6.

Shatia Strother does not stagnate in her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment—the woman and her home are abuzz:

So I was going to visit my great-grandmother—saying hi, keeping tabs on her. And as I was leaving, I passed the lot next to her house—it was a vacant lot with no real purpose. And something made me do a double take because something was out of place. And I realized that there was a sign. So I looked and it was a map that had been posted by 596 Acres.

Shatia is unpacking bags filled with vestiges from her long day: laptop, mail, groceries, spillover from her son’s backpack. Sean is eight and they came home together not ten minutes ago; as they were walking down the block, the boy’s voice echoed with questions to ask, anecdotes to relay, facts to share (mostly about bugs), and dinner requests to make. Shatia managed to get her son, her dry cleaning, her bike, and her bags up the stoop of the brownstone where they live on the second floor. Shoni—stepfather to Sean, husband to Shatia—will not be home from work for several hours.

I remember when I was a kid, maybe ten, and one summer the lot was opened and a lady started an arts program under this pavilion that she had built for the kids on the block. I don’t know if it was lack of funding or lack of interest but she was only able to do it maybe two or three weekends over the course of one summer and then it was shut down. When I saw the 596 Acres poster that memory came back and I thought someone was trying to redo the workshops, or revamp the lot, or do something else. But when I really looked at the poster, I realized it was an organization trying to get other people to do things. So I was like alright, that’s cool, and I contacted Paula, said, “Hey, I saw the sign. I’ve lived in this neighborhood almost my entire life. I want to do something.”

Paula put me in contact with another girl, Kristin, who was a transplant to Brooklyn, and she said, “You guys are both interested. You should link up.”

And that’s sort of the beginning of the garden story.

Shatia interrupts herself to check on Sean who is in the bathroom, supposedly getting ready for a bath. His high-pitched voice, yet to stop, is made indistinct by the running water, which has now been going for several minutes. Shatia gets up and opens the bathroom door to discover that her son forgot to put the stopper in the tub—all that water gone—and he’s fiddling with a notebook instead of getting undressed. He is resisting the familiar sequence of events. She enforces this sequence with a totalitarian glare, which carries authority beyond her twenty-eight years, and holds it for several seconds.

You’re pushing me.

As soon as Shatia steps out of the bathroom, the door closes behind her. It squeaks meekly, echoing her son’s retreat.

Shatia finds a bottle of wine, already open, and fills two large glasses. She gives one to me, and motions toward the couch; she takes a chair on the other side of the coffee table. The apartment is cluttered with stacks of paper and textbooks and laundry and life. Sean finally stops the bathwater and his mom shakes her head. She has big, bouncy hair that matches the brightness of her smile and her energy in conversation, even after a long day. She talks of her past, pinpointing events that changed her life:

I’d been working in the fashion industry for about seven years. It was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a designer and I wanted to be famous and I was going to make these beautiful clothes and everyone was going to know my name and it was going to be awesome. As I got older I realized I wasn’t that shallow. I actually woke up one day and realized: holy shit, you thought you were this shallow and you’re not. But I still did it because I made really good money. And at a certain point I realized it wasn’t enough because my job consumed so much of my time. It was becoming a thing that didn’t leave room for the things that I loved. It didn’t leave room for me to be instrumental in bettering my neighborhood.

As time went on I got more jaded. I was working for this company and I remember being in this meeting where my boss was trying to decide whether or not she should report the results of lead testing on these belts from a Chinese factory. She looked at the cost to do the recall and it was too much so she decided to sell them and let the chips fall where they may. And if anyone got sick, she would settle potential lawsuits. So we’re just going to cross our fingers and hope no one gets sick. Hope that nobody’s kid chews on their belt. And I remember sitting in this meeting thinking fuck that! This is crazy! What kind of world am I living in? I cannot possibly work in a place like this and contribute to this type of carelessness when on the side I’m talking about being all for my people and justice for all and fight the good fight. You can’t do that. It’s not okay. That’s one of the biggest contradictions you could possibly commit. That was the turning point. So I decided to leave.

I had talked about wanting to go back to school and applied to NYU for their masters in sociology program. Unfortunately none of my fashion design credits transferred.

She laughs.

They accepted me with a partial scholarship. So that’s where I’m at right now. This is my first year. I’m loving it. It’s hard work. It’s exhausting. I have a fifteen-page paper that’s due tomorrow morning and I still have six more pages to go. Once he goes to bed—motioning over her shoulder, rolling her eyes—I’ll be doing that all night. And I love it. Because I’m doing something that has a purpose now.

Shatia thinks about social work as a field capable of bringing gardening skills and food policy awareness to targeted neighborhoods. A few months ago she took a job with the Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corporation. Included in the organization’s purview is a range of programs to create more access to healthy food in Brooklyn: renovating a food pantry, adding a demonstration kitchen, hosting free cooking lessons.

