BROOKS AVENUE CHRISTMAS
The story of a building and a woman and a bad night and a good day
Van Stanley walked out near closing time two days before Christmas, onto the sidewalk along Brooks Avenue, in the dark of a winter night, and saw him. Her alarm and reaction were as much instinctual as anything else, he was saying something she couldn’t make out, and moving toward her, and she retreated. A step, and another step, and a turn and run and a bolt through the door.
She was 53, and five-foot-four, and though she worked 12-hour days at the restaurant, she often stooped at the lower back, caught with stiffness and discomfort, and she was not a young woman, and she was not accustomed to running.
She screamed and she cut right, through the doorway to the small west dining room, knowing unthinkingly that in a straight line she would be overtaken, and then she cut left, toward the kitchen in the back, and went down hard, pain shooting through her right hip and thigh, thrashing to regain her feet.
The man from the street, young and lithe, was right behind her, on the attack, through the door and in the restaurant, straining to make up the two-stride lead she had on him. On the west end of the building, in the moments before it all began, he and another man had had a last-minute disagreement about who would go in, and this one had insisted, “Give me the gun, I’ll do it.” And he was trying to do it.
Van scrambled back to her feet at about the same time Darnell Wilson sprinted in from the kitchen, a wall separating them as he intercepted the intruder near the main entrance. Darnell was a tall, thin man, 32 years old, a couple of kids at home, helping Van after he got off work. He threw every bit of himself at the intruder.
Van was through the kitchen and headed toward the basement stairs when she heard the first shot. There was another, she thought, she couldn’t tell over the pounding of her heart and feet, she just took shelter, in a basement alcove near the foot of the stairs, hiding, whispering over her labored breathing to the woman at 9-1-1.
Upstairs, there was broken glass and blood, on the floor, and on the sidewalk outside.
It was her son’s 19th birthday.
He could have been there, she thought at the time, and he normally would have been, but his two best friends were back for the holidays, one from basic training, the other from college, and she let him go home early to be with them. Later, she would believe that that saved his life.
It had been a busy month at the People’s Choice Kitchen. Times were hard for folks and the holidays were coming on and Van wanted to help, and she wanted to get the restaurant some publicity. So she started a pay-what-you-can-afford promotion, offering a hearty meal for whatever people had in their pockets. If you had two dollars, it was two dollars. If you had nothing, it was nothing. But you got to eat. No matter who you were, no matter how hard you had it.
It had been on the news, and bounced around Facebook, and the people came.
And they brought Van a surprise. At the end of the week-long promotion, she was money ahead. Instead of a net loss, she had a net gain. Pay what you can afford brought not just the hungry, but the generous. And so she went a second week, and the rest of the month, and here she was, two days before Christmas, and all was well.
And then the shots rang out.
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It probably all started in 1925, as the edge of settled Rochester spread out Brooks Avenue and along the still partially agricultural Thurston Road. That year, Mrs. Niven donated her farmhouse to the Presbyterian Church for use as an old-folks home, and seven seniors moved in. That was next to Susan B. Anthony’s uncle’s farm, where she and Frederick Douglass had met at abolitionist house meetings. And to the south, where Brooks and Thurston crossed, on the southwest corner, a squat, solid, brick building with three narrow storefronts went up.
The first tenant was Brooks Avenue Candy Kitchen, a Greek place that would be an anchor to the neighborhood for more than 70 years.
Except that it wasn’t called that for very long. Soon, the sign out front called it what customers had always called it – Louie’s Sweet Shoppe.
Louie was the 22-year-old with the heavy accent who opened it.
Born in 1903 in Constantinople, a subject of the Ottoman Empire, he came of age as that world fell apart. The Ottomans sided with the Central Powers in the First World War and that conflict was followed immediately by the Turkish Revolution, which ended the Ottomans and their tolerance of Christians, whose population in Constantinople was more than halved in a matter of months.
Louis Throumoulos fled alone to Athens, and then, at 17, still alone, to the United States, to live with cousins in Maine to finish high school and learn English. A stint with more cousins in North Carolina – where he was a waiter in a drug store – before he decided he didn’t like the climate and moved to yet more cousins in Rochester. It was one of those cousins who fronted the money for the candy shop.
Candy shops were a common business for Greek immigrants then. They were mentored and financed in the business by earlier Greek immigrants. Few if any of the wares were what most would consider traditional Greek foods. But there were chocolates and roasted nuts, and various sweets and confections. In Rochester, Louie learned how to make candy and run his business from another Greek merchant.
The store also featured a fountain, for custom-crafted soft drinks, and in time added ice cream.
And then the Depression came, and though the growth of the neighborhood and the business of the sweet shop slowed, they did not stop, they did not die. And through the hard decade of the 1930s, Louie grew in stature and prominence, like the community around him.
They called that the 19th Ward, after the old ward system of governance in the city of Rochester. It was a community of the upper middle class, the professional class. Not like the rich people on East Avenue, with their mansions and architectural wonders, but nonetheless with large, comfortably appointed homes with lots of square feet, rich hardwood and expert craftsmanship.
The boundaries were clear then, with West Avenue to the north and Genesee Street to the east and the Erie Canal to the south and west. It was an area where then and now a careful observation of the houses and their design showed a beauty and elegance, not of ostentation, but of good taste, truly good taste. The 19th Ward has always been a beautiful place.
And back then a completely white place. First, by happenstance, demographics and economics, and later by civic plan. There were poor Germans and Irish eastward toward the then-growing Jefferson Avenue, and some few blacks near Troup and Ford streets, in the Third Ward, cheek by jowl with the fading opulence of Corn Hill.
That’s where Louise Smith brought her six boys in 1927.
They were lynching in the South then. On the front page of the “Washington Post” on May 5, 1927, there was the story of the lynching of a black man named John Carter. They hanged him in Little Rock, a mob did, and then dragged his body behind a car, ending up in the black part of town, where they put him in the middle of the main street and doused him in gasoline and burned him up, immolating his remains while thousands of horrified black people looked on.
John Carter was one of 16 black men lynched in the South that year.
And that was the year Louise Smith brought her six boys north to Rochester.
A single, black mother, she moved up from Culpeper, Virginia, where, in the lifetimes of many then still alive, a 23-year-old Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer had shattered and captured J.E.B. Stuart’s Army of Northern Virginia headquarters encampment.
Louise’s youngest was a boy named Harry, who, like his older brothers and like most lads of their age and time, got into mischief. That caught the attention of a Rochester cop by the name of Jimmy Stanton. He had been a pretty good boxer in his day, and boxing was then, after baseball, Rochester’s favorite sport, and Officer Stanton suggested to Louise Smith that her boys might want to try boxing. They did. And Jimmy Stanton was their mentor and supporter.
All six of them fought, but three of them – Eddie, Hughie and Harry – fought well. They each won state titles. Hughie, one of the last of the Pullman porters, set the pattern for his brothers and all became not just good fighters, but good men, religious and admired by their neighbors. Eddie was probably the best, going Golden Gloves and fighting Sugar Ray Robinson twice as an amateur. On Friday and Saturday nights at the Elks Club, as thousands gathered for the fights, it was always the Smith brothers who lit the place up.
Then the war came, and Harry laid down his gloves.
And Louie took off his apron.
