Archive for March 31st, 2010
The Door Opens After Years of Dispute; Black Hebrews Find Salvation in a Truce with Israeli Government
By Pamela Ferdinand | December 6, 1991 for The Miami Herald
JERUSALEM, Israel–Alta Stevenson hustles from kitchen to counter to table and back again as she tends to patrons in a one-room vegetarian restaurant.
“Sometimes there’s a line at the door,” she says in English, smiling and slightly exasperated. “See how busy we are?” It is the exasperation of waitresses worldwide. Only Stevenson, 43, who came to Israel 15 years ago from Detroit, is not an average waitress. She is black. She says she is Jewish. And now her name is Cocavatiyah.
Cocavatiyah is one of some 2,000 members of the Original Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem — they’re called Black Hebrews — living in Israel. They say they are descended from one of the 12 lost tribes of Israel. They insist they have a right to live in the Jewish homeland under the law of return, which promises Israeli citizenship to any Jew who applies for it.
Israelis, however, have refused to recognize Black Hebrews as Jews. Controversies involving more than a dozen unrelated Black Hebrew groups in the United States have fueled Israeli distrust; the indictment of Yahweh Ben Yahweh, leader of the Nation of Yahweh in Miami, on murder conspiracy charges is among the sore points.
Now, after years of dispute, the Israeli government has agreed to give Black Hebrews a chance to legally live and work in Israel.
“I came here because when I was growing up, there was something missing — you know what I mean?” Cocavatiyah explains quietly. “Even when I went to church, there was something missing. . . . Then I learned about the Black Hebrews. . . . When I came here, I felt at peace.”
The Black Hebrew sect now living in Israel was founded in the 1960s by Ben Carter, a former Chicago bus driver and foundry worker. One account says Carter, now known as Ben Ami, heard a voice from heaven telling him he had been chosen to take his people to the Promised Land. His followers say they were disillusioned with the “second-class citizen” status of blacks in 1960s America.
In 1967, Ben Ami took a group of black Americans to Liberia, where they lived for nearly two years. They came from Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. Their numbers grew, and in 1969 the Liberian government pressured them to leave. Some returned to the United States, but 39 followed Ben Ami to Israel.
In Israel, they were first detained at the airport and later granted permission to settle temporarily in an abandoned absorption center in the southern Negev desert town of Dimona. Many of the newcomers renounced their U.S. citizenship, then allowed their tourist visas to expire.
“As more and more people came, it caused some consternation,” recalls Zvenah Baht Israel, a community spokeswoman. “Israel has forever been in the state of asking ‘Who is a Jew?’ So, of course, if some black people show up, that just further complicates it.”
Relations were complicated, too, by Black Hebrew practices. Many are the same as other Jews: Sabbath, for instance, is observed from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. Worship services include traditional blessings of the Torah, a scroll containing the first five books of the Old Testament. Black Hebrews circumcise their sons; many speak Hebrew.
But other practices are decidedly unfamiliar — such as the community’s practice of polygamy. Black Hebrew males are allowed to marry up to seven women. Ben Ami has three wives.
The conflict between the immigrants and Israel escalated through the ’70s and ’80s. Israel’s rabbis refused to recognize the Black Hebrews as true Jews because they did not have Jewish mothers. The Black Hebrews refused a proposed Israeli compromise — conversion to Judaism — because they said they were Jews already.
(On the other hand, Ethiopian Jews, often referred to as “falashas” or “outsiders,” are recognized as true Jews by Israel’s Orthodox community. It is believed they were converted to Judaism thousands of years ago.)
As more Black Hebrews arrived and remained in Israel illegally, the government began refusing entry to some black American tourists on suspicion that they were members of the sect. About 40 individuals were deported in 1986.
“The question was that individuals had overstayed their visas or were working in Israel without a permit,” said Immanuel Ben Yehudah, the Black Hebrews’ Washington-based spokesman. “That was the official charge, but some of those individuals had lived and worked there for more than a dozen years.”
Last year, a compromise was reached. The Israelis now permit registered Black Hebrews to live and work in Israel for renewable periods of one year. The visas also entitle community members to education, social services and medical benefits. In turn, the Black Hebrews agreed to reinstate their U.S. citizenship.
“The situation is not simple and quite delicate,” said a spokesman with the Israeli consulate in Miami. “They are not Jewish according to the Jewish religion. That’s why they cannot immediately become Israeli citizens. We have nothing against them and are trying to help them now. I think there has been progress already.”
Over the past few years, the U.S. government has given more than $3 million to Black Hebrews in Israel, according to U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the Europe and Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The funding has been used, in part, for housing and a school.
Hamilton calls the agreement an “uneasy but apparently durable compromise.” Nearly all of Dimona’s residents have been documented as U.S. citizens and have received visas, said Ben Yehudah. The travel embargo on visitors to the community also has been lifted.
Cocavatiyah, a former postal worker, says she is glad her community’s status is “normalizing.”
She has been working at the Eternity restaurant in Tel Aviv for five years. The cafe is simply decorated in yellow and white, with pictures of sandwiches from its creative menu on the wall.
The Black Hebrews are vegetarians, a practice that evolved as a form of preventive medicine, says Baht Israel.
“We didn’t always have access to medical facilities,” she says. “We had to look at alternatives. Four days a week, we don’t eat salt and four times a year for one week all adults eat raw vegetables. We fast on Shabbat completely.”
Cocavatiyah rotates responsibilities at the restaurant in Tel Aviv with five other women. When she is not scheduled to work, she returns to Dimona about 80 miles away to be with friends and family.
Dimona, a town in the Negev and in full view of an Israeli nuclear reactor, is now home to the majority of Black Hebrews. Other communities also inhabit the desert settlements of Arad and Mitzpe Ramon.
The landscape is arid and flat, an agoraphobic’s nightmare several hours’ bus ride from the bedouin markets of Beersheba and a short drive from the salty blue Dead Sea and the cliffs of Jordan.
Here, in a dark, cool sitting room, Baht Israel, 42, talks with a visitor about her life. She came to Israel in 1981 from Atlanta and her speech is peppered with expressions such as “you be praying,” and “shalom, sister.”
While the Black Hebrew dress code stresses modesty, much like that of Orthodox Jews, it resembles African tribal wear with flamboyant colors and geometric designs. Baht Israel wears a green and orange gown over an ivory turtleneck; American-style Docksider shoes peek out from underneath. Four fringes dangle from the corners of the garment, “symbolizing that African- Israelites are scattered to the four corners of the earth,” she says. Men dress simply in tunics with hand-crocheted caps, or kepote, but they tend to work in casual American-style dress.
Baht Israel says she sees a common thread running through her Baptist upbringing and her newfound faith.
“Although I wasn’t raised as a Hebrew Israelite, there were certain cultural similarities,” she says. “For example, when a woman is menstruating (in the Orthodox Jewish culture), she is separated from men. She doesn’t sleep with her husband or cook for the family. It is a time of spiritual renewal and her body is giving off toxins. When I was a child, in my household women were separated, too.”
Some of the community’s young men and women are too young to possess any American childhood memories. Shmooel Ben Israel, who did not want to give his former American name without permission from Ben Ami, is a 24-year-old construction worker who moved here with his mother 18 years ago from Washington. He plans to marry his first wife soon.
“At 19 or 20, we ‘come out’ into brotherhood or sisterhood and we can date with the permission of our parents,” he says. “People marry at all ages. Someone may have a wife or two in their 30s and want to marry again in their early 40s.”
Black Hebrew women say polygamy is liberating for them.
“A woman can do everything here but be a man, there are no limits,” says Baht Israel, who shares a husband and her child with his second wife and her two children. “We made the decision together about the other wife. If I’m separated because of menstrual activity, somebody has to care for him. Why not someone who’s a part of the family? This life style affords me time for self-development. I don’t have to be all things for everyone.
“My sister-wife is the sports person,” she explains. “When it’s time for basketball, she and him go to play and, shalom, shalom, I can go and read.”
Baht Israel says they worked out a system where each wife spends two weeks with their husband. The other wife, she says, “becomes a very dear friend and a family member at the same time.”
Economically, the Black Hebrews hope their changing status may be a windfall.