It’s the first time I’ve had a dream job. I get to work in my neighborhood. And my work is directly involved in improving my neighborhood. The biggest thing that attracted me to the position is that I would be at the forefront to new programs. I would be instrumental in developing new ideas and solutions in my neighborhood.

My family has been here for five generations. My great-grandmother was born in North Carolina and moved to Brooklyn in her early twenties. She had a few jobs. She was a line cook for a restaurant at one point. Eventually she was able to buy a brownstone here in Bed-Stuy. She ran an underground club in her basement. And her brother, my great uncle, ran the band. It was like a little speakeasy.

Her daughter, my grandmother, grew up in that house and still lives there. She’ll be eighty-nine this year. My dad and his brother grew up in that house, too. And then me and my siblings grew up in that house. My son is the first generation that hasn’t grown up there. But he still has a connection to it because we live three blocks away.

She motions out the window and takes a drink from her glass.

Hopefully it will continue if my son decides to stay here when he’s an adult. So that’s one, two, three, four, five generations of us in Bed-Stuy.

My great-grandmother bought it, I think, for $80,000 in the ’50s. Right now I think the value is $665,000. I mean it’s in complete disrepair. It’s falling apart and shit. But we still own it, it’s still in the family.

And now there’s a garden next to it because I saw the 596 Acres poster.

That’s a lot that was vacant since the ’70s. When I was a kid I remember that lot being empty and us running around in it. My dad played there—when he was cutting and smoking weed with his friends that was the lot they went to. And now it’s been turned into a community asset so my son doesn’t have that same relationship to it.

She laughs.

First we had to find out who owned the lot. Turns out HPD owned it—the Housing Preservation Department of New York City. We had to secure a license agreement with them, saying that they would allow us to use the space during whatever interim before a developer came in. We had to sign all these agreements and prove that there were interested people in the project and that we had outreach in the community. And at that point it was just a waiting game for the keys, which took a while. So I decided to rent some bolt cutters and cut the lock and just start working in there while we were waiting. They’d already told us we had the space, and it was taking them a while to send us the finished paperwork. So I was like, “Fuck this, let’s just cut the lock open, we already know we have it. What are they going to do? Relock it?” So that’s pretty much how it happened. I wanted to get started. This is something I’m really excited about.

We decided we wanted to create a gardening space to be open to the community. We didn’t want to turn it into this garden club that was always locked. That was a huge, sensitive topic to me: the amount of entitlement that goes into people starting projects, saying this is for us, and the community at large is not always welcomed. That coupled with the fact that we have a lot of newcomers in the neighborhood who aren’t necessarily engaging with the culture of the neighborhood. So I really wanted to make sure that we were open and transparent and a community asset, and not this elitist group of gardeners who wanted to hang out in this space and not include everybody.

One of the biggest ways to do that was nonverbal: we open the garden when the sun comes up and we lock it when the sun goes down and whoever walks by or is interested in being in the garden can be in the garden. There’s rules about no smoking or no kids unattended or no illegal activity. But anything else and this is your space.

We gathered a whole bunch of donated seeds from events and workshops. So aside from a few private beds anything that grows in the garden you’re able to harvest without permission, without oversight, without guidance. Here, we have extra garlic—take it. We have extra tomatoes—take them. And then we started conducting workshops, and incorporating education into the space. Now we partner with a couple of schools. Our way of showing people that we are an open community asset is by making everyone feel like they’re getting something out of it.

I’m not getting paid whatsoever. Sometimes when you’re in the heat of frustration and you have garden members who aren’t pulling their weight or you’re frustrated with a specific project, I’m always like, “I should get paid for this shit!”

She laughs.

But then I realized that I don’t want that. It really comes out when I’m angry or frustrated about something that I’m passionate about. Other than that, I do it for the love of it. And I do it because, honestly, I want to see more people of color having leadership roles in our neighborhood and the wider community. I feel like it’s something that is lacking. Because I’m involved in the food justice community and every workshop I go to, everything I’m involved in, it’s always majority white women. That is consistently the majority. I went to a cooking workshop last week and it was right at the projects at Fulton and Malcolm X. I went in with an open mind, potentially to pull in some partners with the work that I do.

This workshop was run by three white girls in their twenties, teaching old black women in their sixties how to cook.

Shatia holds her breath for a moment, letting the image settle: three young white women instructing a group of aging black women on the elusive art of cooking. Then she explodes with laughter.

The idea they put out there was we’re not going to teach you how to cook, because we already assume you can do that, but we’re going to teach you how to incorporate healthier items into your ingredient repertoire. That’s what they said they were doing. But then it’s these three white girls, and they say, “Oh, can we get anyone to volunteer to help with the cutting of the onions?”

