American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory [Hardcover]

Russ Rymer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1998

In American Beach, award-winning journalist Russ Rymer provides astonishing insights into the meaning of American race relations. Avoiding the easy clichs of victimhood and oppression, he searches for answers through three unexpected, overlapping, intensely personal stories. Ultimately he presents a vision of a nation where the futures of blacks and whites are as linked as their histories, and where black experience offers a key to the struggle of every modern American.

American Beach opens with the killing of an unarmed black motorist by white police on a Florida resort island. It's the emblematic race confrontation of the 1990s, but Rymer's examination turns up everything but the ordinary. His journey leads us through ghostly plantation cemeteries, sance parlors, black resorts, European opera houses, Harlem salons, America's newest tone, and its oldest incorporated black city. We meet black pirated and planters, witness the incendiary death of the world's first black (and pioneer woman) aviator, the boardroom deliberations of the Walt Disney Company, and the posthumous but victorious last crusade of a prominent black novelist.

Along the way, we are guided by the most extraordinary real-life Southern cast since Mightnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, including Florida's first black millionaire and his great-grandfather, a flamboyant pauper who lives on a chaise lounge on the beach, from whence she strives to salvage her history and rescue her imperiled culture. As Rymer brilliantly shows, no matter what corner of America of which walk of life we may be from, it's our culture and our history as well.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In its heyday during the height of segregation, the little resort of American Beach, Florida was the African American Hyannisport, where the crème de la crème of black society came to enjoy what the town motto called "recreation and relaxation without humiliation." These days, it's more like the African American Daytona Beach--that is, visited mostly by partying teenagers who come to drink and get rowdy in the town's deserted streets. What happened between then and now could be fodder for a sociologist's study, but journalist Russ Rymer turns it instead into a grippingly personal story of race, money, greed, and the struggle over who owns--and interprets--cultural memory.

At the heart of Rymer's tale is one of the most fascinating characters to walk the pages of a book this year: MaVynee Betsch, great-granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, an African American millionaire and the founder of American Beach. Reared in privilege and culture, sixtyish MaVynee once sang lieder throughout the capitals of Europe. Now she lives the gypsy life in the open air of American Beach, an unforgettable sight in her 18-inch fingernails, cowrie anklets, and five-foot fall of hair. Having given all her money away, MaVynee spends her time evoking the glories of her community's past and railing against the white-bread resorts, whose golf courses and cookie-cutter condos threaten to swallow her beloved beach. The painful irony is that when the enforced humiliation of segregation ended, so too did the cohesiveness of the black commercial and professional community American Beach once represented. As one resident puts it, "First we had segregation, and then integration. Then disintegration."

Rymer's story ripples outward to encompass bygone black Jacksonville, the killing of an unarmed African American by Amelia Island police, the first incorporated black town in the United States, A.L. Lewis's Afro-American Life Insurance Company, and revered Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. But it never loses focus on its fundamental question, a question with equal relevance for both black and white: "Where did mankind's economic existence and moral existence coincide, and where collide, and where was the boundary between them?" Rymer avoids both ideology and easy answers in this passionate yet even-handed book. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

For Rymer (Genie), American Beach in northern Florida, the country's first black seaside resort, is a microcosm for the state of race relations in America. It's a weighty subject, which he examines through three stories, the most direct and powerful being the 1989 killing of a contentious but unarmed black motorist, Dennis Wilson, who was the fourth young African American male fatally shot by local law enforcement within five years. The second story focuses on MaVynee Betsch, a flamboyant opera singer turned penurious environmental activist, whose millionaire great-grandfather built American Beach; and the third story involves the late African American author Zora Neale Hurston, whose hometown of Eatonville, near Disney's planned community, Celebration, is, like American Beach, fighting to retain its cultural roots. Both the Betsch and Hurston narrative lines seem a little forced, functioning perhaps as pegs for Rymer's description of their respective struggling communities. These latter accounts can also meander, slipping into rhetoric and the occasional excessive gothic metaphor ("One had the impression that the sand walls of American Beach were like the murderous funnel of the doodle bug"). Still, Rymer has created a serious history of racial struggle that reveals the random murder of blacks by the KKK, shows how white development can destroy the character of black towns and inveighs against the corrosive effects of materialistic values on black identity and community spirit. Author tour. (Nov.) FYI: American Beach was the subject of 1997's An American Beach for African Americans, by Marsha Dean Phelts.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (October 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060174838
• ISBN-13: 978-0060174835
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #263,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and informative, January 11, 1999

By 

Tamala ([e-mail]) (Native Floridian living in NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (Hardcover)

