by JAMES MANIGAULT-BRYANT
My grandfather’s words to me, “I want to leave something behind, for my children and my grandchildren,” form an indelible memory in my mind when I think about his home, Tallevast, Florida. I remember the slight, worried smile on his face as he spoke to me in a voice rasped from a lifetime of smoking; the white, short-sleeved, convertible collared shirt he was wearing; and the way his eyes met mine through his black-framed glasses. I do not recall where we were, or what prompted him to confess one of his last hopes to me, or how long before his passing in 2004 we shared this moment—but I was old enough for him to know that I was ready to receive his witness.
I can still access the disparate feelings of gratitude, sympathy, and regret his words left with me. My grandfather, Arthur Bryant, Sr., was subtly telling me that he did not have much more time to finish what he had wanted to build for us, his family. He was confiding in me that he did the best he could do to make our lives easier than his had been.
Now, when I think about my grandfather’s desire to bequeath a material legacy to his family, I know that he wanted to provide us with a freedom he believed was endowed by the land he and my grandmother, Ruth, had inherited, acquired, and stewarded in their home community of Tallevast, Florida. He had fought for his freedom by defending his country during the Second World War and by purposefully contesting the special brand of dixie apartheid that separated Tallevast from the rest of Manatee County. But neither my grandfather nor my grandmother envisioned the expanse of the quiet war that had been waged against Tallevast before they were born.
Tallevast, the community in which my grandparents lived and died, surrounds Tallevast Road between “old” Florida Highway 301 (now Fifteenth Street East) and the “new” Florida Highway 301. With about 80 homes spread over an area of roughly five miles wide and ten miles long, the Black community stretches across seven streets, each about three-quarters of a mile long. Ranch-style homes with screened-in porches line each quadrant of Tallevast and are separated by thick oak trees and manicured lawns of St. Augustine grass. The Seminole Gulf Railway that runs through Tallevast evenly divides its homes on either side of the tracks, not only physically but also economically—in the distribution of public amenities that tie the community to the enduring legacy of its unincorporated status. Homes on the west side of the railway flush waste via county sewer lines, while those on the east side rely on backyard septic tanks.
Tallevast was born of Black migrations to Florida facilitated by economic speculation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black people of formerly enslaved communities in the northern section of Florida, known as the “Panhandle,” slowly moved to rapidly developing lands in search of work in emerging agricultural enterprises. While this population’s migration south was of a different pattern from the more well-known “Great Migration,” it was part of a large state-wide movement of laborers, financial investors, and real estate speculators alike. Tallevast, which sits about a mile from Sarasota Bay, summoned a cohort of Black laborers to undertake the formidable work of producing naval stores, the manufacturing of forested materials like pine tar, pitch, resin, gum, and turpentine for military shipbuilding and repairs.
In 1902, Jeter Hollis Tallevast, a white South Carolina native, moved to the strip of land between Sarasota and Manatee Counties that now bears his name. Mobilized by the tremendous industrial potential of Florida’s natural resources, Jeter, and his brother, Lide (or Lyde), joined a crew of developers from around the country who trekked to what numerous periodicals referred to as the “pioneer state” because of its industrial and commercial potential.
The Tallevast brothers had a simple aim: to take full advantage of Florida’s emerging pine timber industry. “The migration to Florida to-day is another such great movement of peoples, unparalleled in our generation,” Frank Parker Stockbridge and John Holliday Perry write in their 1926 volume, Florida in the Making. “Here,” they continue, “is history in the making, the drama of a world movement being enacted before our eyes. It is not difficult for the imaginative observer to feel himself in the unique situation of having a front-row seat at a new Creation!”[i]
Zora Neale Hurston, who chronicled the history of Black migrations throughout the globe, saw such movements to and from Florida during this episode of “New Creation” as “hoodoo,” a power that sparked an exodus of people from one place to another. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a fictional narrative that blends folktales, ethnography, and her family history, Hurston tells the journey of Reverend John “Buddy” Pearson, a Baptist preacher gifted with an ability to deliver captivating sermons, but who also possessed a self-destructive desire for women. In one scene, Harris, a deacon in John’s church, explains John’s charisma as a provocative capacity to move people, a talent historically traceable to Moses leading the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. For Harris, the nation’s new charismatic figure was “War Pete,” a sublime force that seduced the nation into an interlocking system of conscription, commodity production, and nationalism. “War Pete” not only enlisted Black people into weapons manufacturing–like naval stores, for instance–but it also lured the nation into “money mad(ness),” a willingness to spend currency to allay anxieties in war’s aftermath.[ii]
The Tallevast brothers established a turpentine still and commissary that attracted Black laborers from across the state. Beginning from the base of a Florida pine, workers would cut into the tree’s wood and extract slim strips, exposing more of the tree with each incision. Using cups of metal, they would collect the sap that would flow from the bottom of the tree, a “gum” substance that was boiled in a vat, vaporized, and then cooled into a liquid. Turpentine was produced from the liquid that flowed directly from the vat during the cooling process.[iii] After laborers barreled turpentine, sometimes without distillation, they would load it onto train cars for shipping to northern shipyards.
