[UA] Myths Over Miami
Richard Pace
richardpace at sympatico.ca
Fri Nov 24 15:55:40 PST 2000
From
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/1997-06-05/feature.html
I included the entirety of the article since it may be down . . .
Myths Over Miami
Captured on South Beach, Satan later escaped.
His
demons and the horrible Bloody Mary are now
killing
people. God has fled. Avenging angels hide out
in the
Everglades. And other tales from children in
Dade's
homeless shelters.
By Lynda Edwards
To homeless children sleeping on the
street, neon is as comforting as a
night-light. Angels love colored light too.
After nightfall in
downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank
building --
always drenched in a green, pink, or golden
glow. "They eat light so
they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the
children sitting on the
patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter
on NW 38th
Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in
the building while they
study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing
going on in Miami," he
says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to
live, you got to learn
the secret stories." The small group listens
intently to these tales
told by homeless children in shelters.
On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven
to escape an
audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet
Offensive. The demons
smashed to dust his palace of beautiful
blue-moon marble. TV
news kept it secret, but homeless children in
shelters across the
country report being awakened from troubled
sleep and alerted by
dead relatives. No one knows why God has never
reappeared,
leaving his stunned angels to defend his
earthly estate against
assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our
world," adds
eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre
with the other
children at the Salvation Army shelter. The
demons' gateways from
Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors,
Ghost Town (the
nickname shelter children have for a cemetery
somewhere in Dade
County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black
windows." The demons
are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy,
hate, fear.
One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami
shelters, children
know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La
Llorona (the Crying
Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from
ghoulish empty
sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a
child is killed
accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered,
she croons with joy.
"If you wake at night and see her," a
ten-year-old says softly, "her
clothes be blowing back, even in a room where
there is no wind.
And you know she's marked you for killing."
The homeless children's chief ally is a
beautiful angel they have
nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin
and lives in the
ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The
demons made it so she
only has power if you know her secret name,"
says Andre, whose
mother has been through three rehabilitation
programs for crack
addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner
on a street when a
car comes shooting bullets and only one child
yells out her true
name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing
your skin, the Blue
Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can
talk to us, even
without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"
A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his
eye, swollen huge as a
ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods
his head in affirmation.
"I've seen her," he murmurs. A rustle of
whispered Me toos ripples
through the small circle of initiates.
According to the Dade Homeless Trust,
approximately 1800
homeless children currently find themselves
bounced between the
county's various shelters and the streets. For
these children, lasting
bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is
permanent. A
common rule among homeless parents is that
everything a child
owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast
packing. But during
their brief stays in the shelters, children can
meet and tell each
other stories that get them through the
harshest nights.
Folktales are usually an inheritance from
family or homeland. But
what if you are a child enduring a continual,
grueling, dangerous
journey? No adult can steel such a child
against the outcast's fate:
the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the
fear. What these
determined children do is snatch dark and
bright fragments of
Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored
Bible-story leaflets
from street-corner preachers, and like birds
building a nest from
scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret
stories" are carefully
guarded knowledge, never shared with older
siblings or parents for
fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for
blasphemy. But their
accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will
not respond to human
pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to
shelter children, a
plausible explanation for having no safe home,
and one that
engages them in an epic clash.
An astute folklorist can see traces of old
legends in all new
inventions. For example, Yemana, a Santeria
ocean goddess,
resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate
and robed in blue,
though she is portrayed with white or tan skin
in her worshippers'
shrines. And in the Eighties, folklorists noted
references to an evil
Bloody Mary -- or La Llorona, as children of
Mexican migrant
workers first named her -- among children of
all races and
economic classes. Celtic tales of revenants,
visitors from the land
of the dead sent to console or warn, arrived in
America centuries
ago. While those myths may have had some
influence on shelter
folklore, the tales homeless children create
among themselves are
novel and elaborately detailed. And they are a
striking example of
"polygenesis," the folklorist's term for the
simultaneous appearance
of vivid, similar tales in far-flung locales.
The same overarching themes link the myths of
30 homeless
children in three Dade County facilities
operated by the Salvation
Army -- as well as those of 44 other children
in Salvation Army
emergency shelters in New Orleans, Chicago, and
Oakland,
California. These children, who ranged in age
from six to twelve,
were asked what stories, if any, they believed
about Heaven and
God -- but not what they learned in church.
(They drew pictures
for their stories with crayons and markers.)
