The Climb

Maybe I made a mistake when I told Miss Treecie that Javante killed Cash's puppy and left it in my rain barrel. Maybe she was no more surprised than Javante was when he said, looking away from me, afraid to face the barrel, afraid to even look up, "I think there's a dog in there. Mr. Zach, I think a dog drownededed in there."
     I knew as soon as I told her that it was a bad idea, but Cash's baby mama said I had to, and Javante's mom had already been summoned. What did I look like from her side of the fence? Only my head was visible and boy did she yell at my head. "Who you think you is? Not my boy! You got him on camera? No? Then shut the fuck up."
     Javante was one of my best helpers when he helped, when it was just the two of us and none of the other kids were around. He helped me build a bench, even helped to design the damn thing. It weighed about six hundred pounds because it was flat two by six screwed to flat two by six about eight high. It didn't matter. We did it. We built it with wood I found in piles throughout New Orleans, wood my wife told me I was not allowed to bring home anymore. I didn't let him give up on himself, even when the screwgun seemed too heavy and he had to use both hands, even when he said, "I can't do this"…I said, "You can." And he did. He said, "You gonna tell my mama this?" I said I would.
     Javante was the leader, the brave navigator that scaled my fence and entreated new troops daily. When I complained to my wife about the two broken windows, the burnt hammock, the smashed terra cotta pots, all the cups and plates I left outside that he then shattered--when I complained about the aronia berries, the orange pomegranates, the goumis, and the numerous other starts he dumped out for kicks, she said, "Maybe this is the only place he feels safe."
     Maybe she was right. I let things slide. I let him lead his ever-growing legion of merry pranksters over the fence and into my yard where he would impress them with his daily deeds of destruction. I let him lead them to the mulberry tree, to the parsley, to the anise hyssop and all around. Sometimes I watched from the window, surreptitiously kneeling in the living room while he gathered mulberries and shared with the others. I liked to think that he was teaching some of them what I had taught him. I didn't hide because I needed space or time. I hid because I was once a kid. I hid because my intrusion would have changed the journey…because I remembered running through fields and down to creeks and picking boysenberries and mint. I remember squishing tadpoles in my hand and denying Frogdom.
     Javante has not climbed the fence once in the three months since Miss Treecie yelled at me. I have seen him on the street, walking with his mom, and when he sees me there is a look of recognition, the beginning of a smile, but then he holds his lips, level, horizontal, as if I no longer represent whatever it was I once represented.
     I yelled at Javante once. He didn't see me, but I saw him. I saw him launch a brick at a laying hen, and I saw that hen leave her eggs. I walked right in front of him, so close that he could not move, and I said, "That is not okay!" I said, "Go home. Now!" And he obeyed. He climbed the fence without warning.
     This did not dissuade him from climbing onto my side of the fence or from playing a game where he would see me working, would turn, wait, look at me as though I was supposed to chase him, and then bolt for the fence at any move I made in his direction. This did not stop him from asking me if I was going to have a birthday party for him when he turned eight. It did not stop his helping me plant okra seeds or lay down wood chips.
     What stopped all of this was the day I poked my head over, the day I saw Cash's lady, the day she asked me if I really knew what happened to their dog. What stopped all of this was truth. A truth so deep that Javante's addicted mother feared she would lose one of the only things she had left. I don't know how to change this. I don't know that anything needs to be changed. I do know this: Tomorrow is Halloween, and I miss Javante.

Epilogue: Javante was dressed as Batman. His sister, Kevyon, was a princess. Treecie didn't dress up, but her mom, Miss Lisa, was a witch. Then there were two itty bitty kids I didn't even know. I told the kids, "Two pieces each." They obeyed. Miss Lisa took six pieces, and then yelled Motherfucker at a man driving the wrong way down a one way street.

   

A letter to Emily Badger at the Washington Post, regarding: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/16/the-deeper-problems-we-miss-when-we-jeer-gentrification/

My neighborhood in New Orleans is on the wrong side of St. Claude. The Bywater, where everything has been bought up and where the residents have become predominantly white is called the riverside because of its proximity to the Mississippi. People have taken to calling the area where I live the HOMI-cide. I do not hear people in my neighborhood calling it this. I hear it from the people eating wine and cheese next to the river. I hear it from people that live in more affluent neighborhoods.

