Aids Takes Its Toll On One Town, One Family

First of two parts

BELLE GLADE, Fla. - In this isolated town in the Everglades, built on earth the color of black velvet and surrounded by lush, green sugar-cane fields, the young are dying in silence.

And they are dying by the hundreds.

People call it "the virus" or "the bug," a killer that has stolen so much life from this town that some families have buried five or six or seven of their own. The dead are mothers and fathers and babies, sons and daughters and grandchildren.

So many, so young - dreams literally gone to the dirt.

A decade after the plague settled here, the dying still hide their illness, and hardly anyone in this farm town of 16,000 knows who is sick until the undertaker comes calling.

But behind closed doors and stiff smiles, inside empty rooms and broken hearts, there are stories of more anguish and confusion than any family or town should be made to bear - stories such as Sue Arnett's.

Arnett, a mother of six and grandmother of 14, was sitting in her living room one afternoon five years ago, beside shelves filled with family pictures and gleaming school trophies, talking with her son about her sick daughter.

"Mama, do you know what's wrong with Carrie?" he asked.

"No," Arnett admitted softly. "She ain't saying."

"She got this sickness," he started. "It's a sickness they ain't got no cure for."

"What kinda' sickness is that - ain't no cure?"

"I don't know, Mama. All I know is they call it the AIDS."

It was 1987, and Sue Arnett could not have imagined how this disease without a cure was about to change her life.

Five years later, her harrowing battle continues.

And Belle Glade has become a bellwether for America.

For the tragedy shared by Arnett and her town in rural Florida may well be the face of AIDS to come in big cities and some small towns across America.

It is increasingly a heterosexual disease. An epidemic of the poorest of the poor. Of people with the least education. Of people already beset by health problems. Of people virtually powerless to demand money and programs to help.

Belle Glade has suffered from AIDS at a rate almost three times that of New York City.

"Belle Glade tells us what the heterosexual epidemic is going to look like," says Harold W. Jaffe, acting director of the AIDS division at the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

What follows is a story of two struggles: a family's, as told by a mother of uncommon perseverance, and a town's, as told by those who would talk.

It stands as a warning to America on the course of AIDS in the years to come. SNAPSHOT FULL OF HOPE

She squints as she fingers a photograph taken long ago. Sue Arnett has a grandmother's gift for recalling the past, both its pain and its beauty. Lately there has been so much heartache, but what she holds now is a snapshot full of hope.

"Mmmmm," she says, smiling as her mind wanders back.

The picture was taken in 1971 on the day that her family moved into a white-shuttered ranch house in a quiet neighborhood of southwest Belle Glade. The photograph is faded a soft blue, but the images are clear: three daughters and two sons, handsome and healthy, posed beside their happy parents.

This is a family with possibilities, a family with a future, the kind of family Sue Arnett had always dreamed of as a girl.

Raised by a grandmother struggling on her meager wage as a farm worker, Arnett left school after the sixth grade and soon was in the fields, picking vegetables and hoeing the dirt, as so many generations in Belle Glade had.

It was on the soft, rich "muck" dirt of Belle Glade that she met the lanky young man who became her husband. A few chance meetings turned into romance. On April 11, 1953, she married Alric Arnett.

She called him "Smiley."

He was an amiable cattleman on a Belle Glade farm. His sons called him a cowboy, and Arnett remembers how they often tagged along as he fed or herded cattle, hoping for a ride, an odd job, an adventure.

Those were the early, happy, healthy years.

There was the Easter she sewed dresses for her daughters, and they trooped into New Bethel Baptist Church beaming in their matching finery: 14-year-old Maebell in blue, 13-year-old Inez in pink and 12-year-old Carrie in yellow.

The sound of those children. Sue Arnett can almost hear it in this little ranch house on Avenue H. But she knows their voices are only an echo of the past.

THIRD WORLD LIVING

Long before AIDS, Belle Glade was a town with its own lore and mystery, a semitropical outpost on the banks of giant Lake Okeechobee, where sugar cane sprouted like a tall, wide fence that blocked out the world.

Here, the very earth holds mystique.

For centuries it sat beneath an Everglades swamp. When the swamp was drained, farmers thrilled at the strange swamp soil. It was lush black. Fertile. "Black gold," they hailed it. But mostly they called it "muck."

On this muck, sugar cane is king, but sweet corn and celery and beans thrive, too. The people who work in the fields - who hoe and pick and pack - are not so blessed. Their work is seasonal, not steady. The wages are low, and the benefits are almost nil.

By sunrise each morning, hundreds of them gather at the downtown "loading ramp" to board buses that clatter off to the fields.

Weary at day's end, the workers trudge home toward flat-roofed rooming houses in which 20 people might share one temperamental toilet. The most fortunate live in tumbledown trailers or tiny bungalows.

