THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 27, 1995 TAG: 9503270035
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN JOLLY DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 161 lines
It's dawn in Bayview, Fairview and Culls. For Alice Coles, looking out from her porch, the sun rises over a field where the state may build a maximum-security prison.
It's an understatement to say that Coles doesn't like the prison idea. She hates it. She believes with all her heart that Bayview, her home, will be destroyed if the prison is built. And Coles is convinced that the Department of Corrections wouldn't be building across the street if she were wealthy and white.
Five generations of her family live in Bayview. The matriarch, 82-year-old Maude ``Ma'' Collins, has 20 great-great-grandchildren in the neighborhood. Of Coles' 10 brothers and sisters, four live in Bayview. Most of her neighbors are cousins of one degree or another.
``They're descendants of slaves that's been here and never went nowhere. Some can't even be dragged away,'' said Coles as she walked the grass trails of Bayview. ``There's something to the land that's just drawing them here. My mother moved to Portsmouth, but she said, `Lord, I just want to die home.' ''
Many of the people in Bayview are desperately poor, living in shacks - some with no electricity or running water. One man there huddles with his dogs at night to keep warm.
Others have inherited homes and built onto them over the generations: houses with long and intimate histories. The people here know one another, depend on one another.
``If you take people that are poor already but helping each other, and separate them, they wouldn't do nothing but die right out,'' said Coles. It's that fragmentation - the irreparable rupture of her family structure - that she predicts and fears.
Most of the proposed prison site, 273 acres of farmland, is across the road from the Bayview homes. That, according to Coles, is bad enough. But the Department of Corrections also has an option on 3.5 acres that border the neighborhood and stretch to Route 13.
Would the 1,267-inmate prison, once built, expand right into Coles' neighborhood?
``No, absolutely not,'' said John McCluskey, chief deputy director of the Department of Corrections. He's the man directly responsible for choosing the prison site.
McCluskey thinks the prison will be a boon to the people in Bayview, bringing jobs, water and sewerage right to their doorstep. Some African Americans say the overwhelming majority of Northampton's black community agrees with him and welcomes the prison.
But Coles doesn't trust McCluskey or the Department of Corrections. She doesn't trust the white establishment in Northampton County. She doesn't even trust the local elected black leaders, whom she has publicly challenged to oppose the prison.
So Coles and her relatives have become a force in Citizens Opposed to the Prison, an Eastern Shore group formed to thwart plans for the $85 million prison. In recent months they have lobbied legislators in Richmond and pushed a bill on prison-location regulations through the General Assembly. They've held rallies, analyzed official reports, threatened lawsuits, interacted with the media and repeatedly confronted local leaders.
``The best thing we can do is hold our ground,'' said Cozzie Lockwood, one of Coles' cousins. Members of the General Assembly's Black Caucus counseled the Bayview folks to be persistent, she said, and to ``stay in their faces'' to win their fight against the prison.
So that's what they've done. For Coles, a part-time crab picker with a high school diploma, being catapulted into the public arena was an ``overnight awakening.'' She's reading books on environmental racism. She helped organize a job fair that offered more than 100 positions to locals looking for work. And she helped sponsor an interracial dance at the Do Drop Inn - a breakthrough on the Eastern Shore, where blacks and whites rarely mix socially.
``I've learned that there is help for people trying,'' said Coles. ``We're all ordinary people. But we can improve our own conditions just by using our own minds.''
Meanwhile, the Department of Corrections is proceeding with its plans for the facility. Prison officials are working with the state Department of Environmental Quality to answer questions about the prison's environmental impact, said McCluskey, and interviewing architectural and engineering firms for the project. The current state budget includes $1 million to design a maximum-security prison somewhere in Virginia - millions short of what corrections officials need.
McCluskey hopes Gov. George F. Allen will amend the budget and fully fund the design phase. If not, the Corrections Department will wait for the next budget cycle and request more money.
The prison they design could be put anywhere in the state. Only Northampton County's board of supervisors can decide now if it will be built here.
So prison opponents are pressuring the board to vote it down. Coles has focused on board Chairman Charles Bell, an African American. Bell has remained neutral, waiting for the results of impact studies the board has commissioned.
That's not good enough for Coles.
``Now we need him, and I want to know where he stands,'' said Coles. ``That's why we promote him, so we would have some sort of force.''
The situation is a classic Catch-22 for Bell. Black leaders have informally polled the community, and believe that an overwhelming number of Northampton's black and white residents welcome the prison. They want the 425 state jobs, with benefits, that the maximum-security prison would bring.
But Coles and other Bayview residents have threatened to take the supervisors to court if they vote to accept the prison.
``Five sites were proposed'' for the prison, said Bayview resident Joyce Lockwood at a recent board meeting. ``Four were near wealthy white neighborhoods, and our neighborhood was the one chosen. We feel we have been discriminated against, and our civil rights have been violated.''
The split in Northampton's black community over the prison has become deep and ugly. Coles said that some local African Americans have begged the Bayview folks not to obstruct the prison.
``They're saying, `What have you done with yourselves to pull yourselves up?' Or, ` Don't make them move it because they'll put it up here,' '' said Coles.
For the most part, Bell has remained calm in the face of pressure by the residents of Bayview, Fairview and Culls. But several weeks ago, at a meeting in a Fairview church, his reserve cracked.
``Apparently I have already been crucified,'' said Bell to Coles and a hostile audience. ``I detest being referred to as a turncoat.''
In the past week, open debate in Northampton's African-American community has shut down. Blacks who once openly supported the prison refuse to speak. The local NAACP is silent. Bell and Arthur Carter, the board's only other African-American supervisor, decline comment.
But Coles is still talking. Her neighbors won't benefit from the prison because most of them won't qualify for the jobs, she said. Many can't read. Some won't pass the drug test. Others have done time or have loved ones in prison. She fears they would sympathize with the inmates, and be vulnerable to drug-running schemes.
Parents would fear for the safety of their children, said Coles. The neighborhoods' many elderly already fear the thought of potential breakouts. ``Everybody would be packing a piece,'' said one man in Bayview.
As she walks through Bayview, she points at a home half-covered with a transparent coat of yellow paint.
``He believed that if he showed the prison people he was taking care of his house, they would leave him alone,'' said Coles. ``You can't cure poverty with a prison. You'll just move it from point A to point B if you don't change the people.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
BILL TIERNAN
Staff photos
A NEW NEIGHBOR LOOMING? Ethel Nottingham sits with family members on
the porch of her Bayview home, across the street from the possible
site of a large, maximum-security prison. Behind her, at left, is
her son Vernon Nottingham. In front, from left, are her son Randy
Nottingham; his daughter, Deene; and a cousin of hers, Ardell Manley
of Culls.
FROM OPEN SPACES TO BARBED WIRE? The view from Alice Coles' porch
now stretches across a field. She never wants to look out her door
and see a state prison. It would destroy her community and her
extended family, she claims.
Alice Coles, a Bayview anti-prison leader
BILL TIERNAN
Staff
Alice Coles, a part-time crab picker with a high school diploma,
experienced an awakening through her work against a prison that
would go up across the road from her Bayview home.
STAFF MAP
by CNB