June 16, 1961
LATIN AMERICA: Part II
A beaten family in Rio slum
“Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty”
In 1961, Life sent Parks to Brazil to shoot a story on poverty in Latin America, concentrating on the favelas, the infamous hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro. At the time, these were home to more than 700,000 people. In one favela, called catacumba, or Catacom, death seemed to close in from all sides. The place was riven by malnutrition and disease; open sewers ran between pitiful shacks. Despite his familiarity with poverty, Parks was shocked by the conditions: “Pockets of poverty in New York’s Harlem, on Chicago’s south side, in Puerto Rico’s infamous EL Fungito seemed pale by comparison. None of the had prepared me for…the favela of Catacumba” (Voices in the Mirror, 1990)

Parks was initially assigned to photograph a series of indigent fathers in the favelas–people his editors believed would best personify the wretchedness of the place. While climbing the hills to the slum, behind the glamorous Rio shoreline that tourists knew, Parks and José Gallo, his Life contact, stopped to rest beneath a jacandra tree. There they spotted a wan, emaciated boy carrying a tin of water on his head. He stopped momentarily, keeling over with a violent cough, and then, meeting Parks’ gaze, flashed a broad and completely unexpected smile. To Parks, this boy, Flavio da Silva, embodied the brutality of poverty–and he decided to shift the focus of his story.

March 8, 1968

“A Harlem Family”

In 1967, Life sent three correspondents into the field to document the living conditions that black families endured in America’s ghettos. While his white colleagues Gerald Moore and Jack Newfield produced broad stories of Chicago’s West Side and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Parks concentrated on a single family in Harlem, the Fontenelles.

The scene Parks presented to Life readers was perhaps more disturbing than his piece on the Brazilian boy Flavio da Silva and his family seven years earlier; after all, it came from a place far closer to home, and chronicled a story just as gruesome. With winter approaching, British West Indies immigrant Norman Fontenelle, Sr., and his wife, Bessie, were falling short in their efforts to scrape together enough to feed their nine children. Jobless and frustrated, Norman Sr. would drink and then beat Bessie. With no food to offer, Bessie could not prevent her youngest child, three-year-old Richard, from eating plaster that fell from the walls of their tiny dirt-covered apartment. On Thanksgiving, Parks photographed the family huddled around an empty oven, trying to stave of the cold with their only source of heat. The image selected for the cover of the March 8,1968, issue is one of Parks’ most arresting: a wailing five-year-old Ellen Fontenelle, with a tear fully formed at the bottom of one eye, just before it descends her cheek.

(…)

As with the story on the da Silvas, Life readers responded with an outpouring of kindness and generosity to the Fontenelles. They contributed enough money to move the family into a small house on Long Island where the children would have access to fresh air and a better education.

Sadly, the hope these changes offered the family were short-lived. Three months after their relocation, Norman Sr. came home drunk and dropped a cigarette onto the family’s new sofa. Fire swept through the house, killing him and his son Kenneth. Though the rest of family escaped with their lives, their home was burned to the ground. Bessie, now a single parent, returned woefully to Harlem. Parks visited her several years later on Christmas Eve, to find that the family had fallen apart. Two sons were in prison, one for selling drugs, another for stealing; three of her teenage daughters were “on the streets.” When Bessie died in 1992, Parks attended the funeral along with four of her children, two of whom would die from AIDS soon after. Norman Jr. died in prison, where he had mourned the passing of his parents and his siblings.