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In its heyday during the height of segregation, the little resort of American Beach, Florida was the African American Hyannisport, where the crème de la crème of black society came to enjoy what the town motto called "recreation and relaxation without humiliation." These days, it's more like the African American Daytona Beach--that is, visited mostly by partying teenagers who come to drink and get rowdy in the town's deserted streets. What happened between then and now could be fodder for a sociologist's study, but journalist Russ Rymer turns it instead into a grippingly personal story of race, money, greed, and the struggle over who owns--and interprets--cultural memory. At the heart of Rymer's tale is one of the most fascinating characters to walk the pages of a book this year: MaVynee Betsch, great-granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, an African American millionaire and the founder of American Beach. Reared in privilege and culture, sixtyish MaVynee once sang lieder throughout the capitals of Europe. Now she lives the gypsy life in the open air of American Beach, an unforgettable sight in her 18-inch fingernails, cowrie anklets, and five-foot fall of hair. Having given all her money away, MaVynee spends her time evoking the glories of her community's past and railing against the white-bread resorts, whose golf courses and cookie-cutter condos threaten to swallow her beloved beach. The painful irony is that when the enforced humiliation of segregation ended, so too did the cohesiveness of the black commercial and professional community American Beach once represented. As one resident puts it, "First we had segregation, and then integration. Then disintegration." Rymer's story ripples outward to encompass bygone black Jacksonville, the killing of an unarmed African American by Amelia Island police, the first incorporated black town in the United States, A.L. Lewis's Afro-American Life Insurance Company, and revered Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. But it never loses focus on its fundamental question, a question with equal relevance for both black and white: "Where did mankind's economic existence and moral existence coincide, and where collide, and where was the boundary between them?" Rymer avoids both ideology and easy answers in this passionate yet even-handed book. --Mary Park
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