and in 1939 a wall was built
Liberty Square, the first public housing development designed to serve Black residents in Florida, opened in 1937. However, in 1939, a six-foot wall was erected to separate it from the white neighborhood to its east. Today, fragments of this wall can be found along NW 12th Avenue, between NW 62nd and NW 67th streets. These remnants stand next to a block of abandoned, two-story buildings, evoking the echoes of the lives once inhabited them. These structures are reminders of the history of racialized planning and zoning practices in Miami that led to the displacement of Black communities and perpetuated racial wealth inequality. Now, these buildings await demolition.
To the south of Liberty Square, the construction boom has taken over Miami, with building materials littering empty lots and new high-rises piercing the sky. They seem to boast, “We are here, you cannot stop us, submit.” However, no act of hubris is safe from the Furies, who punish those who strive for Mount Olympus.
The Furies are already at work, commanding the Hurricanes to become even more catastrophic. The Furies’ plan was revealed though since after they consulted Hades to get his permission, he told Persephone. And she told Karpos, who told her daughter Chloris. Chloris, the goddess of flowers, became curious about this place with the concrete structures and asked her father, Zephyrus, the commander of west winds, to take her there on one of his evening voyages. Just before dusk when Helios flies low and the sky is about to turn red, they arrived.
Chloris saw these strange concrete structures piercing the sky. She saw a cemetery where these manmade pillars were the tombstones of the graves of the dead nature, she was assigned to make beautiful. At that point, she hatched her plan. She immediately summoned a butterfly from her home, the Island of the Blessed, from the realm of Elysium, that sits at the western stream of the river Okeanos. At her direction, the butterfly asked the Titan-King Kronos and ruler of Elysium if she could leave paradise just for a day and carry an ugly greenish worm to Chloris. Little Kronos knew what the worm was carrying. She took the worm to Chloris and Chloris whispered something to the worm’s ear. Then, she asked the butterfly to deliver the worm to the ground. The worm’s task was simple, “plant the seed of an ivy.” Chloris named the ivy Ipomoea Hederacea in honor of the humble creature that was to plant it. In a year’s time the ivy grew. Now, the ivy grows everywhere, it doesn’t surrender. The humans think that they can kill it, but it grows again, and again. It always blooms and its flowers are blue like the sky where Chloris walks beside her father. The sky that Zeus made sure has no wall, no limits.
Of course, this story is made up, but admit it, I had you there for a moment. The story sort of sounded like a true myth but it is a lie, like the fakeness that surrounds us, which ultimately builds another wall that separates us even more. But in the end, everything that rises will eventually fall, and all the manmade structures will come down crashing.