Harry was 19, Louie was 38, one came out of Troup and Ford and the other came out of Thurston and Brooks, two Rochester soldiers marching off to war. But one was black and the other was old, and those things would shape their wartime experiences. One served in a segregated military, the other was kept stateside to train others who would go overseas to fight.
And so it was that Louie Throumoulos left the candy store in the care of a Greek cousin and found himself a sergeant in the Army Air Corps at Kearney Air Base in Kearney, Nebraska.
“He felt he owed the United States,” his son said, “for everything it had given him.”
At Kearney, Louie was a crew chief and mechanic checked out on most of the American bombers of the war. The post’s mission was to train flight crews for service over Europe. Thousands of men processed through, including First Lieutenant Clark Gable, and entertainers from Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey to Nat King Cole and Doris Day performed for the GIs.
It was at Kearney, on Orthodox Easter in 1944, that Louie met a lady.
It was at St. George’s, a congregation founded decades before by Arab Christians, that Sergeant Throumoulos met 21-year-old Violette, a petite flower with a verve and work ethic which would thunder across another 75 years of life. It was a whirlwind courtship and quick, wartime marriage and a year later their first child was born, and a year after that they were back in the 19th Ward, living on Hillendale Street, Vi and Louie, holding court five blocks away at Louie’s Sweet Shoppe at Brooks Avenue and Thurston Road.
Across town, Harry was newly discharged as well, and he turned pro as a lightweight, coming in at between 130 and 135 pounds. Over nine years as a professional fighter, he would record 36 wins, 10 draws and two losses.
And they would call him Smitty.
And that was the name he put above the door at a series of rib and chicken joints he owned – Smitty’s Birdland. Small places, humble places, ribs and chicken, and lots of his own spicy barbecue sauce. Ormond Street and Clarissa Street and Plymouth Avenue and Genesee Street and Stillson Street. Some 40 years of being Rochester’s sauce man, and Rochester’s friend. They were decent people, hard-working people, friends and customers said, Harry Smith and his wife, Marie, she the steady taskmaster, making sure things ran right.
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At Louie’s Sweet Shoppe, Peter Throumoulos and his two younger brothers grew up sweeping and mopping, stocking the shelves, waiting on customers as they got tall enough to work the fountain. Grape phosphates, Mexican sundaes, maple walnut ice cream. And in the basement as early as September, melting and molding the five- and 10-pound blocks of chocolate that, in the weeks before Easter, would be displayed upstairs, on shelves that temporarily displaced tables and chairs, Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies and eggs, sold to hundreds and thousands of customers who would, especially during Holy Week, string out the front door and down the block in great lines of eager shoppers.
In the 50s and 60s and 70s, it was just how it was, it was where much of Rochester got its chocolate and candy, where Easter and Valentine’s Day found the sweets that children and lovers sought.
But it was hard for Peter. A childhood at the candy shop wasn’t exactly this child’s dream.
“I hated working for Dad then,” he said. “He was an old-world Greek. He was very strict.”
So when Peter graduated from high school, he got a job at Kodak, in Building 67, as a photo technician.
Then he got a letter from the president of the United States.
Born in 1945, while his father was in uniform, Uncle Sam now wanted Peter to put on a uniform himself. It was 1967 and the Vietnam War was going full tilt. More than 11,000 Americans would die, and the next year, the deadliest of the war, almost 17,000 would die.
But Peter didn’t want to be a draftee. To him, it rankled. If he was going in, it was going to be because he volunteered, not because he was forced. So he went to the Army recruiter and signed up for the Signal Corps. After basic training at Fort Bragg, and then radio school, his class was broken into two groups – one to go to Germany, and one to go to Korea. That’s where Peter went. For 13 months. And loved it.
“My father always said, ‘No matter what the situation, make the most of it.’ And I did,” Peter said. “Korea was wonderful.”
As Peter’s discharge loomed, Louie decided he wanted to hand off the baton. In the family or out, he didn’t really care, but he, in his late 60s at that point, was tired. The family’s two other sons – James and Basil – had different interests, but Peter decided he’d give it a shot. And so it was that in 1970 Peter and his mother, Vi, officially became the owners of Louie’s Sweet Shoppe. Two years later, they together bought the building at 575 Brooks Avenue and became their own landlords.
Louie continued to be a presence, setting himself up at the seat nearest the cash register each day, visiting and kibitzing, sometimes knocking heads with Peter as the younger man added products or changed procedures. But the workers were Vi and Peter and his wife, Mary, and in time their sons, Matthew and Phillip. They were the fixtures.
They, and Peter’s moustache. A big, long, waxed handlebar affair that came about as he experimented with facial hair, searching for a unique look. Coincidentally, years later, looking at pictures of relatives in Greece, he saw similar, grand moustaches.
Peter continued the chocolate and the peanut brittle, butter crème and fondant, and the old-time soda fountain and ice cream selection, but he added sandwiches and light diner foods, and he expanded the store, adding the west dining room, where the Genesee Section police would often hold their meetings and swap notes as the shifts changed.
It was at the counter that a rookie cop on Third Platoon back in ‘86 or ’87, Frank Camp, sat with mentors Joe Murphy and Mike Ciminelli for a grilled-cheese sandwich and a chit chat about “crimes that were happening on afternoons in the area, and who was who in the neighborhood, and what we were going to do about it.” It was where he learned, “it was up to us as police officers to get to know and try to be on good terms with everyone that we could, because the neighborhood depended on us, and we depended on them.”
A frequent customer and good friend of Louie’s in that era was Captain Lou Campanozzi, who commanded the Genesee Section back when section captains were like princes or deputy mayors, men of great power and incredible community connections and respect. Anybody who had any problem with the city usually solved it by going to the section commander, knowing that he could get it resolved.
Lou Campanozzi was one of the legendary section commanders. A cop’s cop. He had done undercover and commanded the murder police and been in charge of solving robberies. He was a national expert on interrogation. And was the good shepherd of the Genesee Section for a time, omnipresent in the community, particularly at Louie’s. Then he retired to write crime novels and become the chief of the Sandia Tribal Police in New Mexico.
He died in 2002 when his heart exploded.
Ciminelli, who would go on to become a two-time police chief himself, studied for law school in his off-duty time, books and papers and a plate of food in front of him at Louie’s Sweet Shoppe as he worked on his degree.
“We had excellent relations with the Genesee Section cops,” Peter said. “When Dad died, they had a police escort from the church to the cemetery that went right past the store.”
That was in 1987, and by then things were starting to change.
The neighborhood had been integrated for a while, and Louie’s was a comfortable place for all, with blacks and whites, old and young, it was doing ok. But the crack epidemic changed things. It brought in crime. It brought in gangs. It destabilized the normalcy of much of the 19th Ward.
“There were changes in the neighborhood,” Peter said. “Some of the red-lining factors came in, crime became on the increase and the troubles began. It was always very integrated, mixed, good place and good people. But when you see your black customers moving out, well, it gets hard. It’s a hard place to run a family business.”
Concerns about crime in the early ‘90s, one of the most challenging eras in the city’s history, killed Louie’s non-city customer base. People who had grown up in the neighborhood and moved out to the county or the country – regardless of their race – did not come back anymore. Not for lunch, and not for Easter chocolate. Same for Valentine’s Day. And that killed the economics.