Most live in a downtown neighborhood of crumbling buildings and thumping juke joints - a place so dilapidated that the U.S. State Department posted its trainees here in the late 1970s as an introduction to Third World living.

There, alcohol and sex are balms for despair. On Avenue A, proud churches fill every seat on Sundays. On Avenue B Place, haughty crack dealers wait for the weakened.

Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine a more desperate life for many in Belle Glade.

Then came AIDS.

These are the hard numbers:

As of July, 535 people had come down with AIDS since the epidemic started in Belle Glade.

New York is one of the hardest-hit cities in America when it comes to AIDS. Already 39,452 people have fallen sick. Still, if New Yorkers were stricken by AIDS at the same rate as Belle Gladians, the toll would be 109,292.

And King County's AIDS cases would be 20,000 instead of just over 2,000.

Worse yet, in addition to the 535 people in greater Belle Glade with full-blown AIDS, almost an equal number have tested HIV-positive. And thousands more have not been tested at all.

`YOU SHOULDA' TOLD ME'

"Caroline, you shoulda' told me," Sue Arnett says firmly.

It is 1987, and Arnett is standing at her daughter's bedside, in a sterile hospital room.

Carrie is no longer the skinny tomboy who outran every boy in the neighborhood. She is a 29-year-old hospital clerk, a mother of two children, a slender, fine-featured church volunteer - and she has AIDS.

"I'm your mother," Arnett says. "What hurts is if you keep something from me, and I don't know what happened to you."

Carrie looks into her mother's smooth, round, bespectacled face - the face that saw her off on her first date, that glowed when she delivered her two babies.

Now mother and daughter are confronting a disease that saps life away a bit at a time, and will bring them back to the hospital again and again.

"No matter what, I still love you," Arnett says. "You still gonna be my child."

Carrie smiles and reaches from her bed.

"Can I hug your neck, Mama?"

Carrie understands more than she lets on.

For she is a mother, too, and she knows what it is like to hold her baby, Eushenna, to her breast and fear for the child's very life.

AIDS AT 3 YEARS OLD

In the half-light of dawn, little Eushenna slips out of bed and toddles down the tiled hallway, following her favorite smell to its familiar source.

"Grandma! What you cookin'? Whew, it smells SOOOOO good."

Sue Arnett stands at her stove laughing at this small girl with the big appetite who likes not cornflakes, not pancakes, but collard greens for breakfast.

They call her "Bean."

And lately Arnett worries about her. There was the pneumonia that sent Eushenna to the hospital. And the day her legs hurt so badly she crawled on Arnett's lap for a rub.

"Your legs ain't got no business hurtin' like that," Arnett said.

Today, Carrie is home from the hospital, and Arnett decides to broach the difficult subject.

"Carrie, what reason did Eushenna have that pneumonia?"

"I don't know why," Carrie says. "I don't know."

"Carrie, don't tell me no stories," Arnett warns sternly.

Carrie is quiet.

"Eushenna got the same thing you got?" Arnett asks.

AIDS is killing Eushenna, too.

She is only 3 years old.

1982: LIFE BEFORE AIDS

Nobody knew it at the time, but the first AIDS victim in Belle Glade trudged into the public-health clinic one day in early July of 1982 - a 32-year-old migrant farm worker in whom a parasitic infection of the brain was diagnosed.

Before long, other people began showing up with pneumonia, fungal diseases and fevers - relatively mild infections that killed them.

"It was very frustrating," recalls Dr. Ron Weiwora, who treated the first AIDS patient. "You didn't know what you were dealing with, and there was no way to treat it; people just died."

It was a time when most of the world was still living in blessed ignorance of AIDS. Scientists were just coining the term acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

As medical researchers pegged the disease as one peculiar to homosexuals, bisexuals, intravenous-drug users and recipients of contaminated blood, the pattern emerging in this remote Florida town confounded and disturbed them.

Half of the cases did not fit the profile.

Two tropical-medicine experts argued that the disease was so prevalent because of the Third World environment. Mosquitoes were a chief suspect, believed to transmit the disease much as they do malaria.

It was nearly 18 months before federal researchers proclaimed the theory untrue. They said AIDS had probably arrived in the late 1970s with intravenous-drug users and gay men. But it moved with uncharacteristic speed to heterosexuals.

"That was when it was really spreading," said Dr. Muthuswami Ramachandran, medical committee chairman at Belle Glade's only hospital, "and if they had really spent the time and the money then on educating people about their sexual practices, they would probably have 100 less cases now."

`DON'T TAKE MY BABY'

Eushenna lies lifeless - no giggles or mischief or appeals for breakfast - just a tiny girl in a big bed, in a spartan hospital room, surrounded by machines of life gone silent.

It is Dec. 11, 1988.

Carrie lifts her tiny body from the bed and hugs her tightly, pleading with God:

"Don't take my baby, don't take my baby," she sobs.