Even the parlance in
Miami and elsewhere is the same. Children use
the biblical term
"spirit" for revenants, never "ghost" (says one
local nine-year-old
scornfully: "That baby word is for Casper in
the cartoons, not a real
thing like spirits!"). In their lexicon, they
always use "demon" to
denote wicked spirits.
Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms,
regardless of
ethnicity (the secret stories are told and
cherished by white, black,
and Latin children), for the homeless
youngsters see themselves as
allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in
their battle against
shared spiritual adversaries. For them the
secret stories do more
than explain the mystifying universe of the
homeless; they impose
meaning upon it.
Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book
Award and three
Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children's
literature), is the only
children's author to win a MacArthur Foundation
genius grant. Her
best-selling books, The People Could Fly and
Herstories, trace
African-American folklore through the diaspora
of slavery.
"Folktales are the only work of beauty a
displaced people can
keep," she explains. "And their power can
transcend class and race
lines because they address visceral questions:
Why side with good
when evil is clearly winning? If I am killed,
how can I make my life
resonate beyond the grave?"
That sense of mission, writes Harvard
psychologist Robert Coles in
The Spiritual Life of Children, may explain why
some children in
crisis -- and perhaps the adults they become --
are brave, decent,
and imaginative, while others more privileged
can be "callous,
mean-spirited, and mediocre." The homeless
child in Miami and
elsewhere lives in a world where violence and
death are
commonplace, where it's highly advantageous to
grovel before the
powerful and shun the weak, and where adult
rescuers are
nowhere to be found. Yet what Coles calls the
"ability to grasp onto
ideals larger than oneself and exert influence
for good" -- a sense
of mission -- is nurtured in eerie, beautiful,
shelter folktales.
In any group that generates its own legends --
whether in a
corporate office or a remote Amazonian village
-- the most
articulate member becomes the semiofficial
teller of the tales. The
same thing happens in homeless shelters, even
though the
population is so transient. The most verbally
skilled children -- such
as Andre -- impart the secret stories to new
arrivals. Ensuring that
their truths survive regardless of their own
fate is a duty felt deeply
by these children, including one ten-year-old
Miami girl who, after
confiding and illustrating secret stories,
created a self-portrait for a
visitor. She chose a gray crayon to draw a
gravestone carefully
inscribed with her own name and the year 1998.
Here is what the secret stories say about the
rules of spirit
behavior: Spirits appear just as they looked
when alive, even
wearing favorite clothes, but they are
surrounded by faint, colored
light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move
but no sound is heard.
They must learn to speak across the chasm
between the living and
the dead. For shelter children, spirits have a
unique function:
providing war dispatches from the fighting
angels. And like demons,
once spirits have seen your face, they can
always find you.
Nine-year-old Phatt is living for a month in a
Salvation Army
shelter in northwest Dade. He and his mother
became homeless
after his father was arrested for drug-dealing
and his mother
couldn't pay the rent with her custodial job at
a fast-food
restaurant. (Phatt is his nickname. The first
names of all other
children in this article have been used with
the consent of their
parents or guardians.) "There's a river that
runs through Miami.
One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took
over," Phatt recounts
as he sits with four homeless friends in the
shelter's playroom,
which is decorated with pictures the children
have drawn of homes,
kittens, and hearts. "The other side the demons
call Good Streets.
Rich people live by a beach there. They wear
diamonds and gold
chains when they swim."
He explains that Satan harbors a special hatred
of Miami owing to
a humiliation he suffered while on an Ocean
Drive reconnaissance
mission. He was hunting for gateways for his
demons and was
scouting for nasty emotions to feed them.
Satan's trip began with
an exhilarating start; he moved undetected
among high-rolling South
Beach clubhoppers despite the fact that his
skin was, as Phatt's
friend Victoria explains, covered with scales
like a "gold and silver
snake."
Why didn't the rich people notice?
Eight-year-old Victoria
scrunches up her face, pondering. "Well, I
think maybe sometimes
they're real stupid so they get tricked," she
replies. Plus, she adds,
the Devil was "wearing all that Tommy Hilfiger
and smoking
Newports and drinking wine that cost maybe
three dollars for a big
glass." He found a large Hell door under the
Colony Hotel, and just
as he was offering the owner ten
Mercedes-Benzes for use of the
portal, he was captured by angels.
"The rich people said: 'Why are you taking our
friend who buys us
drinks?'" Phatt continues. "The angels tied him
under the river and
said: 'See what happens when the water touch
him. Just see!'"