Where I see the problem is in generalization, in blanket statements like these, in a place not deemed safe until everyone you pass looks the same as you and nobody is screaming on the corner. 

I am white. 

This neighborhood that was once all black is now around 70/30 or 60/40. I saved my money to buy this house with a lot beside it where I could grow vegetables and solicit the help of my neighbors. I thought that this community would help me to build a garden. What I found instead is that this garden that I built with help from a few would help me to build community. 

I rented another lot from the city, one block over on France Street where the people sell dope, day in and day out, and what the guy I was working with wanted to do was to put up a camera and chain up the garden. Mine not yours. What I wanted to do was to get the very people that everyone was afraid of involved.

Kids in neighborhoods like these are subject to bars and beatings from the earliest age. Take a kindergartner who does not return a library book. Describe the offender. White: forgetful. Black: thief. Graham Greene once wrote that if you want people to be trustworthy, put trust in them. 

It has been slow going, almost a year now. People still ran their deals and ran up and down the street. They also tasted the bounty. Twin told me about growing up in Mississippi and how the waste from the house would feed what was in the fields. Cabbages big as your head. Miss Joo Ann had a mom in Chicago that had once grown basil in the 9^th ward. And almost everybody had a grandpa used to have mirlitons climbing on his fence.  

Twin was there to help fill the first box with soil. Before he went to jail, Larry wouldn’t let anybody else mow. He would take a break from running in and out of the abandoned house next door to mow the whole lot. And he didn’t even want a beer. He drank cold drinks. Quinn did what teenage kids in need of shiny shoes do on France Street, but he also started a garden of his own next to the house where his family lived.

I started to love these people. 

Day after day we built boxes with wood found in dumpsters of houses torn down all over New Orleans. We made compost and brought in soil. I never asked anyone to help. Though I did have to tell Quinn he could not work with us during school hours. Different people pitched in on different days. The same game that had always been played still got played, only the faces of the participants changed when the police came and took some of them.

I lost some tools, but the losses were the anomaly. Mostly, it was, Mr. Zach, you left your hammer and then when I said "can't nobody call me Mr. Zach unless they're under ten," they laughed.

The guys all kept telling me, "We need to build a table under that pear tree where we can sit. Won’t be no drug selling. It’s hot out here." After weeks and months of this, I let go of my fear. The ones who thrive on label would say: Junkies and dealers and killers gathered around. Demetrius and Deandre told me they would meet me the next morning at 8. 

I was ten minutes late. They were already waiting. We ran electricity from the neighbor, Mr. EJ. I am not a carpenter. I told them I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I left twice, left my saw and drills and extensions cords and more to go home and get a level, a tape measure. Left it all with the dirty business still going on in the street.

When people came by, trying to do their dirty deals, Deandre would shout out, "Get out a here unless you wanna work. We helping the community." An older woman who came to sit down and have a beer before going to work said, “Y’all nigger rigging that shit."

And that's what we were doing, me and Deandre and Demetrius. We didn’t have all the right tools. Hell, we didn’t even have a plan, but after three hours or so, we had us a bench. Deandre said, "I'm proud of myself. Sometimes I wish I could work." I knew what he meant, that he was getting some kind of disability check and if he worked it would be taken away. 

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"I got a bullet living in my leg. It's been there since '95. Really been bothering me these days."

I sat down on the bench and told him and the others that it wasn't pretty, but it was gonna work.

The tenth anniversary of Katrina is coming on August 29th. There will be a group of volunteers coming to help CRISP Farms. My guess is that they will be mostly white. What I want is for them to work with the men they see as thugs, for them to see them as men.

Too often, I think the white man goes into a place with the best of intentions. He has a desire to save. It is not a bad motivation. What he does not know is that these very people he is trying to save have already been saved. Nothing is wrong. These men I know want the same thing that we all want: not to suffer. That's it. That’s all that any of us want.

