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Real Florida

Pastoral scenes

Mary Ann Carroll, the only woman among the African-American artists known as "the Highwaymen," now sells her paintings for a higher purpose.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published January 8, 2006

[Times photo: William Dunkley]

Mary Ann Carroll sings and plays the organ at her storefront church, Foundation Revival Center, in Fort Pierce. “It was a calling from God to motivate people back to the duties of life, responsibility, dignity, pride and morality,” Carroll says.

	Fishing House, by Mary Ann Carroll. The price: $3,900. When Carroll first started painting, her large landscapes sold for $50, if she was lucky. Now, she sells them for as much as $5,000.
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FORT PIERCE - Mary Ann Carroll's church, Foundation Revival Center, is on the poor side of town. Broken whiskey bottles prop up the fence. Her neighbor repairs cars. Somebody abandoned a burned-out Pontiac in front of her door, blocking two precious parking spaces.

"I'm going to have it towed," she declares. "I've got Bible study tonight, and people need to park."

She just turned 65 and is tired from diabetes, but she considers getting out her trusty jack and removing the three tires that survived the flames. She knows someone who needs tires. If she doesn't claim them, somebody else will. It's that kind of neighborhood.

The Rev. Carroll's storefront church in east-central Florida is as modest as it gets. When nature calls, folks squirm in the pews because there is no restroom. At least the men can walk outside and find a poinciana tree. The ladies are out of luck unless a neighboring store will share the bathroom. Carroll has always been an ambitious person, even when she was a child and discovered her great talent for drawing. Her ambition right now is a new church.

Of course, churches cost money, and nobody around here has much, including Carroll. She's not rich, but she's got talent that pays her bills. She is the only woman in the well-known group of African-American artists known as "the Highwaymen."

When she started painting, Eisenhower was president and she was a teenager who listened to Sam Cooke sing A Change Is Gonna Come on the radio and dreamed of a different life. Back then, when she was lucky, she could sell small paintings of dreamy Florida landscapes for $12.50 and large ones for $50.

A lot has happened since. About a decade ago, the Highwaymen were discovered by the world, profiled in newspapers including this one, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Their work is included in fancy art books. Steven Spielberg featured their paintings in his movie Catch Me If You Can.

Carroll can sell a small painting these days for $1,200. She gets as much as $5,000 for a big painting.

"I have been blessed by God," she says.

About 10 years ago, after she finally began making decent money for her art, she decided to add "pastor" to her resume and help less fortunate people in her community. Now she wants to give them a nicer place to worship: a facility with a toilet.

"I know it doesn't sound like much," she says. "But it's important."

The old church, a room about 40 feet by 40 feet, has taken a beating from Mother Nature. Last year's hurricanes shredded the roof and spilled rain over the pews and piano. Carroll finally got things repaired, but then Hurricane Wilma blew along in October and damaged the roof again.

Carroll's latest piano was unplayable, the carpets soaked. She got the carpets dried out, but her church smells moldy. No matter. Her dozen regulars show up every Sunday morning, Wednesday evening and, if they can manage, Friday at noon for prayer.

"There is a lot of pain around here," says their pastor, who moved to Fort Pierce from Georgia when she was 5. "There's a lot of people who go without around here. There's a lot of people who are confused, who don't know the rules anymore. They need Jesus."

Carroll has to talk loud about Jesus. Next door, a mechanic just turned on his drill. Sound carries easily through the thin church walls.

Now her cell phone tolls. She has one of those hands-free models. "Yes, yes, yes!" she says, raising her hands. Somebody has promised to tow that scorched car.

Not long ago, a large room on the other side of the industrial park that houses her church became available. Carroll began paying the rent. Glory be, the new room includes a toilet. It will make a nice little church.

When Mary Ann Carroll was a kid, Florida was segregated, especially Fort Pierce, a cattle and citrus town where African-American folks picked oranges, did laundry, babysat white children and lived in a neighborhood known as "Blacktown."

One day when Carroll was 16, she noticed a fancy Chevrolet with flames painted on the side parked on the corner of Avenue Q. Behind the car was a 20-something black man painting a picture. His name was Harold Newton. He was painting a picture of a beautiful tree, a poinciana with blood-orange blossoms.

Carroll, who liked to draw, was fascinated. Newton told her how to mix colors and what to look for. Newton, it turned out, was selling his paintings for $25 to $50 along U.S. 1. He sold them at banks, at mom-and-pop motels and at doctors offices.

Two of his younger brothers were painting, as well. In fact, there were more than two dozen young African-Americans - all male - painting fast and cheap landscapes in Fort Pierce. They seldom fretted about being called "artists." They cared more about making enough money to avoid the mop or the groves. Their lush paintings of wind-swept beaches, rivers, swamps and poinciana trees often looked more like big "Welcome to Florida" postcards than something that would hang in a New York gallery.

Their leader was a go-getter named Alfred Hair, whose ambition was to own a brand-new Cadillac and become a millionaire. When Hair found he couldn't keep up with the demand for inexpensive paintings, he recruited friends to help. He taught them to paint and showed them how to sell their work door-to-door.

That's how Carroll became the only woman in the club that later became known as the Highwaymen.

"I hate to say it, but it was a man's world at first," she says. "I've never liked to be told what I could do and what I couldn't do. So I started painting myself. Sometimes I had the only car with gas. One of the artists would ask if I'd take him out to make a sale. I'd say, "Only if I can sell my paintings, too."'