Phatt insists that his beloved cousin (and only
father figure) Ronnie,
who joined the U.S. Army to escape Liberty City
and was killed
last year in another city, warned him about
what happened next at
the river. (Ronnie was gunned down on
Valentine's Day while
bringing cupcakes to a party at the school
where his girlfriend
taught. He appeared to Phatt after that -- to
congratulate him on
winning a shelter spelling bee, and to show him
a shortcut to his
elementary school devoid of sidewalk drunks.)
One night this year Phatt and his mother made a
bed out of plastic
grocery bags in a Miami park where junkies
congregate. It was his
turn to stand guard against what he calls
"screamers," packs of
roaming addicts, while his mother slept.
Suddenly Ronnie stood
before him, dressed in his army uniform. "The
Devil got loose from
under the river!" Ronnie said. "The rich people
didn't stop him! The
angels need soldiers."
Phatt says his dead cousin told him that as
soon as water touched
the Devil's skin, it turned deep burgundy and
horns grew from his
head. The river itself turned to blood; ghostly
screams and bones of
children he had murdered floated from its
depths. Just when the
angels thought they had convinced Good Streets'
denizens that they
were in as much danger as those in Bad Streets,
Satan vanished
through a secret gateway beneath the river.
"Now he's coming
your way," Ronnie warned. "You'll need to learn
how to fight."
Ronnie nodded toward the dog-eared math and
spelling workbooks
Phatt carries even when he can't attend school.
"Study hard," he
implored. "Stay strong and smart so's you count
on yourself, no one
else. Never stop watching. Bloody Mary is
coming with Satan. And
she's seen your face."
Given what the secret stories of shelter
children say about the
afterlife, it isn't surprising that Ronnie
appeared in his military
uniform. There is no Heaven in the stories,
though the children
believe that dead loved ones might make it to
an angels'
encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle
somewhere beyond
Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh
green palm leaf (to be
used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on
the beloved's
grave.
This bit of folklore became an obsession for
eight-year-old Miguel.
His father, a Nicaraguan immigrant, worked the
overnight shift at a
Miami gas station. Miguel always walked down
the street by
himself to bring his dad a soda right before
the child's bedtime, and
they'd chat. Then one night his father was
murdered while on the
job. Recalls Miguel: "The police say the
robbers put lit matches all
over him before they killed him."
Miguel's mother speaks no English and is
illiterate. She was often
paid less than two dollars per hour for the
temporary jobs she could
find in Little Havana (mopping shop floors,
washing dishes in
restaurants). After her husband's death, she
lost her apartment. No
matter where Miguel's family of three
subsequently slept (a church
pew, a shelter bed, a sidewalk), his father's
spirit appeared,
bloodied and burning all over with tiny flames.
Miguel's teachers
would catch him running out of his school in
central Miami, his
small fists filled with green palm leaves,
determined to find his
father's grave. A social worker finally took
him to the cemetery,
though Miguel refused to offer her any
explanation. "I need my
daddy to find the fighter angels," Miguel says
from a Salvation
Army facility located near Liberty City. "I'll
go there when I'm
killed."
The secret stories say the angel army hides in
a child's version of
an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold,
drinkable water winds
among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed.
Gigantic alligators
guard the compound, promptly eating the
uninvited. Says Phatt:
"But they take care of a dead child's spirit
while he learns to fight. I
never seen it, but yes! I know it's out there"
-- he sweeps his hand
past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining
the street on which
the shelter is located -- "and when I do good,
it makes their fighting
easier. I know it! I know!"
All the Miami shelter children who participated
in this story were
passionate in defending this myth. It is the
most necessary fiction of
the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a
distant, honorable
troop is risking everything to come to the
rescue, and that somehow
your bravery counts.
By the time homeless children reach the age of
twelve, more or
less, they realize that the secret stories are
losing some of their
power to inspire. They sadly admit there is
less and less in which to
believe. Twelve-year-old Leon, who often visits
a Hialeah day-care
center serving the homeless, has
bruised-looking bags under his
eyes seen normally on middle-aged faces. He has
been homeless
for six years. Even the shelters are not safe
for him because his
mother, who is mentally unstable, often insists
on returning to the
streets on a whim, her child in tow.
"I don't think any more that things happen for
some great, good God
plan, or for any reason," he says. "And I don't
know if any angels
are still fighting for us." He pauses and looks
dreamily at the
twilight sky above the day-care center. "I do
think a person can
dream the moment of his death. Sometimes I
dream that when I die
soon, I'll be in some high, great place where
people have time to
conversate. And even if there's no God or
Heaven, it won't be too
bad for me to be there."
Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates
that children in crisis
-- with a deathly ill parent or living in
poverty -- often view God as
a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with
emergencies to help.
But homeless children are in straits so dire
they see God as having
simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam embrace the
premise that good will triumph over evil in the
end; in that respect,
shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated.
"One thing I don't
believe," says a seven-year-old who attends
shelter chapels
regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child
could imagine a God
with the strength to force evildoers to face
some final reckoning.
Yet even though they feel that wickedness may
prevail, they want
to be on the side of the angels.
When seven-year-old Maria is asked about the
Blue Lady, she
pauses. "When grownups talk about her, I think
she get all upset,"
Maria slowly replies. She considers a gamble,
then takes a chance
and leans forward, beaming: "She's a magic
lady, nice and pretty
and smart! She live in the ocean and comes just
to kids."
She first appeared to Maria at the deserted
Freedom Tower in
downtown Miami, which Maria calls "the pink
haunted house." A
fierce storm was pounding Miami that night.
Other homeless people
who had broken in milled about the building's
interior, illuminated
only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her
mother tried to stop
him from eating the family's last food: a box
of saltines. "He kept
hitting her and the crazy people started
laughing. When I try to help
her, he hit me here" -- Maria points to her
forehead. "I tried to
sleep so my head and stomach would stop
hurting, but they kept
hurting." A blast of wind and rain shattered a
window. "I was so
scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don't
punish me no more!"
An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of
towel tried to soothe
her. "Hurricanes ain't God," he said gently.
"It's Blue Lady bringing
rain for the flowers." When Maria awoke late in
the night, she saw
the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and
dark hair standing by
the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink,
gold, and white
flowers. "She smiled," Maria says, her dark
eyes wide with
amazement. "My head was hurting, but she
touched it and her hand
was cool like ice. She say she's my friend
always. That's why she
learned me the hard song." The song is complex
and strange for
such a young child; its theme is the mystery of
destiny and will.
When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she
loved it, but the
words were too complicated. "Then the Blue Lady
sang it to me,"
she recalls. "She said it'll help me grow up
good, not like daddy."
Maria's voice begins shakily, then becomes more
assured: "If you
believe within your heart you'll know/that no
one can change the
path that you must go./ Believe what you feel
and you'll know
you're right because/when love finally comes
around, you can say
it's yours./ Believe you can change what you
see!/ Believe you can
act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have
a heart!/You have
the courage to last your life!/Please believe
in yourself as I believe
in you!"
As she soars to a finish, Maria suddenly
realizes how much that
she's revealed to a stranger: "I told the
secret story and the Blue
Lady isn't mad!" She's awash with relief. "Even
if my mom say we
sleep in the bus station when we leave the
shelter, Blue Lady will
find us. She's seen my face."
Shelter children often depict the Blue Lady in
their drawings as
blasting demons and gangbangers with a pistol.
But the secret
stories say that she cannot take action unless
her real name --
which no one knows -- is called out. The
children accept that.
What they count on her for is love, though they
fear that abstract
love won't be enough to withstand an evil they
believe is relentless
and real. The evil is like a dark ocean waiting
to engulf them, as
illustrated by a secret story related by three
different girls in
separate Miami homeless facilities. It is a
story told only by and to
homeless girls, and it explains how the dreaded
Bloody Mary can
invade souls.
Ten-year-old Otius, dressed in a pink flowered
dress, leads a visitor
by the hand away from four small boys who are
sitting in a shelter
dining room snacking on pizza and fruit juice.
"Every girl in the
shelters knows if you tell this story to a boy,
your best friend will
die!" she says with a shiver. When the boys try
to sneak up behind
her, she refuses to speak until they return to
their places.
She begins: "Some girls with no home feel claws
scratching under
the skin on their arms. Their hand looks like
red fire. It's Bloody
Mary dragging them in for slaves -- to be in
gangs, be crackheads.
But every 1000 girls with no home, is a Special
One. When Bloody
Mary comes, the girl is so smart and brave, a
strange thing
happens." Bloody Mary disappears, she says,
then a pretty,
luminous face glows for a moment in the dark.
The girl has
glimpsed what Bloody Mary looked like before
she became
wicked. "The Special One," Otius continues, "is
somebody Bloody
Mary is scared of because she be so good,
people watch her for
what to do. And if she dies, she will die good.
"Boys always brag what they can do, but this is
the job of girls and
-- I wish maybe I were a Special One," Otius
says wistfully.
