It’s a little before 8:30 a.m., and Saundra Burton is packing. She’s been up since 3:45 a.m., sleepless from the anxiety of moving day. Earth, Wind & Fire plays loudly while she and Hawthorne Gillis, the father of her son, Quintae, intently scour the surface of a faux wood table with toothbrushes. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture she will be taking with her. Throughout her two-bedroom concrete shack lie rugs saturated with dirt. It’s a problem impossible to treat, she explains, because the floor is level with the ground outside, granting dust free passage under the door.

Outside, the street number is hand painted in child-like script. Hemming the entrance is a random collection of debris: trash cans lying on their sides, bicycle parts, a shopping cart stuffed with garbage bags filled with her clothes—evidence of the morning’s progress. In the side yard there’s a dented but operating washing machine and an outhouse in the far corner, its rickety plywood door swung wide open exposing its foul innards. Its presence may seem comically old-fashioned, but indoor plumbing has never been part of life for the thirty-nine-year-old or any of the other 114 residents of Bayview, an impoverished African American community in Cheriton on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Saundra’s a handsome woman, almost exotic-looking with high cheekbones and steely, penetrating brown eyes that intensely fix upon whomever she meets. With near giddy enthusiasm she chats about what’s left to do and the shopping spree she went on yesterday in Norfolk for a microwave, towels, and a Swiffer Wet Jet mop for her new digs.

Looking at her overstuffed navy blue love seat, the chipped paint on the walls, and the derelict four-burner stove in the kitchen, there’s no question in her mind what will be easiest to leave behind, “The pot that we use to urinate in,” she says flatly. “That’s the most degrading thing—going to that outhouse and dumping your own feces and urine in it. That’s the most humiliating thing—trust me. Sometimes it’s snowing or icy or raining, and you got to do it because you don’t want that stuff sitting in your house. And people say you get used to it. You never get used to that.”

Don’t let the name Bayview fool you. Although the community is situated on a peninsula framed by the Chesapeake Bay to the West and the Atlantic Ocean to the East, the only bodies of water seen from Saundra’s cracked, potholed street are the puddles created by the ever-leaking, rusty hand pumps in yards. And as for the view, one resident remarked that the first time she ever saw a photo of her house, she wept in horror.

Save for the three adjoining one-story concrete apartments, the majority of the roughly fifty houses in Bayview—a scattered community spread out over several paved and dirt roads—are constructed of wood, some built in the early 1900s by local farmers who leased them to their laborers for minimal fees, sometimes free. Every fall, the farmers would service the property by supplying tenants with exterior paint, cleaning the outhouses, and repairing roofs, roads, windows, and pumps. But when the agricultural system shifted from labor-intensive, high-value vegetable crops to small grains that demanded only a small amount of human labor, seemingly overnight hundreds of people lost their jobs. The farmers continued to collect rent, but the relationship between worker and employer had ended, and so did the landlords’ interest in putting money into the homes. A system of poverty was born—so was Bayview’s reputation as an eyesore.

Like a dilapidated quilt, each home wears its own unique appliqué of patches made from scraps of tar paper, aluminum siding, asphalt shingles, corrugated metal, polyvinyl, even cardboard. There’s a well-known neighborhood story about the time Saundra’s niece Shykea Benton, then nine-years-old, filled a hole in the side of her house with wildflowers, hoping, as she was heard to explain, to make her house look pretty. “It’s been this way for years,” says resident Donald Morris. “If they can send a man to the moon surely they can provide affordable housing. What I don’t understand is why our president goes over to another country, starts a war, finishes a war, and then sends billions of dollars over there to fix what we started. But still, they can’t do nothing for a little small community like this here.”

But something is being done. Thanks to an $8.1 million budget funded by thirty-two organizations, Bayview is getting a new look. The goal is to construct 136 rental and single-family rent-to-own units by the end of 2004.

Community facilities are also in the works, with a laundromat, playground, retail shops, day care center, and a technology center offering classes such as computer education, reading, and carpentry. A third phase of development would add another forty units in the oldest section of Bayview known as “The Bottom.” That project, costing an estimated $5 million, is yet to be funded.