“Income was less than out go,” Peter said. “My wife and I expended all of our savings.”
And in 1997, after 72 years at Thurston and Brooks, Louie’s Sweet Shoppe closed. Vi would live another 23 years, and Peter, who had owned and run the place for almost 30 years, would slip into depression before emerging as a short-order cook at a sports bar, and later work as a shift supervisor or assistant manager at Friendly’s or Big Boy’s. He and Mary ultimately moved to Florida, until Mary died in 2019, and he moved back to New York.
Peter donated the old fountain and counter from Louie’s to the Strong Museum, as a legacy to the establishment and its owners and patrons.
The materials were never put on display.
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The 19th Ward isn’t really the 19th Ward anymore, and hasn’t been in a while. That’s not good or bad, it’s just a fact. Certainly, the boundaries still exist, Genesee Street and West Avenue and the Erie Canal are still where they’ve always been. But the community they demarcate is not the community it used to be, nor is the community that lives there and defines the area limited by the century-old boundaries of the 19th Ward.
“It used to be an all-white area,” said Ernest Flagler, a county legislator whose district includes the 19th Ward. “Now it’s gone to being mostly black, pretty much.”
Many of Rochester’s black families first came to the city in the middle 1900s. Typically, they came from the South. They mostly sought opportunity and safety, and social acceptance. With Jim Crow and other oppressions ripening, and the civil rights movement pushing back against evil, times were hard and uncertain.
And a pattern developed. A pattern replicated by scores if not hundreds of black Rochester families.
From some community in the South, one member of the family would come north, usually a man and usually a man in his 20s. He would leave the Carolinas or Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, and make his way to New York. But not to Rochester. Usually it was to Lyons or Sodus, to the farms and orchards, to look for work.
“When they were running away from the Jim Crow South,” Ernest Flagler said, “there would be different ones of a family sent to scout it out. To see if people could get work, how they were received.”
Black farm workers found an acceptable welcome in the years after World War II, and some of them explored the city of Rochester, and found jobs and got established.
“Then they go back to get the family,” Ernest Flagler said. “And they would continue to bring family members.”
In those years, black people in the city largely lived in the Seventh, 19th and Third wards, and in the Hanover housing project, massive subsidized-housing towers build in 1952. The Seventh Ward was centered on Joseph Avenue, and the Third Ward – a middle-class black residential and business enclave from before the Second World War – was pushed up against Corn Hill.
It wasn’t just happenstance that that’s where black people lived. The reality is that that’s where the city and the banks let black people live. Many deeds or wills had restrictions forbidding the transfer of land or houses in parts of Rochester to black people.
Where this was less commonly so was in the neighborhoods around Jefferson Avenue and into the eastern portions of the 19th Ward. German and Irish immigrants had lived in the area as it was developed in the late 1800s, and beginning in the 1950s, black families moved in.
In 1950, there were fewer than 8,000 black people in Rochester. By 1965, there were 40,000 and their homes began to form something called The Crescent, skirting downtown but generally stretching diagonally across the city from the northeast to the southwest.
And that’s what the neighborhood around the old Louie’s Sweet Shoppe building is today – the southwest. Maybe it deserves to be capitalized – the Southwest. Certainly, there are portions of the old 19th Ward that are still completely that, but most of it is of the same heart and soul as the streets and families east of Genesee Street.
That means that the 19th Ward, like every human community on Earth, has culturally and socially changed over time. It is neither good nor bad, it merely is, and it is of the stuff that makes humanity a sentimental and loving species. My tender memories may be formed under certain circumstances of my culture and time, and yours may be formed under certain circumstances of your culture and time, and those conditions may be very different, but they were dear and sacred to each of us, and ought to be respected and enjoyed by all of us.
Different peoples and different cultures succeeding one another in the same place over time are merely spreadings and respreadings of the banquet of life. They are different of God’s children enjoying their creation and his bounty. They are parts of the same family.
In the early years of social succession in the southwest part of Rochester, it was mostly marked by changing European accents. In the last half century, it has been mostly marked by changing skin tone.
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In 1997, as the Throumoulos family adventure at Thurston and Brooks came to an end, the Smith family adventure began.
Harry Smith was 75, and the old boxer and World War II veteran, beloved for his sauce and his good cheer, had another round in him. He and Marie bought 575 Brooks Avenue from Peter and Vi, and launched a new and bigger venture. Known for 40 years as Smitty, folks had taken to calling him Snuffy, and so the sign above the door said Snuffy’s Birdland, and a new chapter began. Same sauce, same good cheer, same Marie in charge.
People lined up for the “fat burger,” and hoped to be there when Snuffy was in an expansive mood, holding the place spellbound with dramatic tales of his years in the ring.
“I’d go in there,” one customer said, “and Marie would see me and she’d yell back to the kitchen, ‘Half a chicken, and make it swim!’”
That meant lots of sauce.
Lots of Snuffy’s Original Gourmet Hot BBQ Sauce.
People can argue over which sauce is better and which sauce was first, but there’s no question about whose sauce for 50 years owned the palates of Rochester. Harry Smith was the king and no discussion of Rochester foods, then our now, is complete without a tip of the hat to his innovative and satisfying barbecue sauce.
It’d be served ladled over some chicken or ribs, maybe some gizzards, sitting on a hunk of bread, to soak up the sauce so none of it went to waste. For half a century, the happy customers of Louise Smith’s youngest son made sure to eat that piece of bread, and its treasure of sauce. For half a century, Snuffy Smith – Smitty to some – filled bellies and hearts in the southwest.
He worked until he was 80, in 2002, and then he and Marie retired to Arizona, where it doesn’t snow. It was there that he passed away, just before Thanksgiving of 2008. He’s buried down there now, at Valley of the Sun Cemetery in Chandler.
But you can still buy his sauce, and you can still see his imprint at the old building at Brooks and Thurston.
When he and Marie bought it, the city gave them a grant to renovate it. They changed the floorplan some and put in new of most everything. The old black and white checkerboard floor tiles from Louie’s were gone, though they echo in a similar but muted pattern in the new flooring. And the stamped-tin ceiling from 1925, always hard to paint, is still visible in places, witness to almost 100 years of Rochesterians treating themselves.
To this day, customers stand under Louie’s ceiling and look into the kitchen through Snuffy’s window, and neither one of those are bad things.
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Van Stanley was 2 when her family moved to Rochester, from Bainbridge, Georgia.
Not Georgia. Bainbridge, Georgia. She will say it a hundred times and never leave out the Bainbridge. Some scholars see it as a black idiom, stretching back to slavery times and the years immediately after. People identified themselves as coming from a specific town in a specific state, though sometimes the specific town isn’t actually specific, it is regional. It was a shorthand of connection, a way upon meeting to identify with a community or region with an eye toward finding others who might be from that area and possibly be related – cousins, of a sort. It is a vestige of another time and place, and possibly an unconscious homage to the people of that time and place.
Van Stanley is from Bainbridge, Georgia.
And her given name is Evangela.
But they’ve always called her Van. She might have preferred Angel, or Eva, but she didn’t get to pick.
Her mom picked. Mary Moore. Born in Bainbridge, Georgia. In 1938.
