San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
West Oakland’s ‘Eden’ a refuge from trauma
Community garden creates oasis of love and healing in memory of father, son
At the end of an alley next to an older beige house on West Oakland’s 29th Street is a community garden with naturopathic medicine and live music. The ground is covered in wood chips. Sunflowers bloom next to newly planted strawberries. A fountain trickles water along a stone walking path.
The Long Live Love Foundation opened the garden on June 13. I’ve heard it referred to as West Oakland’s “Eden,” a notsosubtle nod to the biblical paradise. But this garden paradise grew from — and is enveloped by — trauma.
The family behind the garden started it in memory of a father who was killed by law enforcement in Texas under harrowing circumstances in 2011, and a grieving son who took his own life eight years later.
Three days after the garden premiered last month, there were two fatal shootings in West Oakland, one just a couple of blocks away.
As gun violence and COVID19 continue to exert disproportionate tolls on Black and Latino neighborhoods, some are turning to community gardens to cultivate some small measure of peace. In so doing,
“People should know they could go somewhere with people who can relate to what they’re going through and know those next steps versus just seeing hashtags of support.”
Gabrielle Dickey Chanel El, the mother behind Long Live Love Foundation
they’re also reclaiming an agricultural heritage that began generations ago under either forced or exploited conditions.
Gabrielle Dickey Chanel El, the mother behind Long Live Love, hopes the garden will be therapeutic — for the community and her family.
“People should know they could go somewhere with people who can relate to what they’re going through and know those next steps versus just seeing hashtags of support,” said Chanel El, who founded the nonprofit with her son, Ezekiel “Ziek” McCarter, and daughter, Chanae Pickett. “Not everybody goes viral when trauma like this happens. We didn’t.”
Chanel El’s former husband, the Rev. David McCarter, was the man who was killed in December 2011 by a Newton County deputy sheriff in Beaumont, Texas. The sheriff at the time claimed that McCarter was suspected of shooting at several churches when he was pulled over and shot while resisting arrest in a Beaumont church parking lot. Chanel El, who had relocated to her native Bay Area by then and was later joined by her children, has long disputed law enforcement’s account.
Nonetheless, the trauma weighed heavily on their son Immanuel, who was 15 when he lost his father. The teenager’s grief and a later runin with law enforcement in Los Angeles were contributing factors in his suicide on June 13, 2019, Chanel El said.
“The day after (Immanuel’s) funeral, I remember having these visions of gardens, of horseback riding, of water and of healing,” Chanel El said. “I felt like the spirit was moving me.”
On the first anniversary of Immanuel’s death, the family launched their foundation. They did so in the midst of twin public health crises — the coronavirus pandemic and a surge in gun violence — that this part of West Oakland certainly didn’t escape.
Ezekiel McCarter, who’s also the lead singer for popular San Francisco soul band Con Brio, thinks his family’s community garden can be a place for fellowship and natural wellness.
“Trauma, the awareness of it and what we can do about it, I am seeing our people paying more attention to this in a way that’s not necessarily pharmaceuticalinfluenced,” he said. “To be able to nurture life, when everything around you is seeming chaotic and like a threat to life, is really empowering for a lot of us.”
According to a 2018 study published on the National Center for Biotechnology Information website, gardening can help people cope with posttraumatic stress disorder.
Horticulture and trauma have long intersected for Black and Latino cultures. Enslaved Black plantation workers fed and clothed an infant America. Latino farmworkers shaped American food production over the generations that followed. Today, community gardens offer us the chance to sink our hands into the soil of our own accord, without regard for an overseer’s whip or a union buster’s gun.
“The country would not be able to eat if not for us from the very beginning,” said Vanessa Williams, the environmental education programs manager for the youthfocused nonprofit Community Grows. “It’s important to take back that ownership of gardening and focus on taking care of ourselves the way we have taken care of other people for so long.”
I think about this when I visit my family in Alexandria, La., a city of roughly 47,000 that has its own high crime rate and history of slave labor. According to local news outlets, there were 24 homicides, including 12 fatal shootings, within the first five months of 2021. Folks I knew are among the victims. Whenever I go home, my mom has this ritual of greeting me in the driveway and walking me to her small vegetable garden in her courtyard. The garden is a humble, bricklined rectangle that usually has a few okra, tomatoes and watermelons. She always says she isn’t gardening to feed the house, she gardens to nourish her soul.
It’s a distinction more Black and brown folks are starting to value.