Tomorrow’s Bread
The black neighborhood of Brooklyn in Charlotte, North Carolina, has received a death sentence from city planners. Its churches, restaurants, schools, theaters, and night clubs will be knocked down, their remains carted away, their sites leveled and raked. The order is indiscriminate: all Brooklyn’s homes, whether shotgun shacks or well-kept homes with front and back gardens, will be bulldozed. Headstones will be carted away from the cemeteries and remains will be disinterred. All because, city planners insist, the area is 70 percent blight.
But Brooklyn in 1961 is a vibrant community, where Loraylee Hawkins works at the S&W Cafeteria, raises her son Hawk, and maintains a clandestine relationship with S&W owner Mr. Griffin. Jonny No Age lives with his partner and runs Steadman’s Flower shop; pastor Eben Polk wonders if he will find the answer to the mystery of the rock at the back of the St. Timothy Cemetery, the marker JTQ, and the register his predecessor claimed would tell the truth behind the grave markers.
Brooklyn faces the same fate as other black areas of major cities. Although intended to raze and replace shacks and tenements with better housing, urban renewal ended up destroying the black neighborhoods that sat close to downtown areas. Tomorrow’s Bread is a lament for the loss not only of a thriving, if poor, community but the businesses it supports, the history it seeks to protect, and the connections it creates with neighbors, friends, and families.
