Three current Black residents of Culpepper Garden in Arlington shared their experience.

Brenda Younger was on the waiting list for affordable senior housing for three years in Fairfax County and had done some looking around. “I was desperate to get out of the situation living with my daughter and her three teenage sons.” She continues, “My blood pressure was high. I was anxious and nervous all of the time. All that energy; I didn’t need that at that stage. I still don’t.”

Younger has been at Culpepper Garden for going on three years. She had picked up an application but didn’t hear back. Then the Department of Aging in Fairfax County made the connection. “Paul from Culpepper Garden called me, and we chatted and joked for half an hour.” She filled out “about a 20-page booklet” and after about 2-1/2 months, “I got in.”

Younger is satisfied at Culpepper Garden but if she had her way, “I’d have a washer and dryer in my unit. I do a lot of wash. And the heat is loud and wakes me up.” But she has found her place volunteering in the community store where residents stop in to get household goods or treats such as popcorn or potato chips. “Candy bars are the big seller, like snickers.”

She has also been elected to the resident council where she serves as secretary. “It is a lot of work.”

Younger, now 77-years-old, is from Macon, Georgia and remembers back in the day it took two hours to get to Atlanta and now it’s just 45 minutes. She remembers when she used to march in the City. “I was a teenager and we all participated. They had rallies at local churches and right around the corner they were trying to recruit teenagers to demonstrate.” She remembers marching to integrate a park. “The white folks were all around jeering — the expression and look of hate. You could see it in their eyes; you could feel it.”

That’s how she met Martin Luther King Jr. “He was just a youngster, just like anyone you would meet on the street, when I met him. But he was a different person in the pulpit.”

Younger feels she has been blessed “just a little girl coming from Macon, Georgia. I have achieved success and I’m very thankful and glad I’ve met the people I have.”

Edward Little (“They call me ‘pop.’”) has been at Culpepper Garden for two years. One day his daughter in Maryland called him at his mobile home in S. Carolina and said, “Get ready to move.” He says, “She wanted to get me closer to her.” He says his daughter told him they have a room now and his grandson was going to drive down and get him.

“I said no-o-o.” He remembers his grandson arrived on a Saturday with a U-Haul and Little started pulling out stuff from the closet and the drawers. “I lost a lot of stuff coming here.”

Little says he likes it here. But it was an adjustment moving from a mobile home with three bedrooms, two baths and a big yard to an apartment he’d never seen before. ”Space, I miss that.” Another adjustment was the loss of his truck. “My daughter said ‘you don’t need a big truck—sell it.’ I listened to her.”

But it was a big change. “I could go when I wanted to; I had freedom.” Now he doesn’t have any transportation except the loop that arrives on a schedule at Culpepper Garden to take residents shopping. “And it is on their terms. You only shop for 40 minutes. I like to cook so I go down all the aisles making up meals as I go.” He says he cooks anything but his favorites are jambalaya and his special catfish and seasoned grits.

Younger wants to know if Little uses milk in his grits to make them creamy. “No, but I use garlic salt, cheese and butter to make my own spicy recipe.”

Little had a hip replacement in September and is currently using a walker but “I had been doing the food bank.” Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC) stops by weekly to serve the needs of about 70 low-income Culpepper residents for supplemental groceries. Before his operation Little had been a volunteer  bagging food like he used to do at his church back home. “It looked like God was moving up here with me.

“I believe God’s hand has been over my life. “ He says when he moved from New York to South Carolina in the 50s his friends warned him about the big difference. But he says he didn’t personally feel the hate that Younger experienced. “God gave me extra protection. I don’t know why he did it just for me. God don’t touch us all in the same way but he does touch all of us.”

Little says right now in his life he is thankful for his daughter, Angela Smith, “who has become everything to me. She is my wife, my mother — the love she has for me. She is always right there.”

Timothy Barnes says three years ago he had a regular job “just like you — working 14 hours a day.” Now he sits in his wheelchair with a leg amputated at the knee as a result of diabetic neuropathy. “I used to be independent. Now having people take care of me is a big change.”

Barnes says that his family growing up never went to doctors. He used to soak his feet in epsom salts. “I didn’t know.” So by the time he ended up in the hospital they told him they would have to take his toe, then part of his leg. “I thought, what am I going to do living without my leg?”

He said, “I couldn’t move. They had to bathe me, change me. I was upset with everybody. I was on a flat table made of steel.” He said somebody came to get him, and he made some progress in rehab. He was doing push ups. “I wanted to go back to work in 2-3 weeks.”

Barnes ended up in a nursing home in Fairfax for one-and-a-half years. He says he couldn't get used to different people doing different stuff. “It was eating at me. With some you don’t feel it and with others, you feel like you’ve been stabbed by a knife.” But he said he had a lot of really good people working with him and they said they would try to get him out of there. He thought “I gotta get out of here. I don’t want to be in this bed staring at the ceiling all day.”

He got a call from Culpepper and he thought it was Culpeper, Virginia. He didn’t want to move so far away from people he knew. “I didn’t take it seriously. Nobody gets out of a nursing home.” But when the time finally came to move to Culpepper Gardens in Arlington, he had to get rid of his truck and his tools. “You realize you done when you give up your tools.”

Now Barnes cooks for himself, “mostly country food like I’m used to.” But he does like the Culpepper chef’s roast beef and sometimes he buys a meal. “The food is like a five-star restaurant compared to the nursing home with no salt, no nothing, bland.”

Barnes left home at 15 since he was old enough to take care of himself and has been doing just that ever since. “I’m doing fine, have a positive attitude and keep going.”

Culpepper Garden is the largest low-income retirement property in the area and the only one that has a dining plan. Residents pay rent based on their individual incomes with subsidies, contributions and the partnership with Arlington County assuring that no resident ever has to leave Culpepper Garden due to lack of funds alone. Culpepper Garden’s growing waitlist tripled in 2022.

Currently 16 percent of Culpepper Garden residents are African American, mirroring the demographics of Arlington County. Of these about 6 percent of Assisted Living residents are African American. Jasmin Witcher, Culpepper Garden Development and Communication Director says, “In these inflationary post Covid (sort of) times, we provide a critical safety net for black older adults who were among those hardest hit by Covid, have seen the highest increases in homelessness and have far less access to affordable housing and services.

“Black seniors face many challenges finding housing. In addition to a lengthy waiting list, they often have fewer financial resources to draw upon which puts them at greater risk for adverse health outcomes.”

For more information: culpeppergarden.org