade got incorporated.
I was right there in the church house and I saw
it all happen, yet like the rest of the crowd, I was just
as blind as a hooty owl at high noon, as to what was a-going
on. Politics can move in a mysterious way, its blunders to
perform, but as it happened, this worked out O.K. in the
end.
Belle Glade was incorporated April 9, 1928, when the
whole population hereabouts, I reckon, white and colored,
couldn't have been more than two or three hundred. Of
course, by this time we had a rock road to West Palm
Beach, and the railroad had just arrived, yet only one year
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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119
BELLE GLADE FROM SW AMP TO SUGAR BOWL
Lauderdale, yet it it wasn't very popular. The locks were six
miles from town, and since the water below was too shoal
HURRICANE OF '28 127
Belle Glade's business district after the storm.
the midst of this hurricane, so I'm a-fixing for to tell you
what that catastrophe was like.
Now as you'll admit, a 150 mile wind is quite a breeze,
and can do a right smart of damage, yet it wasn't the wind,
it was the water which killed so many people here, water
piled high against that flimsy lakeshore levee. Now, this
levee had been built along the lake's south shore so that
wind tides couldn't drown out the farmers' crops. It was
never intended to withstand a hurricane, but then, no
hurricane had struck this lake since 1910 and maybe never
would again, so what the heck! This dike extended from
Bacorn Point along the south shore to beyond Moore Haven.
It was only six to eight feet high and was made of muck,
in places, of sand, whatever the land there happened to be.
Of course, the "Miami hurricane" in 1926 had broken the
dike, and like to have washed Moore Haven away, but
maybe nothing like that would happen again, so the dike
was patched up and people went on about their business.
GLADE CREST
down with a a machete, unless you were
get the cussed grass to to burn. Then, with
hoe, th
36
BEL
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