That means Mary Moore was 17 when, two states to the west, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was beaten, tortured, disfigured, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River with a piece of metal secured to his neck with a length of barbed wire.
That means Mary Moore was 22 when, two states to the north, four young black men her age sat down at the lunch counter in a Woolworth’s and refused to leave when they were denied service.
That means Mary Moore was 30 when, one state to the northwest, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
That was the year, 1968, that Mary Moore decided to bring her children north, and she came to Rochester, where she had a sister. Another baby would be born here, bringing the total to four. Van was the “knee baby,” the second youngest.
It was a childhood of poverty. Her mom made bows in a shoe factory, and met and married a man who was also from Bainbridge, Georgia. They lived mainly in northeast Rochester, on the eastern end of The Crescent.
“We always saw the best,” Van said. “We were poor, but very happy. We would go to the Asbury (United Methodist Church Store) House on East Avenue to get our clothes.
“We were poor. But I never went hungry.”
“I had to support three daughters and one son,” Van’s mother said. “It was hard. Life for her was bittersweet. She was kind of sickly growing up, she couldn’t play outside so much.”
There was a hippie couple who lived near them, Mary Jane and Tom, who took the kids on outings. To buy them ice cream, to the co-op to help make granola, to the suburbs, to the country, “someplace where it was spacious, with a lot of greenery.” Places that kids living in a neighborhood still scarred and scorched by the effects of race riot didn’t get to see or experience.
Almost 50 years later, Van still fondly remembers these people, and misses them. They were some of the happiest parts of her youth.
There was also unhappiness. And horror. Some of it she doesn’t want to discuss or remember.
But it put her on a witness stand, in someone else’s criminal trial, and the defense lawyer ripped her apart on cross examination, at 17. It was a double victimization, and now in late middle age she still emphasizes that she passed the polygraph and was telling the truth.
“I’ve always worked,” Van said. “Since I was a little girl. I love working.”
And when two private trade schools didn’t work out after she graduated from East High – she was trying for business administration – she went to work. Over the years at UPS, Xerox, Strong, a car dealership. For a while she lived on Park Avenue. It was while she lived there that she had a seminal experience. A brief encounter that to many may seem meaningless, but to Van was a sign, a test, an omen.
She wanted Chinese food, and she walked down Park to Alexander and headed to a takeout place there to get some. As she approached the restaurant, that was on the second floor, a white man with a beard and long hair asked her if she had any money she could spare. She said she didn’t but that she would after she paid for her dinner, and that if he waited, when she came back down, she would give him some money.
Which she intended to do, and which she was prepared to do as she came down the stairs with her Chinese food and her change.
Except he wasn’t there.
The bearded man was gone. She couldn’t see him anywhere.
And that changed her life.
Because her faith is such that she believed that was a test, from God, to see if she would give and serve. Maybe it was God himself, she wondered, or one of his angels.
“He is real,” Van said. “And it was him, or someone he sent.”
Some might think it was a bum in a hurry, or a guy who had been burned too many times with the “I’ll be right back” ploy.
But Van believed it was a divine test. And she passed.
And she has wanted to live up to that test since.
“I watched someone interviewing Oprah, and she said that she asked God to use her until he uses her up,” Van said. “Ever since I watched that interview, I’ve asked the same thing from God: To use me, until he uses me up.
“I truly believe that’s exactly what he’s doing. Because I meant every word, and it was coming straight from my heart.”
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Mark Walker was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1967, the year martial law was declared to suppress political gangs in the newly independent nation’s capital. The island then bounced between East and West in the Cold War, with significant social impact and uncertainty. Close ties with the Reagan Administration allowed for easy immigration to the United States, and, as a teen-ager, Mark Walker came to America.
To New York City, specifically, to an aunt’s house in the Bronx, and, ultimately, to trouble.
Something with drugs and guns and a shootout.
But Van Stanley didn’t know that walking up Thurston Road in 1997. It was a pleasant day on a beautiful street and there was a man in the window of a business who waved at her as she walked by.
And she waved back.
And Mark Walker came out and they made their introductions and exchanged their numbers and in that contact she had met the love of her life. A handsome man, a strong man, a graceful man who almost instantly won her heart.
Three years later, their son, Egypt, was born, and one year later – in 2001 – their restaurant was opened.
It was small, it was simple, it was Jamaican takeout. It was the food of his culture, and of his making. At a place on Chili Avenue. And together they made a go of it. Barely, the way food service can be, but they made a go of it, and their lives grew around their work. Get up in the morning, cook and serve and clean, come home and sleep, and do it all again tomorrow.
And there was joy in that. There was life in that. As there is in all vocations and lives, when things are right and souls are at peace. Nothing is perfect, but most is good, or at least good enough.
And things were good enough, until 2009. One morning. Mark Walker had just watched Egypt get on the Gates-Chili school bus and come back to the apartment to get Van and leave for work. They were in the car about to pull out when they were boxed in by two other vehicles. People with guns quickly exited those vehicles and surrounded the car Mark and Van were in.
“Are you Mark Walker?” a man asked.
Van said that was the first she knew he was in the country illegally. Van said the federal agents took Mark Walker that morning, and she was left there, alone at the car, a business waiting to open, a life in tatters, a little boy who in a few hours would ask, “Where is my dad?”
And she didn’t know what to do.
Except what she knew to do.
What she had always done.
Go to work.
So she went to work. She drove to their little hole-in-the-wall People’s Choice Kitchen on Chili Avenue and she set about preparing the food, which had always been his job. All in something of a frantic daze.
“I’ve got to make this work,” she remembered thinking. “I’ve got to keep this going. I’ve got to show Egypt everything is ok, even though it’s not.”
Mark Walker was in the federal detention center in Batavia for months. Van and Egypt visited him there. It was hard on a little boy. It was hard on a sweetheart. But they went forward, and Mark Walker went away, deported to Jamaica, to never truly return to their lives.
Mark Walker had a friend named Kenny, one of his closest, who was a barber. One day, when he was in junior high, Egypt was in his shop in the chair, getting squared away, and they were visiting. Kenny asked how school was going and Egypt responded that he was going out for football, and that he wanted to be a running back.
“He said, ‘When you run the ball toward the end zone, the announcers will say, “Egypt Brown for the touchdown!” And I said, ‘That’s not my name.’
“He looked as if I wasn’t making sense and just kind of brushed (it) off by saying, ‘Yes it is, Egypt Brown.’
“And I said, no, it’s Egypt Stanley-Walker.”
Nothing more was said, but the barber shop was two blocks from the restaurant, and the barber walked over to talk to Van about the matter. She later explained the situation to Egypt, and told him the importance of keeping it quiet.
“It was a shock,” Egypt said. “I didn’t know my dad’s street name until I was 14.”
Mark Walker’s absence forced Van to become more independent. It also forced her to learn how to make the various Jamaican dishes that he had turned out. At first, his Jamaican friends helped her, then she did it alone. Ultimately the menu became a meld of her Southern tastes and Mark’s Jamaican legacy.
And at one point, that almost shut her down.
At one location on Chili Avenue, the jerk chicken got her in trouble.
