WILLIE GARY, WHOSE SKIN IS AS BLACK AS the Okeechobee vegetable fields he picked as a child, and whose Rolls-Royce is colored indigo-on-cream, doesn’t want to hear any whining.

“It’s out there, so just go get it,” is what he says to young, black men and women who wonder how this son of migrant farm pickers went out and got his.

“I know there’s racism out there,” he says. “I know there’s poverty. Rise above it. Don’t tell me you don’t have a chance.”

Gary, who will be 41 in July, just keeps rising, up out of the shack and the outhouse he and his 10 sisters and brothers shared, up to be the first black male from Indiantown to go to college, up to opening the first black law firm in Stuart, up to being one of Florida’s richest trial lawyers, up to land- owning and real-estate investing.

Now, he’s up to being the first black to own a mansion in Palm Beach.

THE TINY, OLD SHACK AND ITS OUTDOOR privy are still there in the Silver City settlement of migrant field hands near Canal Point and Pahokee, a mile from Lake Okeechobee in Palm Beach County. Gary often drives by in his Rolls-Royce.

“Sometimes when I see it, I have warm memories,” he says. “But sometimes there’s bitterness, too. My parents had it so hard. We all did.” He pauses, then adds, “Tough times make tough people.”

Willie Gary came into this world surviving tough times as an infant. His birth was complicated by medical problems, which forced his family to mortgage their farm. That was in 1947, when very few black families owned land. The Gary place was deep in the pine forests of south-central Georgia, near the small town of Eastman. Turner and Mary Gary owned 200 acres then, and mortgaged it all to pay for the birth of their seventh child.

“Dad always thought I was special, because mine was such a complicated birth, and because he never recovered financially,” says Willie Gary. “We lost the farm and had to move to Florida the next year.”

Four more children were born to the Garys in Florida, and all of them — 11 children and two adults — slept, ate and lived in that tiny shack.

For the next 12 years, until 1960 when Willie was 13, living in the shack was as good as the Gary family’s life ever got.

“We were migrants, picking beans and apples, moving with the seasons,” Gary recalls. “We’d work in Florida, then we’d go up to the mountains — Hendersonville and Asheville in North Carolina, and Spartanburg and Landrum just over the state line in South Carolina.”

Gary remembers all of it. The sunrise-to-sunset days in the Florida sugarcane fields. Loading the family and its few possessions into a pickup truck to head north for the summer and fall. The heat, insects, and endless, numbing miles of crops. Gary doesn’t say much about those memories, however, because what he remembers most is missing school.

“They had a law in North Carolina then that migrant kids could only go to school a half-day,” he says. “Kids were 60 percent of the work force. The migrant bus would be at school at noon, and we’d change clothes on the bus, on the way to the fields. We worked to seven or eight at night, and wouldn’t get home on the bus until 10 or 11. I wonder how we got through it.”

Gary remembers wondering what it would be like not to miss 10 weeks of school every year. “I think we finally stopped moving with the seasons because Dad got tired, and I kept begging him to leave us in school,” Gary says.

LITTLE WILLIE JUMPED AT the chance he saw for himself when the family finally settled down in 1960 in a small house in Indiantown. On weekends and after junior high school classes, he mowed lawns and saved his profits until there was enough money to buy an old, used truck.

Willie talked his father into launching a new business, driving through the streets of Indiantown selling produce from the back of the truck. “Dad used to depend on me so much,” Gary says. “You see, he couldn’t read or write.”

Willie soon realized that small-time truck farming wouldn’t get him out of the fields for the rest of his life, so he did what many black boys in Pahokee, Indiantown and Belle Glade would do in later years: play football well enough to win a college scholarship.

In time, football became a family obsession. Gary’s oldest son, Kenneth, 19, is now a sophomore fullback at the University of Miami. His nephew, Cleveland Gary, who transferred to Miami from the University of Georgia, is expected to lead the Hurricanes’ rushing game at fullback this fall.

But college football was not that easy for Willie. After high school, he had an invitation to try out — with no guarantee of a scholarship — at Bethune- Cookman College in Daytona Beach.

“I was the first black kid from Indiantown to go off to college,” he says. “I was the hometown hero, and it made the papers. I couldn’t let them down.”

When Gary arrived in Daytona, he found 125 other young black men waiting to try out for the team. Only 35 of them would stay.

“Every day after practice, the coach called out the names of the players he wanted to see in his office,” Gary recalls. “The last thing you wanted to hear was your name. I made it to the last day, and then he called my name. I cried. I said, ‘Please don’t send me back.”‘

But back to Indiantown Gary went. His high school coach urged him to try again, this time at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., where the coach had friends on the football staff.

When Gary got off the bus in Raleigh, he learned that the Shaw football roster was already full. He stayed anyhow, sleeping on dormitory couches and eating food smuggled to him from the college cafeteria by members of the team. While the others went to practice, he stayed behind and cleaned the locker room.

Finally, when a defensive lineman was injured in practice, the coach called Gary to substitute. Within weeks, he had his scholarship.

BY THIS TIME, A PATTERN HAD emerged in Willie Gary’s life, a way of approaching life learned from laboring as a child migrant worker who missed going to grade school, as a junior high school entrepreneur who fed his lawn- mowing profits into creating a produce business, as a freshman college football tryout who could not accept defeat.

To young Willie, it seemed as though the only real sin would be to give up.

By the time Gary reached his junior year at Shaw, he had married his childhood sweetheart — Gloria Royal, whom he had met in the second grade in Pahokee — and they were expecting their first child.

