Carrying Home

Hemingway wrote about Michigan while living in Paris, and I guess that’s just the way it goes: the yearning of the place you have left behind is what still connects you. In Atlanta, I never wake up to CJ knocking on my door, saying, “Skew me, Mr. Zach. I could get the bike pump?” I don’t tell him that what he needs to do is get a new tire or have Mr. Ron fix that leaky flat for him. CJ helped me tear up my floor for eight bucks an hour, and because he let the word get out I then had kids as young as three come to ask if I had any work.

            These kids wanted to work, like the same kids who came around the garden and asked if I had anything to do. They were asking before money was introduced. So where does the disconnect come from, at what age? When does the desire to be helpful or to make just enough to buy a bowl of Yaka mein or a bag of hot Cheeto’s go away?

            Days after we finished with the floors, Quinn came over. Quinn is my number one gardening ally. He is seventeen. You can usually find him on a motorized bicycle that isn’t his. He started a garden on the abandoned lot next to his house. Every time I see him he is smiling, but there are some kids he runs around with who have guns. Maybe he has guns. He knew the kid who just got shot three weeks ago. Maybe this is why his name is different when he is around them. Maybe this is why I stopped saying, “You seen Quinn?” and started asking, “Where Buck is?”

            I miss the morning squawks of the roosters in the middle of the street and Miss B telling me six or eight times how she got to leave and be somewhere, while she continues to stand on my front porch, sucking her teeth and pushing Jesus, patting her shaved head and telling my friends that she’s 38 when she’s really 58. She makes the best pralines I ever tasted. I give her twenty bucks for as many as she can make along with potato salad for a BBQ. She says, “I don’t know if I’m coming. It’s supposed to be hot.” I don’t say that it’s New Orleans. It’s July. It’s always hot. I’m pretty sure she has spent all the money before making the potato salad, but then my woman Carrie wants to bring pralines back to Atlanta so there’s another twenty, and then there’s some complications so she needs another twenty from Carrie because the first twenty was just for materials and the next twenty was for labor. We did get a mess of pralines and about a quart of mustard heavy potato salad. Miss B even stopped by the party. Despite the heat. She told me bring her some chicken to the front door. Not too much though. I brought her five wings and an ear of corn. “I ain’t eating that.” I was surprised. Maybe I had offended her by not bringing enough. She turned to Carrie. “I told you that white lady brought me cookies. I threw those sons a bitches in the garbage. Birds shit. Stuff fall out the sky. And bugs…ooh bugs. You got to cover that shit. At least put some furl around it. I don’t give nobody nothing ain’t covered.” I walked back to the grill and covered her shit with two paper plates and cursed her under my breath cause that’s the only way to curse Miss B.

             I miss yelling at the kids on four wheelers speeding down Lesseps the wrong way at forty miles an hour to SLOW DOWN. I miss kids chasing kids chasing chickens. I miss Autumn who says that her mama who works at Foot Locker doesn’t like this neighborhood because there’s too much drama going on. And there’s always too much drama going on. And nobody ever knows who fired the first shot. But Autumn is an anomaly. There are lots of anomalies on my block. Autumn is quiet, respectful—she wears glasses and takes time before answering questions. She does not raise her voice to four-year-old Jade. And when I tell her that she needs to be in charge of the other kids if they want to go into the garden she listens. This is her position because she is over eleven. And how can we go wrong when one child is showing another child where food comes from and “Don’t eat the green ones” and “You got to look for bugs” and “Don’t step on that” and “That goes back in the compost” and “Use the water from the barrels” and “That’s not a weed” and “Be careful” and “No running”? These kids come to the fence and ask to work. This does not mean that all is innocence on Lesseps Street. This didn’t stop the fifteen-year-old from getting shot four blocks away. This didn’t prevent CRISP’s horticulturalist from being trapped behind the fences inside CRISP Farms while the man who robbed Family Dollar hid under A.B.’s house and cops milled about less than thirty yards away, shining their flashlights on anybody who passed by and making sure nobody came out of their houses.

            There are times when I water what we call our wild area, permaculture zone four or beyond, a host to Satsuma trees, okra, squash, and similar vegetation that needs less care, and I look through the fence that adjoins the backyards of the houses on France where people of working age stand outside all day and sometimes block the flow of traffic with very important conversations and hand signals. It is odd that our oft forgotten space borders the backyards of the oft forgotten inhabitants of France Street. I am not old enough to write these stories. I sometimes wonder if I will ever be old enough. How do you capture this: me measuring three foot away from the lime tree in each direction of the compass; through the fence a man shoots heroin into another man’s arm; I dig holes and pop yarrow out of four-inch pots; the man on the stoop bows his head in reverence to the rushing of the drug; in this moment I make no acknowledgement—there is no, “How you doing?”—for it is these same men I see when parting the sea on France Street in my black truck, and I still wave, and I still say hello, but they don’t say anything, and some of them glare like they don’t know me, but they seen me back there planting, and maybe they heard that the new owner of France Meat Market is going to stop the congregating, but if they heard what I’ve heard and then seen what I’ve seen, they don’t believe much in words anymore. I want them to believe in mine. I want you to believe in mine. I want all our words to be our bond. And I wonder where this saying came from.