Cooked each morning for Van’s customers, jerk chicken is rubbed with spices and slow cooked over a smoky fire in a process that probably traces back to escaped slaves, and possibly the now-extirpated native people of Jamaica. It produces wonderfully delicious meat, and hours of rich, billowing smoke that can be a restaurant’s best calling card, or worst imposition. If you like it, it’s heaven. If you don’t, it’s hell.
And it’s every day.
If you live next to the brewery, you better like the smell of beer. If you live next to the Jamaican place, you better like the smell of jerk chicken.
At 651 Chili Avenue, some of the neighbors didn’t like the smell of jerk chicken, and they called City Hall, which sent Van a letter, which scared the daylights out of her, and got her on the phone to City Councilman Willie Lightfoot, who said to call council President Lovely Warren, who happened to be a customer.
The letter summoned Van Stanley to a meeting at the city attorney’s office, where she was confronted with some pictures and some legalese and an order to immediately shut down her grilling operation.
That was 80% of her business, wiped away, her restaurant ruined, by some jibber jabber from a guy in a suit.
Terrified, she called Lovely Warren.
No strings got pulled, but calmer heads prevailed, and understandings were reached, and three months were given, for Van to figure out how to come into compliance, and her restaurant went on, saved.
Lovely Warren would be elected mayor a couple of years later. It was a thunderclap. It was the Young Lion of the West roaring a new way. It was the victory of a person and a community. A daughter of the southwest, raised on Jefferson Avenue and in the 19th Ward, the granddaughter of South Carolina sharecroppers and the daughter of a Trinidadian drug addict, she faced what everyone faced and fought like everyone fought, but she came out on top, at 36 possibly the city’s youngest mayor ever. The party didn’t want her, the lieutenant governor didn’t want her, the congresswoman didn’t want her, but the people did, and on primary day it was 60-40 for Lovely. She wasn’t the city’s first black mayor, but she was its first Rochester black mayor.
Her family came from the South in the 1960s, part of the great migration, and she knew poverty, hardship and struggle. She also knew the love of family and the identity of community. And she was heart and soul of the southwest, of streets where in this generation some see poverty and others find strength. She was ultimately an American, an expression of the people, selected by them as a representative of them because she was representative of them, cut from the same cloth, based on the same values, pumping the same blood. Many in the southwest are literally her cousins, but all are measurably her brothers and sisters.
And that’s democracy. That’s representative government. That’s the voice of a free people.
And that’s who saved the People’s Choice Kitchen when the jibber jabber said it had to close down.
-----
Evangela Stanley opened the People’s Choice Kitchen at 575 Brooks Avenue on the first of December 2015. After 14 years, the business was prominently and proudly rooted in new digs, at an historic intersection, with new expectations and new possibilities. The lights were on again, and there were echoes of Louie’s and Snuffy’s in the air as from the first day the restaurant became an anchor and haven.
“We sold out three hours early the first day,” Van said.
And it continued like that. With Van as the chief cook and bottle washer, greeter and janitor, the face and the heart of the place. The food was rich and good, and the proprietor was warm and gracious. Oxtail and curry shrimp, collards and curry goat, jerk chicken and sweet potato pie. Macaroni and cheese and string beans and yams and pepper steak.
And Van’s memory of the man with the beard outside the Chinese takeout.
The constant prodding to give and to give some more.
Sometimes it was a plate of food to a hungry wanderer, the look in the eye of the passerby with a gnawing in the belly but not a dollar in the pocket. Sometimes it was a citywide effort, like Thanksgiving of 2016 when Van reached out to eight competitors and asked them to join her in putting on a free holiday feed. It was the Father’s Day when she welcomed in the neighborhood’s dads, to fill their bellies and warm their hearts. It was the pay-what-you-can weeks, and the steady months and years of companionship, across the counter or with a hug as you enter the door.
The big fire trucks came from across town, and firefighters in bunker pants got takeout, sometimes their chiefs gathered around a table for lunch and a planning session. It was grub and gossip for neighbors and politicians, with various of the day’s most powerful city officeholders coming for takeout or to perch on a stool at the counter, to catch up with Van and the regulars or to escape into a moment of relaxation and quiet.
The blue and whites from the new Genesee Section parked out front as a rising generation of cops got lunch and made connections in the old building, and sometimes the tall, young chief came in, greeted by his first name and welcomed by all.
And Egypt was often there, intensely polite, very refined, amazingly positive. Another generation growing up sweeping the floors at 575 Brooks Avenue.
Van’s success is not insignificant.
“That’s a huge achievement,” Ernest Flagler said. “Because, you know, a lot of black folks know how to cook. We don’t really need to go there for dinner.
“It’s more than just cooking. You can see the way she nurtures. She nurtures the community, to come back. To feel the comfort she gives. The smiling.
“It’s like churches for black folk, there are certain havens for us. It’s a place where people know they can go, and be safe and accepted. She is family to that community.”
But it’s not all roses, and doing good isn’t always easy.
Like the Tuesday after Thanksgiving back in 2016. She had been on the news for the holiday dinner, and on the radio as a place to buy Step Jam tickets, and walking out to her pickup truck in the dark, there was a tall guy with a mask and a gun and he violently grabbed her purse, and stuck his hand into her clothing, searching for hidden money. She lost it all. Taken by a young man she later learned she had fed for free when he was a boy growing up.
It was the first robbery at the store since before World War II – when somebody pulled a stick up on Louie – and just the second robbery in the building’s then 91-year history.
“I looked at every customer a little different after that,” Van said, “especially men.
“I looked into their eyes: ‘Are you one of them?’ I asked.”
It brought back old fears, and gave her new ones. She was afraid to go to her vehicle. She was afraid to leave her home. She felt the impulse to withdraw, and it rode her hard.
As if it wasn’t hard enough already.
Mark Walker came back from Jamaica. He didn’t do it legally.
And he tried to get back with Van, and Egypt. But that was not possible. He wasn’t Dennis Brown anymore, he was known, he was a fugitive. But he came to say hello.
And then he went to California. To North Hollywood, to start a life there.
Egypt went to visit him once. To visit his father – Mark Walker – and his brother – Mark Lewis – one of three of Egypt’s half siblings by different mothers. They were close, and the time was pleasant and happily spent. The younger Mark – his father’s firstborn – had quit college to come live with him, and seemed to Egypt to be what he had always been – a good son and brother.
Egypt treasured the memories of that trip.
But the joy was short lived.
Shortly before noon on Saturday, February 13, 2016, the Los Angeles Police Department was dispatched to 5745 Fair Avenue in North Hollywood, for the report of an assault with a deadly weapon.
It was a stabbing.
And at age 49, Mark Walker was dead, and his son, Mark Mossiah Lewis, age 24, was charged. Bail was set at more than $2 million. Four years later, the matter was still not resolved in the courts.
“That’s where the problems in my life started,” Egypt said. “Hearing your brother killed your dad, 15 years old, that just changed me. I can’t trust. I can’t trust anyone. I became more introverted.”
“We both cry sometimes,” Van said. “We’ve shed plenty of tears.”
Egypt drew in, and he lashed out.
“I looked for a reason to be mad,” Egypt said. “Like a chip on my shoulder.
“I really had a problem with authority. But 90 percent of the time it was me bringing in my baggage. When I was younger, I used to fight.”