The process of cutting, collecting, barreling, and shipping mass-produced turpentining for naval stores goes back to the Revolutionary period when North Carolina’s voluminous pine trees supplied materials for Great Britain’s warships. By the mid-nineteenth century, naval stores production was integrated into southern plantation economies when enslaved Blacks took up the arduous work of sapping turpentine.
After the Civil War, naval stores manufacturing relied on the convict lease system. Usually contained within a “camp” in which turpentine industrialists provided every aspect of workers’ existence—including housing, food, and supplies—captive Black labor was integral to ship-making for global war campaigns. Labor wages were generally low, so workers’ inability to pay for their daily needs often indebted them to still owners. At times, wages were eliminated altogether, and camps operated on a cashless basis, comprising a system resembling a plantation. The state even entrusted still owners with responsibility for disciplining its workers’ criminal behavior.[iv] The processing of naval stores was a voracious system of extraction, of both Florida’s abundant pine trees and its post-plantation Black labor.
By 1920, when 80% of Florida’s turpentine laborers were Black,[v] Tallevast was one of thirty camps used for naval stores production in a thirty-mile stretch across Manatee and Sarasota counties.[vi] When the turpentine still owned and operated by Jeter and Lide Tallevast shut down in 1920, Black laborers continued to form a community on the land that had been cleared of the pine trees that once populated the landscape. Over the ensuing two decades, a community of Black men and women like my grandparents—with surnames such as Ward, Washington, Sloan, Smith, and Bryant—purchased land around the former still and made a social, cultural, and economic infrastructure with three churches, a grocery store, a post-office, and a community center for family reunions, award receptions, and community organizing. However, Tallevast’s exclusion from government amenities during its era as a turpentine camp continued after turpentine production ceased as residents were obstructed from accessing educational opportunities and civil amenities under Florida’s Jim Crow regime.
***
My grandfather was discharged from the U.S. Army in October of 1945, after serving nearly two years in North Africa during World War II. He returned to his wife, my grandmother, Ruth, and his two sons, my uncle, Arthur Lee, and my father, W. James, in Tallevast, and lived on land that had been in Ruth’s family for two generations. Like many Black war veterans, my grandfather, having risked his life for a country that did not love him, felt the contradictions between the supposed freedom he was defending abroad and its absence in his home community. He organized demonstrations for civic improvements in Tallevast.
For instance, when my grandparents were children, there was no phone service in individual residences in Tallevast, only one payphone shared by the entire community. When my grandfather returned from the war, he went to each resident to enlist signatures on a petition demanding telephones in each home, a campaign that ended with a Sarasota County communications company agreeing to install telephone lines in Tallevast, even though resident property owners paid their property taxes to Manatee County.
The military operations that were present in Tallevast before my grandfather was born, which he became a part of as a serviceman during the War, were reborn in Tallevast as his family and community leadership grew. In 1959, Henry “Hank” Glass, a Navy veteran of the War, and Orpheus F. Quartullo, an inventor and engineer, established a precision machining plant called Visioneering across the street from where my grandfather and grandmother lived with my father, his brothers, Arthur Lee and Gerald, and his sister, Mary. Two years later, after acquiring a new patent for beryllium billets, Glass and Quartullo changed the name from Visioneering to American Beryllium Company (ABC), which was under the auspices of Loral Corporation. Between 1961 and 1996, as the U.S. increased its military-related manufacturing in preparation for potential nuclear war, ABC produced beryllium components for the defense industry. Although this new facility in the middle of the Tallevast community brought new workers to the area, the Black community surrounding the plant remained relatively unchanged. ABC offered jobs to some of Tallevast’s residents, but at limited pay rates and few opportunities for occupational mobility.
With the birth of ABC, life in Tallevast continued along the peculiar path of US military industrialization that began with turpentining at the turn of the twentieth century. This was most evident in the stark polarity between properties on both sides of Tallevast Road: on the southern side lay a manufacturing plant where engineers machined weapons-grade beryllium; on the northern side, and in a stretch of homes clustered at the rear of the plant, resided a close-knit Black community where homes, churches, and businesses thrived, even in the midst of entrenched racial segregation that slowed the arrival of telephones, municipal water lines, paved roadways and walkways, and street lights.
The duality only became more pronounced as ABC neared the end of its operations in 1996. When Lockheed Martin assumed ownership of ABC after purchasing Loral Corporation in 1997, Lockheed authorized a series of environmental audits of ABC’s facilities. Three years later, Lockheed Martin reported to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) that storage tanks holding solvent waste from beryllium manufacturing had leaked toxic chemicals in Tallevast’s soil, groundwater, and private water wells—a “plume” stretching across over 200 acres of land.
