Just Published... Excerpts:Ybor City was my skin, and skin covering poor people wrinkles faster than the rest of the city. It was an immigrant world, a world of tabaqueros, cigarmakers, who clung to the middle part of the Florida peninsula as if the rest of America didn’t exist, didn’t care it existed. It was the tabaqueros world, and it promised to be mine. I entered the enclave unaccompanied, and America, well, she was there, too, standing at my side, at a distance, but it was Sicily who napped under my bed, and the bogeyman, well, he was never the devil, although he stood around at arm’s length from poverty.
On a Sunday morning, my cousin Vince and I visit old Ybor City. Neither of us are churchgoers, but we have a mission. Oh, there was a brief time, back in high school, in the1950s, we went to mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church because we attended the Catholic school there, but it didn’t last, didn’t take hold. We decide to visit the neighborhood that holds much more meaning than we ever found inside a church.
“Think it’s safe?” Vince says, as we drive up East Columbus Drive and park near the cross street of Nineteenth Street.
“Sure, why not?”
“Hope you know what you’re doing. We’re worse than sitting ducks out here. We don’t belong anymore, you know.”
“Hell, it still feels like home, Vince.”
“Hasn’t been for a long time,” he says, stressing a long time, saying it as if he’s trying to shake me into reality.
“Just take decent shots. Don’t give me your grief,” I say.
From different angles he points his camera at the old two-story house. He snaps photos of where we began life, where our grandfather Ciccio died when Vince and I were five. He pans and snaps the duplex I moved into at age six, only a half dozen houses away. The duplex sits due west on the same side of the street, on the north side of Columbus Drive, and it was there I lived until age twenty-three. Vince is wrapped up in his camera. It’s obvious he’s not much at taking pictures, so he keeps looking at the camera’s parameters as if it were manual. He flips levers this way and that, so I wait and look around and watch him check and recheck the number of frames left. Adjusting his bifocals, he peers through the viewfinder. Maybe he thinks wire-rimmed glasses make him look younger or chic. He’s fussy that way. Oh, yes, always that and undeniably fidgety.
“Take good ones,” I say, trying hard not to pressure his already stressed high- tech skills.
“It’s user friendly, Frank, see?” He holds the camera out in his palm. “A Canon Elph.”
I nod. “Nice and compact.”
“Did you ever think we’d want pictures?” he says.
“Did you?”
Dark silhouettes peer out from behind torn screen windows and front doors as we sit inside the Ford, ignoring the black women who rock on porch rockers. Winos, like slugs, lift their heavy heads, contorting themselves as if there is perhaps a way to find comfort on curbstones and sidewalks along storefronts, clutching brown paper bags, overnight bags, outlining the necks of whiskey and wine bottles. Broken glass with labels of Calvert and Seagram litter gutters as if awaiting the runoff of a spring rain.
I’d driven into the ghetto slowly so as not to highlight our presence, as they say, keep a low profile, not awaken the damned, but only few sleep—most know we are there.
I hear a smart-ass teenager cry out, “Whitey, go home.”
I turn to Vince and say, “But it’s our home, too.”
He says nothing.
“How can I tell them? Sure, I’m white, but it doesn’t mean I don’t understand the indignities of a ghetto life. Who better than me, than us? Who better understands a muzzled mind?”
“Don’t bother,” he says.
Some things in ghettos never change, stay the same, and it isn’t the lack of materialism wasting minds. It’s the not knowing there is something different, another way of living, another way of thinking. It happened to me before I could read, before I could write. Then one day, fate twisted my arm and led me away.
“Vince, those two by four studs weren’t propping up the porch of the two-story the last time I came by.” I flip down the car’s visor to block out a bright morning sun.
“You really think it’s safe?” His eyes meet mine, linger, and then move away.
“Sure, don’t worry. I got a .357 magnum in my duffle bag,” I say, glancing at the back seat.
“You gotta be nuts!”
“Well, you never know.”
“Yeah, but still, it’s illegal.”
“Shit, don’t worry about it. Just take good shots. I’ll be in charge of keeping us alive, okay?”
“Look at those beauts.” I point across the street at the duplex.
A heavy-ass black woman drapes a beat-up rocker on the front porch. Her ass molds itself outside the seat, and her arms are as big as pig thighs. A string bean teenage girl hovers over her, braiding cornrows.
“Never saw cornrows around here before,” I say.
“Corn?”
