The Twitch

Overtown in 1900

THE TWITCH

BY GEORGINA MARRERO

Do you know what it’s like to make a wrong turn when you leave Jackson Memorial Hospital, and end up in Overtown?

What I see is blight, and boarded-up buildings. A few stray people lolling about listlessly slumped against the sides of these buildings.

What I sense is despair.

What I feel is a twitch, an almost imperceptible twitch of something between shame and guilt.

“Why don’t they help themselves?” quickly becomes, “Why don’t we help them?”

Then I turn my car around, make the correct turn on 12^th Avenue, and head back toward Eighth Street.

You know, where I come from, everyone’s pretty much alike. We might call someone “El Polaco,” or “La China,” and that person might pretty much be as white as the driven snow.

My father’s best friend had a great nickname: “El Moro.”

All right. So he was dark complexioned. We were taught not to care. However, when we got here, we learned about things like Jim Crow, segregation, and the KKK.

All we could do was shake our heads.

The Civil Rights Act stirred up a lot of Black Power, and made Afros fashionable. I’ve heard there’s a neighborhood in Atlanta where the homeowners and the gardeners have turned the Oreo cookie outside in.

However, here in Miami I can’t help noticing the envious stares; the sullen, angry looks; or, worse yet, the faces turned away.

My mother’s coworker told her many years ago that her grandchildren were being taught to hate us. “Why?” my mother very calmly, yet plaintively, asked. “Because. Just because,” responded my mother’s right arm.

They had enormous respect for each other.

I confess to the twitch: that brief, “How can they? How dare they?” And then it fades away into nothingness.

When I see the Overtown shacks, though, it lingers. It festers, and rebounds… all the way to my cozy cottage.

We know corruption. Art Teele knew corruption. He just wasn’t very good at disguising it, as an old-timer in my community informed me the other day, all the while wisely shaking his head. His cronies agreed.

Art Teele wanted to help his own. He did it the right way, and the wrong way.

However, his twitch rebounded throughout Miami.

So every day that I—that we—sit in our comfortable homes, let’s carry through on the twitch, a little bit at a time, a little bit more each day.

If not, that little “aah” that follows will smack more and more of hypocrisy.

Go take that wrong turn: you’ll see what I mean.

Copyright, 2005 by Georgina Marrero 425 words One-time rights