Gary turned to the lawn business again. He bid on landscaping jobs at condominium complexes around Raleigh, and hired others to do the work. By the time he graduated with a degree in business administration in 1971, he was earning $25,000 a year from landscaping jobs.

By that time, too, he had decided to become a lawyer. “I felt that the law was the way I could do the most for my family and my people,” he says.

In 1974, Gary graduated from law school at North Carolina Central University in Durham. By this time, a second son, Sekou, now 15, had been born. Two more sons, Ali, now 10, and Kobi, 8, would follow.

What would later become the Gary style in a courtroom also had been forged in the mock trials of law school. The style combines the oratory of the black Baptist preachers Gary listened to as a child with the legal bulldogging of a Perry Mason — a mixture of Clarence Darrow and Jesse Jackson (Gary is Jackson’s general counsel).

AFTER LAW SCHOOL, WILLIE and Gloria Gary and their two young sons returned to Florida. He opened a law office by himself, the first black firm in Stuart. Gloria taught during the day at Palm Beach Junior College and did secretarial and administrative work for the law firm at night.

Within six months, Gary’s star was rising fast, and he registered his first major victories as an attorney.

His first big criminal case was his successful defense of a white school bus driver accused of raping a 14-year-old girl. His first big civil case ended in his winning a $500,000 jury award for the widow of a black North Carolina truck driver. The driver had been killed when his truck overturned as he swerved to avoid a collision with an elderly white woman who had pulled into his path.

Gary persuaded the all-white jury to give the widow an award 10 times the highest ever given in rural Putnam County.

A year later, Gary added an associate lawyer and two secretaries to his staff and opened a second office in Fort Pierce.

In 1985, one of Gary’s most noted cases — the accidental electrocution deaths of seven members of a Jupiter family — resulted in a settlement negotiated for the family survivors that was estimated to cost Florida Power & Light Co. $100 million. Forty percent of that went to Gary’s firm.

Today, Gary is the senior partner of Gary, Williams and Parenti, with seven associate attorneys, three private investigators, two business managers and 25 administrative and support employees working out of offices in Stuart and Fort Pierce. The firm has settled two other major civil cases estimated at $100 million each in recent years.

“When we go to trial, it’s because we couldn’t settle the case out of court,” Gary says. “I’d much rather settle, because the anxiety and stress of going to trial is awesome — for both sides.

“But if we have to go to court, then I’m consumed with that particular case. I try not to take any calls, not see any people. My whole team is up early, meeting for breakfast by 6 a.m. Then, for an hour or so after court, we take time to cool out. We go to dinner, then it’s back to the office, usually until 3 a.m., for the whole team. That happens every day of the trial.

“In 99.9 percent of all cases, the best prepared lawyer is going to win.”

Gary has become such an expert in his field that the Florida Bar Association frequently calls on him to give seminars to other lawyers specializing in personal injury cases. When word spreads that he is taking a case to trial, attorneys often crowd the courtroom to study his technique.

Gary’s courtroom skills and case preparation are so well-respected by other lawyers that, given the opportunity, they will settle a case out of court.

“The threat of going to trial against someone such as Mr. Gary can be the most formidable weapon a personal-injury specialist has,” says Walter Probert, a law professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He thinks Gary provides a vital service.

“Let’s face it, there are some personal-injury lawyers who are ambulance chasers,” Probert says. “Most lawyers who advertise are personal-injury specialists. There are some other lawyers who look down their noses at that kind of practice. But I believe that individuals who are injured through the negligence of others have basic rights which would not be protected without personal-injury lawyers.”

GARY HAS NOT LOST A CASE IN seven years, and has become a multimillionaire. He is so rich that he has formed Gary Enterprises, a development company that handles apartments in Fort Pierce, a shopping center in Stuart, four office buildings and the historic old Pelican Hotel and its marina on the St. Lucie River in downtown Stuart. The hotel, built in 1925, is being transformed into Waterside Professional Plaza, where Gary’s firm will relocate.

Gloria Gary is president of the development firm, and son Kenneth is being groomed to enter the family business after he completes college.

Gary has bought a new home in Indiantown for his mother, and lives in an $800,000 home with pool and tennis court in the exclusive Sewall’s Point section of Stuart. He is chairman of the board of trustees at Shaw University in North Carolina, and chairman of the building fund for Evergreen Baptist Church in Indiantown, where he still sings in the choir. His brother, the Rev. J.L. Gary, is pastor of the church, now located in a new building that Willie’s $100,000 donation helped construct.

Gary also donated $100,000 to help build a community health clinic in Indiantown.

“If you’d met Willie before he had money, you’d find that he was basically the same person,” Gloria Gary says.

Money, however, has changed Willie Gary in some ways. It gives him the freedom to volunteer to speak before scores of community groups, high schools and colleges. He was this year’s commencement speaker at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. What he reiterates in almost every speech is an appeal for positive thinking and hard work.

“You can be whatever you want to be, but you will never be any more than what you think you can be,” Gary says. “You have to make a commitment, you’ve got to dream, you’ve got to set your goals.”

GARY RECENTLY SET A NEW goal for himself — a mansion in Palm Beach. He admits he doesn’t need it.

“We might live in it during summers and on weekends, or after the kids get out of school,” he says. “We will use it for fund-raising functions, too, and eventually we plan to open another office in Palm Beach.

“But no black person has owned a house in Palm Beach before. It’s not that I’m trying to integrate the place. It’s just that I’m saying something to black kids. It makes a statement to the young folks.”

He pauses, then smiles. “You know…one day I’m gonna have that house in Palm Beach,” he says. And who can doubt him?