“You know, the way blacks style their hair. Looks like rows of corn, doesn’t it?”
Perhaps to the worldly who live and work among blacks in big cities, cornrows and dreadlock hairdos are a given, household words, but not to those of us who grew up isolated and sheltered from a diversified America. Those of us in Ybor City were always the last to know. I recently learned about cornrows, so it didn’t surprise me Vince was unaware.
“Oh, didn’t know it had a name,” he says.
“Where the hell you been?”
“Don’t be corny,” he says.
“Everything happens here last.”
“Always did.”
“Except integration,” I say. “Cause no Kennedys lived here.”
He doesn’t smile, telegraphing he’s a Democrat.
“Just saying it like it is. You think you’d ever find a Kennedy living next to colored town?” I slap his back.
He gives me a limp smile.
So I say, “It wasn’t until my folks rented out my half of the duplex that Papa plumbed in hot water. Damn blacks demanded it, said it was a civil right. Mama was so pissed after having done without all those years. She kept saying, ‘He put it in for the blacks but wouldn’t do it for me.’”
Papa kept saying, “We can’t rent it, Mary, without hot water. Doesn’t matter they’re black.”
“You’ve been gone too long, Frank.”
“No shit.”
| Author's Commentary.
This is a story for those who cannot imagine life in a barrio, and for those who grew up in one. It is about a culture and place that doesn’t exist. It’s factually written, using the language detonating around me in a segregated South next-door to colored town. It’s also about the coming of age inside a culture that clung to its ancient customs and traditions, balking at America’s ways. I began writing A Stranger in the Barrio six years ago. The project started when I developed a need to express myself as I reflected on my life. It dawned on me how the uniqueness of a barrio and seemingly inconsequential events, at the time, had made me what and who I am. I was writing about my own existentialism and didn’t know it. Much had changed since the days I lived in Ybor City. Cigarmakers abandoned the place about the time Interstate 4 bulldozed its way through, and blacks moved in next door during the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s. Since then buildings have been condemned and razed, yet when I visited, I felt no different toward the place. It seemed right I should write A Stranger in the Barrio. After retirement from a lifetime of practicing pathology, I wrote poetry about my experiences in the barrio. It was then I enrolled at a local junior college and took poetry, Shakespeare and humanity courses and sat in fiction writing classes. My instructor said I had a voice—I should write. So I worked on learning the craft. After all, what does a physician know about literary writing? I was a victim of a ghetto education, an illiterate family and a bookless home. English grammar and syntax still plague me, but I loved playing with the words that came to me from nowhere. A Stranger in the Barrio was birthed from classroom assignments that evolved. Words became vignettes, then chapters, and a book took over my life, resurrecting more and more characters that had influenced me so many years ago. Relatives and friends began saying, “Write a book, Frank.” I smiled. “They got to be crazy.” The nonwriting public doesn’t know what it takes to write well, and I didn’t want to write junk. I’d read a lot of textbooks and medical literature but had never read a novel. Hispanic authors had written on Ybor City, yet none described visiting factories or seeing cigarmakers at work or tobacco leaf stored inside refrigerators of their homes. None described the details of making cigars or the tabaquero talk or the abuses of Spanish foremen, most couldn’t. None saw their mothers vomit, pass out and pass gas all at once from acute nicotine poisoning or lose front teeth to the tobacco leaf. None lived in the barrio, so none could tell it from the inside out. Hispanics romanticized the barrio, portraying it a Shangri-La, one big happy Latino family. Perhaps it was to them, but I was neither Cuban nor Spanish. I was a wop rolling with the punches while my family rolled cigars to put pasta on the kitchen table. Then, Mama dunked the dishes in hot pasta water in a sink that hung next to a linoleum covered drain board. Today, where I lived is a black ghetto, but it’s also a National Historic District. Old Seventh Avenue claims to be the “Nightlife Capital of Florida’s West Coast.” My story is authentic, about cigars, cigarmakers and the cigar factories that dominated all our lives. Oh yes, lives, lives not spared. Now they are all gone, swallowed by the Florida sand. I’ve not been invited to be on the Oparah Show, nor has she endorsed my book—probably never will. Some say, “It’s politically incorrect,” uses unacceptable language. But that’s the way it was. I did not sugarcoat it. So here it is, as it was with the termites, rats and cockroaches that shared our space. I hope you enjoy the story.
Frank P. Urso, M. D.
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