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."