Hope and grief can be found in troubled neighborhood garden
Purple wasn’t the only color lighting up the Purple House in Binghamton this Holy Week.
Five dozen kids of varying sizes, shapes and shades dyed and painted 15 dozen eggs with varying colors, designs and degrees of difficulty.
The light and intermittent spring rain kept them on the porch and in the house, but didn’t dampen their Easter spirit.
“You see how much they love this space and the relationships they have with the people here,” said Erin Harris, founding director of the Carpenter Art Garden and its arts center, the Purple House. “You can’t help but feel hopeful.” Hope is light and intermittent for children in this troubled but tenacious street.
Last summer, two men were shot and killed just down the street. One died, the other was paralyzed.
Last October, they watched police looking for a missing 29-year-old search a lot two doors down from the Purple House with cadaver dogs.
The next day, they watched as police used a backhoe to break up a concrete slab on the lot. The woman remains missing.
A week ago, police swarmed the area around Cornerstone Prep and Lester School, just across the street.
The schools closed early because of concerns about retaliation for a murder in the neighborhood two days earlier.
On April 3, 17-year-old Deago Brown was shot and killed at a corner store a block from the garden. No arrests have been made.
Deago had been coming to the Purple House off and on for several years.
He loved to draw and paint and take art lessons in the house, a once-condemned structure reborn as a neighborhood safe house.
He loved to hang out next door in the art garden, a once-vacant lot now blooming with mosaics, murals and other works of art.
He was even more intrigued by the vegetable garden. He often stopped by just to go there and look at the plants and flowers.
He’d ask Harris about them. What they were. How and when they grew.
One day, he started asking about the tomatoes and the rose bushes.
“He asked if he could work to earn the money to buy his mom a tomato plant and one of those rose bushes,” Harris said.
Harris put him to work helping one of the garden’s neighbors make a flower bed. He tilled the soil, dug a border and planted flowers.
Harris paid him for the work, then she took him to Lowe’s. He used his earnings to buy a tomato plant and a rose bush.
He planted the rose bush next to the cracked concrete steps at his mother’s porch, then set the potted tomato plant next to it.
Harris went to see Deago’s mother this week. Carol Brown told Harris that she was on the porch when she got the news her son had been killed.
“So much happens here, it’s traumatizing and desensitizing,” Harris said. “But mothers still grieve and children still hope.”
A few nights after Deago was killed, friends and neighbors held a vigil on his mother’s porch.
They lit candles and tied purple ribbons and prayed beside the tomato plant and the rose bush.