It's rare that a person gets to live a dream so I guess I should consider myself lucky. I'm not living out my dream exactly but I am living somebody's: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s to be exact. OK, not all of it, just the part, "where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers." I have many good friends in Tampa and most of them are white. The fact that I'm black doesn't keep us from going to the movies, having dinner, sharing secrets or doing any of the things that friends do together. This is good. It means that while racism is still in full effect, it has receded to the point where I can comfortably be friends with people of another race.
I used to think it was a shame when I read that in school cafeterias across the country, black kids and white kids segregate themselves. But lately, I find myself wanting to pick up my tray and go sit at the black table for a while.
The people there share my culture. I don't have to explain my hair. They may not celebrate Kwanzaa, but they at least know what it is. They celebrate the Fourth of July but they know that it's just an excuse to have a barbecue, that the premise of the holiday is a sham.
Most important, among my own I can be an individual. Most black people know enough other black people to know that we don't all think, act or dance alike.
Finding the black table in Tampa is a different story.
I've lived in Long Beach, Calif., and in Buffalo, N.Y., and in both of those cities I was able to not only find a black table but whole rooms full of them. Tampa is different. Tampa is southern, not just geographically but culturally. Miami is in the south but it's not southern.
Being single and still young enough to pretend I'm in my 20s, I hit the club scene first. There are three types of night club in Tampa: those with an all-black clientele, those with an all-white clientele, and those that have a mostly white clientele but have a kind of "black night" where they play hip-hop and R&B and a large number of black people show up. But only on that night. On other nights the club plays some form of rock, Goth or other music that blacks tend to avoid in droves.
The Cotton Club is an all-black club all the time. It's located off North Howard Avenue in a neighborhood that has seen more prosperous times. I was a little skeptical about what sort of crowd I would find there. I needn't have been. On Friday night the streets around the club are surrounded by cars of every make and model, and the club is so packed it can be hard to move around. But even with all of those people and the music blaring, the vibe is mellow and relaxed. The people are mostly older — in their 30s and 40s and the owner prefers it that way. "I don't go for that young jitterbug stuff," he told me. And the youngsters stay away.
If you arrive at the Cotton Club early enough on Friday, you might hear Luther Vandross and other old-school R&B artists who get your body swaying and make you reminisce about what you were doing when Luther's "Bad Boy/Having a Party" came out. The club's patrons seemed to enjoy this since the song is about a young man sneaking out to a party when his mother said he couldn't go, and most of them were old enough to have done that when the song came out. I was in elementary school when the song hit the airwaves, and most of the parties I was invited to involved bobbing for apples and getting home by nightfall. It was my parents who had to sneak off to parties while I terrorized a babysitter.
Later the DJ skillfully switches from Luther to Outkast to Gerald Levert. The dance floor is elbow to elbow but it doesn't get wild. Probably because the patrons don't want to muss their three-piece suits or fall from their 3-inch heels.
"Dress to impress" written on fliers advertising clubs or a party is code for "welcome black people" and the crowd at the Cotton Club is proof. There are no grungy jeans or thrift store specials here. This is both nice to see and a bit of a problem given my penchant for grungy jeans and thrift store specials. I am far too cheap to wear the designer clothes that are the norm in these places. To prepare for my journey into the nightclub scene, a friend with better fashion sense had to take me shopping for clothes that wouldn't make me stand out like the poser that I was.
I was horrified by the prices, and I'm sure there's some irony in the fact that the only way I could hang out in clubs with my people was to wear clothes that made me feel like I was wearing a costume. So much for being an individual.
On weeknights at the Cotton Club clothing isn't an issue. The atmosphere is more casual, with a few older men hanging out at the bar, shooting the shit while sports play on a big screen television. There's a jukebox where for a few coins you can listen to Aretha Franklin, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Al Green, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley or Otis Redding. Oldies from my parents' generation that served as a soundtrack for my formative years. There's even a chessboard set out for anybody looking for a game. It's a nice vibe and I can see myself going back to sit at the bar and sway to the music after a hard day at the keyboard.