I think they were making jambalaya.

So this woman gets up and she says, “Sure I’ll help you with the onions.”

She’s this older woman—like fifties, sixties, can’t tell which but she’s up there—and she starts cutting the onion and the girl’s like, “No no, no—that’s not how you cut an onion.”

And the older woman goes, “Woman, I’ve been cutting onions for thirty years. I’ve been cutting onions since before you were even born. I know how to cut an onion!”

That was the most condescending thing I’ve ever heard. I would never think to tell a woman, one of my elders, how to cut an onion. I’d be looking to her to teach me things. Even if I assume she doesn’t eat healthily, at least she knows how to cook. That’s a big source of pride.

I think there have been long-standing stereotypes and ideas about seeing a white face as the authority—and the only authority. There needs to be some measures for correcting that, for saying, “There are people like you who know things. There are experts who look like you.” It’s that same idea of telling a little black boy that he could be president because: look, there’s somebody that looks like you. I think that should start on a local level. And I’m not going to say that these girls didn’t know what they’re talking about, that they aren’t suited to the task, but I think it’s important for everyone to know that people who look like them have important roles and they’re doing things and they’re making changes and they’re leaders in certain ways. Because a lot of people don’t feel like the black population gives a shit. A lot of people feel like the black population is lacking leaders, lacking people who are involved. I think that workshop might have been more appropriately led by a group of women of color, or a group of men of color, or a group of men and women of color.

It isn’t something that you should manufacture. You shouldn’t have affirmative action with this formula where you say, “Well, you know, all of our workshops are sixty percent this.” I think it’s something you tailor to your audiences. Today we have A, B, C people coming. Let’s think about what that means. Let’s think about how we can make this the best it can be for them. That should be something that’s constantly in the forefront of your mind when you educate a group of people. What would be best for them? What do they need to see? Or even ask them! I think it’s another condescending thing to say, “I’m going to go in and teach them.” Find out what they want to be taught. I don’t feel that happens very often.

When I got involved in activism, I just assumed white people do everything. “There’s not going to be many people like me, not very many black people. They don’t do this.” And I knew better! As someone who prides myself on being open-minded and educated, it’s surprising how easy it is to fall into stereotypes. I know of many, many, many amazing black leaders throughout history and even currently but still I catch myself with those thoughts sometimes. Does that make any sense? I can’t really explain the contradictions. I knew there were people of color that existed in my community and in the larger community of New York and also America but I walked in saying to myself that I was going to be the only one. It’s just a thing you have in the back of your head. It’s ridiculous but you still feel it.

I think that where the disconnect comes in is that black leaders are not widely publicized, they’re kind of behind the scenes and no one is connecting the dots. So you’ll have one person in East New York doing one great work, and then you’ll have a person in Bed-Stuy doing another great work, and there’s not much cross-referencing of these resources and ideas.

One of my ambitions is figuring out a way to create a coalition of these leaders that is very public and very present. How’s that going to happen? No idea! But it’s going to happen. I shouldn’t have to scour the earth looking to find my people.

In a rapidly changing landscape, the search for “my people”—a community united by a shared sensibility or a common aesthetic or a vision for what a neighborhood can become—often feels especially urgent. In the 1970s, many new Brooklyn residents began to identify themselves with the moniker “urban Thoreaus” (rather than “gentrifiers”). Regardless of each person’s longevity in a neighborhood—a month or five generations—there is often the desire to feed off the electricity of others, or, in the case of Shatia, to harness disparate currents, new and old, running throughout the borough.

When I was growing up here, we always lived in the part of Brooklyn people called Stuyvesant Heights. That’s where all the really beautiful original brownstones are and a lot of gorgeous architecture. And that’s where a lot of the wealthier residents lived. So I grew up in this little pocket on my mother’s side. They are significantly wealthier than my dad’s side. My great-aunt on my mom’s side of the family, she owned a brownstone before she passed away. Estimated value maybe like $1.8 million. She was packed with money. My dad’s side of the family is lower working class. My experience in Bed-Stuy has always been kind of weird because when I was with my mom’s family I stayed very insulated from the world at large. And then being with my dad’s side on the weekends, I realized: oh shit, there are poor people and Bed-Stuy’s a lot bigger than these fifteen blocks that my mom’s side of the family tries to keep me contained in. So I’ve always had this weird sense of wealthy vs. poor and being a part of both worlds. Once the influx of wealthy started coming into Bed-Stuy, that didn’t really faze me because I already knew there were pockets that existed. They’d already been here. Just not in such large numbers and not in this take-over mentality. Plus all the wealthy people I knew when I was a kid were black.

