The Last Resort

WITHIN THE MARROW OF RUSS RYMER'S AMERICAN Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth and Memory lies a little-known fact of American history. Until recently, in most places in the United States, if you were free and black, white society wouldn't let you die right. A white institution wouldn't insure your life or bury you -- even for money.

The American way of death has always been racially segregated. Because of this, black-owned insurance companies and mortuaries were created to accommodate the black masses' desire for a decent sendoff. The market was lucrative: Upon it several African-American fortunes swelled, one of which was generated by Abraham Lincoln Lewis, founder of the Jacksonville, Florida­based Afro-American Life Insurance Co., chartered in 1901. Lewis was a prominent millionaire with a 22-room mansion. His stature was recognized by powerful whites as well as by his own people. As an insurance magnate, Lewis not only helped African-Americans die right; he aided them in living, too. Among his accomplishments was the building, on Amelia Island near Jacksonville, of American Beach, a flourishing vacation spot enjoyed by wealthy blacks and those folks of moderate means, a place on the ocean's edge, as Rymer puts it, "free from the humiliation of Jim Crow."

American Beach guides the reader through territory rarely traversed in mainstream culture but rich with resources for grappling with our past. Lewis was a member of what Rymer, borrowing from Jacksonville's famous native James Weldon Johnson, calls "the invisible class." These elites were few but disproportionately influential, particularly in the early-20th-century drive for civil equality. Rymer finds the pitch of their song, even though it has been nearly "drowned out in a chorus of slave chant and poor man's blues." In a complex layering akin to musical composition, his admirable book radiates outward from Lewis to his elite descendants, to a host of characters throughout the surrounding region. American Beach ranges in time and space from ancient Dahomey to Florida, from colonial Spain to the White House and back to Germany in the 1960s. And the elusive millionaire himself becomes a touchstone for some of the nation's deepest concerns about community and self-knowledge.

Lewis created more than wealth; he contributed to a national black culture of uplift. His contemporary, Johnson -- lawyer, American consul, NAACP head, poet known for the anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing" -- relates in his autobiography, Along This Way, that this culture transmitted a "central idea . . . [of] service." Service was the idiom common to the aristocracy of color, whatever its shortcomings. As Lewis rose, so did the fortunes of black Jacksonville. His investments funded not only funerals, but home mortgages in thriving residential areas, at whose apex sat the tony Sugar Hill. His company provided loans for merchants in The Bricks, Jacksonville's substantial black commercial district, with its bustling businesses, theaters, newspapers, churches and Masonic Hall. In 1935 Lewis established the Lincoln Golf and Country Club, where, Rymer notes, "black celebrities from around the country -- most notably Joe Louis -- came to play or dine." By the 1940s, Lewis had parceled together over 100 acres of prime beachfront to create what the author calls a "democratically open resort utopia." For generations, American Beach was a crowning symbol of the accomplished culture that had produced Lewis. Its leisure amenities, the sand dunes and what an advertising brochure described as "the ripples of the tangy sea" were a promise fulfilled to African-Americans. A stretch of the Atlantic coast had been triumphantly transformed from slave dock to recreational sanctuary.

Now, however, American Beach, Sugar Hill and The Bricks are gone -- demolished or in ruins. In that reversal lies Rymer's moving investigation. An extraordinary descendant of Lewis, MaVynee (pronounced mah-veen) Betsch, asks the question at the heart of the book: "What went wrong?" Rymer demonstrates that the decline of American Beach is emblematic, not only of the fate of America's black neighborhoods, but of "the trench war between morality and money" being waged in the nation's communities. It is Rymer's achievement that most readers of American Beach will find that war disturbingly redolent of their own civic reality.

AMERICAN BEACH IS DIVIDED INTO THREE STORIES, each pointing to Rymer's theme of "emancipating those things -- culture, memory, history, heritage and personal integrity -- from the chains that modern commerce imposes on them." The first story exposes the open wounds in Fernandina, neighbor to Jacksonville and the seat of Nassau County. The drama of the shooting of a black man, Dennis Wilson, by white cops in 1994 is distressingly familiar. Unusual, however, are the small-town relationships that transcend race. One of the cops who killed Wilson, Denny Bell, was a regular visitor to the dead man's home over the years. When Wilson's mother, Albertina, saw Bell coming, "she set an extra place for breakfast." After the policeman concluded his testimony at the inquest, a relative of Wilson whispered to him, "How could you? You sat at our table!" Rymer explores surprising aspects of the town's past beneath the history of police brutality and institutionalized racism to find a significant period of racial "affection" before the big industrial mills transformed the town in the 1930s. Johnson confirms this in his autobiography; he tells of having a white mammy in 1871, and of the conditions that made the area "good for Negroes" before Fernandina became dominated by "crackers." Denny Bell's agony over the shooting helped trigger his fatal heart attack, a counterpoint to the grief and rage of black residents.