STANDING UP FOR SUNNYSIDE
The historically Black neighborhood has long been dumped on. The pandemic now adds to the stigma residents continue to fight.
Bridget James couldn’t put the tissue up her nose fast enough to stop the bleeding.
Paper towels soaked through. She pulled them away and saw blood clots. After a week, she went to her doctor, who sent her to the ER. Had she had any nose trauma? he asked. The only thing she could think of was the coronavirus test she’d taken in her neighborhood, Sunnyside, just before the bleeding started. The swab had gone so far up her nose that she leaned out of her car and puked.
The doctor sent her home with a nasal spray of steroids.
She told her pastor at First Missionary Baptist Church, Henry Price II.
“It’s a lot of BULL going on in the neighborhood with these test sites!”
Price said. “You get anybody in the hood doing these tests. They say, ‘Oh, well people here are not going to go get tested.’ Well, this is WHY.”
The doctor couldn’t say for sure that the test caused James’ nosebleed. People at testing sites around the country have reported minor nosebleeds after the nasal swab. But because Sunnyside has always gotten the worst — if the neighborhood gets anything at all — it was easy to assume that it had gotten the worst of the testing sites.
Sunnyside is a historically Black neighborhood in south Houston, set up for Black people in 1912 by a white councilman as the other segregated neighborhoods in the city center grew crowded. The city of Houston didn’t annex it until 1956. In the 1960s, Sunnyside had so many Black-owned businesses that residents called a stretch of
Cullen Boulevard “Black Wall Street.” By the end of the 1980s, most of the businesses had shuttered.
Over a century after its founding, Sunnyside finds itself atop the lists of “worsts.” In 2013, an article from NeighborhoodScout.com dubbed Sunnyside the sixth-most dangerous area in America, an article the entire neighborhood read and most resent. As the pandemic picked up, Sunnyside was near the top of the bottom again: In May, the neighborhood had 3 coronavirus cases per 1,000 residents, nearly double the Harris County average. Mayor Sylvester Turner responded quickly, promising and delivering a testing site to the neighborhood.
But tests couldn’t fix what had put Sunnyside so high on the list in the first place, and the residents know it. And no prevention measures could come in time to prevent the funerals that Henry Price would officiate when the pandemic took hold.
Ignored — till election time
Three weeks after she took the COVID-19 test, James had a handful of friends over.
It’s a tradition they’d put off when the virus came: On Sundays, the women come over to James’ house after she gets back from church. She cooks (that Sunday, fried steak) and they gossip. Most of the women grew up in Sunnyside.
James has lived in Sunnyside all her life. She was born at the now-defunct Sunnyside General Hospital. Her grandmother’s house was right next to First Missionary Baptist Church. She sang in the choir with the woman who would become Price’s wife and played with her friends in the small park across the road.
She inherited her parents’ house, paying down a reverse mortgage her mother took out with help from a cousin. Many people she grew up with are in their parents’ old places. Just as many were forced out, unable to pay back reverse mortgages or navigate inheritance when there was no will. It’s how many families — especially in Black communities — lose their homes.
She used to walk around at night in Sunnyside. Not anymore.
“We don’t hear from nobody until it’s election time, then they bombard your mailbox with brochures and blow up your phone when they call,” she said. “I don’t see a lot being done. My pastor’s trying. But if there’s a lot being done, I’m not aware.”
Five years ago, James and her husband arrived home to find their house had been broken into. James called the cops. No one came. Four hours passed. She didn’t hear anything. When she called back, she lied and said someone had been shot. It worked. The arriving officer warned her not to ever lie to police again.
“I say, ‘We been waiting on y’all for hours. So is that what it takes for y’all to move?’ It’s almost like you have to be all but dead for them to come,” she said.
James hadn’t seen any signs pointing her to a testing site. She went because she got a call from a neighbor telling her she could get tested at Sunnyside’s Worthing High School, and there was no line. She’d heard on the news that Sunnyside had some of the highest rates of COVID-19, so she thought it’d be worth it.
James keeps thinking how her test went. She wonders, Would that have happened in another, whiter area of the city?
“I think it’s because it’s a Black community,” James said. “And they look at us like trash.
Like garbage. So if you look at somebody like garbage you gonna treat them like garbage.”
Dumping ground
Nearly two decades before it was formally annexed, the best use the city of Houston could find for Sunnyside was, quite literally, garbage.
The city put a 300-acre dump in the neighborhood in 1937. In 1964, the city opened a second dump in Sunnyside. Three years later, a new incinerator on the original dump spewed toxic fumes into the neighborhood. (Price has been asking for an air monitor in Sunnyside for years so people can learn what, exactly, they’re breathing. It hasn’t materialized.) The dumps have shut down now, with the promise of a solar farm to replace one.
Sunnyside is a food desert: It has exactly one grocery store (a Fiesta). Over 10 percent of Sunnyside residents have asthma, more than double the city rate (those with asthma are an atrisk group for COVID-19).