Neither FDEP nor Lockheed informed Tallevast residents of the contamination, and the community did not discover that it was being poisoned until 2003 when homeowners questioned why engineers were installing monitoring wells on their lawns.[vii] Tallevast had been baptized into the slow but persistent violence against Black inhabited environments prevalent not only globally, but also strikingly in the state of Florida. Just last fall, for instance, the predominantly Black community of Tangelo Park, located roughly fifteen miles from Hurston’s Eatonville, brought a lawsuit against Lockheed Martin for its leaking extreme concentrations of methylene chloride and trichloroethylene into the community’s drinking water.[viii]
Tallevast is now embroiled in a silent war waged against it by a defunct corporation that has been absorbed into the world’s largest defense contractor, and a state government that has largely failed to hold the polluting industry responsible—a joint dismissal that has ostensibly sanctioned the destruction of Tallevast as a necessary sacrifice for empire.
The siege against Tallevast includes the failed mechanisms of civil repair after the discovery of the contamination: the state’s unrecorded and unaddressed illnesses among residents; unsuccessful and inadequately successful legal suits against Lockheed Martin (which assumed responsibility for the remediation of the contamination of Tallevast when it purchased Loral Corporation); a cleanup plan for the contamination that offers no guarantees of success, and, even with favorable results, will outlive most residents and their children. Even more devastating is the absence of discourse to effectively map the war against Tallevast as an organized series of campaigns of military occupation over the course of generations.
***
Not long ago, Tallevast’s western and eastern boundaries were marked by two wooden signs. One sign, at the western end, was strategically placed at the edge of the land where Dr. Clifford “Billy” Ward’s Dentist Office has stood for over forty years. It read: “Crime Scene—Crime Scene—Crime Scene—Where are the warning signs?” Bolded arrows extended from each of the three vertically listed phrases “Crime Scene” and pointed to the lot across the street where the ABC plant once stood. The other sign, located at the community’s eastern boundary, read on one side, “Welcome to toxic Tallevast. What was once thought to be a historical community may soon be history.” Although the signs have been removed, ABC’s war crimes drag Tallevast, moment by moment, into the silent folds of U.S. history.
My grandfather’s ambitions of leaving his family “something behind” has materialized into an undertaking for Tallevast’s survival he did not imagine. The toxins beneath Tallevast have irreversibly altered the future of a community where generations of men, women, and children have lived. County developers, seeking to seize upon the potential value of real estate in Tallevast after its environmental recovery, now pass policies to facilitate the clearing of land for the burgeoning industries of airport commerce and merchandise warehousing. Planners are moving to widen Tallevast Road to accommodate increased traffic from public transportation vehicles seeking access to a bus depot at the eastern end of Tallevast Road and to meet the needs of impatient daily commuters seeking to shave off a few minutes from their travel times to larger expressways like U.S. 41 and Interstate 75.
“War Pete”—war-driven economic manufacturing—and its aftermath is driving Tallevast residents from land they’ve held for generations. There is already a growing migration of residents from Tallevast to communities throughout the state of Florida, and to more metropolitan areas in Georgia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts. Others will join efforts to relocate Tallevast to some other section of Manatee County. But even in the midst of this movement, the land still holds the hopes and dreams of ancestors who made it with their lives.
Notes
[i] ^ Frank Parker Stockbridge and John Holliday Perry, Florida in the Making (New York: The de Bower Publishing Company, 1926), 2.
[ii] ^ Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins e-book, 2008, 1934).
[iii] ^ Stockbridge and Perry 1926, 33.
[iv] ^ Johnson and McDaniel 2005, 57.
[v] ^ Nollie W. Hickman, Mississippi Harvest: Lumbering in the Longleaf Pine Belt, 1840-1915 (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1962), 121-127; Cassandra Y. Johnson and Josh McDaniel, “Turpentine Negro” in ‘To Love the Wind and the Rain’: African Americans and Environmental History, edited by Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 51-62.
[vi] ^ Bridget Donahue-Farrell, “Through the trees: Manatee County’s turpentine industry,” Bradenton Herald, January 31, 2017.
[vii] ^ James Manigault-Bryant, Ruby Bagwyn, and José Constantine, “Poisoning Tallevast,” Boston Review, February 3, 2021. Accessed at http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/james-manigault-bryant-ruby-bagwyn-jose-constantine-poisoning-tallevast.
[viii] ^ Monivette Cordeiro, “Lockheed Martin facility mishandled toxins, created ‘environmental nightmare,’ lawsuit claims,” Orlando Sentinel, September 28, 2020. Accessed May 28, 2021: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/environment/os-ne-lockheed-martin-orlando-lawsuit-20200928-7x242mvddzfidig47zx276ivvm-story.html.