Community members earn money mainly by selling jewelry, working as domestics in Israeli homes or as construction workers. Now that many have work permits, they are hoping to capitalize on Israel’s growing construction needs.
Ten percent of each person’s earnings go into a central fund that provides food, medicine, education and housing. Currently, an average of four families share a household, says Baht Israel.
Administrative duties are divided according to rank. Brothers and Sisters are titles for the common members of the community. Above them are Crown Brothers and Crown Sisters, who run day-to-day operations, and then the Sahreem or Ministers, officials who run many of the group’s international outposts, according to Ben Yehudah.
Ben Ami remains the Israeli-based spiritual leader of the sect with his advisers, the Holy Council, also called the Princes or Apostles. They run a central office that handles economic affairs, negotiating work contracts for men who work in the outside community.
Foreigners who want to join the community must pay their own way to Israel, Baht Israel says.
“It has worked well both in hard times and in times when we were a little more prosperous,” she says. “We’re not millionaires. We get the menial jobs.”
Still, community members say life in Israel provides an escape from America’s crime-ridden society and what they believe is the oppression of blacks.
When asked if she misses her comfortable America, Baht Israel replies, “not really.”
“We were not self-determining,” she said. “It was always somebody else’s culture. Our struggle was to recapture our identity. We were denied access to our culture, and just look at the crime rates and life expectancy rates among American blacks. Finally, the thought came, could there be something else?
“We have developed a model for drug-free living, if nothing else,” she says. “People used to say, ‘What’s a black person going to do in Israel?’ But our longevity says something in itself.”
“Going back to the United States is our last thought,” says Ben Israel. “We have family there, but we came out here for a particular reason: to save the lives of our people.”
Readers Grapple with Issue
By Pamela Ferdinand | March 28, 1992 for The Miami Herald
Moved by Theresa Ann Pearson’s plight, busy South Floridians paused to ponder the larger question of who should decide whether a child lives or dies: God or us?
“When I first read about this, I wanted immediately for them to give other children the baby’s organs,” agonized Shirley Miller of Pembroke Pines. “But then I thought of the precedent that this would set and what would happen if we did this.”
About 200 people called TeleHerald lines Friday, most expressing support for giving Theresa’s organs to other children in need.
“The baby is going to die, why not let something good come out of it?” said Robin Katzenstein of Davie. “Give her death some dignity.”
But several callers felt the baby should be allowed to die peacefully.
“I think the baby should be able to live, not be cut up,” said Gloria Traitz of Miami. “What’s next? Taking the organs of old people who are going to die anyway?”
As a Catholic, June Fowler from Miramar said, she opposes abortion.
“Yet I believe in this case God would expect us to use these parts if we could,” she said.
Some callers had harsh words for Judge Estella Moriarty, despite her reputation as a defender of children’s rights.
“They needed a strong judge who would use common sense where children’s lives could be saved,” said Dr. Ronald Marx of Hollywood. “This judge was a gutless moron.”
Another Hollywood caller, Gerald Weiner, said Moriarty’s decision was “the most morally wrong decision ever made by a court.”
“I really think she should have thought of all the kids that are going to die because they didn’t get an organ,” he said. “What about their right to life?”
Underlying all the heart-felt opinions was a deeper message. Dr. Alexander Goldenberg put it this way:
“No one in their right mind wants to see a baby suffer. All the world loves a baby.”
Relative: “It’s bigger than they can handle”
By Pamela Ferdinand | March 27, 1992 for The Miami Herald
Even when tiny Theresa was still in her womb, Laura Campo was concerned about other children who could benefit from the baby’s organs, her sister said Thursday.
“Laura said, ‘I have to eat for the baby to be healthy, I have to take care of her for somebody else’ ” Donna Bertrand said. “She found it really hard, but she kept going.”
Once Theresa was born, Campo and Justin Pearson explained tenderly to their children that the baby was small and very ill. The couple have two healthy children together: Ashley, 3, Justin, 4. From a previous marriage Campo has another son, Sammy, 13.
Campo, who moved to South Florida nine years ago, is being comforted by a close-knit family. Her mother, Susan Clark, lives in Coral Springs in a separate apartment downstairs from Campo, while two of her three sisters live nearby. A third sister lives in Rhode Island.
Clark hovered over granddaughter Theresa at Broward General Medical Center earlier this week and contemplated the financial strains posed by her daughter’s troubled pregnancy.
“Their finances are right down to the wire,” she said. “They’re making their rent, they’re making their grocery bills, but they’re caught between their insurance and their paychecks on this.
“They’re caught in the middle of this, and it’s a lot bigger than they can handle.”
For more than five years, Campo, 30, has worked as a waitress at The Feedbag restaurant. Pearson, also 30, is a cement worker with Area Paving and Excavating.
“Laura works when she has to work and laughs and jokes with the customers,” said her boss, Paul Catsicas. He said customers had been calling all night with prayers and best wishes for the couple. “I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t like her. She’s just that kind of person, and Justin’s a nice, quiet guy.”
Bertrand said Pearson is “like a rock to lean on, he’s really been a great emotional support for her. They discuss things on an open level. They don’t keep their feelings inside and get too distraught over it.”
This experience will change their lives forever, she said.
From now on, both Campo and Pearson are “bound and determined” to change the law for future babies.
“Their hearts are in the right place.”
Makeshift Hospitals Tending to Wounded
By Pamela Ferdinand | August 27, 1992 for The Miami Herald
Two field hospitals sprang up overnight amid the devastation of South Dade, treating hundreds of hurricane victims and attracting medical assistance from across the country.
Off Krome Avenue in Homestead, local paramedics and medical teams from Indiana and South Carolina transformed a low-slung turquoise senior citizens center into a M.A.S.H.-like outpost Tuesday evening. At the South Dade Government Center in Cutler Ridge, volunteers turned office space into an emergency room to help relieve Dade’s overburdened hospitals.
By Wednesday morning in Homestead, dozens of people waited on beige folding chairs. The hum of a nearby power generator drowned their voices, and the constant flow of helicopters airlifting the most seriously injured patients to hospitals kicked up dust and dirt around them.
Inside, patients lay on rumpled white sheets covering dark green military cots. An elderly woman closed her eyes as a clear intravenous tube dripped liquid into her veins. A 2-week-old boy screamed as hovering doctors in camouflage sought to cure his dehydration.
And at 10:54 a.m., a 20-year-old woman gave birth.
Evelyn Greer said she hadn’t expected to go into labor that day. She wasn’t about to name her 7-pound baby boy after the hurricane.
“Andrew?” said Greer, who lost her Leisure City home to the storm. “No way, not after all this.” She named her son Calvin.
Another homeless patient, 77-year-old Rafael Dillanueva, lost his trachea tube during the hurricane. Gasping for air, he had not left the hospital since it opened Tuesday. Doctors said he was healthy and gave him a place to sleep, but no one was available to drive him to a shelter.
Most people, however, came to the hospital seeking prescription refills or treatment for minor injuries after stepping on nails or getting cut by glass at their battered homes.
Esther Agnew, 43, caught insulation debris in her left eye. Doctors taped gauze over her eyes and gave her a general checkup.
She says they also gave her some solace. Seeing and talking to other people in similar straits was comforting, she said, even if it was in the hospital.
“We’ve been feeling like we’re out here alone, just surviving,” Agnew said. “So this is great.”
In Cutler Ridge, doctors emerged tired and sweaty from the humid makeshift emergency room.
Dr. Richard Swihart flew in from Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne, Ind. After four hours of sleep, his only break Wednesday was for lunch — spaghetti and meatballs out of a plastic packet.
Wednesday morning, four doctors from Palm Beach County hospitals arrived at the scene — a multilayered municipal structure littered with broken glass, gravel and cans. Massive uprooted palm trees stretched across the concrete steps and dead birds rotted on the sidewalks.
The doctors, who brought antibiotics and surgical gloves, said they were shocked.
“You can smell it in the air,” said Richard Levin, a podiatrist at Palms West Hospital. “It doesn’t smell like South Florida.”
