Ms. Johana Let's Me Into Her Garden

Now to prove myself worthy.

I started to drive over to visit Ms. Johana in her East New York garden during the first summer of the pandemic. COVID was beginning to affect the suppling of fresh fruits and vegetables in my neighborhood and I began wondering if community gardens were helping people. East New York is one of the worst food deserts in the city, but, with the help of the city’s Green Thumb program, it now has the most community gardens of any borough. The neighborhood is particularly favorable to urban gardening because of the overwhelming interest of the residents and its many vacant lots, remnants of the riots in the 1970s that destroyed many homes.

Ms. Johana’s garden was one of the largest, a corner lot within the footprint of a demolished five-story apartment building. She had come upon it 18 years earlier after she retired. It appeared to be the perfect solution for her abundant energy and boredom. Ms. Johana cleared the land by herself, removing smashed bricks, cement, needles, trash, and rats. Then she built raised beds, poured in fertile soil and mulch. She formed a winding path out of discarded bluestone sidewalks, and constructed trellises for peas and grape vines. Someone dropped off an old picnic table and benches, which she dragged into the shade under the overgrown mulberry tree. Over the years, she offered classes in herbs and knitting and sometimes agreed to host teenagers in need of community service credits. She won multiple awards from Green Thumb. But she didn’t care for their rules and people who asked to plant in her garden eventually grew frustrated with her many restrictions. Now, at 83, she worked every morning and afternoon alone. This did not trouble her at all.

Early one Saturday morning, I parked in front of her garden’s tall chain link fence and pushed open the gate. No one seemed to be there.

“Ms. Johana,” I called out.

“Garden’s closed,” a stern voice shouted from behind an overgrown patch of greens.

I followed the sound and found her sitting on the ground hunched over and stabbing the dirt with a butcher knife. Ms. Johana is small, ample in body with strong arms, and bad knees. She quickly glanced up at me with a look of such suspicion and displeasure before returning to her stabbing. I had received similar looks when I stopped to ask for directions at a bodega. East New York is predonimately Black with a mix of Puerto Ricans, and only two percent white. My son has a friend who grew up in the neighborhood and from him I knew that the presence of a white person can only mean trouble. They’re either police or some other government offical or they’re developers who are buying up properties to make room for new apartment buildings that only outsiders will be able to afford. The bodega stop gave me a first class lesson on the distrust, if not hostility, people of color meet everytime they venture out among whites.

I was hoping Ms. Johana would recognize me as a serious gardner in my paint-stained cargo shorts and a clean but stretched out tee-shirt. Then again, what was I doing standing in her garden?

“I was wondering if I could help out for awhile. Green Thumb said you were kind of the queen of gardening around her.”

“Queen,” she sniffed. “Don’t pull that one out.”

This would be my order to leave. Instead I sat down beside her. She kept stabbing the earth. I began to pull up weeds until she hollered at me.

“Don't pull nothing unless I tell you to, or you ask me.” She pointed her knife at what looked like a straggly blade of grass.

“That’s Egyptian garlic! You can’t get that anywhere near here!”

“I’m so sorry!”

She pinched off a bit of the tip. “Rub that between your fingers then take a lick.”

I did what I was told me. It’s sweetness under a gentle garlic flavor brought out an involuntary “WOOOO” sound from me.

“You use the whole thing, even the flower. Sprinkle that on everything. So you watch yourself. I have what I call a Mount Vesuvius anger and when I blow, I blow,” she said.

“Yes, maam,” I said and surprised the both of us by smiling. She smiled. I laughed. She laughed. And we went on working with her telling me about everything in the garden and me trying to remember everything she said.

The afternoon was dimming by the time we shifted on our butts around to the next portion of the garden. I was sunburned, aching, sweating and dirt crusted and my fingers stiffening.

“Ms. Johana!” a man shouted. We looked up to see him standing by the gate, apparently waiting for her to invite him. “Where are you?”

I helped her up.

She shouted “Imam George!”

“I brought you something,” he said and held up a tin foil package. She hobbled over with the support of some trellises and two water barrels before lowering herself on the edge of a raised bed.

I obviously didn’t frame this right because I took this when Ms. Johana was talking to Imam George.

He glanced over at me. “I looked in and said to myself, ‘look at that, Ms. Johana’s got herself a white boy.’ Sorry about that,” he said to me.

I laughed—I could kind of see that my cargo shorts and crusty state could have confused him. Ms. Johana didn’t

“What can I do for you?” She asked.

I decided I should leave them alone and left to gather my bag at the picnic table to sneak out. The Imam seemed to have a lot to say to Ms. Johana. From the look of it, though, she was paying more attention to eating what was inside the foil. I started toward the gate.

“Wait a second,” Ms. Johana raised her voice to me. “I can’t promise, Imam, but I’ll think about it.”

“I’m counting on you now, Ms. Johana.”

“Alright,” she said and he patted her hand before he left.

“I better get home,” I said, coming back to her.

She didn’t want any help from me to stand up. “All he ever wants is for me to join that place of his,” she said and then after a beat or two, added, “me and religion don’t get along, you know what I mean?”

We laughed about that truth.

“Is it alright if I come back next week?” I asked.

“Alright,” she said in a way that suggested she didn’t believe me.

“I’ll see you, then,” I said.

Without a response, she started walking back to the patch we were working.

The next week I brought with me two large soda bottles of frozen water that pretty much got us through the afternoon.