The five-acre property was an overgrown jungle. The derelict house needed repairs. The abandoned swimming pool was a swampy pit covered with oozing green algae, where crabs scuttled over the rocks and trash. But Donna Johnson saw an oasis. So she packed up her five children and moved from strip-malled west Miami-Dade to the Redland, a wild, Edenic place that reminded her of her native Jamaica. They scrubbed the pool clean, but then the three brothers and two sisters had to learn to swim so they wouldn’t drown while their mother, a nurse, was at work. They got pretty good at it. They got very good at it. A backyard pool in the Redland where five siblings used to pelt each other playing...
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