St. Petersburg today is “nothing like it was when I was growing up; it’s a new day,” says Ramona Brayboy Reio, at work in her beauty salon.
BY SALEM SOLOMON
NNB Student Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – They grew up in the same St. Petersburg household, but at first glance sisters Lynae and Ramona Brayboy couldn’t be more different.
Lynae, 33, pursued a career in medicine and couldn’t wait to get away from a place she considered limiting in many ways. “It would have been a lot harder for me to become what I am today staying in St. Petersburg,” she said.
Lynae attended a local religious school, Keswick Christian High School, where she remembers encounters that were “very racist, mean and rude.” Eventually, she came to view education as her way out. Opportunities were scarce and “a lot of us who were interested in science, there wasn’t much for us in St. Petersburg,” she said.
This go-getter attitude would take her to college at Florida A&M University to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology in 2002 and then to Temple University, where she earned a degree as a doctor of medicine in 2007.
Ramona, 27, took a different path. She graduated with honors from St. Petersburg Catholic and then earned a bachelor’s degree in international business from Florida International University.
However, she chose to stay in her hometown. She married her teenage crush, Damon Reio, and they work side by side – she in a beauty salon, he in a fitness center – in a building her parents own on St. Petersburg’s historic 22nd Street S. Her clients come from all over town.
“People like to leave and they get their claim to fame once they got out of St. Pete,” she said. “But I think there is anew movement of people here that embraces St. Pete as paradise and want to make it great.”
Despite their differences, the Brayboy sisters share the determination and work ethic of two women who figured prominently in their early years.
It was their mother, Carolyn Brayboy, who demanded that her daughters succeed in school and aim high in their ambitions. And it was their beloved grandmother, Mary Brayboy Jones, who opened her home to them and nurtured them through childhood.
Carolyn, the daughter of sharecroppers who never graduated from high school, wanted a better life for her children. She came to St. Petersburg when she was in sixth grade because at the age of 11 or 12, she said, her family’s landowner asked her mother, “Isn’t it time to take that girl out of school so she can work in the fields?”
Her mother decided to come to Florida to visit an uncle during Christmas and stayed.
One of the first African-American students to attend St. Petersburg Junior College, Carolyn earned a bachelor’s degree and MBA and worked for 39 years at IBM.
Now, in her “retirement,” she and her husband are spending $800,000 to buy and restore old buildings along 22nd Street S, called “The Deuces” when it was the main street of the black community in the days of segregation. It is a daunting task.
The matriarch of the family and the girls’ grandmother, the late Mary Brayboy Jones, was a trailblazer in her own right. She was a registered nurse for 42 years who worked at Mercy Hospital on 22nd Street S during the segregation era. She later worked at Mound Park Hospital (now Bayfront Health) and Eckerd College post-segregation.
“During Lynae’s childhood in the medical clinic,” began her father, Elihu Brayboy. “Lynae spent a lot of time playing nurse and being around the doctors,” Carolyn added, finishing his sentence. They said that Lynae wanted to be a doctor when she was 8.
The grandparents played an integral role in the children’s lives. “[Jones] also helped us raising Lynae and Ramona,” said Carolyn. “Here we are newlyweds; we didn’t know how to raise children. My mother did the laundry and his mother did the cooking. They told us that ‘all you had to do is work.’”
Originally from the small town of Bertrandville, La., Jones also catered meals for the African-American community. “I was the only child but she cooked like she was cooking for 10 people,” said Elihu Brayboy.
“Her willingness to share the food is kind of how it started, word of mouth. People would come and ask, ‘Ms. Jones, can you do me a Christmas cake?’ or ‘Would you do our Thanksgiving dinner?’ That’s how her intimate friends around the city asked.”
Over time, Jones began to cater to musicians who came to town because of a family friend who was a promoter. She catered for the O’Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, Earth Wind and Fire, and others, the Brayboys said. “But these were the names that were consistent repeats.”
Carolyn Brayboy, shown in her new restaurant in Midtown, set an example of hard work and determination for her two daughters.
Elihu and Carolyn Brayboy recently opened Chief’s Creole Café at 903 22nd St. S, where they continue Jones’ tradition of hard work and Southern cooking.
Although the sisters cherish their family memories, St. Petersburg means very different things to them.
Despite her unhappy memories as a schoolgirl in St. Petersburg, Lynae – the doctor – said there were some positive aspects. “There was a program that I liked in St. Pete, a program called the McKnight program. It was one way I had access to black culture. It was a program for middle and high schoolers, and being in that program allowed me to meet black kids who are also academically strong,” she said.
Her academic achievements enabled her to travel the world. She went to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic for a Spanish language immersion program and a year-long biomedical research at the University of Mali in West Africa on a Fulbright scholarship where she made use of the French she learned in high school.
In Mali, she met a man whom she would later marry and who would become the father of her daughter. Her husband “came to the States and didn’t like the culture and so they divorced,” said Carolyn. This meant that she had to build her career as a single mother.
Lynae currently works as a physician in Providence, R.I., in the Division of Reproduction and Infertility at Women & Infants Hospital. She is a three-year fellow there and has been awarded a Physician Scientist Award to participate in the Reproductive Scientist Development Program, a national career development program for reproductive physician-scientists based in academic institutions. She began the program in July.
Ramona, on the other hand, sees a bright future for herself and her family in St. Petersburg.
“It’s nothing like it was when I was growing up so; it’s a new day and I represent the beauty of this age,” she said.
Fresh out of college, she said, finding a job was almost impossible. Her solution was to pursue her passion for fashion and take training at Aveda Institute, a beauty school with branches across the nation including one in St. Petersburg.
Today, she tries to break the lingering effects of segregation by serving a diverse group of customers. “The majority, say 80 percent, of my clientele is Caucasian. I do have great love for all hair textures, especially, of course, mine,” she said.
Her husband, Damon Reio, shares the sentiment. “What we do is not specific to the African community; it is about broadening out and giving everyone an opportunity to see what 22nd Street is all about,” he said.
Mary Brayboy Jones and her husband, Norman E. Jones Sr., nurtured granddaughters Ramona (left) and Lynae through childhood.
Reio is a grandson of Omali Yeshitela, the founder of the Uhuru Movement, an organization based in St. Petersburg that pushes for an end to what it calls the oppression of African people.
The fitness center and beauty salon strive to have a diverse clientele. This is something that their grandmother instilled as a family value.
“People would come by and ask what medication to take or ask her to check their blood pressure; she was the medical liaison,” Lynae said. “My grandmother helped a lot of women in St. Petersburg. I only found out at her funeral that she used to deliver babies for couples who couldn’t afford the hospital, and I never knew that.”
Jones died on Sept. 13, 2005. “It’s sad that she is not here to see that I finally got to where I am,” said Lynae. “I gave up being close with her, to be able to do all of this.”
It has been 10 ten years since their grandmother’s passing. But the journey for the Brayboy daughters and the rest of the family has come full circle.
When Jones died, they couldn’t fly to Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina. However, on Dec. 20 the family held a formal memorial for Jones in Louisiana to celebrate the life and legacy of their beloved matriarch.