The Homestead field hospital is at Krome Avenue and 16th Street. The hospital at the South Dade Government Center is at Southwest 211th Street and 108th Avenue. The hospitals have lists of open pharmacies where people can get their prescriptions filled.
Faithful Assemble in Grateful Prayer for Lives Spared
By Pamela Ferdinand, Donna Gehrke and John Donnelly | August 31, 1992 for The Miami Herald
On the seventh day, South Dade celebrated life.
Parishioners sat on damp pews in churches without steeples or roofs. They looked up at open sky. They faced broken altars.
One Mennonite congregation in Florida City held outdoor services on eight folding chairs in front of their flattened church.
And yet even here at the heart of Hurricane Andrew’s destruction, churchgoers’ weariness evaporated at the sight of friends and neighbors not seen or heard from since the storm.
“I came here to see our family and friends and to see that everybody is alive together. I need to hear that everything will be OK,” said Maxine Plummer, 51.
Plummer said she was deeply moved by the sight of donations — thousands of bottles of water, diapers and stuffed animals — stacked in hallways at Christ the King Catholic Church at 16000 SW 112th Ave. near Perrine.
“My faith has been strengthened by seeing what people have donated and how they’re helping out,” Plummer said.
That, and the visions of hope spoken from pulpits, may have helped some people answer questions of why them, why their neighbors.
Some said they believed God was punishing them for their sins. Others said God was breaking down boundaries between people, between churches. In some communities, all-black churches and all-white churches joined together as one, divisions generations old that evaporated in seven days.
“We know scientifically why the hurricane came to Miami,” said Woo Lee, a Miami Lakes Presbyterian who conducts services three times a week in Homestead. “But religiously we believe strongly there is some other reason. We have to repent our sins.”
Roman Catholic Archbishop Edward McCarthy had a different answer: “The Lord permits these crises to develop because he’s calling us to a new level of humanity and virtue. We’ve always been told that we’re supposed to be suffering with Christ. This immediate morning, everyone is upset, but in the long term, there will be a little more meaning than today.
“You have to look at it in a broader perspective. There’s power in suffering.”
And so in hundreds of churches around South Dade, from the ripped-open to the air-conditioned and untouched, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and several earthly powers that be moving from church to church, people left the pain aside for a few hours, celebrated fellowship and prayed for life.
In deep South Dade, the Princeton Church of the Nazarene off Southwest 248th Street was packed.
“I feel very up at the moment, happy because I’m here,” said Don Bernecker, 54, outside the church. “Everyone I know is here. There’s not a broken finger, not a broken bone, not a lost life.”
Nodding his head toward the congregation, as voices raised to the strains of Because I Live, he smiled:
“We can sing.”
Inside, under a vaulted white ceiling stained brown by rain, sobs of relief and empathy punctuated the Rev. James Spear’s sermon. Children on parents’ laps leaned through windows blown out by the storm.
At the back of the room, a man strained his arms holding a fan above their heads.
“We spent all week trying to board up our roofs and patch up our houses, but now we’ve come to give our thanks to the Lord,” Spear said. “I’m just thankful that I’m able to say to you, ‘Hello today.’ ”
Together, congregation members whispered, “Hello.”
Ten miles north of the worst of the disaster, members of the University Baptist Church in Coral Gables said prayers for their good fortune.
“I don’t have electricity, but many of my friends don’t have houses,” said Jelsys Perez, 28, of 7240 SW 13th Ter., as she waited to enter the standing-room-only church.
Over the loudspeaker, head pastor Dan Yeare exhorted the congregation, “We need to pray more. We need to pray now. We need to pray together.”
Next to Perez, Clara Jenkins also was waiting to get into the church.
“We lost everything,” said Jenkins, who lived off Old Cutler Road and 188th Street. “We praise the Lord and thank Him for being alive, the six of us. We were in a closet for five hours. I came today for inner strength to start all over again.”
Assistant pastor Gary Stroope’s voice boomed over the sound system: “People we know and love have lost their shelter. There are houses down, but Father, thank you that the home still exists.”
Clara Jenkins looked at her feet.
A friend tapped her on the shoulder. Jenkins turned and burst into tears. They hugged on and on and shook, weeping.
There was a crack above as Archbishop McCarthy rose to speak at Christ the King.
White tiles fell from the ceiling, crashing onto the pulpit. Gasps. Then silence as parishioners cleared the debris, then ordered roofers down from the top of the building. McCarthy walked a second time to the pulpit.
Before him: a couple of hundred people sitting on plastic over the pews, their feet in puddles, some weeping. “You’d better be careful,” he said, meaning the tiles above.
The archbishop praised the hundreds of people at Christ the King for helping other people even as they try to rebuild their own homes.
“I think we’re building up a great charge card with the Lord,” he said.
McCarthy said truckloads of food and supplies were arriving daily from parishes in Cleveland, Buffalo and elsewhere. The archbishop of Santiago, Cuba, sent a note of condolence and support, McCarthy said.
The Miami archbishop said he was moved by the suffering he has seen, including a badly dehydrated infant brought by a woman to St. Joachim Catholic Church at 11711 SW 193rd St.
“A nurse there saved her life,” he said. “There have been many beautiful things happening.”
McCarthy also tried to lighten the grim reality. He said he tried to comfort a sick relative by telling him that often the Lord’s gift was a cross to bear.
Replied the man: “I wish the Lord wasn’t so friendly to me.”
Gov. Lawton Chiles traveled from congregation to congregation, delivering messages of hope.
As sunlight streamed through the roof of the darkened Bethel Baptist Church in Richmond Heights, he said: “Somebody said this area will never be the same. I think that’s right — it’s going to be even better,” to a chorus of “Amen!”
And at St. Joachim’s in Perrine, amid aisles littered with stained glass, he quoted the Bible:
“You all are the harvest, and we will continue to get the labor in.”
Broward Gangs Moving into Suburbs
By Pamela Ferdinand | November 15, 1992 for The Miami Herald
The scene: An autumn evening in suburban Sunrise, St. Bernard’s Church fair. Cotton candy, kids squealing on the carnival rides.
In a parking lot, four teenage males confront a 17-year-old high school student.
Someone stabs him in the back. Then they run.
“Unknown gang members,” Sunrise police officer Edward Sanetti writes in his Nov. 5 report.
“Victim will be permanently scarred for life even after plastic surgery, according to the physician on scene,” the officer notes.
The chaos of gang violence — stabbings, beatings, shootings — seems an anomaly in Broward County. Few people have taken youth gangs in the suburbs seriously.
Until now.
* Until they shot and paralyzed 16-year-old Andre Gollett at a community center teen dance in Hollywood in April.
* Until they killed 18-year-old Ernesto Tapenes in a drive- by shooting on Hallandale Beach Boulevard in unincorporated Broward in July.
* And until they crashed an August party at Sawgrass Mills Residences in Sunrise and shattered the host’s windows with baseball bats, throwing a mailbox through the living room plate glass.
“All the juveniles are convinced that they can murder someone and walk away,” says Fort Lauderdale Det. David Nickerson.
Broward youth gangs aren’t the crack-dealing soldiers of Los Angeles. Nor are they the West Side Story turf punks of New York. But they are armed, dangerous — and increasingly violent.
“When the Davie Boys first started out, they were a bunch of guys who liked to drink beer and fight fist-to-fist,” says Det. Renae Griggs, a Davie juvenile crime officer. “Now they don’t use their fists. Half of the gang kids are packing weapons and the other half are starting to, because they’re scared.”
Gang kids are different from suburban kids who like to hang around malls. They possess identifying traits — colors, haircuts, clothing — and an exclusivity, performing rituals and crimes together.
To put it simply: When teenagers tattoo gang names and symbols on their ankles and knuckles and stow 9mm handguns under car seats, it is time to pay attention.
Especially when gangs make the headlines, as they did last week, here and elsewhere:
* Sheriff’s deputies arrested two teenage gang members for attempted murder in the July shooting of an Interstate 295 motorist in Jacksonville. A third teenager was arrested for stealing the car involved in the shooting.
* Fort Lauderdale police noted that an unlicensed underground nightclub, where a 19-year-old Pompano Beach woman was shot to death, is frequented by gangs and spray-painted with gang graffiti.