But he has worked to turn that around. He said his hard times have “done nothing but motivate me,” and he has worked hard to focus on God and to associate with “people who are chasing goals, who are motivated.”
“I’m trying to learn,” Egypt said. “I want to keep my head on straight, avoid the nonsense.”
He is handsome and muscular and polite, with a winning smile and a can-do attitude. He knows how to work hard, and is focused on learning how to work smart. People naturally like him and expect great things of him.
But he is a young black man in America, and that brings a perspective some others may not have. Asked if he had ever thought of going in the military, he spoke of his friend who is a soldier, and of his entreaties to join him, but then said, “For a country that doesn’t give two craps about me? Especially all the injustices that my people face? I wouldn’t want to serve a country like that.”
To remember Mark Walker, her son’s father and the love of her life, Van has put up a display in the People’s Choice Kitchen. A large picture of him is in the center, a plaque, with his birth and death dates, surrounded by photos and artifacts, a shrine in the fulfillment of a dream he conceived, but did not live to see.
“Without Mark, I wouldn’t be where I am,” Van said. “this was his idea.”
-----
Marvin Adams walked in the People’s Choice Kitchen like he does every several days or few weeks, depending, a sheaf of photocopied papers in his hand, to leave on the counter for the restaurant’s patrons. It’s religious poetry, his poetry, often something that he writes in the night, when it comes to him.
“He wakes up at 2 or 3 in the morning,” Gloria Adams said of her husband. “I will hear him crying.”
She finds him at the dining room table, writing, telling her, “God is dealing with me.”
He is 73 and she is 69.
They have been sweethearts all their lives. Their moms were friends. His family lived in Mount Clemens, Michigan, near Detroit, and her family lived where there was fruit to be picked. Gloria and her mom – it was just the two of them, and her mother was an only child, so it was just the two of them – were sharecroppers sometimes and migrant farm workers most of the time.
It was a cycle. First strawberries in Michigan, then cherries in the same state, then to New York, where her mother’s grandfather lived, to pick apples. Year after year. She started when she was 5, with school fitting where it could and when it could, around the harvest schedule. At one time or another, she said, she probably attended briefly all the schools in Wayne County.
It was hard, in ways most can’t imagine, and many couldn’t endure.
Her mom was intensely alcoholic, and life was chaos.
“Oh my God,” Gloria Adams said, “it was a bad, bad, bad life. Most people would have drowned themselves in drugs and alcohol. But I always had hope.
“And my life has been good, even though it has been difficult.”
That’s a theme she emphasized. The fact something is hard does not mean that it is bad, and even when it is bad, one can be simultaneously afflicted and blessed. The burden on your back does not control the feeling in your heart, and even the worst of difficulties can be crucibles of faith and growth, and whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.
Gloria was about 15 when she stopped working the harvests. She couldn’t take it any more and she wouldn’t. So she lied about her age and went to work in a factory and Marvin moved out from Michigan in 1967 to be with her, walking every day from their upstairs “slum” apartment on Ritz Street – near the Public Market – to a job on Canal Street – near Nick Tahou’s and Morse Lumber. He soon got hired at Xerox, and walked to and from Webster one day when he had no transportation, so as not to miss work and make a bad impression.
“I didn’t come here to sit,” Marvin Adams said. “I came here to work. And I’ve been working all my life.”
Gloria was 16 and pregnant with their twins when the draft notice came. They went down to the courthouse and were married by Rochester City Court Judge Arthur B. Curran, an Air Corps veteran of World War II who went to Notre Dame law on the GI Bill. They were married on the 8th of March in 1968, four days later, Marvin reported to Fort Dix to become an infantryman.
The babies were born in May, and the meningitis came two weeks later and took the little boy away. Private Marvin Adams was allowed to come home for 48 hours to comfort his wife and bury his son, a lad they had named Marvin, after his dad. Then it was back to training, and over to Vietnam. That was the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.
“It was terrible,” Marvin Adams said of his year at war. Before he went over, they had noticed his keen mind and sent him to combat medic school. In Vietnam, he was part of the standing up of the 687th Engineer Company, a group of men charged with clearing land mines, and who saw regular combat.
“I could hear the air from the bullets going over my head,” he said. “I always wondered why they didn’t just lower their point of aim. But it was God. It was God kept me alive.”
When Marvin talked about Vietnam, like always, Gloria reached over and put her hand on his forearm. Every time. Every reference. It’s not a road he can walk alone.
“His war experiences were hard,” she said. “They still are.”
One time, a friend of his, a young man one week from going home, walked away from the armored personnel carrier by which they’d both been standing. He had gotten about 25 feet when he stepped on a land mine.
Marvin Adams, his wife and baby daughter 13,000 miles away in an upstairs apartment in a tiny house in the worst part of town, walked over a large area, a plastic bag in his hand, picking up parts and pieces of his friend so that this family back home would have something to bury.
He wrote poems back then, too, and kept a daily war journal. They all have been lost. Maybe it’s for the best.
Specialist Marvin Adams was discharged from the United States Army in October of 1969. Nobody noticed. Him, or any of them. “That did not sit well with a lot of us,” he said of America’s treatment of the veterans of his war. But he came home to Gloria and he went to work at Xerox, as a fork truck operator, for the next 32 years. Gloria spent five at Bausch & Lomb and 25 at Kodak. Through that period he was a Christian, the head deacon at their church, attending every funeral and calling on the members and visiting them in the hospital.
They built a good life, solid middle class, step by step, year by year, paycheck by paycheck. They lifted themselves from poverty, they provided better for their children, they kept the stories of their youth to themselves so that their children might live in a different and prettier world, free of the nightmares their parents had known.
Then, in 2017, something changed.
At their church, New Life Fellowship, the Rev. Bernard McNeill, gave a sermon titled, “Be Ye Holy.”
It pricked Marvin Adams in his heart. He was a good man. He was a Bible-believing man. He did right by people. But he wasn’t all he could be. He was pumping money into the lottery every day, and spending his free time at Off-Track Betting. And by the end of the sermon, he knew he couldn’t do that anymore.
And he knew that he had to do more to warn others. To tell them about Jesus, and the comfort he offers, and to try to ease their burdens. He knew that was his calling, a calling from the Lord, like the prophets of old, like Paul and Silas in jail, he was a man with a mission, sent to preach and save.
And his poetry came to mind. Simple poems. Four stanzas of four lines – quatrains, an English teacher would call them. Often innately the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare. Lyrical. Rhyming sometimes and sometimes not.
Written out in clear manuscript, with his name – Marvin T. Adams – and the date and time of their composition written in the lower right corner.
And then photocopied, and handed out. He went out on rounds most days, to stores and parking lots. He kept some above the visor of his car, in case he felt prompted. Like the time outside Speedway while his wife was inside getting coffee and there was a woman standing outside the car. He felt like the Lord told him to give the lady a particular poem and he got out of the car, walked over to her, and did so, and then went back and waited for his wife.
Shortly, the woman came to his window, sobbing, asking “How could you know? How could you know I needed this?”
“I didn’t know,” Marvin Adams said. “But the Lord did. The Lord knew.”
That is the ministry that fills his days. Poems on paper for strangers who pass. A word of testimony and faith.
“I want to be about the Lord,” he said. “I want to go out and reach people, and that’s how I do it.”