When you let people be a part of the change that is taking place in their community, you will have reached them. This I believe. It may be only for a day, only for a moment, but that story will last, that story will go on as long as someone new sits down on the bench next to Deandre and pulls out a dollar for dominoes. 

Deandre will say, "I built this bench." And maybe, just maybe, he'll say, "We built this bench."

A Country Chicken is No Different Than a City Chicken If Your Perception is Right

I drove a tractor today. I loaded hay and delivered fifty-five gallon drums of water across red Georgia clay to seedlings recently planted.

            Nobody taught me that what we did when growing up—my father a salesman and my mother a stay-at-home in the city of Cedar Falls, Iowa—was any better than the cousins we never saw, the ones who spent their childhoods raising pigs and growing the biggest ear of corn they could in order to impress whoever was in charge of the future farmers of America. The FFA had their sticker stamped on each and every Iowa Hawkeye football helmet. I’m not sure what I thought of that or if I even thought of it at all.

            It hurts for me to realize that day after day after my grandma’s death I grow to appreciate her more. For her simplicity in what she ate which was always based on what she grew, and maybe looking back makes me more romantic, but I do feel as if there was someone there all along, teaching me without saying anything. Each stroll down her basement stairs, past shelves of mason jars of tomatoes and beans and beets and pickles and apples and apple sauce brings us closer together. When I was a kid, not yet old enough to be trusted to open the refrigerator without greasing up the stainless steel door, those jars were mysteries on the scale of what might be found in a scientist’s laboratory. The jars came to represent what they were: remnants of a distant past, an old world connection with what came from the earth. In other words, not cool. There were no toys hidden beneath these blobs of color. No chance of overdosing on chemically altered flavors like the lemonheads and peanut butter cups and cool ranch Doritos I craved.

            I appreciated only the visual. It took many years before I was able to begin to understand what went into each jar.

            I now have my own urban farm, an oasis in the 9^th ward of New Orleans, smack dab in the middle of Heroin Central and getting closer as we expand into adjacent lots. I wake to indiscerning roosters—sometimes their crows begin before the sun comes up, waving home the late night bar crawlers, waving on the restless crackheads strolling around the block, waving on the morning newspaper man, waving on the barges blowing blocks away.

            Morning is different in Georgia. There is mist and silence on this low lying field. I feel far from any guns, with no worries about the water cans being stolen or a woman dying on the curb in front of me with a needle in her arm while I gently water each seedling.

            Farmer Ben’s chickens have been fed. They know their place. They have everything they need. In addition to the feed received each morning, these chickens get gifts of the vegetables that don’t make it to market—cracked cantaloupes and tomatoes and watermelons give their eggs a dark orange hue. There is a kinship between man and chicken, a symbiotic relationship that extends past these creatures and back to the land.

            The 9^th ward chickens are leftovers, refugees forgotten after a flood, scavengers that nobody cares for. They subsist on paint chips and chicken bones. They eat the seedlings we plant and tear through raised beds like anarchist bikers leaving ruts behind.

            It will be months before the truth of what I am doing hits me, before I realize that I have been trying to force the very nature I praise to work for me. It will be months before I realize that these creatures I once saw as the bane of my existence have been my willing assistants all along. I believed them to be my enemy. I racked my brain with ways to keep them away from what I started. All the while, they worked without complaint. At the break of dawn, the roosters rounded up the crews. The laborers turned the wood chips I spread and sacrificed their own waste to help these break down. They turned dirt into soil. They could see further than sixty days or ninety days or however long an annual takes.

            It has taken years for me to slow down and let what lives live and let what dies die. Death feeds life. It is happening all around us. 

Safe Sex

Javante's mom is either Tina or Tracie or Tess or some other name that begins with "T". His grandma is called Miss Lisa, and mom and daughter fight like cats and chickens, calling each other whores and saying my man this and your man that and so on. Miss Lisa told my fiance, the first time the two of them met, that she better keep an eye on me 'cause Miss Lisa want to bite my dick. She said all the neighborhood women want to bite my dick.

