Monica Hale recently turned 69, but she says she still feels like a youngster every time she dives, swims upside-down or practices the “barrel,” a sophisticated move she usually attempts with a trusted synchronized swimming partner.
Hale, who is Black, became fascinated with synchronized swimming as a child while watching the champion swimmer and movie star Esther Williams, a White woman, perform in water musicals on television. “She would do these fabulous turns and come up at the surface like a flower,” Hale recalls. “I remember thinking, I want to do this one day. But you never saw Black people doing this. You never saw Black people very much in the water at all.”
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Today, Hale is the proud captain of the Harlem Honeys and Bears, a synchronized swimming team for seniors 55 and older, whose current members are between 62 and 101 and almost exclusively Black. Like Williams, the Honeys and Bears create and perform what used to be called “water ballet” — synchronized choreographed routines accompanied by music — in addition to competing in traditional swim races.
But instead of Hollywood, Harlem is their home, and part of their mission is teaching younger Black swimmers. When Hale was about 12, two children she knew fell off a boat and drowned in the Hudson River. That day, “it became clear to me that swimming is not just a fun thing to learn. It is also a survival skill,” she says.
It is a survival skill still deeply lacking in the African American community.
According to the YMCA, 64 percent of Black children in the United States cannot swim. And African American children and their parents are three times more fearful of drowning than White people, according to the USA Swimming Foundation, based on a 2017 study conducted by the University of Memphis and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
The fear is supported by grim statistics: The rate of drownings is 50 percent higher for Black people than White people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even worse, Black children between the ages of 10 and 14 are nearly eight times more likely to drown in swimming pools than their White counterparts.
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At their biweekly practices, Hale spends most of her time in the shallow end of the pool, teaching basic skills to recruits, some of whom don’t know how to swim when they join the team. She holds their hands while they submerge their faces in the water and cradles them while they learn to float on their backs. “If you teach the eldest, they’ll teach the young,” she insists, wrapping a towel around her short-sleeved wet suit.
The Honeys and Bears also hold monthly meetings to share ideas about how to spread the message that swimming can be learned by anyone, at any age. They find purpose in trying to bridge the racial gap that makes Black people of their generation less likely to swim than White seniors.
Team members say synchronized swimming takes care of the body and the mind, and being part of a close-knit team is a way to work out and socialize at the same time. Their impressions are borne out by research, which finds that swimming offers a full-body workout that’s easy on injured or arthritic joints — a common problem for older people. It also de-stresses and burns calories, and it’s good for the heart.
The Honeys and Bears perform at local pools, in other boroughs of New York and even out of state. Since the early 2000s, they have also traveled as a team to race individually during the state and national Senior Games, always sporting matching red sweatsuits. Some use a cane or a walker to access the pool deck, and sometimes employ a lift to slip into the water. But once they float in what they nickname their “fountain of youth,” they feel more capable than when on land.
The Honeys and Bears started gathering at the “bathhouse,” an old name for what is now called the Hansborough Recreation Center, in 1979. Over the years, the team grew from a handful of swimmers to 35 members, most of them women, today. In the mosaic-tiled natatorium, they wore colorful handmade costumes to celebrate birthdays and even held a memorable aquatic wedding in 2005.
It was their way, they say, of reclaiming the swimming pool, a place where many team members did not feel welcome or comfortable for most of their lives. Some migrated to Harlem from states where interracial swimming was not allowed until the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public spaces in 1964. Others grew up in New York, where pools were not officially segregated, but “a de facto racially segregated use was in place,” historian Jeff Wiltse writes in “Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.”
“When I was a little girl, my brother and I would go to the pool on colored days,” explains Rasheedah Ali, 87, a member of the team who lived in Cincinnati before moving to Harlem in 1967.
The Honeys and Bears refer to Ali as the “historian” of the club because she stores and annotates numerous photographs of their gatherings. “Of course, we need to remember our past,” she says. “But we should also tell the story of whom we became — a bunch of joyful Black elders who thrive in the water.”
Born and raised in Harlem, Gerterlyn Dozier, 89, remembers swimming in the late 1930s at what was then called Colonial Park on 146th Street, instead of the Thomas Jefferson pool on 111th Street, just a few blocks from her building.
“If you had dark skin, it was too dangerous for you to wander” near the closer pool, she says, because of hostile White neighbors.
To deter the African Americans and Puerto Ricans who lived in Lower Harlem from using the local pool, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses employed only White attendants and lifeguards, Wiltse writes in “Contested Waters.” According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, the parks commissioner kept pool water unheated on the assumption that cold water bothered swimmers of color more than Whites.
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The history of segregated pools partly explains why Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are still underserved in their access to swimming. Following the desegregation of pools in the 1950s and 1960s and even after the Civil Rights Act, White attendance plummeted at municipal pools, according to Wiltse, and cities generally stopped building large pools and let those already constructed fall into disrepair, widening a swimming education gap between Whites and communities of color that still exists.
Thelma Ruffin Thomas, 89, was not allowed as a child to get more than her feet wet when her parents took her to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Her mother “grew up in the segregated South, she never learned how to swim and was fearful of the water,” Thomas says.
This unease could have been passed down to more generations, but the cycle stopped with Thomas. She started swimming in her 50s and won her first medal in 2014 at age 80.
All of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are comfortable in the water, and Thomas insists on paying for their swim classes.
When her 15-year-old great-grandson announced that he could tread water for five minutes, Thomas decided to challenge herself before calling him back.
On a March day last year, the Honeys and Bears’ coach, Oliver Footé, helped Thomas position her arms and interlace her fingers, and she leaned over the pool’s edge until she let go and dove into nine-foot-deep water. “It was the second dive of my lifetime,” she says with a smile.
“The first one was almost 40 years ago. I had to do it to stay in my swim class. This time, I did it because I felt like it.”
Most summers, the Honeys and Bears teach water skills to the Harlem community through a youth program. They walk around in the water with 6-year-old children holding onto their necks. They clap and sing while teenagers swim their first continuous laps.
“We make it a party,” says Dozier with a burst of youthful laughter. “Hopefully, our kids will feel like they belong in this space and this sport. And by the time the next generation comes, the statistics will have changed.”
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