Only the Strong Survive
(Page 6 of 8)
Hard times came after 1973. John deMenil, HOPE’s most important patron, died that year; grant monies dried up; financial entanglements within HOPE took a toll. But with new director Harvey King, an ex-schoolteacher from Refugio, and Barbara Marshall, HOPE is revitalizing its programs. Late last September came $164,000 under the Emergency School Aid Act. The National Endowment for the Arts in October announced a grant of $15,000. Marshall will use it for continued support of the theater training program, which has been out of money since last June’s freedom festival. Bringing culture to the ghetto, making residents aware of their heritage, giving teenagers a chance, perhaps, to escape by developing their acting abilities and knowledge are slow and expensive tasks—but things are happening, and at a most unlikely address.
“In the Fifth Ward,” says Barbara Marshall, “you could go from terror to happiness in thirty minutes. As a little girl walking down Lyons, you could be chased by a dirty drunk shouting the most evil things and, in the next minute, escape into a church and hear heavenly gospel singing with the preacher bringing you ice cream. A black poet once wrote, ‘You climb into the streets like you do the ass end of a lion.’ That’s Lyons and Jensen.”
She grew up quickly. She was orphaned as a young girl, when her mother died at 30 and her father at 33 of tuberculosis. Fifth Ward, then as now, was a rip-roaring place—tough, brutal, savage, yet full of life. From the beginning all her world was a stage despite, or perhaps because of, growing up in the shotgun houses of aunts and grandmothers south of Pearl Harbor amid the squalor bred by poverty.
“The worst whipping my father gave me was when he caught me dancing with my girl friends in the corner grocery for Hershey Kisses. I loved to perform even then, when I was five or six, and he had told me about shaking my behind in public. He taught me about the streets, about strangers, sex, my body, that life out there was very uncertain.”
She remembers the neighborhood violence, men filled with whiskey and rage, cutting and fighting. One incident was prophetic. A neighbor, drunk and half crazy, beat his wife out in the front yard and raised their small baby over his head, as if to dash it to the ground. Last year, in the Equinox Theatre presentation of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Barbara Marshall played the powerful Lady in Red whose husband, Beau Willie, does just that, (“i stood by beau in the window / with naomi reaching for me / & kwame screamin mommy mommy from the fifth story / but i cd only whisper / & he dropped em”).
Until she entered Texas Southern University, Barbara lived with several families in foster homes, her nine brothers and sisters scattered around Houston. She sang in the church, acted (mostly tragic roles) at Wheatley, majored in drama at TSU, and received a graduate speech pathology degree from Northwestern University. She returned to become Houston’s first black public school speech pathologist.
“Besides the violence, mostly I remember Fifth Ward as also a giving place, people without much helping each other, merchants selling more for less, neighbors sticking together during the inevitable crises. It’s still that way if you look hard enough. Despite society, or certainly the law, not offering much help or protection, people here remain decent and full of hope.”
Valuable Real Estate
In the green years of hope and youth for Fifth Ward, the land to the south near Buffalo Bayou was the best. Known as “the Bottom,” then as now, there were plum and peach orchards, two dairies, a cotton farm, and baptisms on Sunday right where the cattle forded after traveling down what is now Gregg Street. It was choice real estate and it sat almost like an island, watching the dirtier and dustier streets and houses coming up closer, lapping it like the sea.
Then it was inundated, as the poorer people were pushed south toward the bayou. The shabby shotgun houses with outdoor toilets and rags for window glass were stacked together like rows of dominoes. It became the most common area for “burnouts,” grudge fires to avenge an insult. In the Bottom were the biggest rats, meanest dogs, worst stench, and deepest mud in Fifth Ward, all this in a shroud of constant steam and smoke from burning rice-hull piles stacked by the nearby Comet Rice Company. It was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell; and it was literally a dump.
The city dump moved to the north bank of the bayou in the twenties, providing food, clothing, toys—in short, survival—for many of the Bottom residents. The center of Fifth Ward activity was just north, about where IH 10 and the Eastex Freeway now intersect, a place known everywhere as the “Big Tree.” Here was the end of the Lyons Avenue streetcar line. Near the huge oak was a hotel, a fish market, one of the first Danburg stores in Houston, shoe stores, and a barbershop. Gamblers shot craps in Danburg’s horse trough until the police arrived, then fled, leaving only small change that was scooped up by the children.