One time, another artist picked up one of her paintings and, teasing, held it out of reach above her head.

"I grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, "STOP! GIVE IT RIGHT BACK! I DON'T MEAN MAYBE.' I startled him, but I meant for him to take me seriously."

She remembers the glorious week when she sold $72 worth of paintings.

"I don't know if a white person can appreciate how much money that was," she says. "Back then, lots of black folks worked all day for $5 or $7. A good wage was $50 a week. It was a hard life."

Alfred Hair, the leader of the Highwaymen, didn't live long enough to become a millionaire. On Aug. 9, 1970, while playing pool at a Blacktown juke joint called Eddie's Place, a fight broke out, supposedly over a woman. Somebody fired a gun into Hair's shoulder. He made a run for it, but the gunmen finished him off in the parking lot next to his brand-new Cadillac.

He was 29.

Carroll owns two old Lincoln Continentals. A tag on the front of the blue one says "Prayer Changes Things." The tag on the white one says "Jesus." When she pops the trunks, the smell of fresh paint comes boiling out. Always ready to make a sale, she carries a load of paintings wherever she travels.

She paints every morning if she has time, though sometimes she lacks even a few minutes to call her own. She is raising two grandchildren. Their mother, Louise, died a year ago December from the complications of lupus. She was 44.

"My precious daughter," Carroll says, fighting back tears. "She was sick, but we didn't know how sick until she didn't come home from the hospital that last time. The hurtful thing was that I was out selling paintings, trying to come up with some money for Christmas presents, when it happened. I keep feeling bad about that, that I could have done more."

Carroll has five living children. She says she is proud they are all good citizens. One is a carpenter, one works as a clerk, one makes concrete for a living and two work in medical clinics. Carroll was married once, but her husband left, leaving her to support the kids. She couldn't pay bills by painting pretty pictures alone. She also cut lawns, painted houses, hammered nails, installed drywall and delivered newspapers. The worst job she ever had was greasing the gears under a drawbridge.

"Sweet Jesus, I thought I was going to crushed by those gears a couple of times, but I had to do what I had to do. I've never been afraid to work."

Mary Ann Carroll might be the only preacher in Florida who delivers her sermons with paint dappling her loafers. Looks like blue paint from a Highwayman sky.

A few hours before the Wednesday night Bible service, she makes her rounds, stopping at frame shops to pick up paintings or to leave them. She talks about publishing a calendar or a book one day. Customers who can no longer afford a painting might buy a book or a calendar and help raise money for her church.

"I'd like to do so many things," she says. "I have the energy, Lord have mercy, but I don't have an education, I don't have the know-how."

She drives past a big church in the white part of town. It looks freshly painted and landscaped and has a parking lot Wal-Mart might envy. Probably it has an ATM in the lobby.

"I get tired," Carroll goes on. "I have the diabetes - I have to give myself two shots every day. I also wake up a lot at night with, what do they call it? Apnea. Sleep apnea. But once I get busy, the tiredness leaves. Once I get busy, the hungriness leaves."

She drives past a new development. Does a double take.

"See those pines in front of that house? I used to paint them. Now there are houses! Sweet Jesus! Everything is changing now. I like those pines. I might paint those pines again. You know what, I'll come back here and paint the pines and leave the houses out."

All the street lights in front of her church are broken. Her car beams reveal parking spaces. "Well, thank you, Jesus! They towed that burned-out Pontiac away. I wish I could have gotten the tires, though. I know somebody who could have used tires."

A few folks wait in the pews. She waves, looks at her watch, takes her place at the organ, donated to her church after the last hurricane ruined her piano. A few years ago, she taught herself to play. She only knows three chords: C, F and G. But they work well together in church music.

"Pass me not, my blessed savior," she sings in a raspy voice that might draw a goose bump from Irma Thomas. The eight congregants in the pews join in. A man in a peach-colored suit plays tambourine, and her grandson Johnny accompanies on drums. Above Johnny, hanging on the wall, is his dead mother's portrait.

When the hymn is over, a very proper woman walks erectly to the front of the church, kneels and leans her head on the pew. She calls on God to heal her. She calls on God to heal her for a good five minutes, with Carroll punctuating her testimony with a firm C chord. Every once in a while Carroll wails, "I know you're going to make everything right, Lord Jesus!"

Tonight the church is honored to have a guest preacher, Dr. Ernest Walters, a dapper man with a bald head and a beard who stands up with his Bible. He reads from Matthew 6:4.

Carroll follows along in her Bible, so old it's held together with duct tape, pages folded over and marked.

That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

"Don't give it for your own glory. AMEN!" shouts Dr. Walters. "Give it for the glory of God."

"AMEN" cries Carroll. "I know you're right. I KNOW YOU'RE RIGHT!"

She has always tried to avoid bragging about spending her own money on a new church with a toilet.

Sooner or later, her congregation will thank her.

Mary Ann Carroll's congregation at Foundation Revival Center in Fort Pierce recently got a new church - complete with bathroom.

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

Safety Harbor Museum of Regional History, 329 Bayshore Blvd. S. Exhibit from Jan. 6 through Feb. 26. On Feb. 26, a lecture and sale featuring some of the artists, including Mary Ann Carroll, is scheduled from 1 to 4 p.m. For information about museum hours, call (727) 726-1668.

The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters, by Gary Monroe, University Press of Florida.

[Last modified January 27, 2006, 09:57:26]