Jessica Kastry is a waitress at the club, and the people are what she likes most about it. "It's good people," she says. "We never have fights, we never have trouble — it's just a nice crowd." At the Rain Lounge on Friday nights, the rule is also dress to impress but with a younger, hipper crowd, this takes on new meaning. No jeans allowed, but you're welcome to wear see-through blouses and skirts short enough to raise more than an eyebrow. There are clean-cut gentlemen wearing slacks and sweaters and ghetto fabulous homeboys who would give P Diddy a run for his Benjamins. Hip-hop's crossover appeal is demonstrated in the mixed crowd of blacks, whites and Hispanics. "Rain is one of the most diverse clubs in Tampa," says Mario Simmons, a frequent clubgoer. "It's beautiful, I love it."
Simmons is the kind of guy who comes with the bar. Like there's the dance floor, there are the barstools, and hey, there's Mario. This is evident as he moves through the crowd and people stop him to shake his hand and say hello. "I don't actually know everybody's name," he admits. "But I get along with just about anybody."
Though Simmons is black he doesn't really want to go to a club that's not racially mixed. "I don't want to go to a club that's all white or all black," he says.
LaDonna Brasson likes Rain but basically finds that the clubs in Tampa have less to offer than the ones in Orlando, where she moved from seven years ago. A lot of clubs in Orlando cater to blacks from every socioeconomic group, but in Tampa clubs catering to professionals are few and far between. "Went to the Garage and the crowd was a little rowdy," she says of the downtown club's "black night." "Clientele means a lot."
And the clientele is a little different at every club I go to. Moet on West Hillsborough Avenue has a virtually all-black crowd on Saturday nights, and although the crowd is as young as the crowd at Rain, their dress is more classy than trashy. In spite of the price tags, the silk pants and high-heeled sandals my friend made me wear were a good choice. On Wednesday nights the club has a live R&B band. The crowd is much older, but the vibe is compatible with hanging out in the middle of the workweek. Some other spots around town are deceptive. The Orpheum, in Ybor City, advertised a DJ that played hip-hop and reggae. Expecting a crowd that is at least mixed, I arrive to find only white hipsters. A handful of black people walking around The Castle, also in Ybor, which plays old-school Goth on Monday, comes as a surprise.
While the clubs in Tampa may draw a large black crowd, live shows are another story. "Black people don't really support the live music scene here," says local musician Kenny Walker. Walker's jazz band Dr. Lohertz and the Groove Injectors played at Limey's Pub in St. Petersburg on Sunday nights, and on the evening I attend, I find only two other black people there. I count three before I realize that the third is really a white guy with a tan and dreads.
Walker doesn't really care what kind of audience he plays to, but it's nice to have people in the audience who grew up listening to jazz and see the music as a part of their heritage. Many who come and hear the band are young, says Walker, but many of the black people who hear them play say they recall their parents listening to jazz and can recognize some of the tunes the band plays.
Of course many jazz bands don't have regular gigs, so it's hard to know where to find them when they do play. A trip to Tycoons in St. Petersburg yields a New York-style jazz club with deep leather chairs and an upscale ambiance. It's the kind of jazz club that you see in movies. Since I'm in St. Pete looking for a reggae club that a coworker described as being "somewhere near downtown" I'm wearing skin-tight camouflage pants and clunky black boots. This is not the kind of outfit you see in movie jazz clubs. Why, oh why, didn't I wear the silk pants?
Once seated as inconspicuously as I can manage I find that the music is pure Sinatra. Unfortunate for me. Fortunately for jazz fans, the club books a number of good bands and a copy of the club's calendar and a little advance planning will allow you to sip martinis in the club's sumptuous atmosphere while listening to renowned black musicians practice their trade.
Live reggae in Tampa fares a little better than jazz. There's a live band at Whiskey Joe's on Sundays and Fridays, usually locals like Deja or Democracy. A few other local bands play out regularly around town. Again with the research, but it's worth the work to hear good music.