Says Dr. Ronald Huff, author of the book Gangs in America: “People should take gangs seriously. There isn’t any place that’s immune.”
Huff, consultant for the L.A. gang film Colors and a research director at Ohio State University, recently received a federal grant to study emerging gang problems.
He selected two sites: Denver and Broward County.
Broward’s western suburbs — the pristine bedroom landscapes of retirees and families — provide fertile territory for gang expansion:
Rapid urbanization and population growth. Substantial pockets of poverty. A rich racial and ethnic mix. And easy access to highways, like interstates 595 and 95.
Add to that the longings of male adolescence — recognition, protection and identity — and the concoction is explosive.
If crime statistics are accurate, the problem is getting worse. In December 1986, Broward police departments documented 45 members in two gangs.
Now, according to photographs and field interrogations, police document up to 3,500 members in 60 gangs.
Last year Fort Lauderdale investigators traced 100 specific individuals, so-called gangbangers. They counted 315 arrests — among them, 20 percent for violence; 11 percent for possession of weapons; 10 percent for narcotics and 18 percent for burglary.
“Some gangs get into drug dealing, but mostly their crime of choice is burglaries, purse-snatchings and strong arm robberies,” says Coral Springs Police Det. Scott Heysler. In a drive-by shooting, one gang hit the police chief’s conference room in 1989, Heysler says.
Take the youth gang, Most Powerful Nation that Doctor Tac belongs to. He is an 18-year-old Anglo from New York. He attends high school in Plantation and lives in a middle-class Davie townhouse with his mother and stepfather. The gang’s leader is Fear-1, a 16-year-old born in Puerto Rico. He works as a telephone salesman by day and takes high school classes at night.
The harmony within gangs is warped by the violence toward others.
When it comes to drawing a gun, says Dave Cortes, a retired detective, “a kid that is brought up in downtown Fort Lauderdale who has to fight every day of his life is no different than a mama’s boy with a $100 allowance.”
Cortes, a former Miami police officer, is known as South Florida’s police “gang guru.” He points out that more established gangs in Dade deal primarily in narcotics.
Most Broward police departments designate gang unit officers, such as Sunrise Police Det. Donald Cannon. He looks for gang symbols: A pitchfork. Six-pointed star. Colors: Green and black. Blue and white. And kids using hand signs: Right-hand “D’s” and “B’s.” Thumbs and forefingers splayed like “L’s.”
Gang members contend they have no choice but to resort to violence.
They fight with knives, AK-47s, nail-studded baseball bats, and the ultimate suburban armament — sawed-off golf clubs.
“We’ve been shot at many a time,” says Fear-1, lifting his shirt to expose the silver handle of a 9mm handgun tucked in his trousers. “But it’s a way of life. They roll on you or you roll on them.”
Gangs affect teenagers who want nothing to do with them.
Says a 17-year-old North Lauderdale youth whose friend quit a gang: “We left a club and a gang called LaFamilia kept driving by (U.S.) 441 and Atlantic (Avenue). They threw their sign out the window and started shooting. They turned around and came back, and I ran underneath a car. Nobody got hit.”
But sometimes someone does get hit.
On April 18, Andre Gollett attended a teen dance at the Northeast Community Center in Hollywood. At 1 a.m., a gunman
from a gang fired a bullet into his back.
Now Gollett, a South Broward High School student, is paralyzed. Reliant on a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he doesn’t want to talk about that night.
Police charged Robert Ramon “Tico” Brush, 16, with attempted murder.
But fear of arrest does little to deter gang violence.
At age 16, Craig Bonaventura of Lauderhill plotted a drive-by shooting after a rival gang crashed his birthday party and started hitting people with baseball bats.
Bonaventura’s gang fired 13 bullets into the Sunrise home of Hans Mullings. He belonged to a rival gang, the O.C. Express.
This occurred Oct. 15, 1989, and Broward Circuit Court Judge Robert Carney sentenced Bonaventura to eight years in a Gainesville correctional facility.
At sentencing, the judge said he wanted to send a message: “The court is well aware of the gang violence . . . and that juveniles look to see what the courts do when these types of offenses occur . . . ”
From jail, Bonaventura wrote the judge: “When I get out of the Department of Corrections, I’m going to put my life back together in a whole new way!”
Fresh out of prison after two years, Bonaventura formed a new gang called La Vida, or Life. Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrested him Nov. 5 for disorderly conduct, his fifth arrest this year.
“Everyone in my gang is ruthless,” says Bonaventura, coral red and black beads dangling from his bare chest. At 19, he is the gang’s “godfather.” “We don’t just fight. Whatever it takes, shooting, stabbing, whatever.”
Other gangs, too, possess established hierarchies with first, second and third officers. Most Powerful Nation’s “godfather” supervises a “fight department” and an “initiation department.”
Some gangs rely on little kids called “footies” or “pee- wees” for money.
“We’re down with them,” says an 11-year-old boy named Alex, sitting astride a bicycle in a Davie shopping center parking lot.
His friend, Patrick, a 12-year-old holding a cigarette, adds: “If they need tokens or money, we let them borrow it. We trust them. They take us places and give us rides and stuff.”
While some gangs split into local chapters, police say the high mobility of Broward gangs makes turf — a traditional gang trait — rare.
“We ride out all night, go to malls looking for trouble, recruit other people and find other gangs and fight,” says Bonaventura.
Typically, gangs meet at places like McSugar’s video arcade in Davie, Subway on Riverside Drive in Coral Springs, and Don Carter’s bowling alleys in Tamarac and Sunrise late at night.
“They get different factions that come in and the next thing you know, there’s a big fight,” says Stephen Anthony, manager of McSugar’s. “When they come here, they don’t come to play the games. I’m tired of playing nursemaid to these kids.”
Broward gangs conduct their own rituals. Initiation often involves fighting up to six gang members for two minutes or more.
If you’re conscious afterward, you’re in.
Loyalty is constantly tested, as it was at McSugar’s one recent Friday night.
Away from the din of arcade games, six members of Most Powerful Nation retreat to the restroom to talk strategy. They’ve heard at least two other gangs — Insane Crips from Hollywood, Davie Boys from Davie — are on their way.
“I don’t care, dog,” says J-Dog, a black-haired 16-year- old. “We gotta get somethin’. They gonna come shootin’ and we ain’t got nothin’.”
Doctor Tac leans against the porcelain sink. He bows his head so that the rim of his backward black-and-white Raiders cap sticks straight up in the air.
J-Dog wants him to steal one of his father’s guns.
“I gotta think,” Doctor Tac says, crossing his arms on his chest and staring at the floor. “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.”
Minutes later, he is on his way home to get the gun.
A new trend in family planning: Young women of limited means have tubes tied
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 13, 1993 for The Miami Herald
Miami–Young, low-income women in Florida — most of them already mothers — are more and more having their tubes tied. At age 22, Margaret Mack ended her child-bearing days. She lived with her three small children, mother, and unemployed brother in a cheap, two-bedroom apartment. Medicaid card in hand, she went to a Broward health clinic. She felt she could not afford more children and disliked condoms and the pill.
“The lady tried to make me not do it. I was too young, she said, but I told her this was what I wanted.”
Nationwide, sterilization is the leading form of birth control for women over 30. Most younger women rely on the pill. But Medicaid statistics in Florida show that, increasingly, sterilization is the contraceptive of choice for women like Margaret Mack — young and poor.
In the past four years, tubal ligations rose more than 30 percent among low-income women younger than 25 in Florida. Medicaid spending for their procedures nearly tripled to almost $2.7 million.
Many of the young, low-income women who choose sterilization say they cannot afford — financially or emotionally — to have more children. They have already tried other methods of birth control and are either unfamiliar with or unwilling to try newer, long-term contraceptives. So they decided on a permanent solution.
“When you don’t have money and you have babies, it’s a nightmare,” said Rickie Solinger, author of Wake Up Little Susie, a book on single pregnancy. “Women who don’t have resources are feeling pushed to . . . where sterilization is the only responsible thing they can do. That’s new, and that’s different.”