In addition to the building site, approximately 100 acres have been purchased through funding and will remain undeveloped, earmarked for conservation and farming. The idea is to return Bayview to its roots as a working farm and to maintain its natural character. Residents will grow and market crops and flowers, which they can sell at an on-premise farmers’ market. “Bayview is a remarkable story,” says Steve Parker, who has been involved with the Bayview project since the early 1990s. He’s now director of The Nature Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve, which acted as the community’s agent in purchasing the land. “It’s a prime example of how community-based conservation can successfully address human, economic, and environmental needs. Here you have a small group of people, struggling to rebuild their neighborhood and provide the basic necessities of life. But they see beyond the short term. Through planning, persistence, and hard work, they developed a new vision of progress. If every community followed a path like Bayview’s, the world would be a better place.” behind the hurricane-force winds of change that have blown through Bayview is resident Alice Coles, a blessing disguised as a fifty-two-year-old grandmother with an American Indian bloodline and a will of iron. Although she’s lived here for thirty-two years, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Coles ceased being able to stomach watching the once proud, self-sustaining community sink into the pit of poverty. “I felt that I was looking through a set of eyes that no one else could see,” says Coles. “The others couldn’t see it disappearing. While it was falling away, I begin to think that, ‘Oh, my God, all these jobs are going and these people don’t know anything else.’ I started trying to get people to move into other industries. Some did, but many got caught blindsided after everything was gone.”

Her quest for change began in 1994 after joining with members of the local community in the victorious fight against the county’s proposal to build a prison in the heart of Bayview. The win gave her the courage and momentum she needed to found Bayview Citizens for Social Justice (BCSJ) in 1995, a platform from which she could articulate and implement her ideas of revival. That included letting the outside world know what was going on.

Coles explains that after several failed attempts to get the attention of the county government, she invited the Baltimore-based national headquarters of the NAACP to tour Bayview. They arrived in February 1998, left horrified, and returned three months later with a caravan of spectators: politicians, bankers, officials from the state health department. And an onslaught of media. Throughout the month of May came the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Danish and German press, Black Entertainment Television, the Washington Post, all of the local networks, and still more. Photographers hid in bushes, climbed on rooftops, peeped through windows. The surprise attack enraged residents. Some moved. Some hid out. But nearly all felt betrayed by Coles. “I hurt a lot of people by exposing our conditions,” says Coles. “And there was another group that was worried that the attention would attract developers to the land we were living on. But if things aren’t exposed, the suffering is going to stay here. It takes somebody to do something to make change. If nobody does nothing then things remain the same. That’s what happened here—nobody did nothing.”

She and the BCSJ volunteers spent the next year knocking on doors to find out what residents’ needs were. She turned to local organizations like Citizens for a Better Eastern Shore to learn the ways of business. In addition, she took roughly sixty-five continuing education courses, including homeownership education, housing development financing, and how to organize community development.

In 1997 the BCSJ received its first grant, $10,000, from the Environmental Protection Agency, which paid for a water quality study in the community. After that, money began to pour in, with the USDA contributing the bulk, just over $5 million. “We never knew that we would be the ones to bring ourselves out of this hellhole, this dilemma, this cycle,” says Coles. “We thought some savior would come out of the East and come save us. We never thought back then that it was within ourselves to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.” t hese aren’t your typical low-budget cookie-cutter dwellings. BCSJ hired Charlottesville, Va.,-based RBGC to design traditional farmhouse-style houses neatly containing two or three apartments with up to three bedrooms. Built on forty-three acres of cleared cornfields located directly opposite the old community, the houses face each other in two rows three hundred yards apart. Only two roads run within the community, behind the units, leaving front yards open and traffic-free. A U-shaped promenade runs in front of the homes, returning the area to a village-like atmosphere.

Painted butter yellow, soft gray, and cream—with hunter green or light gray asphalt shingles—each building comes replete with all the modern amenities: digital thermostats, cable television, ceiling fans, brass hardware, as well as new stoves, refrigerators, and kitchen, living room, and bedroom furniture. “I feel great about getting a new house,” Shykea Benton says today, five years after she tried to beautify her home with flowers. She, like her Aunt Saundra, will be moving into a new unit with her mother and little brother. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, a very long time.”

For newlyweds Jessica and Dustin Robberecht, eighteen and twenty-two, this is their first home together. They are one of the two white families living in Bayview. “We’re going to make sure we get to know our neighbors, invite them over if they need anything,” says Jessica. “One of my next-door neighbors has already told me if I need anything to go ahead and come on over and she’ll help us out.”