Worth the work but not always worth the money.
Eventually I run out of my allotted drinking allowance, so I decide to ditch the club scene and go the cultural route. Hoping to find the black art scene in Tampa, I call Derek Washington, a local artist who takes on the controversial issue of racism in his work. "There is no black art scene in Tampa," he says. In fact, Washington says, being a black visual artist in Tampa makes him feel like "a rapper at the ballet."
Washington claims that once he completes his graduate degree in fine arts at the University of South Florida he intends to skip town in search of blacker pastures.
Poet Phyllis McEwen has been a part of the art scene in Tampa for more than 20 years. McEwen doesn't read her work around town as much as she did years ago. "I think people get tired of hearing me," she says with a laugh. But she's aware of some of the younger people coming up in the area who are starting to emerge. McEwen moved here from Atlanta, a city hailed as the black Mecca, but she says there are some similarities between the chocolate city and Tampa. "You have to work it there just like you have to work it here."
That's exactly what Wally B is doing with his Black on Black Rhymes poetry readings and open mic nights. The 25-year-old poet used to travel to Jacksonville and Tallahassee to find a place to read his work but now he's created his own venue right here in Tampa. While B acts as host, young Afrocentric poets and rappers perform in front of crowds that appreciate not just the words they're saying but also the place where they're coming from.
It's hard to describe the feeling I get watching a young woman with an African head wrap read a poem that proudly proclaims her strength and pride or a young black man rap about life in the hood in a way that's all about intelligence and not at all about the violence that I see in videos on Black Entertainment Television. OK, It's not hard to describe. First I feel uplifted and proud of these talented people that I've never met. Second I feel angry that BET, UPN and record companies ignore this talent in lieu of the violence, misogyny and buffoonish comedy that they pass off as black culture.
Charmaine Jennings, B's wife, uses her poetry to speak out about important issues such as women's health, community and the multicultural subject of love. All of her work is intended to uplift. "We need to change our attitudes so that change will be reflected in our children," she says.
Black on Black Rhyme has a growing audience and there are other venues popping up as well, says B. "The word is getting out."
I enjoy getting out and listening to music and the spoken word but sometimes stimulating conversation is what I really need. A trip to Books for Thought, Tampa's black book store, introduces me to a number of reading clubs in the area. Ladies of Literature mostly read books by black authors and meet to discuss them once a month. Natalie Preston joined because she thought it was a way to meet other black professional women and to expand her literary horizons. "I like smut," she admits. "Smut, sex and guns, whether it's by a white author, Hispanic, black or whatever."
Smut is not what the Ladies of Literature read.
The group recently read I Wish I Had a Red Dress and the Gone with the Wind parody The Wind Done Gone. Before speaking to Preston I thought the reading list was a little too Oprah for me and that perhaps the women may be a little too bourgeoisie. A member tells me that when the group discussed I Wish I Had A Red Dress, the members all wore red to the meeting.
That's not my thing. Note there are no sorority meetings listed here (not that there's anything wrong with sororities). But Preston says I should slow my rush to judgment.
There are women from all walks of life in the club, she said, and they're all friendly and down to earth. "Sometimes if somebody's going through something, we'll just stay there eating, drinking and advising till 2 o'clock in the morning," she says. As for the books, they're chosen by a democratic process and it's not all Oprah all the time. When it comes to meeting other blacks in Tampa, says Preston, it helps to keep an open mind because a closed one will leave you sitting at home alone.
And there's no need for that. Tampa may not be the Mecca of black culture, but it is possible to eat at the black table here whenever I feel the need.
And when I'm hanging out with my white friends, I can recognize that I'm not out of place; I'm adding color. As McEwen says, "Everywhere I go is black. There might be some white people up in it, but if I'm there, it's black. You carry your blackness with you."
Contact Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163, or e-mail her at rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
I'm sure there are plenty of places that I should have mentioned or visited but, hey, I'm only one person. If you play in a band (jazz, reggae, R&B) or know of some interesting cultural activities, I'd be glad to hear about them.
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2002.