For the fiscal year starting July 1, 1989, 6,353 low-income women were sterilized in Florida. In the nine months after July 1, 1992, an estimated 8,673 low-income women underwent the procedure, according to Tallahassee-based Consultec Inc., a billing agency for the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.
For the 1989-90 fiscal year, 2,676 women under age 25 chose the procedure. The number since July 1, 1992, increased to 3,538, Consultec reported. In Dade and Broward, most were black.
Women are considered sterile immediately following the procedure, which blocks or separates each fallopian tube so that eggs cannot travel from the ovaries to the uterus.
Young women — many of whom had teenage pregnancies — choose sterilization for various reasons. The lack of federal and state funding for abortion in Florida does not appear to be a major factor, health care workers agree.
“Most women who want to get abortions generally do, even if it’s a financial hardship,” said Michael Policar, vice president of medical affairs for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I’ve never counseled a single woman who said, ‘I’m considering sterilization because if I get pregnant again, nobody will pay for the abortion.’ ”
Health clinic workers say they hear other reasons for sterilization: It eliminates the hassle of daily birth control and its potential failure and side effects. Male partners often refuse to use contraception or to undergo vasectomies.
Also, not all young women are reliable users of contraceptives. Remembering to take pills can be difficult, prescriptions must be refilled, and diaphragms can be awkward to manage, clinic workers suggest.
Many young women are unfamiliar with or are unwilling to try newer, legal long-term contraceptives such as Norplant, time-release capsules placed under the skin every five years, and Depo-Provera, a synthetic hormone injected every three months. Medicaid covers both options, as well as other forms of contraception including the pill and diaphragm.
Alma Rodriguez, 24 years old, mother for the first time at 16, now the mother of four, says she has never heard of Norplant. She and her husband, Geraldo, eloped and left Mexico when she was 14. Ten years later, they live in a Davie mobile home with their children. After rent, they have less than $200 a week to spend.
Her mother and an older sister both had sterilizations. Last year, after an unplanned pregnancy, Rodriguez did the same. “I feel fine,” Rodriguez said. “I think I feel fine.”
Pressed, she said that she is not entirely sure that she will not want more children in the future.
Her uncertainty is not unusual. To be sterilized under Medicaid rules, the woman must be 21 and she must sign a consent form. To minimize second thoughts, and to prevent sterilization abuse by doctors, the government requires a 30-day waiting period between the signing and the date of surgery.
Still, a 1988 study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York shows that the younger the woman, the higher the chances of regret.
“You take a woman who’s 40, she doesn’t want to risk pregnancy between 40 and 50,” said Sally Skull, HRS operations and management consultant in Broward. “But a 21- to 24-year-old who makes the decision — there are too many years that her life circumstances can change.”
Dr. Garry Wachtel, a private Tamarac gynecologist, agreed, calling tubal ligation a “heavy-duty decision.” Chances of reversal are slim, he said, and that procedure is expensive.
“I tell these patients to consider the possibility that something may happen to their children,” he said.
Others praise these young, low-income women.
“They don’t want any more children because they’ve got all they can handle,” said Joyce Tarnow, administrator of The Womens’ Clinic in Fort Lauderdale. “I admire the fact that they are taking control of their lives.”
The midwife option
By Pamela Ferdinand | August 1, 1993 for The Miami Herald
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.–Margaret Dynes, her cheeks flushed, strands of long blond hair stuck to her sweaty forehead, clutches floral bedsheets printed with yellow roses.
She curls her back into a stack of pillows, parts her lips and closes her eyes as she heaves her hips and pelvis forward with the contractions.
“Ooooohhh,” she moans, grunting through clenched teeth.
A midwife, perched on the end of the bed, tells Margaret to hold her breath a little bit, to save all her strength for the next one.
She asks, “How does it feel to push? Does it feel good?”
The contractions pass. “I’m so tired, I just want to sleep,” Margaret says.
It will be at least five more hours before she does.
*
Birth is normal. It happens every day.
For prospective parents, though, each birth is remarkable and a little mysterious. Most feel comfortable in hospitals with obstetricians and emergency technology at their fingertips.
They don’t necessarily want to use the machinery, but they want to know it’s there in case something goes wrong. And things do go wrong.
Still, hospital births with obstetricians can be frustrating — emotionally, financially and physically. Some women may find the experience daunting and the surroundings unfriendly.
More and more healthy pregnant women are choosing midwives, and sometimes home birth, as an alternative.
Margaret and Tom Dynes decided to have a home birth with a licensed midwife, Janice Heller, after two hospital births.
Tom, a carpenter, met Margaret through friends at Our Father’s House church. They married and tried for a year and a half to have children. Just when they were about to give up, move out of their North Miami house and travel in a motor home, Margaret became pregnant.
Some of their friends had home births with midwives when having babies at home was “the thing to do,” Margaret recalled.
But she and Tom, 22 and 25 years old when she first became pregnant, wanted the security of a doctor in a white lab coat and electronic monitors.
They anticipated the joy of seeing and holding their newborn. They did not want to take any chances.
*
That first time, five years ago, Margaret spent most of the day with mild contractions, watching the winter Olympics on television.
Her water broke on the way to North Shore Medical Center in Miami.
Nurses laid Margaret flat on her back and hooked her up to an intravenous tube to relieve her dehydration. They attached an internal monitor to the baby’s head.
About nine hours later, still not dilated more than four centimeters, she groaned in agony. An anesthesiologist injected a regional anesthetic, hospital records show. It relieved Margaret’s pain, but numbed her urge to urinate and her normal, instinctual urge to push.
Her bladder swelled like a grapefruit. Then the contractions slowed.
To speed labor, a nurse injected a synthetic form of the hormone that stimulates uterine contractions.
The drug-induced roller coaster caused the baby’s heartbeat to drop, Margaret said. Tom watched as nurses fitted Margaret with an oxygen mask.
“My feeling was that I was in the way,” he said. “I was sleeping on the cold, hard floor, nobody wanted to answer my questions.”
Midway through Margaret’s labor, Tom wrote his wife and unborn child a letter: “Though it probably has been foolish, I have despaired of your lives today. To sit here by your side and see all the tubes, to see your face as your body screams in pain, my heart has almost burst with love and fear and hope.”
Margaret dilated, and nurses sped her to the delivery room. They covered her legs with a sheet, propped her feet in stirrups, and urged her to push. The doctor made a cut to widen the vaginal opening.
Abigail “Abby” Dynes was born February 19, 1988, at 6.6 pounds after 34 hours of labor.
Margaret felt like she was going into shock and began trembling. She could not hold the baby.
*
April 19, 4 a.m.
Margaret’s water breaks. The Dynes head to Linda and Erik Sampson’s Davie home. Its lights pierce the damp, dark morning.
Linda, Margaret’s best friend, makes coffee. Erik pours corn flakes for seven sleepy-eyed children. The midwife, Cynthia Feinberg, takes a mug of coffee and gets acquainted.
Cynthia is a stranger to the Dynes. Janice, Margaret’s regular midwife, is on call at another birth. It’s not unusual for midwives to come to each other’s rescue, and Cynthia, a mother of three, runs her own practice in Miami. Without the rapport usual between midwives and their clients, she is counting on Tom to support his wife.
Her unobtrusiveness puts Margaret and Tom at ease, though they are disappointed Janice will not attend the birth.
A lullaby tape plays in a corner of the low-ceilinged bedroom. Two lamps throw shadows over an Indian quilt tossed over a bookshelf. A knickknack reads, “Happiness is being married to your best friend.”
Dressed in a flowery, oversize T-shirt and white athletic socks, Margaret sits in the middle of a handcrafted wooden bed and sips water.
The midwife’s birthing assistant, Marguerite Spillane, wraps a cuff around Margaret’s arm and takes her blood pressure. It’s normal.
*
Janice, a licensed Hollywood midwife since 1984, attended her first birth by ultimatum.
“This woman called me and said, ‘I don’t care, if you don’t come, it’s going to be me and my dog,’ ” Janice recalled. At the time, in 1976, she was a midwife-in-training.
She has since assisted more than 1,200 births. Most took place at homes, and only one resulted in a serious problem.