Sunnyside residents have protested for decades over slumlords, dump sites and school closings. In the last five years, leaders have gathered data and drawn up action plans. A 2019 comprehensive needs assessment found that people wanted better drainage, a police department they could trust and a second grocery store in the neighborhood. A 2015 neighborhood action plan lays out short- and long-term action plans from a homeowner stabilization program to enforce fines against owners of multiple properties who let them fall into disrepair.
There have been some results: A Sunnyside Place Community Development Corp. initiative, led by a pastor who grew up in the neighborhood, helped bring a partnership with the Houston Food Bank and the city police. But residents are still waiting on services as basic as sidewalks. The neighborhood’s oldest subdivision just has drainage ditches on the side of narrow roads, serving as a dumping ground for trash (and, occasionally, a body).
“They have been promised things for so long by people with clipboards and a pen — they get their information, say, ‘We’re gonna do this for the community,’ and then nobody ever did nothing,” said Price, who helped with the Sunnyside Plan in 2015 and is part of the Sunnyside Community Redevelopment Organization. “Everybody came back here and got our information, and nobody has done nothing.”
So Price and local leaders do it themselves. Sandra Massie Hines, dubbed the Mayor of Sunnyside for her activism, has a phone filled with the numbers of elders who need food. Pastor James Nash, leader of the Sunnyside Place Community Development Corp., drives around handing out face masks. Until the pandemic, Price distributed food from his church every Thursday.
‘Not worth a damn’
No one who knew Henry Price II growing up would have expected him to work with any clipboard-carrying organization, but it feels right to him to help a neighborhood he’d wronged. He started dealing drugs as a teenager and got so much business that he had men under him and multiple drug houses — including in Sunnyside. His wife and son once watched him pistol whip a man who dared show up at his own home. Three arrests, a military discharge and six calls from God later, Price took over Sunnyside’s First Missionary Baptist Church in 2008. He found God under a green blanket in the Harris County Jail, studied the Bible for a decade and was arrested for the last time in 1999.
“The stigma over Sunnyside is the reason,” he said. “And what you saying is, ‘I’m just gonna always look at it as low income.’ ”
When Anthony Frazier arrived at one of the two Sunnyside boardinghomes he owns, he noticed one of his residents was missing. The facility had been locked down for months. So where, he asked, was Eugene?
Ternikia McCullough, an employee of Frazier’s for three years, shrugged. “Somebody came and picked him up.”
Frazier stared at her. Who came to get him? How could she not have called? He hadn’t given permission for family visits. Didn’t she know there was still a pandemic?
McCullough distributed vanilla cookies to the three men sitting around a high table. “They go to day program; it’s just as dangerous.” Besides, she said, the city was open. Wasn’t it over?
“Where they go, wherever they went, someone could
breathe on them.” It could bring the coronavirus right there, he said, opening up his phone to call around to find Eugene. “I don’t know where he’s going. He could come back and he got that s—, now everybody got to be quarantined for two weeks.”
Frazier, 52, grew up two lefts and a right from Price’s church, on a street where his father and aunt had built and owned nearly every house on the block. As he grew up, some of the houses on his block were torn down, and some got sold off. His brother lives in one still standing.
Eleven years ago, Frazier turned one of the two-story homes from a rental property into a home for men with intellectual disabilities, substance abuse and mental health issues. On the top floor, he runs a radio station and hosts his show five days a week: “High Volume Music Radio, the of Sunnyside.” He wipes his microphone with Clorox between segments.
He saw the coronavirus cases spike, then subside, in Sunnyside — by September, the neighborhood’s per capita cases were around the middle of all county ZIP codes. Something about it felt off.
“Call me a conspiracy theorist or whatever, but I just don’t believe that the cases are as high in Sunnyside as they say.
We’re being told that this neighborhood is quote-unquote infected with COVID-19,” he said. “I feel like it’s just another way to get people to believe this neighborhood is not worth a damn so they can get people out of here so they can buy up a property for $7,000, build a home and sell it for $150,000.”
Something feels wrong about Sunnyside’s crime reputation, too. If Sunnyside’s as bad as everyone says it is, why does Frazier get so many calls from people who want to buy his property?
Sunnyside is a desirable location. It’s between two major highways and a hop from the Texas Medical Center. It’s close to downtown and equally close to Pearland. A Sunnyside pastor said he heard a rumor that the neighborhood would be rebranded as Medical Center South once enough of the original Black inhabitants had been priced out. It’s a neighborhood at the beginning of gentrification: Developers put signs on corners with a phone number and a promise to buy houses for cash, fast, as-is. Frazier has seen new townhouses go up and wonders whom they’re being built for.
On June 2, Frazier posted a long message on Facebook directed at city officials.
“We are hurting here in Sunnyside. Violence is at an all-time high in Sunnyside,” he wrote. The schools were underserved. He had hosted a food distribution for families a few weeks ago — where were the elected leaders?
“Why didn’t we hear from you when the COVID19 outbreak was announced as ravaging through Sunnyside?” he wrote. “We NEED TO TALK.”