And that’s what brought him to the People’s Choice Kitchen, a sheaf of new poems in his hand, to leave a stack for those who need to hear.
-----
The basement alcove where Van hid the night the shots rang out was where, when Louie’s had been in business, they kept the compressor for the ice cream freezer. A small half of a closet in the dark where she frantically whispered to the 911 operator that she had to be quiet.
It was there where she heard a man’s voice, she couldn’t tell if it was Darnell’s or not, calling her name. Plaintively. Searchingly. As she hid, resolved not to move until the dispatcher on the phone said the police had cleared the building and wanted her to come out.
While Darnell Wilson stood upstairs, in front of the counter, bleeding onto the floor.
He’s a quiet man. Comfortable. Polite. Inclined to modesty. Not a braggart.
But a man, and a man who in the moment he was needed, did what had to be done.
And that’s how we ought to be rightly judged, by how we respond when fate calls our name, when it is our moment of purpose and we stand in the breach and it all depends on us. Do we rise to the occasion. Do we deliver. That’s what truly counts.
Darnell Wilson is a son of the southwest, from Flint and Genesee, and he had it tough coming up. Mostly raised by his grandmother, sometimes his mom, often his aunt. He went to East, but he didn’t graduate.
“I took the negative route,” Darnell Wilson said. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly. It was pretty hard.
“I fell out. I fell out of everything. Everything just started going down. I did not do well.
“A lot of it was my fault.”
His mother died, and nine months later, his grandmother, and then he was in jail.
It was just three months, mostly in Plaza North at the Monroe County Jail, but it was pivotal.
“I met this one kid,” Darnell Wilson said. “His mother was a minister and he had a Bible. And two or three times we prayed. I really liked that. It felt good.”
In a surprise, he found himself in the same lockup with his older brother and the time together was precious to them. It was to be their last extended time together before the brother died of an aneurysm.
Something else began in jail for Darnell Wilson. He began hearing a voice.
It manifest itself initially as he checked his jail commissary account and found it empty.
“I was hearing this voice,” he said. “It said, ‘Go on your bunk, get under your sheet, and pray.’”
He did.
And then he heard the voice again.
“It said, ‘Go check your commissary account.’”
It now contained $30.
“The voice is still with me. It encourages me to do good. It keeps me company,” Darnell Wilson said. “I want to say it’s the Most High. I don’t know. My guardian angel, maybe. My mother, my grandmother. I don’t know. But it helps me.
“I still have my ups and downs. But I keep my head above water. I seem to come through.”
Like he came through that night.
It was all on the surveillance video.
As Van ran screaming into the restaurant that night before Christmas Eve, Darnell had instinctively flown to the front door, and immediately beset the attacker, intercepting him as he entered the premises.
Darnell Wilson hit him and hit him and hit him. There was no quit in the man. And as he recalled it, it was a series of discrete thoughts. Every blow had to land and every blow had to stun, or he feared the masked intruder would inflict an injury on him. He instinctively knew he had to maintain the tactical initiative. It had to be his fight.
The man went down, in the doorway between rooms, near the door that opens onto Brooks Avenue, in front of a big picture window. That’s when he pulled the gun and fired, and Darnell Wilson thought of his son and his daughter. It wasn’t going to be here, he thought, and it wasn’t going to be this way. This wasn’t how he was going to die. Damned if this was how he was going to die. Damned if he was going to leave his son and his daughter this way.
When the gun fired again, Darnell Wilson intensified the barrage of his fists, man against metal, knowing that this might literally be a fight to the death, and he knocked the intruder through the plate-glass window, the two men so closely bound that they were both lacerated as they fell onto the Brooks Avenue sidewalk outside.
The same sidewalk where people used to line up for Louie’s Easter chocolate.
Beside the street, Darnell Wilson saw the gun begin to come loose, and he struck the man again, knocking it completely loose, and he scrambled for it, and grabbed it, and began striking the intruder with it.
By that point, Van’s elderly uncle, Tyrone Roundtree, had come out to join the scrum, and the intruder was able to break free and run off, and Darnell Wilson thought it best not to pursue him.
A second intruder had fallen back and slunk around the corner of the building, going south on Thurston. The apparent getaway car, parked directly behind Van’s utility vehicle on Brooks in front of the store, pulled away quickly, likewise disappearing down Thurston.
Months later, Van would learn that as this was happening, a woman with an Eastern European accent was at the Walgreens diagonally across the intersection. She saw the assailant flee. She saw the vehicle flee. She saw where they went. She did not pursue them. She did not call the police. She called her husband, who told her to say nothing and to get out of there. The proprietors of their own business in the southwest, they were themselves victims of an armed robbery not many weeks after.
None of that was known to Darnell as he reentered the store, tried to find Van, and assessed his injuries. They turned out not to be insignificant. He was cut pretty good, from the glass, not just skin but also tendons and nerves, and he had been injured as well by the ferocity of his own blows. It wasn’t a Band-Aid deal, it was a go-to-the-hospital deal, and later that night, uninsured, he did.
But he gave that man one hell of a fight. One Snuffy and his brothers would have been proud of. One three generations of Rochester cops who’ve frequented that building would have stood and cheered. It doesn’t appear that the assailant was able to land a single blow, or escape a single one of Darnell’s. Darnell Wilson was the man. He probably saved a woman’s life, and he, barehanded, attacked and overcame an armed man intent on committing a violent felony.
Protect and provide. That’s what men are supposed to do. That’s how nature wired it.
And that’s what Darnell Wilson was about that night. He was working, to provide for his babies. And when an innocent woman needed him, he protected her.
He was a man, in a noble and natural way.
And maybe he was there on God’s errand.
“God is real,” Van said, “and I know I have angels watching me.”
“There’s been angels guarding her, protecting her,” her mom said. “I mention her in my prayers all the time.”
“All my mother’s prayers are answered,” Van said.
This time, perhaps by a man God spoke to first at the county jail.
-----
By 11 o’clock that night, the police were mostly gone and Lt. Jason Bagley and his Group 4 on Engine 7 from the old-school 1913 firehouse on Genesee Street were spraying down the sidewalk, to clean up the blood, a last nicety from the city of Rochester. The crew from Emergency Enclosures was waiting for the firemen to clear, to put plywood where the plate-glass window had been. It was a one-man job but the boss had had a couple of beers after work so he called in a helper to drive.
The People’s Choice Kitchen seemed unusually bright in the dark winter night. It was something of a beacon. Inside, a man was mopping up the gore, and outside, cars were passing sporadically, some slowing to crane their necks and try to see what was going on, others seemed purposely to look straight ahead, as if they were trying to seal themselves off from whatever had brought the flashing lights and the TV cameras to Brooks and Thurston.
Across Thurston, on the southeast corner of the intersection, in the dark, stood Evangela Stanley, with her arms folded across her chest.
The one who was ripped apart on the witness stand when she was a teen-ager. The one whose sweetheart was torn out of her life with his hands cuffed behind his back. The one whose son had a brother who killed their father.
The one who had, for near 19 years, carried the vagaries and burdens of a small business on her back, paying bills, opening and closing, cooking and cooking and cooking, worrying and wondering and sometimes prospering.