Down the street, Shavon Myrick critiques her mother’s placement of the just-delivered new eggplant-colored couch. A cashier at Hardee’s in Cape Charles, the twenty-one-year-old has never been out from under her mother’s roof. “The best part of all this is being on my own. I mean, I’ll never forget where I came from. I’m just glad that I moved up a little bit. I’ve learned that you just need to be patient ’cause your day is coming. It may not come when you expect it, but it’s coming. Just be patient.”

But with new housing comes a whole new set of struggles. While rental fees in the shanties were as low as $25 month (some landlords ceased collecting rent after the media’s visit), the income-sensitive rent in the new units ranges from $20 to $400 per month. And the purchase price for the single-family rent-to-own houses is $80,000, offset by income-sensitive interest rates. With increased rents and three new bills for water, sewage, and garbage added to their budget, residents’ incomes will be stretched even thinner than ever. “It might be a struggle,” says Sharlene Benton, Saundra’s sister. “There might be some things that I might can’t get or do because now we only pay rent and down there it’s central heat. And they want a phone—I got teenagers. I might have to get a second job cleaning up.”

Coles is already working on these challenges, overflowing with ideas for new jobs, like tapping into the tourism market by starting entertainment businesses both on the land and water. Or growing hot peppers in the community’s fields to manufacture into gourmet hot sauces, with the bottles’ labels carrying Bayview’s name and a little history about the community. “There are a lot of people here living on welfare and hoping the farm work will come back. And it won’t. You have to move on and find other skills. They have to learn how to survive without the government giving you something or play dumb so that people will give you something. We need to find out what the need is and how to supply it, learn about the work force and what are the best-paying jobs, who hires, what are the most-needed skills.”

While Bayview’s rebirth has most recently caught the favorable attention of media outlets such as “60 Minutes” and People magazine, there are others who remain skeptical. “The outside community is buying into it slowly,” says Adebola Ajayi, BCSJ’s deputy executive director. Ajayi, born in Nigeria, was hired in 2001 after BCSJ held a national search for a housing development specialist. “We are trying to build bridges. There should be a lot of local support, but we are still surely class divided. There are some people who, if you say you are from Bayview, want to run away like you have leprosy. The social stratification on the Eastern Shore still causes many bad things to happen. And bad things happen when all of us don’t do three things: We don’t want to see, we don’t want to say, and we don’t want to hear.” The demolition of 80 percent of the homes in Bayview has begun. “We’re going to keep one standing,” explains Coles. “Because people aren’t going to believe that we lived through the hell and the conditions and the struggle that we have. They’re not going to buy it.”

It’s October 1, 2003, the day residents receive the keys to their new homes. The crowd’s mood is electric, the positive current proving powerful enough to force a group of teenage hoodlums into temporary retreat down the road to an abandoned Mobil station.

The first called to the podium at the key presentation ceremony is Burton Solomon. Known as “Uncle Solomon,” the seventy-two-year-old widower and former vegetable farm laborer has been a life-long resident of Bayview. “We spent a long time getting this far, but we done got here,” he muffles into the microphone. “And we appreciate it.” His succinct words are quickly followed by a round of amens and applause. He explains that the first thing he is going to do in his new place is lock himself up for two days and go nowhere, see no one.

The rest are called up one by one to receive their key and a miniature American flag, an in absentia gift from Virginia state senator Nick Rerris, their district representative. Some speak their thanks to Coles, some offer it to God, like Mabel Owens, a resident of neighboring Seaview, an equally decrepit community. Dressed in a brilliant purple blouse and skirt with an African design on the hem, she stands behind the lectern and sings what is introduced as an old Negro spiritual, “How I Got Over.” It only takes a few words before the crowd releases tears of exhaustion and gratitude.

How I got over.
How I got over.
You know my soul look back and wonder how I got over.
I wanna thank you because you brought me, Lord.
I want to thank you, Jesus, because you taught me.
I want to thank you because you kept me.
Wanna thank you ‘cause you never left me.
And I’m going to sing, Hallelujah!
Lord, I’ll shout, ‘Troubles over!’
You know my soul look back and wonder how I got over.