The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (44 page)

It doesn’t actually matter who did Thoreau’s washing, though I remained curious to see if we knew who that might be. We don’t. But we do know quite a lot about the Thoreau family’s values. The second Thoreau scholar, Michael Sims, had sent me an excellent essay by Sandra Harbert
Petrulionus about the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society that the writer’s mother and sisters belonged to, along with Mrs. Emerson, and after the laundry issue was raised on Facebook, I read it again. “The influence they brought to bear on some of America’s most noted antislavery speakers and writers had a pronounced and far-reaching impact,” Petrolonious declares. “Thanks directly to eight women, six of whom lived in his home, Henry Thoreau had long been exposed to the most radical antislavery positions during his formative young-adult years.”

The women seemed to find a kind of liberation for themselves in this movement for the liberation of others; they were able to act independently of husbands and fathers, to take public stands, to become political beings in a new way. The women’s suffrage movement, the first feminist movement, grew directly out of the abolition movement: they went to liberate someone else and found that they too were not free. Thoreau’s mother and sisters were more radical than he was initially; they even publicly supported the “disunion” position that would have had the North secede from the slave South long before the South actually seceded from the North. The Thoreau women were also participants in the Underground Railroad, and Henry David sometimes walked or drove the fugitives northward toward freedom. These Americans cared about prisoners enough to risk their own lives and liberty on their behalf.

A young abolitionist named Daniel Conway describes one such encounter on July 27, 1853, thus:

In the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a colored fugitive from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive. . . . I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. The whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and probably there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got off to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.

In this vignette, brother and sister are collaborators in a project of liberation, and by this time, more than fifteen years after the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, Thoreau was wholeheartedly recruited to the cause. A year later Thoreau wrote, “I endeavor in vain to observe Nature—my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the state—I trust that all just men will conspire.” Many just women already had. And so in my reply to Sims, I said, “Reading that superb piece you sent a month or so ago deepened my sense that his abolitionist mother and sisters were political powerhouses in whose wake he swam. My position now is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

This is the washing that really mattered in Concord in the 1840s, the washing that affected not only the prisoners of slavery, but the fate of a nation and the literature of the century. Thoreau’s writing helped twentieth-century liberators—Gandhi and King the most famous among them—chart their courses; he helps us chart our own as well, while also helping us measure climate change and giving us the pleasures of his incomparable prose. His cabin at Walden was ten by fifteen feet, less than twice the size of a solitary-confinement cell at California’s supermax Pelican Bay State Prison, though being confined to a space and retiring to it whenever you wish are far more different than night and day. In a sense Thoreau is still at work, and so are his sisters, or at least the fruit of Helen and Sophia Thoreau’s work to end slavery is still with us, along with their brother’s liberatory writings. Though there are other kinds of slavery still waiting to be ended, including much of what happens in our modern prison system.

Continuing my reply to Sims, I wrote,

Thoreau’s relationship to his sisters reminds me a little of mine to my brother, who is a great activist and a great carpenter and builder, a support and ally to me in every possible way, and someone for whom I often cook and sometimes assist in other practical ways. (Though of course in this version the sister is the socially inept writer person and the brother the more engaged activist who leads his sibling into the fray.)

My brother David actually built me a home at one point. In that home in which he sometimes stayed and often ate (and usually did the dishes after he ate), we held political meetings as well as family gatherings. In it, as before and since, I helped him with activist publications, because for almost all our adult life he has been a political organizer who seems to end up volunteering for publications. We’ve been through three books of his that way, and each of these projects for which I am an informal editor has drawn me deeper into political engagement.

David cares about prisoners and has worked on their behalf many times, most recently Bradley Manning. Sometimes I’ve joined him. He has often been arrested, spent time in jails from Georgia to Ontario, and is named after our grandfather, who was named after Thomas Davis, the Irish revolutionary and poet. He has provided astute critiques of my writing and ideas, and without him I might have been lost in the clouds, stuck in an ivory tower, or at least less often called into the streets. Though I am the writer, he taught me a word when we were building the home that was mine for a while. The word is
sister
, which is a verb in the construction industry, as in “to sister a beam.” This means to set another plank alongside a beam and fasten the two together to create a stronger structure. It is the most fundamental image of the kind of relationship Thoreau had with his sisters and I with my brother: we reinforce each other.

It is what we are here to do, and to raise melons and build houses and write books and to free anyone who might possibly need freeing, including ourselves and the meanings of our lives in all their uncategorizable complexity. By this, I don’t mean freedom only in that sense that many Americans sometimes intend it, the sense in which we are free from each other; I mean freed to be with each other and to strengthen each other, as only free people can.

2013

REVOLUTIONARY PLOTS

On Urban Gardening

The anti-war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon reports that toward the end of World War I, Winston Churchill told him that war is the normal occupation of man. Challenged, Churchill amended this to “war—and gardening.” Are the two opposites? Some agriculture is a form of war, whether it’s clear-cutting rainforest, stealing land from the poor, contaminating the vicinity, or exploiting farmworkers, and some of our modern pesticides are descended from chemical warfare breakthroughs for the First World War. But gardening represents a much wider spectrum of human activity than war, and if war is an act of the state, gardening is far, far more ancient than city-states (if not nearly so old as squabbling).