Most of the worst poverty is gone. In 1947, Brown & Root construction company bought first 79 acres, then 54 more, along the bayou for their world-wide headquarters. The dump has long since been relocated. Other large industries, like TESCO, moved to the area. During Mayor Louie Welch’s administration (1964-1974), many streets were paved, curbed, and guttered, and a few vest-pocket parks were carved out of the semi-industrial neighborhood. For Houston’s civic leaders, Fifth Ward isn’t a neighborhood; it is valuable real estate.
“Fifth Ward is typical of low-income areas in virtually every city in American and the world. You know, King Solomon rode around his kingdom where the poor lived and spoke of them as the ‘the slothful.’ The Houston Chamber of Commerce does not look at a single area of town and say what should take place. If there are any properties offered for sale in Fifth Ward, they will be presented to our clients. Land values are high in Fifth Ward because it’s so close to downtown. I’m confident that it will not be developed residentially. Light industry will be the fate of Fifth Ward in the future.”—Louie Welch, former mayor of Houston and president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce.
In an informal poll I took to discover the heroes of the Fifth Ward, four names were mentioned consistently: Muhammad Ali for his strength and brashness; Martin Luther King, Jr., for showing up the white man for what he was by coming to him as a Christian, nonviolent man and dying for it; Malcolm X, for his brain and because he was a true product of the ghetto and the streets; and Barbara Jordan, because she is a national heroine, a woman, and has escaped Fifth Ward. Malcolm X and Jordan ranked highest among people eighteen and under.
Frenchtown a-Dying
As Fifth Ward is a city within the city of Houston, so is Frenchtown a unique city within Fifth Ward: different language, different skin color, different food and music, different mores. It was settled by Creole blacks driven out of Louisiana by poverty and the two-month spring flood of 1927. It is heavily Catholic, clannish, and semi-highfalutin. It has a reason to be, and Mack McCormick, a music historian who lives in Houston, is the man who discovered it. “I can think of only two other neighborhoods in the United States that developed a unique music form. In New Orleans with jazz, and neighborhoods in New York with salsa. From Frenchtown came zydeco music, the marriage of Texas blues and Louisiana creole. Zydeco is gumbo-French for snap bean, and you’ll notice at a zydeco dance that many will slap their wrists like they were on the porch with a bag of beans. The difference is in the style of singing and in the selection of songs, rather than the instruments. What you end up with is Louisiana dance music tingled with blues.
In Frenchtown is one of Houston’s most exclusive social clubs. Eli Valien, of Valien’s TV Repair, is president of the Creole Knights, eleven members of the original Frenchtown families. They meet, usually at J.B.’s Showcase, once a year for a dinner dance to talk over old times with the Provos, Batistes, Vagerons, and Thibodeauxs. Occasionally, Frenchtown and Houston’s best zydeco accordionist, L.C. Donato, will come over from Vada’s Lounge with his band, the Drifters, to make music.
Frenchtown also has the most beautiful women, the best weekend barbecue outlet (Floyd Willis’, on the corner of Brewster and Josephine), and the best road-ditch crawfish in Fifth Ward. Nowhere else can you get boudain sausage and find it spelled seven different ways on the windows. The Boudain Man takeout is not far away. “Get them while they hot, just got them out of the pot,” says the sign that also publicizes “hog head cheese.”
But Frenchtown is dying. The daughters are intermarrying with other blacks and moving away, the old folks are passing on, and there is a new migration, again from the east. Mexican Americans are moving west out of Denver Harbor and buying the houses on Des Chaumes and Josephine and Delia streets. The skin color is exactly the same.
Easy Money
I was awakened in the middle of the night by the rattling of the shaky iron stairway that separated my apartment from Lovick’s drugstore. My bedroom window looked out on the tar roof of Lovick’s with its skylight and onto the intersection of Staples and Liberty Road, one of the top four junkie hangout corners in Fifth Ward. On the other side of the locked door at the head of the stairs was my rooftop patio, a brown and yellow couch with busted springs and a rusting barrel barbecue pit. From here, I usually ended the day with a beer, watching the street life change from its after-school to its after-work stage.
My Library