She is one of 34 licensed midwives in Florida. Also called “direct-entry” midwives, most attend home births or births at one of 21 birth centers statewide. About 329 certified nurse-midwives practice in Florida, assisting births in hospitals, birthing centers, and a limited number of homes. They work closely with physicians and are registered nurses with advanced childbirth training.
State laws now require three years of midwifery education for new direct-entry midwives. Both nurse-midwives and direct-entry midwives are regulated by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
Unlicensed midwives are illegal in Florida.
Janice typifies most modern direct-entry midwives, who are committed to a safe birth, preferably — but not necessarily — at home. Midwife means “with woman,” and they believe birth is a normal event, not a pathological process requiring constant medical intervention.
Janice planned a home birth for herself in 1986, but needed intravenous fluids and transferred herself to Hollywood Memorial Hospital. She gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Shanti Rose, in two pushes on a hallway stretcher.
It was no mean feat for a heavy woman who has used crutches since she had polio at age 3. Raised in upstate New York by a surgeon father and nurse mother, Janice originally worked as a massage therapist and pharmacology research assistant.
After attending births with two housemates, both midwives, she got hooked. Now, her music-composer husband takes care of their home and midwifery is a full-time job.
“You fall completely in love with the birth experience,” she said. “Husbands find a great appreciation for their wives, and women really get to acknowledge their strength.
“Who a woman is and how her life works for her is really going to be how her birth is,” she said. “If you are this radical, crisis-oriented person, chances are that your birth is going to be crisis-oriented.”
*
April 19, 6:46 a.m.
Margaret’s contractions fall three to four minutes apart. Her cervix readies for the birth, laying thin and smooth against the baby’s head.
Supplies are ready, including: hot compresses, bulb syringe, umbilical tape, clamps, and olive oil. Cynthia also carries oxygen, local anesthetic, pitocin — the synthetic hormone used to increase contractions — and vitamin K.
Tom huddles with Cynthia in the hallway. He looks worried.
“I get the impression from Marguerite that there’s something I should know that I don’t know,” he says.
Cynthia detected a slight fetal bowel movement in Margaret’s fluid. If the baby breathes the substance, it can cause pneumonia or death.
Cynthia must rule out any immediate fetal distress by checking the heart tones. If they are normal, the light staining may be evidence of temporary distress prior to labor and there’s no need for panic.
From prenatal classes, Tom knows that midwives use a DeLee suction tool to clear the baby’s breathing passages after the head emerges.
“It’s your call,” he tells Cynthia. “If we need to go (to Memorial Hospital), we’re on the way.”
With an an electronic instrument that uses sonic waves to detect a baby’s heartbeat, Cynthia listens to Margaret’s belly.
She hears regular heart tones. They stay.
*
Abigail’s brother, Jonathan, was born on March 15, 1989, at Hialeah Hospital after 14 hours of labor.
Margaret’s water broke at midnight, one month early. She knew that could increase the odds of a Caesarean section, when a physician cuts open the uterus to deliver the baby.
Two years later, in 1991, Hialeah Hospital would deliver a higher percentage of its babies by Caesarean than any other hospital in Florida — one of every four.
Margaret followed instructions when nurses hooked her to an intravenous tube, gave her a synthetic hormone to stimulate contractions and laid her flat on her back.
“They gave me an enema, then they shaved off all my pubic hair, which was ridiculous, but I didn’t want to make waves,” she said.
All of a sudden, the urge to push took over. She said she yelled for a doctor, but the nurses shouted not to push because she was not yet 10 centimeters dilated.
“That baby came out in two contractions and probably could have come in one if they weren’t telling me not to push,” Margaret said.
A borderline preemie at 5.14 pounds, Jonathan was taken away, and Margaret said she did not see him again until the next day. No one told her why her waters broke early.
“What happened with Abby helped prepare us for what happened with Jon-Jon,” Margaret said. “You’re so alone, so isolated from people who care about you.”
*
April 19, 7:30 a.m.
Margaret leans against a bedpost and sips Carbo Fuel, a high-carbohydrate drink.
The contractions strengthen. She is restless, hot and sweaty. Her legs feel like jelly.
“You look so beautiful,” Tom tells her. A friend’s 6-month- old baby cries in the next room. “Hearing him is a perfect sound.”
*
After what they considered two unpleasant births, Margaret and Tom chose home birth with a midwife for their third child.
Margaret’s best friend, Linda, gave birth to four children at home with Janice.
“I knew how good she was, just from Linda,” Margaret said. “But there’s always that element of fear until you have a home birth and get to know the midwife.”
She and Tom loved the idea of having a child surrounded by family and friends. Cost was also a factor, she said.
The first birth, not covered by insurance, cost $5,000; the second, which was, cost $500 in co-payments. Janice charges $3,200, with a sliding scale for clients who cannot afford the full fee.
So, on Tuesdays, Margaret joined the steady stream of women who flowed through Janice’s clinic door.
“I just don’t trust (the hospitals),” said Margaret, worried at 30 weeks into her pregnancy about another premature delivery. “I feel that you know much more about what you’re doing than they did.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not really true,” Janice said. “We just talk more.”
*
April 19, 8:30 a.m.
The contractions come faster. Margaret’s belly tightens. She releases great whooshes of air.
“I’m trying to relax, but it’s hard,” she says.
Marguerite recognizes this restlessness as a sign of transition, the dilation period from six or seven to ten centimeters when a woman struggles to concentrate — the time when some women report out-of-body, near-death experiences.
“Don’t worry that you’re having trouble focusing now, it’s part of the process,” Marguerite says. “The contractions are getting hard, the baby’s advancing.”
*
As a state requirement for direct-entry midwife care, Margaret and Tom attended a seven-week session of prenatal classes.
“It’s important that you’re comfortable with your midwife,” said their instructor, Hollywood midwife-in-training Debbie Marin. “If there’s something she’s said to you or done, you have to be up front with her.”
She and Janice weed out parents who may be inappropriate, and unsafe, for home birth. They don’t take women who smoke, drink or use drugs. They don’t take people who are uncommunicative and uncommitted to prenatal care and breast- feeding.
“You can’t go home with them and say, ‘You have to eat right,’ ” Debbie said. “They have to be responsible people.”
*
April 19, 9 a.m.
Margaret lies on her left side with a pillow between her legs to relieve her lower back pain. The contractions follow one after another in less than a minute.
In the living room, Erik plays guitar and sings to the children.
“Once there was a windy day, a beautiful day to have a baby. A lot of people came to help out,” he sings.
Cynthia presses a warm compress between her legs, stimulating circulation and making the tissues more supple and more liable to stretch, not tear.
“Oh no, oh no,” Margaret moans, her legs quivering.
“Your body knows just what to do,” Cynthia says. “It’s perfect.”
“Look at me, OK, OK, yeah, sweetheart,” Tom says, massaging her back.
Linda kneels on the bed and bows her head, eyes closed, praying.
*
On this clinic day in late March, Margaret, bags under her eyes, looked peaked.
“Your iron’s 11.9,” Janice said. “You’re doing real good.”
“We’re on top of this,” Margaret said. “It’s very comforting.”
She has decided to give birth at her best friend’s house, where she feels most peaceful.
“So what’s my next clue?”
“Your next clue is probably going to be contractions.”
Margaret laughed and said, “Good clue.”
*
April 19, 10 a.m.
At the end of a contraction, with two gloved fingers, Cynthia feels and notes the condition of the cervix and the position of the baby’s head.
As the next contraction begins, she moves the lip of the cervix up and away, out of the baby’s way.
The baby’s damp brown hair peeks between Margaret’s legs and retreats. Margaret reaches down to touch his head, then pushes.
“A couple more like that and you’ll be done,” Cynthia tells her.
“I wish.”
Marguerite briefly fits Margaret with an oxygen mask for energy.
Cynthia lifts Margaret’s legs and slips a clean absorbent pad underneath her. When the baby is born, she will remove the wet, blood-soaked pads. The bed will be spotless.
*
The baby won’t come unless Margaret and Tom resolve any tension between them, Janice counseled Margaret as the due date, April 10, approached.
Birth is as much emotional, mental, psychological and spiritual as biological, midwives believe. Janice suggested they go on a “date.”
