The rumor made sense to Early May, and she was alarmed. It was that inexpensive soda pop, a flier posted in her apartment building said, the kind her daughter liked to buy.
For weeks, the story burned through Harlem like wildfire: Low-priced brands of soda called Tropical Fantasy, A-Treat and Top Pop were made by the Ku Klux Klan with an ingredient to sterilize black men."My daughter used to buy those sodas and I told her, `Don't buy them no more,' " said Early May, 62, who declined to give her last name. "I came from Alabama. That's why I believe it."
A block away down Malcolm X Boulevard, 17-year-old "Tosh" Williams repeated the rumor as he stood outside one of many small groceries dotting the Harlem neighborhood that makes up Tropical Fantasy's hottest market.
This is a story about a rumor - how it nearly soured the success of a little soda company and how the company fought back and won. It's also about being black in America.
It begins in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Bottling Co. was limping into bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, barely surviving on sales of seltzer when Eric Miller inherited the firm his grandfather founded in 1937.
The 33-year-old scion of bottlers revived the family business with shrewd marketing. He brought back the old line of fruit-flavored sodas, added a few more and changed the name from Crown and Glory to Tropical Fantasy. His strategy was to keep the price down.
Tropical Fantasy sold well in corner groceries from Boston to North Carolina, but Miller couldn't control the counter price. Soda was soda to shopkeepers, who charged up to 85 cents for what Miller intended to be a bargain. He solved the problem by printing the 49-cent price on the bottle cap. While he was at it, he increased the bottle size from 12 ounces to 20. The new packaging made its debut Sept. 30, 1990. It was a smash.
"It just started selling, selling, selling," Miller said.
Sales rose 50 percent in 1990, to $12 million. Miller projected sales of $15 million this year. Optimism lasted seven good months. But then the rumor struck.
By all accounts, it began in April. At least that's when the first flier was seen. It was April 3, to be exact, in Harlem.
Mel Johnson remembers the day. His company, WAM Beverage Distributors, owns half the fleet of 25 trucks that distribute Tropical Fantasy.
The anonymous handbills were crudely printed. The grammar was flawed. They got the KKK's full name wrong.
"ATTENTION!!! ATTENTION!!! ATTENTION!!!" each handbill read. "Please be advise, Top Pop, and Tropical Fantasy, also Treat .50 sodas are being manufactured by the Klu Klux Klan. Sodas contain stimulants to sterilize the black man, and who knows what else!!!!
"You have been warned," it concluded. "Please save the children."
Three days later, the same flier turned up in Brooklyn.
"Overnight, the thing mushroomed to no end," Johnson said.
Eric Miller had the most to lose, and he was the angriest. A man proud that his company of 125 workers is staffed largely by minorities, who likes the idea of offering poorer consumers a good deal on soda, he saw the rumor as an absurd attack and set about to stop it.
Miller hired Robin Verges, a public relations consultant expert in African-American concerns. Her efforts paid off immediately when New York Mayor David Dinkins, a black man, agreed to drink Tropical Fantasy on television.
The news media jumped on the story. The Ku Klux Klan came out with a disclaimer: "The KKK is not in the bottling business," Wizard James Farrands of Sanford, N.C., told a weekly magazine. Editorials in the city's major and minority newspapers raised stern voices against believing hurtful nonsense. Brooklyn Bottling employees met with the PTA and church leaders.
And Brooklyn Bottling, as well as the maker of Top Pop, distributed its own fliers.
"Someone put up a stone wall. We didn't have dynamite, but we have a pick and we're breaking it down, stone by stone," Miller said. "We just went around re-educating and shaming people. Step by step, people are realizing it's a hoax."
Miller also bought a billboard truck to drive around affected areas touting Tropical Fantasy. As summer approached, he gave away free samples. Then he waited for the hot weather. What thirsty kid can resist a bargain?
A month later, stores were refilling their stocks.
The wait worked.
"I'd say we got most of our consumers back," Miller could say by mid-June. "But we had three months of horror."