I bought this book because I grew up hearing stories about the "black" beach near Jacksonville and about the beach lady, MaVynee Betsch, and because I attended Spelman College under the extraordinary leadership of Johnetta Betsch Cole and could never believe "the beach lady" was her sister. Their family history is amazing, and timeless. My mother's side of the family is native to northeastern Florida. Rymer's undertaking to expose the world to the richness of these people is laudable. I learned so much about my history and the history of the place where I'm from that I'd never known. I took the book home with me (FL) for the holidays and my family was so deligted to learn so much about home, and to get reacquainted with the familiar things once known, that we had to go out and get additional copies of the book. It will be a standard in our family for years to come. In short, it is compelling and quite informative. To read this book is to get a true appreciation of a people and their glorious,on-going struggle. I highly recommend American Beach.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disney vs. democracy, February 8, 2003

By 

Rennie Petersen (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (Hardcover)

I have very mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand the book is very well written by an author who is obviously very intelligent. (He had me feeling intellectually challenged from time to time, and I consider myself to be a pretty bright person.) He presents, again and again, extremely thought-provoking ideas and profound comments about modern society. And in presenting his biting analysis of today's society he provides glimmers of hope that things can be changed for the better.

On the other hand, I found this book to be very depressing. The descriptions of the sins of the past, in the form of slavery and racial segregation and violence against blacks, are chilling. Today's problems, with lingering discrimination and the commercialization of American society, are also saddening. Sometimes I took a break from reading because the book made me so unhappy.

"American Beach" is a collection of four stories, three short ones and one quite long one. All but the last story are based on Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida next to the Georgia border, where the towns of Fernandina Beach and American Beach are. (The last story is based in Eatonville on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida.) And all but the first of the four stories has racial conflicts as a primary theme.

But Mr. Rymer makes it clear that today's racial problems, serious as they are, are not the biggest problems faced by blacks or by American society in general. He sees big business and it's influence on everything to be a greater source of apathy and alienation and disenfranchisement and environmental destruction.

In the view of Mr. Rymer, unbridled capitalism and the "culture of the corporation" are breaking down the values that the founding fathers stood for and that many generations of Americans up until WW II fought for, such as democracy. As an example he tells about the Disney-owned town of Celebration which proclaims itself to be the reincarnation of the old-fashioned American town, but which requires residents to sign a contract in which they let Disney operate the town without them, the residents, having any significant influence!

One of the author's claims is that cultural poverty can be worse than economic poverty. Blacks are especially hard hit by cultural poverty, having lost their roots when they were abducted from Africa. Black attempts to create their own culture often resulted in their best creations being usurped by the dominant white society and their less fortunate attempts being ridiculed by the whites.

But American society in general lacks roots, being a melting pot society. Added to this is the rise in the power of the corporations, who can transform functioning towns into ghettos on the edge of holiday resorts for the rich, and can commercialize and thus de-fang every kind of cultural protest. Bob Dylan becomes Muzak and street gangs and gun-toting rappers become movie fodder and hit entertainers.

Consumer capitalism has turned culture and even history into proprietary products, merchandise for the masses. And very few, other than Mr. Rymer and a few of the people he writes about in "American Beach", have even noticed the danger.

Highly recommended.

PS. I read the hardcover book, which has the subtitle "A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory". The paperback edition has the subtitle "How Progress Robbed a Black Town--And Nation--Of History, Wealth, and Power". I'm guessing both subtitles were dreamed up by the publishers' marketing departments in attempts to sell the book to people who want to read about American race conflicts. Shame on them.

Rennie Petersen

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book to Change One's Views, November 4, 2004

By 

James C. Fraser-Paige (San Leandro, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (Hardcover)

I found this book, in first edition and excellent condition, at the Oakland Library book sale. I paid $3.60 for it and consider it one of the best bargains I've gotten in terms of value. This book needs to be read by anyone attempting to understand black culture, the effects of commercialism and the Disneyfication of our cultural heritage.

Told in a very personal way by a journalist who became fascinated by stories of an enclave of black upper-middle-class families and the society that grew around them in the days before desegregation, it also speaks volumes about our heritage as

Americans, white or Black.

If I got nothing else out of this book -- and I assure you, I did -- Rymer managed to explain as I had never heard it the reasons for the antagonistic, in-your-face angry Black youth that are the

hip-hop nation. In his view, white consumerism created them in search of something "authentic" to grind up and feed into he maw of the commercial pop exploitation machine. He likens them to

the minstrels of old, acceptable, even desirable, stereotypes to keep us from noticing that, at the core, we are all really very much alike.

I can't recommend this book enough. There are passages that may bring tears to your eyes, as they did to mine, eyes jaded by years as a white police officer usually working in non-white

neighborhoods. This is a book that will change the way I look at culture, history and America. May it do the same for you.