During Margaret’s past two pregnancies, Tom did not confront the emotional trauma of childhood sexual abuse by his mother, who later committed suicide. Nor did he discuss doubts about his ability to be a good father, which made it difficult for him to bond with his own son, Jonathan.
When Margaret’s sonogram showed their third child was a boy, he felt disappointed at first. But this time, he and Margaret discussed their concerns.
“Nothing is hidden,” Tom said, during their Saturday night “date” at Steak and Ale in North Miami.
“Our relationship goes deeper,” Margaret said. “I’ve been much more excited about being a mother again.”
They shared, too, their expectations about a home birth with a midwife.
“I look forward to being around people I love, playing my own tapes, being able to eat and drink and take a hot shower or bath,” she said.
Tom said he was torn.
“I’m a real private person, I don’t even want the midwife there,” he said. “But this other part of me wants people who love me and people I love near. I want it to be like a holiday.”
*
April 19, 10:40 a.m.
Cynthia massages Jason’s emerging head and the surrounding area with olive oil.
With her fingers, she eases the pressure around the top and bottom of the vaginal opening and checks his scalp color for pinkish-blue or purple tones, both good signs.
She clears his mouth with a suction and feels for an umbilical cord around his neck. She finds part of the cord.
In a split second, she slips a finger down along the back of the baby’s neck, flexes the finger and grasps the cord. With her other hand, she unwinds it.
Neither Tom nor Margaret notices.
“He’s so beautiful, honey,” Tom says.
Margaret’s face is transformed.
*
With the baby overdue by nearly a week, Janice and Margaret spoke about God and accepting that she cannot control when he will be born.
“By next week, if you haven’t had the baby, I’ll have to do an ultrasound,” Janice said. “You would probably be induced by now if you were going to an obstetrician.”
Her guess, after an internal exam: Jason will be about 7 1/ 2 pounds.
“There may be a minute or an hour when you get really blue and think you’re going to be pregnant forever,” Janice empathized.
“Before it was like, it’s going to happen today,” Margaret said. “Now it’s like, is it ever going to happen?”
*
April 19, 10:48 a.m.
Jason pops out, a limp white body, a blood-streaked reddish face.
Tears stream down Tom’s face, “He’s perfect.”
Cynthia massages the baby into movement. He cries, and she wraps him in a blue towel and places him into Margaret’s arms.
“My baby, oh my baby,” she whispers.
Linda cuts the cord.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” Margaret says. “I was so scared I was going to have to be induced again.”
Cynthia weighs Jason with fisherman-type hanging scales, suspending the baby like a stork with its bundle.
Jason Dynes is seven pounds, eight ounces.
“If we had gone to the hospital, they would have whisked him away,” Tom says.
“This was a total healing.”
10,000 cases, and AIDS endures; As the epidemic reaches a milestone, awareness and indifference grow
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 9, 1995 for The Boston Globe
The death certificate for a man in his late 30s puzzled Boston funeral director Kenneth F. Bennett when he saw it 13 years ago. It read, “acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” and a mystified Bennett remembers calling a state health official to ask precisely what that meant.
“He indicated that this was the beginning of a very serious epidemic,” Bennett recalled.
That case, in 1982, was one of the state’s first reported AIDS-related deaths. Today, Bennett handles three such deaths a week at his Kenmore Square funeral home.
Last month, the state passed a grim milestone when the 10,000th person in Massachusetts was diagnosed with AIDS, of whom some 6,000 have died. Another 30,000 have tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease.
Now the leading cause of death for those aged 25-44 in the United States, the face of AIDS has changed dramatically in Massachusetts and the nation. Women account for 50 percent of new infections. The percentage of cases among heterosexuals increased from 9.2 percent in 1993 to 10.3 percent in 1994. The as-yet uncurable disease has produced a social culture bound by fear, loss and love. It has led to medical breakthroughs, anti-discrimination laws, improved sex education and expanded social services.
Nearly 2,000 people living with AIDS or HIV celebrate Thanksgiving together each year in Hynes Auditorium. Hundreds pray in an annual healing service every winter at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End.
Awareness has grown, with admissions by celebrities like Greg Louganis and Magic Johnson. But so has indifference. Kids can recite virus facts and bodily fluids – but don’t change their sexual behavior. Discrimination persists, and some fear compassion will dwindle in a climate of funding cuts.
Larry Kessler, executive director of the AIDS Action Committee, said of the state’s 10,000th diagnosis of AIDS: “It’s a good reminder that while you weren’t paying attention, something has been happening, and 10,000 is no small potatoes. They are your neighbors, your co-workers and your friends. And now they have AIDS.”
Robert Allen, 36, of Methuen, had three sexual partners in his lifetime. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1985.
A slender man with blue eyes, reddish-blond cropped hair and a moustache, Allen thought he was going to die several years ago. So he spent his savings on gifts for nieces and nephews and trips to Puerto Rico and Mexico.
Now he is a longtime survivor, living in a public housing development filled with elderly residents because his savings were depleted. His mother hasn’t spoken to him since he went public with his homosexuality by making an AIDS quilt panel in memory of his partner of seven years, Steven, who died in 1991 and whose photo remains on the side of his refrigerator.
Allen has had meningitis and suffers badly from neuropathy, which makes his muscles ache, and occasional night sweats, which drench his sheets. But he still volunteers for an AIDS agency three times a week and takes a daily handful of pills.
“I take really good care of myself, plenty of sleep, make sure I eat right and make sure people don’t stress me out,” says Allen. “I stopped going to funerals unless it’s a really close friend. I just can’t do any more funerals.”
In 1983, people diagnosed with HIV typically lived six months. Now they live an average of 30 months from diagnosis, doctors say.
Improved doses and combinations of drugs such as AZT and 3TC help, and antibiotics prevent related infections, including pneumocystis, which causes severe pneumonia. Researchers are also testing new drugs and investigating gene therapy, and they recently reported the first case of an infant infected at birth who fended off the virus by his first birthday.
An informal poll by the Harvard AIDS Institute last year showed 50 leading AIDS scientists and policy makers believe that AIDS will eventually be effectively treated and cured. Many are also calling for efforts to develop international vaccines and surveillance of lethal, foreign HIV strains. At a conference Wednesday, institute chairman Max Essex called for national screening to see if yet more infectious HIV subtypes are moving into the United States.
Generally, someone infected with the HIV virus in the last two years with a white blood cell count above 200, who eats properly and exercises, stands a decent chance of maintaining a good quality of life, said Jerome Groopman, a New England Deaconess Hospital hematologist and Harvard University professor of medicine.
“The disease is not cured, but I think we are on the right road,” Groopman said. “There’s much better understanding and empathy on the part of the academic community and more trust on the part of the HIV-infected community, so that has removed a lot of the conflict that led to people rejecting mainstream treatment.”
In Massachusetts, dozens of clinics and social service agencies have sprung up since AIDS first appeared in the early 1980s. In Cambridge, for instance, with the highest number of AIDS cases in Middlesex County, the Zinberg Clinic saw 50 people in 1990. It now treats 400 people with HIV annually, a quarter of whom have AIDS.
The state budget for AIDS-related services, slated to remain level next year, increased to $ 37.5 million in 1995 from $ 18.2 million in 1992, Department of Public Health figures show.
About 1,300 injection drug users participate in pilot needle exchange programs in Cambridge and Boston. New residences for people with HIV and AIDS are planned for the Fenway and Beacon Hill. Religious groups opposed to homosexuality and contraception run support groups, meals, hospices and special functions for those with AIDS, including the annual Catholic Church healing service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
“Last year, the cardinal went to one young man holding a 2-year-old,” said Sister Zita Fleming, director of the Archdiocese of Boston’s Office of Aids Ministry. “I was close enough to say, ‘Which one is to be anointed?’ and the father said, ‘Both.’ You just weep.”
Increasingly, the courts will have to determine the rights of HIV-infected people, from issues of confidentiality and mandatory testing to definitions of “reasonable accommodation” when employees with HIV or AIDS miss work, said Janice H. Platner, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.
“We’ve had discrimination cases in emergency rooms and all sorts of places that should know better,” Platner said. “People are discriminating and not apologizing for it.”
