New Column: “Planted In Black Norfolk Soil”

By Terrance Afer-Anderson

How do you seed and nurture resplendent African-American spirit?

I was blessed that my courageous Creole father and exquisite Norfolk mother were wholly committed to finding and enrichening a local cultural soil, wherein they could plant and nourish their children, blessed with a capacity to weather the tempest of growing up Black.

My arrival occurred at home on Corprew Avenue in the old Liberty Park community, just one block from the old Norfolk Community Hospital, and two blocks from the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College, now Norfolk State University.

I remember attending daycare at the Liberty Park Nursery School, in the community’s older section, across Ballentine Boulevard. After my family moved to an end unit on Pioneer Avenue, my father used to show nighttime home movies on the side of our humble home. Many neighbors would gather in the adjacent field to watch. I also remember one day, around age 5, when Vanda Cameron, a little girl one year my senior and whom I had a heck of a crush on, got hold of a pair of scissors and cut each other’s hair.

While I had countless, wonderful memories at my grandparents’ Huntersville home, my earliest memory was at their previous Reilly Street address. It was nighttime and I was standing in a basinet in their kitchen, looking out onto the alley behind their house. I can’t recall though what I saw that makes for such a distinctive memory.

My grandparents’ Huntersville home was on the corner of C Avenue and O’Keefe Street. Many years later, I learned the latter street was named for a priest, Father Matthew O’Keefe. Having once served as a Confederate chaplain, he was also known for his dogged efforts to integrate Masses at what is now the Basilica of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, though Black congregants were relegated to sitting in the choir loft. Ironically, St. Mary’s is now the only African-American basilica in the nation.

Fond memories of Huntersville include the hordes of youth who would roller-skate down C Avenue every Christmas, early walks down the railroad tracks that my brother Karl and I took with our grandfather “Big John Jenry” Harrison, Frog’s convenience store at the corner of B Avenue and O’Keefe, the dearly loved “Jew Mary” store at the corner of C Avenue and Church Street, and Bonnie McEachin’s celebrated Plaza Hotel, at the corner of Church and 18th Streets. The Plaza hosted countless African-American celebrities not allowed to stay in Norfolk hotels exclusively for White guests.

My father worked at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and my mother at the Norfolk Naval Base. Each had to be at work at 7 a.m. I remember having to get up at 5:30 a.m. each workday morning to get ready for them to drop my siblings and I off at our grandparents. My grandmother would feed us breakfast and we’d make final preparations to walk to school.

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After nursery school in Liberty Park, I attended kindergarten at Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Lindenwood. Later, when I began attending elementary school, my siblings and I walked to St. Joseph’s Catholic School. My family also attended St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Then, after St. Joseph’s was closed, a few of us briefly attended St. Mary’s Catholic School, while the family began attending the church. After all these Black families migrated to St. Mary’s, there was a massive White exodus of congregants and students.

Walking down Church Street to go to school was a wondrous experience, forever etched into my memory. Known as the “Harlem of the South,” I understand there were 80 Black businesses that once populated Church Street. There was the Attucks Theater, of course, built exclusively by African-Americans in 1919, and the place where, years later, my parents first laid eyes on one another. There were the Regal, Dunbar, Lenox, and Carver movie theaters. I also remember Simpkins store, the Regent Brewery, Metropolitan Drug Store, Goldberg Hardware, and the legendary Queen’s Lounge.

I remember the ever-popular “Wild Bill” would walk down Church Street, proudly packing a pair of toy guns, anxiously waiting for passersby to dare him to draw. There was also the lady who was a fixture on Church Street, sitting at a window in a darkened room, her face fully-painted in haunting white make-up. I don’t know how true it was, but rumor had it she had lost a son and lost her mind afterwards. I always felt more compassion for her than fear.

Along with my siblings, I was well-planted in Norfolk.

So much so that, when the family moved to Portsmouth’s Victory Manor community in 1959, I continued going to school in Norfolk until 1966. And still today, though I lived in metropolitan Washington, D.C. for some two decades, I am the only member of my immediate family that calls Norfolk home. The city is in my DNA!

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Of course, I first performed on stage at the old Norfolk Arena. A quarter century later, I helped found the Generic Theater, at that same site. More than three decades later, I retired from the Norfolk Department of Public Health. In 2008, I had the honor of meeting Barack Obama, the first African-American U.S. President, at Norfolk’s Harbor Park. In 2010, the City of Norfolk commissioned me to write and stage a drama chronicling our grand African-American history, presented at the Attucks Theater as “Cast in History.” In 2019, I was engaged by the Virginia Arts Festival to write, produce and direct a film, entitled “The Phoenix & The Ashes,” in the centennial celebration of the Attucks, “the Apollo Theater of the South.”

Surely, it’s not been all roses and rainbows, but I am forever indebted to my late, beautiful parents for the sacrifices they made to plant me in such fertile, gilded Black Norfolk soil, blessing me with an abundance of resplendent African-American spirit.

So humbled by the city’s proud Black history, I’ve decided recently that, when the curtain closes on my final walk across Earth’s proscenium stage, I want to be planted, via “green” internment, in Norfolk’s West Point Cemetery, a once segregated section of the city’s Elmwood Cemetery. I want to literally nourish the verdant Black Norfolk soil that had been so good to me.

Terrance Afer-Anderson is a writer, actor, director and producer. He is also President/CEO, TerraVizion Entertainment Network.

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