Can it be the antithesis of war, or a cure for social ills, or an act of healing the divisions of the world? When you tend your tomatoes, are you producing more than tomatoes? How much more? Is peace a crop, or justice? The American Friends Service Committee set up a series of garden plots to be tended by people who’d been on opposite sides of the Yugoslavian wars, but a lot of people hope to overcome the wars of our time more indirectly through their own gardening and farming. We are in an era when gardens are front and center for hopes and dreams of a better world or just a better neighborhood or the fertile space where the two become one.

There are farm advocates and food activists, progressive farmers and gardeners, and maybe most particular to this moment, there’s a lot of urban agriculture. These city projects hope to overcome alienation from food, from labor, from embodiment, from land; the conflicts between production and consumption, between pleasure and work; the destructiveness of industrial agriculture; the growing problems of global food scarcity and seed loss. The list of ideals being planted and tended and sometimes harvested
is endless, but the question is simple. What crops are you tending? What do you hope to grow? Hope? Community? Health? Pleasure? Justice? Gardens represent the idealism of this moment and its principal pitfall, I think. A garden can be, after all, either the ground you stand on to take on the world or how you retreat from it, and the difference is not always obvious.

HOUSING PROJECTS AND CHOKECHERRIES

So many of the projects that end up involving a whole community or school or generating a nonprofit begin with one person with dirty fingernails and big dreams. Antonio Roman-Alcalá, for example, was in his very early twenties when he and a cohort of idealistic young anarchists developed a dream of starting a collective with two bases. One would be urban, the other rural, he told me as we knelt on the slope of Alemany Farm, the three-acre, city-owned plot next to the Alemany housing projects in southern San Francisco, eating ground cherries (which come inside a husk like tomatillos and burst on your tongue like tangy plums). They had decided that the ideal life involved being both urban and rural, not one or the other. The two have often been opposed, their denizens casting each other in hostile stereotypes—the rural hicks and rubes, the corrupt and alienated city people. Of course the country and the city depend on each other like day and night; you might not want to depend on the carbohydrates grown in Manhattan or on the medical technology available in a farm county. And with peregrines and raccoons in major metropolises and the Internet in most American farmhouses, if not in migrant farmworker shacks, the distinctions might not be as stark as they once were.

So the anarchist kids had an integrated vision, and then, thanks to Antonio, they had a next step. His mother’s house is right on the border of Alemany Farm, so it was an obvious site—at least to him—to experiment. As we moved on to graze on early mulberries, he told me that Alemany Farm had been run by SLUG, the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, until its leadership got embroiled in a corruption scandal and the whole organization that had done so many good things was shut down.
The farm was abandoned and padlocked, though the padlock kept out only people who traveled the official routes. Children never stopped playing on this lush hillside that slopes down to what had once been Islais Creek, flowing east into San Francisco Bay, and is now the branch of Interstate 280 that snakes west from the 101.

Antonio proposed that he and his cohorts try out some guerrilla gardening—unpermitted work on public or government land—to see how they liked farming and working collectively. Only a few of the group came along with him, and the group’s visions were never realized. But then the farm itself became a project and a vision, and for several years Antonio served as co-manager with Jason Mark, the editor of
Earth Island Journal
, who showed up several months later.

By this time we were eating the sweet fleshy petals of pineapple guava flowers and admiring the first blooms of pomegranates that, he told me, don’t do very well in foggy San Francisco. Guerrilla gardening would’ve been the easy route, but the farm became official, and what began as an anarchist project has evolved into, among other things, an exercise in cultivating, weeding, and wringing something fruitful out of a bureaucracy designed to protect the city from lawsuits and govern pleasure-ground parks, not to oversee a food-producing landscape run by volunteers. Any vision of a purely autonomous zone involving only Antonio’s companions decayed early on, and from that compost grew a project to engage with practically everyone. There is still a fence around Alemany, and a padlock keeps people from actually driving in. It makes the place look closed from the road, but there’s an open gate a few steps away and another gate between the housing project and the farm.

As we desultorily ate some superb strawberries planted here and there on the slope—grids are not one of Alemany Farm’s strong suits—Antonio told me about their complex relationship with the housing project’s denizens, who inhabit a city-run set of bunker-like buildings. The mission statement of Alemany Farm describes it as “a project of the Alemany Resident Management Corporation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving conditions in the Alemany Community, a 165-unit public housing development beset by high unemployment and recurring violence. The
Alemany Resident Management Corporation believes that we can address the root causes of violence by providing youth with meaningful opportunities for advancement.” In practice, this means an informal relationship, but a relationship nonetheless, involving occasional disagreements, open space for kids to play, as well as “You Pick It” free food on Wednesdays for residents who want to show up and glean. Co-manager Jason Mark tells me the immigrant Chinese residents have been the most enthusiastic harvesters, and the farm now grows Asian vegetables such as long beans as part of the relationship.

A thin brown-skinned young man with bright eyes and shaggy hair, Antonio looks a little like Pan, the god of picnics and panics, and a little like a mild young Che Guevara. The farm is hardly the kind of preened and styled model garden that sometimes gets produced by, say, the Slow Food Festival in front of San Francisco City Hall, or by the architecture firm Work at PS1 in Queens, New York, gardens that are inspiring works of art but hardly viable economic models. At Alemany, there are some native plants on the slopes, some mixed grasses, a scattering of willows and mature fruit trees like the mulberry, many more young trees, and ledges of plantings, along with a few beehives, a wetland pond full of cattails, and a windmill that never pumped anything but does say
farm
pretty well.