Catherine Gaudette, 25, of Milford, says she suffered for months with chronic pain because doctors accustomed to treating men failed to detect her gynecological infections. She contracted HIV after her college freshman year through unprotected sex with her fiance. She tested positive in 1990 and was diagnosed with AIDS in August 1992.
By then, she had discovered that the former fiance, who told her he had cancer, had been keeping two secrets: He was a heroin addict and he had a gay lover.
Gaudette says she transferred to four colleges to complete a psychology degree, twice because of discrimination. One professor told AIDS jokes in class. Two roommates broke into her locked file cabinets, discovered HIV pamphlets and tried to get her thrown out of school.
“Being a straight woman with this disease has been very lonely because people automatically assume that I’m a drug user,” said Gaudette, who speaks to children about AIDS and appears healthy at 5-feet-7 and 165 pounds. “I’m not sick looking. It scares the crap out of them, actually, because they’re just like, ‘I thought you could tell by looking.’ ”
AIDS has become an illness transmitted without regard for sexual identity, gender or race. Half of the state’s residents with AIDS now live outside Greater Boston, up from 33 percent in 1986. But many suburban professionals are reluctant to come forward, said Madelaine St. Amand, executive director of Strongest Link.
While state officials say the disease has shifted to new populations, others say recent statistics reflect greater attention to minority communities still in need of housing, culturally sensitive education and medical treatment.
In one case, HIV-related lesions on a Latino man’s skin were not recognized because they were brown, not purple, said Nicolas P. Carballeira, director of the Latino Health Institute. That has changed to the extent that “a thin Latino coughing very often is misdiagnosed with HIV or AIDS because people now expect minority communities to be infected,” he said.
“AIDS is directly killing the minority community,” said Jeffrey Beard, executive director of the Cambridge Men of Color Task Force, who lost his brother to AIDS. “The challenge is outreach, to get to where people are.”
Injection drug users, many of whom are female and minority, represent a growing segment of the AIDS population as the purity of heroin increases and its price falls. Statistics show AIDS transmission through injections statewide have nearly tripled in the past 10 years to 47 percent of all cases diagnosed in 1994.
Crack smoking and oral sex are also “extraordinarily dangerous” because the pipe leaves burns in the mouth, said Mark Kleiman, associate public policy professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
He suggested that police crack down on places where people shoot heroin, rather than arrest those who illegally circulate clean needles, to prevent sharing. Massachusetts requires prescriptions for needles and syringes, and police respond they are merely enforcing the law.
Said Kleiman, “The law enforcement community has not been interested in AIDS control, and the AIDS community has not been interested in law enforcement.”
Rafael Fainz, 21, a gay Latino man from Haverhill with jet black hair and brown eyes, estimates that he had sex with 200 partners, including many strangers at highway rest stops, but had unprotected sex with only two or three of them.
“That’s the important thing. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality of sex that you have with each one,” says Fainz, who was diagnosed with HIV at age 18. “When you’re out in the woods and stuff, you really don’t have the availability of condoms.”
In his Catholic home and parochial school, Fainz says no one ever spoke to him about sex and told him AIDS was a “gay thing.” What little he learned he learned through the Boston Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Youth.
The youngsters Fainz speaks to as a health educator at the Latino Health Institute either believe AIDS can’t happen to them or are absolutely convinced it will, he says: “They think, ‘It’s hopeless, so why not just do it and have fun and go out with a smile?’ ”
A new generation is at risk, and some suggest AIDS activism has been misguided, treating the symptom and not the disease.
“Don’t have sex outside of marriage, and don’t do drugs,” said Nancy Sutton, executive director of Family First in Needham. “The conventional wisdom is that if you use condoms and sterilized needles, you won’t have any problems. But that’s ridiculous. Eventually condoms break and needles get dirty.” While AIDS activists push for condom use and safe-sex education, others, like Sutton, say abstinence is the only answer.
Felicia Swan, 17, says she knows not to have sex without a condom. But the Boston teen-ager adds, “Guys know about AIDS, but they think they’re too good to catch it.”
A memory laid to rest; Lost love returns to haunt man after 44-year marriage to another
By Pamela Ferdinand | June 9, 1996 for The Boston Globe.
Brookline, Mass.–Edwin Barker, 76, happily married for 44 years, had a vivid dream one night about an old flame.
They were together again back in the 1940s, listening to Arthur dexadrene on the Esplanade in Boston, watching Jimmy Stewart films at the Brookline Theater, walking arm-in-arm as couples do.
It got Barker to wondering. Tugged at his conscience a bit: Whatever happened to Mary Catherine MacKay? Was she sending him some kind of message? And did she find happiness after he left her brokenhearted?
She was the girl who never spoke ill of anyone and for whom apologies came too little, too late. And when Barker reached back into the past for her, his message in an April 20 newspaper ad resonated in the hearts and imaginations of anyone who ever wondered about an old love or failed romance.
“A letter for Mary Catherine MacKay,” the ad read. “We were in love with each other at the time. You were relying on me, and I let you down. I am truly sorry for what happened, and I lost you forever . . . I don’t have many years left, and it would do my heart good to know that she has had a happy life. Please someone let me know.”
Barker didn’t even want to see her. He needed to find out what happened to her. And he did. But a reunion was not to be.
“Usually when I dream something, I forget it,” Barker said from his home in Clearwater, Fla. “But this one was so real that I thought, ‘I wonder how she made out?’ because I still cared.”
Which did not please Mildred, his wife: “How would you feel after 40-some years if your husband was trying to find someone else?”
Mary Catherine MacKay was virtually the girl next door. She lived with her parents and sister two houses away from the Barker home on Thorndike Street.
They met at choir rehearsal. Eddie was 20, tall and dark-haired, a grocery store clerk. Mary was 23, with brown hair and a reedy frame. She worked at the Woolworth 5&10 in Newton Centre and won him over with kindness.
They fell in love in 1940. As they courted, debates raged in local newspapers over Roosevelt’s foreign policy and local schools considered opening machine shops for defense workers. They went to concerts on the Esplanade and sometimes the movies when he could afford it. Her parents found no reason not to approve.
Suddenly, without warning, Eddie ended it one February day in 1941. They stood outside her house, and he told her he was moving to Philadelphia for a railroad job. She pleaded, said she had counted on him. He gave no further explanation.
There was no way she could have known what was going on in his adolescent mind. He was still reeling from the deaths of two previous girlfriends and worried, foolishly yet sincerely, that his love for Mary put her at risk of dying young too.
His first girlfriend, a 17-year-old named Nona, whom his uncle adopted as a young girl, was murdered in Vermont in 1937 by a jealous farmhand, Barker said. The 14-year-old boy stole their love letters, read them and tore them up. Then he shot Nona in the head as she read a Sears & Roebuck catalog before dinner.
Eddie’s second attempt at romance, a friend of Nona’s named Rosemary, died minutes before their first date. Famished after church and nervous about seeing him, she ate a hasty lunch. Acute indigestion brought on heart failure. A priest was giving her last rites when Eddie came to pick her up for a Sunday matinee.
“I had this crazy notion at the time that I was never going to get involved with a woman again because every time I do she dies,” Barker said. “I didn’t want anything to happen to Mary.”
In 1941 he moved to Philadelphia. Two years later, Eddie came to his senses and tried to win Mary back. But it was too late. When he visited on furlough, she shook his hand coolly and said it was nice to see him.
Later she wrote him that she was engaged to another man. She may only have been trying to let him down gently.
A decade after the 1945 death of her father, a supermarket manager, Mary moved to Dedham, Mass., with her younger sister and mother.
Mary stayed at Woolworth’s for the rest of her life, becoming the chain’s first female manager in the Northeast.
The three were private and inseparable, hunting for antiques, attending church, traveling to the Maine coast on weekends and wearing matching sheared beaver coats in winter.
There was no time for romance, and Mary never mentioned her breakup with Eddie to her family.
Mary died on Dec. 13, 1969, at age 53 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
She never married. By all accounts, she was happy. And she never knew Eddie broke her heart to spare her life.
“I have no regrets,” Barker said. “She was really too good for me. She deserved the best.”