The one who fretted over the hunger of others, who sometimes paid for strangers’ funerals, who tempered ambition with charity, who wanted to live a life of Christian love and service.
That one stood on the southeast corner of Thurston and Brooks, trying to hold it together, her hand quivering, staring across the street at a squat, solid, brick building with three narrow storefronts.
After a few minutes, she would leave. She had to go to the store. The next day was Christmas Eve, and in addition to customers at the restaurant, she had two catering jobs to do, and the work had to be done. So she left and she went to the store, near midnight, to a 24-hour Wegmans, and she broke down. Sobbing. Sitting there in the car. Alone. Shorn of the peace and security she had craved, built and clung to.
That will affect a person, right now, and in the future. Maybe for all of the future. Maybe everyone struggles with that. Those times in life when it’s all ripped away and years pass but the scar is still there, and it builds on itself, this year’s difficulty and that year’s trauma, test upon trial upon adversity upon grief, until life is a little broken, maybe universally so, when the best one can do is hobble through. Maybe that is the common situation of humankind. Maybe that is one of the purposes of life. To learn to endure, and to do so with faith and hope, instead of self-pity and bitterness, to grow and be stronger, instead of being ground to powder.
But it is what it is, and every man climbs his mountain.
And so it was that an emotionally wounded and physically limping 53-year-old woman shopped after midnight for the makings of other people’s Christmas Eve feasts, gunshots intended for her still ringing in her ears, and the demon of fear taunting her from every shadow.
To such an extent that the next place she sat mortified was outside her own darkened home, afraid to enter, unsure, unsafe, pushed too far.
Gates Police Sergeant Martijyn Verbakel, a big, tall, smiling Dutchman, came to her aid, and searched the home, and assured her it was safe, and only then would she enter, and try to sleep.
-----
In “Miracle on 34th Street,” it happened on a drive. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it happened in a dream. In Rochester, it happened with the dawning of a new day.
By morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, the story had spread. Online, and via Facebook, and then the TV stations. And as Van Stanley drove back to Brooks and Thurston, to begin the day’s cooking, the community, Rochester, the region all about, was rising and learning and rallying to her side.
There were almost 500 robberies in the city in 2019, and this was not the most spectacular of those. It was, all things considered, a rather minor crime. But this didn’t end up being about a crime. It ended up being about love.
A love for Van Stanley, and the good she had done. A love for the brotherhood of man that can exist in the most mundane and routine of places and events, like the place you go for lunch.
A little after 8 in the morning of Christmas Eve, Justin Wilcox – a white county legislator from Brighton – and Ernest Flagler – a black county legislator from the city – showed up with brooms and mops and rags to clean up the debris. The two of them – from sometimes clashing factions of the local Democratic Party – had started having lunch at People’s Choice Kitchen, to build some bridges and get over some problems, and had become friends, and fond of Van.
There was still a lot of blood and broken glass and the two politicians worked through the morning to clean it up and prepare the business for the day’s customers. Wilcox, whose mother had come as a little girl to buy candy at Louie’s, called Morse Lumber, that opened in 1853, to see about replacing the broken window, and he and Flagler ran errands and picked up more supplies for Van.
But these two were just two. The first two, yes, but the first of many, gathering to help.
And so it was that through the day, through Christmas Eve, people gathered to the People’s Choice Kitchen. Hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They were communing. They were consoling. They were fellowshipping. There were hugs, and love, an outpouring of the heart, a solidarity and support, for Van behind the counter, and for the goodness she represented and the community to which they belonged.
Yes, the community of black Rochester. Yes, the community of the 19th Ward and the southwest. But, also yes, the community of years past and miles distant. Peter Throumoulos, more than two decades after he walked out the door of Louie’s, came back to give Van a hug, and tell her he loved her and was proud of her. People from Brighton and Batavia drove into the city to demonstrate their fondness and support, to show that this community had neither boundaries nor barriers.
“Person after person walked through that door,” Justin Wilcox said, “who normally wouldn’t have been there.
“It was an opportunity to show that we are one community. We stand by good people, people who work hard and do good things. It was an outpouring of sympathy and unity.”
Strangers brought flowers, a steady stream stopped to make a contribution, neighboring business owners came behind the counter to lend a hand, some customers paid $50 for a $12 plate of food. The mayor stopped in to hug Evangela Stanley, the City Council president laughed and danced with a county legislator. Some gathered around Van to pray over her, to bless her and thank God for her. There were pastors and cousins and rekindled friendships, and the beating heart of a people and a place.
All of it recorded and reported and echoed across the region on the evening news.
Van melted and reformed and glowed. It was as if the love and support of strangers and friends was a tonic. There were tears in her eyes again, but they were tears of gratitude and affection, joy and peace. The demons were pushed away, the victory was seized, the day was won.
Darnell Wilson early on hung back, his hand bandaged, uncomfortable with the idea that he had done anything special, and with the attention people tried to pay him. But he was taken aside by a couple of older men, one with a badge on his belt, the other a retired firefighter.
“You are a hero,” one said.
“You did what a man is supposed to do,” the other said. “You set an example people need to see.”
And so it was that he spoke to one reporter and then another, and finally to wide-eyed people who gathered around, looking at the bullet hole in the floor, and its twin in the wall across the east dining room.
All day long, at 575 Brooks Avenue, at a humble joint that sells collards and jerk chicken, at a place that has made a community feel at home, like it has since 1925.
“The greater story is, we are all neighbors,” Justin Wilcox said. “We human beings have a need to help one another – people search for that opportunity.”
A month before, talking about her idea, at a table by the window, Van had wanted to do good. To feed people, yes, but to inspire them also. Maybe to inspire them more. It had come to her in the days after Thanksgiving, the people going hungry, and the gamble of pay what you can afford. For a week at first, to see if it broke the till, and then for the rest of the month. Some will pay less, and some will pay more, and maybe it comes out as a wash. And maybe some will be filled, and some others will be inspired. To love and give, however they can, wherever they can. To be one, and one heart, at Christmas time, and always.
That was the dream, hatched as she cooked and served and cleaned, as she visited and encouraged and bore the burden.
And it was a dream that came true to a degree she couldn’t have imagined, by a means she couldn’t have anticipated. A greater good than she could have hoped, as a consequence of an evil she couldn’t have conceived.
People were fed for a month, and then the darkness came, and the light shone.
And on Christmas Eve, they were fed in a new way, with brotherhood and community, gratitude and joy. A light and a love in the faces and hearts of the people and the city. It wasn’t just about people who had come through the door, it was about people who saw and heard and were touched, inspired and bettered.
Van Stanley got what she wanted. She did what she was called to do.
Miracles happen the way they happen, and the Lord uses who he will.
To teach us to love as he loved, to serve as he served. To remember that service to our fellow man is truly service to him.
This is the true story of a lady and a building and a bad night and a good day. And of how one place, over almost a century, has been community and home to successive generations of the sons and daughters of Rochester, people who are truly brothers and sisters, regardless of how they looked or how they spoke or where they came from or even when they lived.
Which comes back to what the angels sang outside Bethlehem so many years ago.
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
That is the message of this Christmas miracle.
Peace on earth, good will toward men, as proclaimed and lived by the angels who walk among us, and whose ranks we should aspire to join.
Copyright 2020 BOB LONSBERRY