It was fitting that two blocks away, at a church founded by some of Miami’s first Bahamian settlers, Bethel led a frantic effort this week to aid storm victims in the country of his ancestors. Miami was spared the wrath of Hurricane Dorian but the Bahamas suffered a direct hit, one that left the islands in utter devastation.
The ties could not be stronger between Miami and the archipelago less than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled in South Florida decades before Miami was born, building bridges and railroads and raising children who would become some of the region’s most prominent leaders. This week, their descendants, many veterans of devastating hurricanes themselves, gathered across South Florida to lend a hand.
“When we were desperate, people came to our rescue,” said Bethel, 68, a retired state juvenile justice administrator who lost his home in south Miami-Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, another Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The community pulled together. There was no sense of division. Now, we are doing the same.”
Past disasters, both natural and political, have cemented Miami’s identity as a beacon for the region. The city took in Cuban exiles after Fidel Castro seized power. It mobilized to support Haiti after a crippling earthquake. It adopted the cause of Venezuelans after their country was plunged into crisis.
In the case of the Bahamas, Miami owes its very beginnings to residents from there. Bahamian laborers worked in construction and agriculture, creating the city’s infrastructure and teaching white settlers unfamiliar with the tropics how to build with coral rock, till the soil and plant tropical fruit, said Marvin Dunn, a retired college professor who chronicled local history in his book “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century.”
“It’s probably safe to say that Florida would not have evolved as it did without Bahamians in this community,” he said.
Some of the early settlers’ employers paid them with land, allowing black homeownership to flourish. In the 20th century, Bahamian Americans became among South Florida’s most influential civic leaders and civil rights activists.
Bahamians started to arrive in the 1880s, following an economic downturn on the islands, Dunn said. Many went to work in pineapple fields in Key West and then migrated north to Coconut Grove, which they called Kebo. Bahamians also settled in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown and in Carver Ranches, which is now part of the city of West Park, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.
One of the early figures in Coconut Grove was Bethel’s great-grandmother Mariah Brown, a laundress in Key West who became a Grove innkeeper and built her two-story home on what is now Charles Street.
Brown helped establish the Greater St. Paul AME Church on Thomas Avenue, Bethel said. One of her daughters, Lulu Reddick, Bethel’s grandmother, was a founding member of the nearby Christ Episcopal, on Hibiscus Street, where Bethel is now senior warden, the congregation’s lead layperson.
On Wednesday, volunteers gathered in both houses of worship, dripping with sweat as they sorted through heavy boxes and bags.
Stacks of water bottles. Heaps of diapers. Baby formula. A chain saw. So many donations came in that Christ Episcopal ran out of pallets.
“None of my normal church work is getting done,” the Rev. Jonathan Archer, the church’s rector, said with a chuckle. Archer is from Nassau, the Bahamian capital, and had learned that his relatives there were safe.
“This is in our denominational DNA — we provide relief in times of crisis,” said the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson III, the senior pastor at Greater St. Paul, which was founded in 1896. “While this hurricane in particular affects our parishioners directly, when it was the Haiti earthquake, or the hurricane in Puerto Rico, we did the same thing. Our members do feel this one a bit more personally, but it’s the same effort.”
“It’s too close to home not to react,” said Ligia Crystal, a Colombian-born retired florist who was unloading blankets and pillows from her van at the door of the church. “If someone isn’t helping, what rock are they hiding under?”
Robinson said seven seaplanes lent free of charge by Tropic Ocean Airways in Fort Lauderdale had been pressed into service for the relief effort by the city of Miami and various churches and institutions.
“We do have clearance from the Bahamian government to take medical supplies in today,” he said. “They’ve told us they need to know what’s in each box, so we’ve been filling out a lot of forms.”
In a large hall outside the pastor’s office, a Nassau-born volunteer named Elvern Ross — everyone calls her Mel — said she had heard from her brother in Nassau that their cousins in Marsh Harbour had survived but lost everything in the storm.
“The house is gone,” Ross said. “They were surrounded by water and couldn’t get help. There were six or seven people in the house. It’s a sad thing, you know what I mean?”
Gordon Eric Knowles, president of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, which promotes black-owned businesses, said he still had not heard from a cousin who is a doctor in the Abaco Islands. He saw a photograph of the clinic where she works on CNN but could not manage to get a glimpse of her.
“We’re just praying that she’s OK,” said Knowles, whose great-grandparents first migrated to Fort Pierce, Florida.
The plight of the Bahamas has drawn the attention of public officials, including the state’s Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who asked President Donald Trump to waive or suspend certain visa requirements for Bahamians with relatives in the United States who can take them in temporarily.
Local officials were frustrated that the federal government had not dispatched search-and-rescue teams from Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami to the Bahamas, apparently because they might be needed in Georgia or the Carolinas. The Coast Guard has sent helicopters and boats to perform evacuations on the islands.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat representing Miami Gardens, whose mother’s family hailed from Abaco, said she would like to establish a Bahamian heritage museum in Coconut Grove and obtain a formal designation for the area to be called “Little Bahamas.” Commissioner Ken Russell of Miami, who represents the neighborhood, said he won some protection last year for the last remaining wood-frame shotgun houses built by Bahamian settlers in the West Grove.
“There have been more evictions, demolitions and nonrenewals of month-to-month rentals in that part of town than any other part of town because it’s in between fancy Coconut Grove and fancy Coral Gables,” he lamented.
Back at Christ Episcopal, Bethel said he hoped the community’s efforts to help the islands would draw attention to the need for affordable housing in the West Grove, to maintain the neighborhood’s important history.
“If you don’t keep telling your history,” he said, “you lose it.”
This article originally appeared in
.