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 9th 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."
