Strong Roots - community garden project for young people - Cover Story

Sierra, May-June, 1997 by Melody Ermachild Chavis

We Thought an Urban Garden would help restore our Community: Just take Kids, add Water and Dirt, Grow Food. But for the Project to Sprout, we would need . . .

Things were not getting any better in my neighborhood. For years white families like mine had joined with black neighbors to ask for police protection, but we were drowning in a flood of unemployment, crack, and gunfire. Some of us had lived on our block long enough to see a whole series of youngsters follow their older cousins and friends into drugs and trouble.

When Shyaam Shabaka, a program supervisor with the Young Adult Project in Berkeley, California, introduced himself at our neighborhood crime-watch meeting, he said his job was to work with youth in our community. I volunteered to help him because I am always talking about "prevention," and "early intervention," and I wanted to do something positive, not just call the police.

At first, I helped Shyaam arrange trips to ball games and museums. When some of the kids put their field trip lunch in their pockets to take home for dinner, we talked about the need for food in a neighborhood where so many families run out at the end of the month. The one nearby supermarket had closed, leaving just the liquor stores selling overpriced milk and overripe bananas as their only produce. We decided to start a garden.

The kids wanted something to do so badly they would have agreed with whatever we suggested. Shyaam had served as a volunteer with a horticulture project in Mali, West Africa, and he had a vision of restoring "the lost agricultural heritage that's rightfully ours" to the African-American community. As for me, my own garden was my solace, a place that gave me shelter when the street outside was I just too rough.

From the beginning, we had our eyes on a lot for our garden. It had nothing on it but a billboard that usually advertised alcohol on one side and tobacco on the other, showing black people drinking, smoking and smiling. Someone had dumped a mattress in the weeds and the little kids used it as a trampoline. At night, there was often a card game on the lot and, 24 hours a day, almost any drug could be bought along the sidewalk. Our vision of a garden full of food took a lot of imagination, but Shyaam and I could see it: vines growing on the billboard and, hanging from its frame, baskets of produce for sale.

We decided to act like a functioning garden project even though we hadn't yet gotten the space, and took the youths to organic farms and gardens. As they walked among the plants and fruit trees, their faces relaxed. Every place we visited, the kids asked the farmers, "How'd you get a job like this?" (Ask young people here what they want, and they always say, "A job," and they mean it. They need money in their pockets for all the things a teenager needs, like clothes, movie tickets, and pizza slices.)

Between trips, the kids still so profoundly had nothing to do that when somebody threw an old sofa out of an apartment building up the block from my house, they slouched on that couch like it was a life raft. "At least," I told my husband, "we don't have to worry about our couch potatoes watching too much TV." (In fact, many of the sets that were once in their apartments had long since been stolen or sold for dope. Houses where drugs are used are furnished with nothing.)

We were still a long way from turning our first spade of soil. Though the community-minded owner of the property offered to rent us the ground around the billboard for the price of the county taxes, we also needed money for a fence and liability insurance. I checked out library books on grant writing and got to work. Then, on a bright day, four guys in a car drove by the billboard lot and shot three people right there on the corner. Shyaam arrived on the scene just after the cops did. He didn't want to look at one man's body lying bloody on the sidewalk in the noontime sun, an officer trying to resuscitate him. The man died. Shyaam said, "We need a garden, but we also need to feel safe." We realized we couldn't use the billboard lot.

The only other open space was a tot lot where children never played because everybody knew it was dope dealers' turf. We never did find land for a garden that first summer. School finally started and the rains came and soaked the couch and the city hauled its sodden mass away. But if it occurred to either Shyaam or me to give up, we didn't say so to each other.

When school let out for the summer, we were ready with jobs. Shyaam had found a rent-free garden plot, already fenced and insured, at a city-owned senior center a mile away. At first, the seniors weren't so sure about teenagers coming around, but Shyaam and I persuaded them to give us a try. It turned out to be a perfect match: the kids, so hungry for love and attention from adults, and the seniors, eager to teach what they knew about growing food. Doris, a heavyset lady with a sweet voice, told us she had raised goats as a girl just blocks away. She taught a class for us on traditional African-American crops like a squash grown in the South called "kush," an African word. Albert, who moved stiffly on his bad leg, started all of our first vegetable seedlings in cut-open milk cartons on the porch of his tiny apartment.