"Maybe one of my friends from the shelters are
now. I'll never see
them again -- so's I guess I never know."
Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among
children all over
America nearly twenty years ago. Even in Sweden
folklorists
reported Bloody Mary's fame. Children of all
races and classes told
of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her
name before a
mirror in a pitch-dark room. (In Miami
shelters, the mirror must be
coated with ocean water, a theft from the Blue
Lady's domain.)
And when she crashes through the glass, she
mutilates children
before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in
Miami kids'
drawings with a red rosary that, the secret
stories say, she uses as
a weapon, striking children across the face.
Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody
Mary polygenesis, and
the common element of using a mirror to conjure
her, that they
consulted medical literature for clues. Bill
Ellis, a folklorist and
professor of American studies at Penn State
University, puzzled
over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease article
describing an experiment testing the theory
that schizophrenics are
prone to see hallucinations in reflected
surfaces. The research
showed that the control group of nonpsychotic
people reported
seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after
staring at it for twenty
minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick
the brain plays was
merely a partial explanation for the children's
legend.
"Whenever you ask children where they first
heard one of their
myths, you get answers that are impossible
clues: 'A friend's friend
read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'"
says Ellis, an authority on
children's folklore, particularly that
concerning the supernatural. As
president of the International Society for
Contemporary Legend
Research, he's become an expert on polygenesis.
"When a child
says he got the story from the spirit world, as
homeless children do,
you've hit the ultimate non sequitur."
Folklorists have not discovered a detailed
explanation for Bloody
Mary's ravenous hatred of children, or her true
identity. Today,
however, shelter children say they've
discovered her secret
mission, as well as her true name. All of the
secret stories about
her enclose hints.
In Chicago shelters, children tell of her role
in the death of
eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer, who shot an
innocent
fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he mistook for an
enemy. Cops
combed the streets, shaking down gangbangers.
In desperation
Sandifer's gang turned to the one who could
save them from
justice. They sat in a dark room before a
mirror and chanted,
"Bloody Mary." The wall glowed like flames. A
female demon
weeping black tears appeared. Without speaking,
she
communicated a strategy.
That night, realizing his gang was going to
kill him, Sandifer ran
through his neighborhood, knocking on doors.
"Like baby Jesus in
Bethlehem -- except he was bad," explained an
eleven-year-old at
a Chicago homeless shelter. The next morning
police found
Sandifer's body, shot through the head, in a
tunnel. According to the
eleven-year-old, the boy was "lying on a bed of
broken glass."
Bloody Mary commands legions. She can insinuate
herself into the
heart of whomever children trust most: a parent
or a best friend.
Miami shelter children say they learned about
that from television.
Salvation Army shelters offer parlors with
couches, magazines, and
a television. While their mothers play cards
and do each other's
hair, the children carefully study the TV news.
They know how
four-year-old Kendia Lockhart died in North
Dade, allegedly
beaten to death and burned by her father.
Bloody Mary was
hunting Kendia, shelter children agree.
"Gangsters say that God
stories are like Chinese fairy tales," observes
twelve-year-old
Deion at a downtown Miami Salvation Army
shelter. "But even
gangs think Bloody Mary is real."
This is the secret story shelter children will
tell only in hushed
voices, for it reveals Bloody Mary's mystery:
God's final days
before his disappearance were a waking dream.
There were so
many crises on Earth that he never slept.
Angels reported rumors
of Bloody Mary's pact with Satan: She had
killed her own child and
had made a secret vow to kill all human
children. All night God
listened as frantic prayers bombarded him.
Images of earthly lives
flowed across his palace wall like shadows
while he heard gunfire,
music, laughing, crying from all over Earth.
And then one night
Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven
with an army from
Hell. God didn't just flee from the demons, he
went crazy with grief
over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless
children say the
spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ's
mother.
"No one believe us! But it's true! It's true!"
cries Andre at the
Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. "It
mean there's no one
left in the sky watching us but demons." His
friends sitting on the
shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary
sightings: She flew
shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School.
She stalks
through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars.
"I know a boy who
learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she
burned through a
shelter wall to get him!" a seven-year-old boy
says. "When the
people found him, he was all red with blood.
Don't matter if you're
good, don't matter if you're smart. You got to
be careful! If she see
you, she can hunt you forever. She's in Miami!
And she knows our
face.
--
Richard Pace
After November 1st The Gallery will be found at
http://www3.sympatico.ca/richardpace/
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