The Toll & Father John Crossing the Gandy
Guest ekphrastic poem by Julie Buckner Armstrong, Ph.D.
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Introduction: For your widening view of the Gandy Bridge and its shore, I include an ekphrastic poem offered with permission by Julie Buckner Armstrong. Ekphrastic poetry is a genre in which the poet takes a historic event, a sculpture, a painting, even a piece of music and writes about it offering a deeper, albeit interpretive sense, of what might have happened. This ekphrastic piece also incorporates the well-known Negro National Anthem by James Weldon Johnson — Lift Every Voice and Sing. Following, that poem, I add my own poem which was inspired by the Toll that was to be paid for crossing the Gandy. Time immemorial, tolls have been levied for bridges and roads, that’s how they get paid for and maintained, after all. But both Dr. Armstrong’s poem and mine also refer to a toll not paid for privilege of access, but one imposed in order to subject and deprive equal access, equal worth, equal status as a person.
John E. Culmer From the South Florida Photograph Collection Collection at HistoryMiami. Collection No. HMA0014.
Father John Crossing the Gandy In August 1927, Father John Culmer, Vicar of St. James, drove across the newly built Gandy Bridge from Tampa to St. Petersburg. His mission: bring the Eucharist to Black Episcopalians denied a place at God’s whites-only table. What did he think about as he headed west? Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmonies of Liberty Perhaps he considered the ancestors whose paths he followed: St. Augustine of Hippo, a north African bishop and, later, namesake of the St. Petersburg church that Father John helped to found; Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, who led the United States’ first Black Episcopal congregation; James Theodore Holley of Haiti, the world’s first Black bishop. Stony the road we trod Perhaps he envisioned, in the hot light of sunrise behind him, the cold realities that a Black church in a segregated city might one day face: that a young couple wishing to marry in the cathedral would be told to use the back door; that sister Episcopalians, as the neighborhood integrated, would load their whole building onto a flatbed truck for a two-mile move to the white side of town; that the church he founded would one day make its own move, as the city declared the neighborhood “blighted,” and took over by eminent domain the space it wanted for an interstate and a baseball field. God of our weary years God of our silent tears Perhaps he dreamed of a future he could not yet know: his success as Archdeacon of Southwest Florida and Rector of Miami’s St. Agnes, the largest Black Episcopal church in the South; Pauli Murray (Jane Crow hero in a collar not a cape), the Episcopal Church’s first Black female priest; Presiding Bishop Michael Bruce Curry, preaching at a royal wedding and reminding the world that Beloved Community takes continual work. Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? Perhaps what he really wanted was breakfast: after the wine and wafer, a communion of catfish, grits, mango, and papaya – a tradition that St. Augustine’s would keep for a century. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won Perhaps, instead, Father John, driving over Tampa Bay, mused: water gives life, water destroys, water washes clean. Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea Perhaps Father John, crossing the Gandy, thought none of these things. Perhaps he merely opened his mouth wide and Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. The Toll "They wanted to rise . . . to be everything that other people were." George F. Bragg 1863-1940* One August Sunday in 1927 the Vicar of St. James Episcopal paid his toll at the Hillsborough gate of the Gandy Bridge to take "the privileges of the altar" to a handful of folk gathered in a home just south of Central Ave, St. Petersburg. That crossing would be hot, but being a Bahamian by birth, he would bear that circumstance as part of his vested garb. It's said, he drove across -- so his toll would be .75 cents each way, which I wouldn't wonder was taken-up as a free will offering by the good folk at St. James who were glad to share the Table of the Lord with their by law segregated brethren across the bay -- now only an hour or so removed. A Pilgrim Bridge, the Gandy was that Sunday. By the time he arrived, surely the tolling the bell at St. Peters just a few blocks north would have sent its parishioners into the world with God's peace that passes understanding, family meals & good works . . . . . . but his visit likely followed after ministering to his home congregation -- Ybot City's Bahamian and Cuban immigrant cigar workers. Sacrament, Prayer Book & Bible in hand he crossed the bridge to minister to those waiting few -- those weary and heavy laden few -- making ready a "preaching station" and the table around which to receive the Body and Blood. It was the toll -- a rate levied for all according to manner of crossing: a horse or teams with wagons, Ford Model T's, bikes -- each had their rate that allowed access on the Gandy linking two shores, two cities bursting with expansion energy -- the toll that people would start reconning as part of the cost of having more opportunities -- and still, that interconnection which was the catalyst of change passing understanding did not include the equality of a common good. Let it be said . . . that while Mr. Gandy had to believe & wrestle twenty years to see the fruits of his labor, then wait another two decades to pay of his investors the Vicar John E. Culmer's* August crossing of the Gandy is witness to a forty-year journey to bridge bays of inequality, span waters of prejudice and recalcitrance of spirit so broad and deep, that it daily extracted from all who labored with him the toll of a thousand humiliations -- unjustly & self-righteously demanded as part of the cost of being among the elect. Here is the tell -- in the Land of Justice, Liberty, and Opportunity those whose muscle and sweat built its railroads and bridges. its harbors and tower blocks were forcibly benighted, denied the full glow of the sun of prosperity & the harvests of self-realization. yes, the people of the Book & Christ's invitation to come & receive mercy and blessings & be embraced cultivated that message no better than seed fallen on thorny and rocky ground -- even those cherishing the Book of Common Prayer could not -- it defies understanding -- consent to black hands stretched to receive the host, black knees seeking mercy before the altar -- the toll of Christ's death was not enough to pay the toll extracted by Jim Crow -- the bridge of communion that "radical inclusion of Christ's love"* had yet to be built. How long? A hundred years on, a people still pay a toll to gain welcome, to walk over the bridge to Beloved Community. * Armstrong, Julie Buckner, "Father John Crossing the Gandy: A Micro-History with Music" (2025). Creekshed: Ekphrastic Writing with the Archives. 2. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed_ekphrastic/2 *George Freeman Bragg 1863-1940 one of the first African American priests of the Episcopal Church. * John E. Culmer's -- though he never made a second visit being shortly thereafter sent to Miami, he came to be one of the architects of the modern, integrated Episcopal Church. * History of St. Augustine Episcopal Church, St. Petersburg Florida