EDITH BELLE SMITH

A home with heart, but little else

By Barbara Marshall
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

When life has been long and way too hard, shouldn’t there be sweet ease at the end? Or at least a few years of sitting comfortably on a porch surrounded by grandchildren?
Edith Belle Smith, 82, has the porch and Lord knows she has two adoring grandsons, both basketball stars at Martin County High School.
But ease and comfort? They’ve never found this address.
Edith Belle’s house, the one her stepfather built in Indiantown in 1945, is falling down and threatening to take her family’s precarious existence with it. Without help, they may soon be homeless.
Edith Belle left school at 12 and stepped into the migrant stream in the 1930s. For decades she followed the ripening crops, cooking for the field hands.
In the late 1960s she came home for good with Tawan, a baby girl who had been abandoned in the fields by her birth mother. She had to squeeze a dollar until it screamed, but Edith Belle raised Tawan by herself and always kept her beloved home.
Then poor health and bad luck made a difficult life nearly impossible.
In 2001, Edith Belle again took in Tawan and her two sons, Quamain, now 18, and Qunzi, 15, after Tawan’s husband was sent to prison.
Then hurricanes destroyed the roof and soaked the interior. Although FEMA money repaired the roof, the interior remains a moldy disaster with fallen ceilings and softened floorboards.
The mold contributed to Edith Belle’s already failing health. Last spring, Tawan quit work because the tough, hard-working woman who rescued her from the fields now required full-time care.
“We discussed it years ago that I would never let her go into a home. I owed her that,” says Tawan, 39.
Surviving on food stamps and Edith Belle’s Social Security payments leaves no money for home repairs. Without income, the family doesn’t qualify for home repair assistance programs.
As a result, Edith Belle’s little house is nearly as squalid as the labor camps she remembers. In the bathroom, the shower and bathtub have long since stopped working, forcing the family to take sponge baths in the sink. To keep away rats, rags fill the space where the barely functioning toilet has separated from the floor.
Edith Belle spends her days on her broken-down front porch trying to escape the toxins from moldy walls. She longs for a better home for the two bright spots in her life, Tawan’s lanky sons.
Quamain, a senior recognized by ESPN’s Rise magazine as a high school star, is being courted by several colleges, yet the family can’t afford to buy his senior pictures or a jacket for the three varsity sports letters he’s earned. Only in 10th grade, Qunzi is already on the varsity team.
Both are devoted to the grandmother Quamain credits with keeping him off Indiantown’s dark street corners.
“She taught us how people think in the streets and why we need to stay away,” he says.
But their haven from the streets can’t last much longer.

EDITH BELLE SMITH’S WISH

$30,000 to repair her home, including new plumbing, walls, floors and windows. $1,900 for new furniture and $350 for a computer. Class ring, senior pictures and letter jacket for Quamain, Christmas presents and clothes for both boys.

Nominated by the Council on Aging of Martin County, 1071 E. 10th St., Stuart, FL 34996 (772) 223-7800.

UPDATE

The Indiantown house 82-year-old Edith Belle Smith struggled all her life to keep is going to be repaired, thanks to generous Palm Beach Post readers.

Edith Belle, who was nominated by the Council on Aging of Martin County, is a former migrant worker who now requires constant care. Along with her adopted daughter and two grandsons - both basketball stars at Martin County High School - she has been living in a squalid hurricane-damaged house with rotting floors and broken plumbing. They survive on food stamps and Edith Belle’s Social Security payments.

Moved by their situation, Jim Geiger of Titan Resources in Palm Beach Gardens, and Frank Arena of Stuart, the project manager for a general contractor, will begin renovations next month.

While repairs are being made, Indiantown Non-Profit Housing will subsidize most of the rent on an apartment for the family. A group of anonymous donors gave Quamain, 18, who has a chance to go to college on a basketball scholarship, his letter jacket, senior picture, yearbook and class ring. The group also gave “Q” and his 15-year-old brother, Qunzi, an Xbox system for Christmas.

Other donations include $2,500 from the Frances Langford Foundation in Jensen Beach, a laptop computer and $7,000 from Season to Share readers which will be used to buy new furniture and pay the balance of rent on her apartment.

“This will be a new start for us,” said Tawan Foreman, Edith Belle’s daughter.