     Javante was doing penance for throwing a rock through Michael's window. Michael is a former teacher and one of the guys who helps around CRISP Farms in the 9th Ward. He was the one that offered Javante the experience and saved him two hundred dollars. Javante would be responsible for helping the two of us plant peppers and okra.
     Javante's favorite part about planting was the break between each plant that gave him time to hang upside down on the gate that had no chain link and served no purpose other than a false barrier. It was a perfect size for an eight year old to hang and swing.

     The world must have been upside down to him. I didn't try to force too much. If he helped, he helped. He asked me did my lectricity get turned off, because his mama's lectricity got turned off, but his grandma's lectricty still worked, so they was staying by her.
     I told him I wasn't sure.

     "You gonna give me a dollar when we finished," he said.

     "We're saving you two hundred dollars," Michael said. 

     "What you need a dollar for?" I asked.

     "Something from the store."

     He had already eaten six or eight leaves of curly kale and red Russian kale, and even jammed an entire bunch of crisp mint lettuce into his mouth, but that he chewed and stood with his mouth open, green saliva, and green bits all around his pink tongue, and through this mess, he asked, "This is good?"

     "Is it bitter?" Michael asked.

     Javante nodded his head. We told him that he could spit it out. 

     He bent down before me while I planted okra. I had him water each hole. Then I taught him stem and leaf and the difference between the two. It took a few times of my pointing for him to go from leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf to leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf...I mean stem. I felt it was a success.

     Kids can only pay attention for so long, and it was clear that Javante had other important things to do, so Michael and I planted Scotch bonnets, jalapenos, cayennes, sweet reds, and banana peppers. At one point, I turned to see Javante sitting on the back of my truck, blowing up a balloon that kept getting bigger and bigger until it rivaled the Goodyear blimp from a distance. As I investigated the capacity of this amazing balloon, I realized that it was a condom. 

     I asked Javante, "Where'd you get that balloon?"

     "This not a balloon," he said. "It's a condom."

     "Where you got that condom?"

     "At the barber shop. I got it for free."

     Javante tied up the condom balloon and hit my truck with it. He hit the condom balloon against his chest and against his knees and stood in the back of my truck, condom balloon raised high like David about to slay Goliath. 

     Biting ants attacked my feet. I swatted them away.

     "Look," Javante yelled. "It's flying. It's flying."

     The condom rose with Javante's seemingly helium breath, higher into the sky, toward France Street and all the heroin dealers milling about. The three of us watched like it was a hot air balloon about to land on the moon. The ascension of this condom balloon made Javante's day, so much so that when the condom balloon hit Mr. Jackson's pine and popped so quick you almost heard a hiss, and then hung on the bristles with a lifelessness that defied it's former majesty, Javante did not even seem phased. Maybe, just maybe, he had three more condom balloons in his pocket, and if not, there would always be another trip to the barber.

The Rush

Do not wish for too much, nor think that the things you wish for are the only right or necessary things. You should wish only for those things for which God wishes. –Henri Amiel

This is growth. This is the love of neighbor no matter where he lives. This is joy at hearing and seeing the chickens, a realization that they were here before you and that your complaints about them eating what you plant fall on deaf ears. They do not even have teeth. They do not even know how they got here. But they have lived through a hurricane and overcome the onslaught of rocks slung by neighborhood kids. They have survived cars speeding down side streets at sixty. They have taken on a kitten and now allow that cat to be a part of the pack that roams along France Street in search of crumbs and bones.

            God wants only that you plant seeds, that you be outside, that you take time and stop to talk to the people who pass by, and, sometimes, God wants you to give to the lady in house slippers and robe, the one who asks for fifty cents and looks at you as though you have never met. She will surprise you one day by knowing your name, and you don’t know how she knows your name because you have never told her your name. You don’t know hers. Yet, somehow, her knowing yours makes her less of a burden.

            There will be a new man, a Latino named Diego. He does not know that was your first dog’s name. You do not know whether that is actually his name. He may have said Emanuel or Daniel. You can’t be sure. You only know that his presence lets you stop, pause, and remember why you’re planting. You don’t know at the time, or before, that this is why God had you plant extra seeds in the greenhouse. You don’t know that the man standing in front of you is better skilled in English than you are in Spanish. Neither of you know the exact words, but he understands that you know sol and he knows flowers and that it is best to dig a deep hole and cover most of the stem, that this will make the flowers fuerte and that these flowers are a gift.

