“Kenny, you still got beef with that Marcus Garvey kid?”
“Me? Nah.”
“Boys, I got something better for you to be doing.”
She took them down the avenue to the hardware store and asked them to pick out two colors of paint and a block of wood, promising pay worth their time if they made a sign for the garden.
An hour later, the boys had applied a layer of blue to the board, and Tyrell and Melvin had removed every scrap of trash from the lot.
“This is starting to look like a real nice slab of real estate,” Lina declared. “A nice beef steak. I know the mayor would love to throw it to his hungry dogs!”
But in all honesty, she was feeling good. It was the first time since the Freedom School that she’d gotten her hands so dirty.
“This is what I want you to write,” Lina said, leaning over next to the boys. She noticed their knees were covered in paint and hoped their parents wouldn’t be angry. “Wesley Price Community Land Trust. I’m going to help you spell it.”
“W-E-S-L-E-Y,” the other boy, Jeremiah, interjected.
“That’s good, Jeremiah.”
“It’s like Wesley Gibson from the gameWanted: Weapons of Fate,” he said.
“Wait! You naming the garden after Wesley Gibson?” Kenny exclaimed, looking up at Lina.
“Let’s put theWhere!” Jeremiah directed. The two boys embarked on the assignment.
There was something about Jeremiah’s precision that reminded her of Tyrell. She hoped Jeremiah would be the kind of man to eat his yogurt, as she probably wouldn’t be around to ensure he did.
Two weeks later, someone reported the break in the fence to 311, and Lina returned to the lot to find the fence patched, the boys’ sign confiscated, and a bunch of city notices warning that fines would be assessed for future break-ins. She busted her way back in, and that afternoon a team of Brownsville’s best gardeners arrived to help her prepare the soil. Some time later, the city repaired the fence again, threatening fines of an even higher amount if the trespasser was caught in the act, and Lina decided to buy her own wire cutters. She couldn’t have Floyd, the Brownsville Houses janitor, snitching to the Seventy-Third.
Her gardeners were teaching her things. Funny how one could be seventy-one years old and still have so much to learn. Ms. Freda had caught Lina pulling out the dandelions—she said they had medicinal properties and could be harvested later.
“Don’t you worry, ’cause those dandelions have deep roots,” Ms.Freda had reassured her. “When you pull them out at the top, you ain’t getting rid of the taproot.”
Ms. Freda ate her own plants and had much to teach others about health and wellness. She helped Lina start her own collard greens patch, and instructed her to also leave alone the mycelia, the worms, and the ants. Over time, Lina realized that maybe the lot hadn’t been abandoned all those years. It was home to fellow creatures, and they’d been taking care of her land all that time—their land, our land,theland. She was trying to adjust the way she spoke about it, trying not to sound so possessive. Ms. Freda was part Cherokee and insisted they honor New York’s Indigenous history.
“This land don’t belong to Black folk,” Ms. Freda would often remind Lina. “Not the Puerto Ricans, not the Jewish, not the Dutch. This land belongs to no one.”
“I know, Ms. Freda,” Lina would say. “This was Lenape land.”
“But this ain’t Lenape land either, Ms. Lina. The Native people didn’t think about land like that. Nobody owned it. Land can’t be owned, just like humans can’t be owned.”
It wasn’t the first time Lina had heard that ownership was a European concept, invented to divide and conquer, to enrich the few at the expense of the masses, but it made her chuckle to think how many years she’d expended playing tug-of-war over a made-up thing. How many years spent trying to convince Richard Wong, then the city, to turn over the deed.
She respected the dandelions for their resilience. If she and her people in the ’Ville could be like dandelions, it wouldn’t matter how many times they had to climb back from death. They’d keep on. She admired the mycelium fungi, too, the way they held together all the plants under the soil, and also the ants—how they worked in tandem. She took inspiration from these creatures, the reminder that she wasn’t meant to work alone. Guilt could do that to a person, make you too self-reliant, afraid of asking others for anything, terrified of letting them down.
In September, she organized a community barbecue in the lot. A crazy barbecue—no permits, no license. Mr. Trevor brought his grill set from home, and Lina purchased all the hot dogs at the Associated. Tyrell invited everyone in the neighborhood, and all the members of BYTE came, along with residents of each NYCHA complex in Brownsville. Ms. Freda led the teenagers around the garden and gave them herbs to put on their tongues. Ricky, Lina’s downstairs neighbor, showed up mid-smoke, and Lina promptly took the Newport loosie from his mouth and ground it into the dirt.
After everyone had helped themselves to the food, Lina sat on a plastic chair and watched her beautiful people. Now that there’d been articles about her lot in theBrooklyn EagleandOur Time Press, she was less nervous about the police. It would reflect badly on the Seventy-Third Precinct and on the mayor’s administration if they were to start making arrests. And yet she was still sure that they would lose the lot once the ULURP process finished. She needed to figure out how to explain why it mattered that they had planted a garden, even a temporary one, and come together for the barbecue.
The sun was setting, and Lina, sucking on a sage leaf, remembered how at this time of day, she’d lean out of the windows of the restaurant-slash-apartment-slash-Freedom School to take in all the color. The sky would have the rawness of sushi.
In the fading light, she looked over the party—at Tyrell, José, his aunt, Ms. Dorothy, Greg Trevor—even at Lou, her little brother.
Lou?
Usually she saw him only in her dreams.
The young man was sitting on a crate with the BYTE boys, and he looked exactly as she’d always remembered him: hair buzzed short, the faint traces of a mustache. His elbows were like hers—ashy volcanoes. He smiled at the other boys’ jokes and said nothing. He’d always been the shy one.
