Separate But Equal

“American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory” tells the stories of two little-known pockets where black meets white in rapidly developing northern Florida: Amelia Island and the outskirts of Orlando near Disney World. But in truth the book is less a narrative than three meditations about a subject much bigger than race: the conflict, in contemporary American life, between the pull of commerce and the thirst for something more authentic--for history, memory, heritage, personal integrity and rooted culture.

It’s an ambitious topic, and Russ Rymer brings to it an impressive array of skills. Besides his eye for telling detail and character, he’s a supple, sometimes dazzling writer, and he cares passionately about the important question he’s tackled. Yet in the end, “American Beach” is a frustrating book: here close to poetic, there baroque and overwritten, at once rich in insights and maddeningly reductive.

The first of the three essays is another rendition of a familiar story: An unarmed black man shot to death in ambiguous circumstances by white police--in this case on Amelia Island in 1989. Rymer’s reconstruction of the event is vividly dramatic. He understands that stories like these have no easy heroes or obvious villains: In this case, victim Dennis Wilson was drunk and confrontational and had a long history of violent run-ins with police. Yet the lesson Rymer draws from the episode is familiar to the point of banality--that blacks and whites see incidents like this through different prisms. And in the end, he sells his own sense of ambiguity short by unequivocally endorsing one perspective, siding just a little too glibly with the black community against the cops.

The second essay, which makes up the bulk of the book, is a more original story, actually, set of stories. The central character is MaVynee Betsch, the eccentric great-granddaughter of Florida’s first black millionaire, A.L. Lewis, a patriarchal entrepreneur who built one of the South’s most successful black insurance companies.

Betsch is an extraordinary though ultimately murky character, highly educated, cultivated (at one point in her life an acclaimed opera singer), now homeless, living on the beach on Amelia Island, with 18-inch fingernails and a long train of matted hair adorned with political buttons. Intriguing as she is in her own right, for Rymer, Betsch is also an emblem of something larger. Alongside and mirroring the story of Betsch’s decline are the decline of the black resort town, American Beach, founded by her great-grandfather on Amelia Island; the decline of Lewis’ firm, the Afro-American Life insurance Co.; the decline of the historic black community in nearby Jacksonville; and the decline of what Rymer sees as another era’s instructive values, an ethos in which social responsibility was more important than commerce.

If all this sounds a little complicated, it is, though for the most part it’s woven together in a masterly braid. In its heyday, before integration, black Jacksonville was a bustling, self-sufficient community. The Afro-American Life Insurance Co. (known as the Afro) was its most important institution, but the enclave also had its own newspaper, transit system and every variety of business and cultural enterprise. Working-poor and middle-class blacks lived next to each other in an orderly, cohesive community. Both Rymer and the blacks he interviewed remember this period (roughly the first half of the century) as a golden era, and the locals look back at their summers at American Beach--founded and financed by the Afro--as among their happiest moments and a pinnacle of black achievement.

It all came crashing down in the 1970s, for a variety of reasons. Integration played a major part, but it wasn’t the whole story. The Afro happened to self-destruct in the same period, torpedoed by internal financial shenanigans, and the residents of American Beach, who failed to recognize the value of their real estate, undersold much of it to corporate developers.

Rymer, ever searching for lessons, draws a number of morals from this story--some perceptive, some oversimplified. As do many who look back today at black life before integration, he tends to romanticize that era and overlook the way most ordinary people had to live: the grinding poverty and degradation, the limited horizons and stunted lives. The urban middle-class milieu he focuses on was only a tiny corner of black Florida and far from typical. (At the time the Afro was founded, 80% of Southern blacks still scraped a living off the land, most of them close to illiterate, trapped by crushing debt, without property or prospects of any kind--let alone beach houses.) Even Rymer’s picture of middle-class Jacksonville is unduly rosy, so taken with the cohesiveness of the community that it ignores the claustrophobia and the suppressed rage that often came with it.

On top of these historical inaccuracies, Rymer has a troubling tendency to idealize any and everything black. Unlike white Americans, who he insists have no sense of the past, the book’s blacks honor their ancestors and maintain a “culture of memory.” Unlike whites, who have historically “dichotomized” business and morality--owning slaves but worshiping a Christian God, plundering the land for profit, etc., etc.--black businesses like the Afro are described as paragons of social virtue, doing good even as they did well, by taking care of the poorest in their community. Rymer’s portrait of A.L Lewis and his company is inspiring, but the generalizations the book draws from their story borrow from the worst of racial stereotypes--positive stereotypes, but stereotypes nevertheless. And by the end of the essay (we ‘re now in the mid-’90s) when residents of American Beach try to block expansion of a nearby resort, the standoff with corporate developers is too overdrawn--too Manichean--to be truly instructive.

The culminating moment of “American Beach” comes in the short final essay, a comparison between black author Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, Fla., (also a self-sufficient, segregated black enclave) and the new utopian community of Celebration that the Disney company is building nearby. Even Disney, purveyor par excellence of inauthentic commercial make-believe, understands that a model town needs a soul of some kind--that gated cul-de-sacs and golf-course developments are not what most of us mean when we talk about community. Struggling to create something different, the Disney people hire a raft of planners. Their architects engineer a socioeconomic mix by building garden apartments and modest homes on the same blocks as large expensive houses. Creative types hoping to evoke “the special magic of an American hometown” search frantically for what they call “a back story”--Rymer terms it “a usable past”--to give residents a sense of where they live and what brings them together. Then, at the last minute, the planners throw up their hands. They can’t manufacture meaning. The town is built: a model of small-scale urban planning. But it doesn’t have a soul--doesn’t have that authenticity or cohesion that so many Americans feel their lives lack today.

The moment perfectly captures the national problem--the cultural hunger and emptiness--that is Rymer’s real topic in “American Beach,” and in the last essay, as before, he searches for ways to meet it. Here as earlier, some of his insights are sharper than others. Blacks and black culture are again hopelessly romanticized: not only segregated Eatonville but even the urban ghetto are held up as models of authenticity. Racial and ethnic identity come across as the best, maybe only effective hedge against the sterility of commercial culture. (What about patriotism, civic tradition, democratic values, larger trans-ethnic loyalties? All seem decidedly secondary for Rymer.) The racial solidarity he triumphs can be a source of meaning for some, but what’s to stop Disney or Hallmark from commercializing ethnic culture too--and in the end, what “back story” would hold the balkanized nation together?

Still, as one puts down “American Beach,” whatever one thinks of Rymer’s antidotes, it’s hard to forget the sobering story that Rymer tells of Celebration’s planners and their failure. “You can’t fool the public,” one Disney man says. “People gravitate to what’s real. You can’t buy time [or] tradition.” It’s a brilliant, poignant image, one that speaks deeply to what’s wrong with contemporary life, and the challenge it poses echoes long after even the best of the book’s answers have faded.