            You do not tell him you only know frijoles because you have read the word on a menu. Instead you set the bean plant next to your own fence and mimic the motions of climbing and spreading, and the second time he repeats your words. Muchos frijoles. He points down the street to the casa where he lives and you wonder who else is in that home and what they will talk about at the dinner table that night and whether they are new to the neighborhood and where the rest of his family is. You remember the Treme, 2008, singing Pablo Neruda poems as the Hondurans played guitar and drank Budweiser from tin cans. You think of every neighborhood you have ever lived in. The stories go on and on without end.

            You would have you rush. You would have noise cycling in your head. God would have you silent, planting your own frijoles, taking the time to read the words of a man from Austria, a man who speaks of using brambles and thorns to keep wild animals away from tender seedlings, a man who suggests piling up bio mass: twigs and bushes and branches, to let the seeds find their own way. You have seeds you try to control in the greenhouse.

            Sepp Holzer would let nature decide. So would God.

            You think that you are too busy to determine just how blackberries should be pruned and that you need to get right to work rather than reading about what to do. God would have you use some of this time to see what the world says, to use the computer not as a place to judge and feel less than, but as a place to learn.

            You would go out and start cutting at the blackberries. You choose to go with God. God is the internet at the moment. The internet/God tells you to relax, that pruning is not imminent, that three blackberry plants is enough for a good start. You do more research, searching your email (still God’s work) and you find that you ordered your plants—a Shawnee, a Chickasaw, and a Kiowa—January of last year, and put them in the ground shortly thereafter. They are babies in the grand scheme of things, babies that you have ignored for the most part. You have two neglected big red muscadine plants and a crimson goji berry. You do not need to run to the greenhouse when there is work to do right outside the door. Feed what you have planted. Open the gates and see what happens.

            You miss God’s gift. After layering bags of leaves around the blackberries, halfway through planting Scarlet Runner beans along Mr. Lee’s fence, moments after Nathan passed to talk about himself and his truck and what he was going to do, you missed the moment. Mr. Lee, well past eighty, used to stand with his arms folded and watch you work. He would chew on his cigar, never lit, and when you tried to greet him he did not respond. Less than two years later, Mr. Lee gave you the materials and knowledge to build a fence at a new garden down the street from his house on France.

            You are focused on the Scarlet Runners. They are meant to fix nitrogen, to eat, to come back year after year. Mr. Lee, the old man who has become your friend, calls down from the steps that lead to his second floor. (He had to climb those steps just to see over the fence and talk to you.) His arms are not folded.

            I see what you mean about those chickens, he says, as they peck through the remains of the raised bed Patrick recently helped you move. 

            You tell him that you will have to cover everything. You tell him that you are planting beans. There is a small part of you that knows it is time for him to tell you, but rushing, rushing, rushing has taken over. You are trapped by what Allison Armstrong calls diffuse awareness. Everything you see is a task, even Mr. Lee, even this man who brought out his Brooks Brothers shoes months ago to show you what quality used to look like.

            You could have slowed down. God gave you the opportunity to slow down. Put Mr. Lee right there, perched atop his step, and you had a chance, even at the end, even as you saw the top of his head and the half cigar in his mouth as he descended, and you could have called out, Mr Lee! You should have called out. You should have shared with him what was going on in your head. He might have told you what he has told you, that you can work like that when you’re young, but what would he have said about the chickens? What would this man who has been here since horse and buggies rolled down these streets have said about the rights of the chickens? 

            You will have to wait. You can’t just walk up to Mr. Lee’s door and knock. There is an eight foot chain link fence at the sidewalk with locks too big to cut through. Behind this is a cinder block wall that is the railing of his front porch. You will have to wait to see Mr. Lee. He said he wanted some of those peppers that grow on a bush in clusters, the ones that point up, and you think he means Tabasco. You have the seeds, but he wants plants. Time will deliver plants, and time will deliver answers.