Carrie's older daughter, who is 12, begins to cry, too. A nurse insists that Carrie put the baby down.

"No, let her hold her," Sue Arnett says.

The nurse studies Arnett. She is holding strong, and so is Inez, Carrie's sister. "If it will do any good," the nurse agrees.

Carrie hugs her baby tightly, as if love would bring her back.

"You can't keep her," her mother says finally, trying to pry the baby away.

But Carrie holds on tighter.

Inez steps in. She is a mother, too, and she knows how much this must hurt Carrie - losing her child and feeling blame. But how could Carrie have known that she had the AIDS virus and that her baby would be born with it?

Arnett holds Carrie's arms while Inez takes the dead baby away and gently places the tiny body back in the big bed.

Carrie sobs and wails and won't be soothed.

"It won't be long now," she cries.

HYSTERIA HITS AMERICA

America was in a panic about AIDS back in 1985. What caused it? Who got it? And when it was discovered that a small town in rural Florida was riddled with the disease, little Belle Glade squirmed in the harsh glare of international publicity.

"The AIDS capital of the world."

So started the hysteria.

Football players from other towns refused to play in Belle Glade. Store clerks sprayed Lysol on checks written by Belle Glade residents. Visitors drove through town wearing surgical masks. A developer scrapped plans for a big subdivision.

The town was humiliated.

"Every community is given the opportunity to grow," said Patricia Hood, a nurse who lives in Belle Glade. "We had that stolen from us because of AIDS."

For, in spite of its poverty, Belle Glade is small-town America.

Main Street is a busy highway that rolls past a drive-in movie theater, big white churches, a blond-brick City Hall and an ice cream shop shaped like a giant vanilla cone. As the bowling alley comes into view at the town's southern edge, so do the cane fields - willowy, green and endless.

Belle Glade's identity is built on hard work, agriculture and family. It is the farm town where author Zora Neale Hurston set her classic, "Their Eyes Were Watching God."

On one side of Main Street, comfortable houses are set off by palm trees and bright awnings, fine cars are parked in paved driveways. The area is mostly white. On the other side is downtown, congested with rooming houses and juke joints. It is mostly black.

The institution that spans Main Street is the church. Belle Glade has 32 houses of worship in 3.82 square miles, and they are a moral anchor in a place where crack cocaine and prostitution beckon relief beyond the grace of the Lord.

Here, AIDS is a scarlet letter in a small town full of small-town gossip. And it threatens jobs, insurance policies and social acceptance.

So people keep secrets.

When they need an AIDS test, some people sneak through the back door at the HIV-prevention center on Main Street.

When they need counseling, some get it by telephone for fear they will be discovered walking into the unmarked office of the AIDS assistance program.

When they need medical help, some refuse to risk being seen as they walk into the trailer where people with AIDS are treated.

The pastor at one of the largest black churches in Belle Glade says no one has ever come to him for guidance about AIDS. He can't talk about AIDS because "my members wouldn't want me to. They're too sensitive."

The local chapter of the NAACP doesn't want to talk about it either. Neither do two of the senior physicians at the public-health clinic.

But there are some who help quietly. The 15 members of the AIDS Coalition raise money. Women at one church assemble personal-care packages for people with AIDS. And volunteers who fry chicken and boil greens serve a special dinner to AIDS patients every month.

Then there are a few strong souls such as Lessie Sinclair who contend that only talking about the epidemic will stop it.

Says Sinclair: "If that could help anyone else from getting it, it don't make sense lying."

Christmas and New Year's have passed, and it's the height of the 1989 harvest season in Belle Glade. Sugar-cane fields are burned, then cut by thousands of farmhands. Every day, smoke billows and twists in dark black clouds over an endless horizon of flat farmland.

The Arnett family gathers again at Glades General Hospital - Sue and Smiley, a sister, a brother, a niece, a friend - almost everyone is sobbing.

At 30, Carrie is dead - 66 days after Eushenna.

Arnett gazes quietly at her youngest daughter's body: still now, unburdened. There were times when Carrie was so miserable that Arnett would brush her soft hair, or rub her achy feet. Now the pain is finally over. Carrie is gone. Arnett reminds herself of her own advice: "Don't cry. Just pray."

There are so many others who need her.

Inez sobs loudly. This was the little sister she played dolls with. As women, they gathered their children for summer hotdog roasts and Old Maid games that lasted into the night. When Carrie got sick with AIDS, Inez stayed home from the fields to nurse her.

"Oh, Lord, Carrie, I know you ain't gone," she cries. "Carrie, don't leave. No, don't leave."

That's two deaths in a little more than two months. Inez knows that before long there will be a third.

Tomorrow: AIDS may end up claiming one of every 12 residents of greater Belle Glade. For Sue Arnett, the toll has been even higher.