But Frazier could never abandon the neighborhood. On a trip to Las Vegas, someone asked Frazier where he was from. He said, “Sunnyside, Houston, Texas.”
The deacon’s wife
An hour and a half after he was released from the hospital, L.C. Killings learned his wife had died.
Killings and his wife, Hazel, had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on Feb. 7 with 90 people in attendance. L.C. wore a white suit and hat; his wife hit the dance floor in a gold sequined top. They held a knife together as they cut a three-layer wedding cake. Four generations of the family posed for pictures.
Hazel died at age 70, nearly two months to the day after their anniversary, on April 6. Of the 90 people who celebrated her marriage, only 10 — her husband, her sister-in-law, her three children, four grandchildren and her pastor — could be at her funeral.
Killings has attended Sunnyside’s First Missionary Baptist Church since 1974 and became a deacon the year Price got arrested for the last time. He was raised in Fourth Ward back when it was a Black community. Now, Fourth Ward is so gentrified that he can’t recognize anything. He looks at the new houses going up and thinks Sunnyside will wind up the same.
Killings started feeling sick in late March. He went to the emergency room and was told to quarantine at home.
He only saw Hazel as she cracked open the door to leave food on the dresser table and hollered, “You need to eat something! You eat something!”
The last thing she ever left him was chicken noodle soup. He didn’t eat it.
On March 30, his daughter called. “Daddy,” she said, “can you come to the back door?”
He shuffled out of bed and looked out the door that opened into their driveway. Paramedics were carrying Hazel away on a stretcher. Weeks later, he learned she called them herself. He had no idea she’d been sick. It was the last time he saw her.
The next day, his daughter insisted he go to the hospital. Killings was brought to a room on the fourth floor, the same floor as his wife.
He and Hazel both tested positive for COVID-19. He learned only after he was discharged that Hazel’s lungs and kidneys were failing, that she had double pneumonia and had been placed on a ventilator.
Killings’ daughter drove him home on April 6. She went home to shower and change her clothes. When she came back, she said, “Daddy, Mom didn’t make it.”
A few days later, he woke up and looked around their house, where a poster welcoming guests to their 50th anniversary party rests against a wall.
She’s buried, but the house is still Hazel’s. She picked it out 13 years ago and chose each piece of wall art: a painting of a woman in church clutching a Bible, a mirror in the front hall. Her two sewing machines are still in the front room. When his daughter asked what he’d do with them, Killings shrugged and said, “Learn how to sew, I guess.”
The Word of God
Price reopened First Missionary Baptist Church for its first small service during the pandemic on the first Sunday in June.
It was two weeks after protests against racism and police brutality swept across the country, stemming from the videotaped killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Price had moved a hand sanitizer dispenser to the anteroom. If parishioners didn’t heed the handwritten instructions taped on it (“Please Use Before Entering Service. Thanks.”), the security guard reminded them.
Price, in a white suit and his black-and-white mask hanging off an ear, grinned down at the socially distanced worshippers from the pulpit.
“It feels good to be seen rather than viewed,” he said, and chuckled. “We gonna have a slim-trim service, amen? Aymen.”
It was Killings’ first in-person service since Hazel died. The deacon liked seeing people he knows and leading call-and-response reading. It took his mind off his grief. The second bedroom of their house — where Killings stayed when he got sick — has boxes of Hazel’s clothes stacked next to the bed and blouses hanging from a drying rack on the other side. When his daughter began taking Hazel’s things from the house, Killings took back his wife’s perfume.
“We found out something during the coronavirus,” Price said. “We found out something. We found out that we don’t have to be in the building to worship God! Amen, amen, that was lessons in the virus, amen, to show us we have to have the Lord in
our heart. Amen, amen.” He called James up to sing. She had shown up in a flowing gray blouse and a gray mask to match. James hadn’t been sure about going back. But Price had asked, How come you can go to the grocery store in a mask but can’t show up for church in one? So she came. She tapped a red-felt mic, took off her mask and swayed with the music as she sang.
Price took the mic back from James and led the congregation into the Word of God.
“You sent the pandemic, Lord. If you sent the pandemic we know that you’re able to TAKE IT BACK. But let us hold
on until you see fit.” His tone dropped to a murmur. “Thank you, Father God, for allowing us to commune with you just one more time. Lord, we pray now that you will remove these pandemics, that you will remove racism and hate. We pray, Father.”
Service dismissed after just an hour. James went home to clean up and start cooking before her friends came over. Killings lingered.
Killings is a stoic man. Everyone says so. Price commented on it a few years back, when Killings’ niece, sister and brother died within months of one another. It’s a habit left over from his two years in Vietnam, where he was taught not to get close to anyone. Learn a first name, maybe, and move on. He carried that through nearly every death in the family. But when he thinks about Hazel, he tears up.
At the church, he looked at the curtains, the small white ones in the bathroom and the flowing white drapes in the fellowship hall. Hazel had sewn them. He drove back home to their house without her.