As An African American Woman, I’m Your Most Unlikely Homesteader
Slavery forced a wedge between Black people and the land. But now the garden feels more like church—a place for my spirit to be renewed.
On a crisp March 2015 day, in a D.C. suburb, my family and I stood in a fenced-in community garden, nestled behind a church, looking at a grassy, weeded over, 10-foot-by-20-foot rectangular plot, daring us to tame it. The overcast sky hung over us, and our shoes grew damp from the dewy grass. “What are we supposed to do with this?”
This was not what I imagined when I signed up at my friend’s suggestion to join a community garden. I envisioned rich dark soil, in neatly arranged rows, waiting for us to sow vegetable seeds and water them with cute silver watering cans.
But we dug in, and that day marked not just the beginning of my healing,...