She laughs and refills her glass with wine, a more modest pour—not long now before she starts with her homework. Her son is draining the bathwater, inching toward bed.

I really started to notice when I would walk to the train and there were more white faces than black faces. That’s when it became real to me. But that’s also when I became aware that I had a very skewed view of gentrification because I never thought of black wealthy people as gentrifiers. It always had this racial connotation to it. And I woke up and realized that gentrification is a class issue, it’s not a race issue, and it took all the white faces to move in for it to occur to me that gentrification has been occurring for a very long time, it’s just now it has a white face.

Right now my world is in chaos, I have to tell you, because I have so many competing ideas of what this all means. If I was on one side of the fence it would be so much easier to deal with this. If I was just a wealthy white girl, or a wealthy black girl, moving to a neighborhood, I could take a stance. If I was just a poor resident I could take a stance. But I come from a unique position of knowing both sides—knowing a bunch of sides.

It is refreshing to hear Shatia shift from the idea of “both sides” to a more complicated story—that of multiple perspectives. Gentrification is often saddled with an us vs. them framework, with “us” and “them” redefined ad infinitum—no two people ever talking about the exact same thing when it comes down to what “we” want and what “they” are doing wrong. Most of the time this idiosyncratic bifurcation is, as Shatia puts it, about class: wealthy vs. poor with everyone on either side of a centerline. But Shatia’s own experiences, the contradictory spaces she lives in, obliterate that clear line. As Neil Smith puts it in The New Urban Frontier, “Many people occupy ‘contradictory class’ positions; the source of contradiction … might involve anything from the occupation of an individual, to the level of class struggle in a given period. Classes are always in the process of constitution.”

Shoni and I, our wealth has fluctuated. When I was in fashion we were what Obama calls the middle class, the $200,000 or more, we were there. Then I decided to be a crazy person who leaves all that and works with my hands in the dirt and, well, we’re still middle class but our household income is less than what it was.

And when me and Sean’s dad were together, when we were first starting out, I was fiercely stubborn in the idea that I didn’t want family help. So we lived in a shelter. I know what it’s like to live in a shelter for three months. I know so many perspectives and you would think that would be something that helped but it just confuses me. ’Cause I actually don’t know how to feel about it all.

Even outside of myself I have friends all over the spectrum. A lot of my friends are people that moved into the neighborhood recently and they’re considered the problem. But I love them. And they’re all really invested in their community and you can’t really hold them to blame for being successful. One thing I hear is all this “rich this,” or “wealthy that” or “you make more so you think you’re better.” I would hate for someone to begrudge me for being economically successful! Why wouldn’t you just be happy that I made it?

Then I started to realize that maybe that isn’t the issue. Maybe the negative impact of gentrification has more to do with the disengagement of the people who are moving in. So I started to hone in on what I saw as the target of my anger. I found out it’s not so much the neighborhood changing and displacing people, which is a legitimate problem that I’m angry about, but I think my biggest problem is people who move here just because the rent is cheap and they see this as a pit stop to wherever their path is in life. They decide to come here but they decide to not be fully invested in their community. So they come here like we have a little more money, we’re driving rents up, we’re not going to be involved, we’re going to walk down the street with our headphones. We’re just here to find the cool bars and restaurants, and we’re not really engaged in the larger community. Those are the people I’m angry at.

I refuse to wear headphones.

I’ve started going on this campaign where if I’m walking and I notice that you have your headphones on, I’ll step in front of you and say, “Look up!”

She laughs.

And I’ll say, “Hi, how are you? How’s your day going?”

And the reactions have been hilarious. Some people jump. Because sometimes I’ll jump when I approach them and go—she stands to demonstrate, springing forward with both feet—“LOOK UP!”

I told my husband about it. I said, “So I’ve started yelling at people on the street.”

And he was like, “What’re you talking about?” I told him what I was doing. And he said, “No. There is no way. I know you’ve done some ridiculous shit but this is just—you’re going above and beyond.”

And I said, “I feel really passionate about this and I’m going to continue to yell at people on the street. If you don’t look up, I’m going to yell at you to look up.” I think he only halfway believed me.

So we were on the way to this friend’s house, maybe last week or the week before, and I did it to somebody. And he said, “How has no one punched you in the face yet?”

She laughs.

But I haven’t gotten any negative reactions.

She laughs again.

For me it’s principle. When you’re walking down the street, no one wants to be invisible. Look people in the eye. Just look and nod. Smile. I don’t know—frown. I don’t give a shit. Look at me and acknowledge that I’m existing and that I’m walking past you. Something to acknowledge that we are here. We are existing in the space together. That’s a phenomenal thing. Just the idea that two people are sharing a space at any given time deserves acknowledgement.