Bullets and Beets: Murder at the Farm Stand

Jason Mark is a columnist for Change.org's Sustainable Food cause. He is a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots and the editor of Earth Island Journal. When he's not writing, he co-manages San Francisco's Alemany Farm, a four-acre organic fruit and vegetable garden in the city.

The fourth anniversary of her son Travis’ shooting had just passed, so it felt especially hard to Vivian Irving when Ray Twine was killed in front of her apartment two weeks ago. Irving, a resident of the Alemany Public Housing complex in San Francisco, was enjoying a quiet Friday night at home when someone approached Twine from behind as he was walking across the basketball court in the middle of the projects and put five bullets in the back of his head. Irving, a spirited woman who sings in nightclubs, had to spend the next day cleaning brains and blood off of her car.

A few days later, community members gathered for a vigil to remember Twine. “It was real nice,” Irving said of the memorial service. “I’ve been in these projects 38 years. I lost my son four years ago, August 14th. We’ve had 12 murders here. But this vigil was real nice. No shouting. No yelling. The cops were down the block, but they kept their distance. … He [Twine] was just 18 or 19 years old. It’s just crazy.”

The makeshift shrine at the edge of the basketball courts has all the signatures of a life taken too young and perhaps lived too hard. A pair of stuffed animals — a pink bear and a faded, red puppy dog — sit amid a collection of empty liquor bottles: Absolut, Tequila Reserve 1800, Bacardi Limon, Veuve Clicquot. A half dozen, half-burned Virgin Mary candles and a dusty conch shell cluster around the bottles. At the center of the shrine stands a mock card table (maroon felt glued to the thin cardboard of a Diet Coke case) with all the face cards taped to its front. A prose-poem, written in pencil with a girl’s looping script, has been stapled to the card table: “Live well with dignity … Live well with strength … Live well with honesty … Live well with compassion,” and so on for two pages, until it ends abruptly, “Forever & Always, RHR.”

This tragic tableau sits no more than 15 feet from where, every Wednesday, the volunteers of Alemany Farm set up the table for our neighborhood community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Distributing food in a low-income area is a nice initiative for an urban farm —and nice is about it. The Alemany residents that pick up organic fruits and vegetables at the stand appreciate and value the food; I know this because they’ve told me, and because they keep coming back. Yet our modest accomplishments to boost food security are wholly inadequate to address the crisis of violence that grips a poor community. No one is under the illusion that growing beets can stop the bullets.

In trendy, foodie San Francisco, however, many people seem more interested in the beets — and would prefer to ignore the bullets. Twine’s murder was book-ended by two others: the likely gang-related shooting of 19-year-old Hashim Kamau and the shooting of 26-year-old Steven Garrett, Jr. Three murders in 24 hours — news that warranted no more than a small blurb in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The shootings, and the collective yawn that greeted them, is yet another example of the wretched conditions endured by the underclass in America and of our utter disregard for the vast chasm of wealth and opportunity in this country. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently summed up this disgrace: “Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men, with the murderous wounds in most cases inflicted by other young black men. … This is a cancer that has been allowed to metastasize for decades. Not only is it not being treated, most people don’t even want to talk about it.”

As Herbert noted, joblessness contributes to the sense of hopelessness that fuels (or at least permits) neighborhood violence. “The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking," Herbert writes. "There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job. … As with so many other problems in American society, a lack of gainful employment has been a huge contributor to the problems faced by blacks.”

Non-profit urban farms are doing their best to provide that gainful employment. Will Allen’s Growing Power farm in Milwaukee has created jobs for people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Greensgrow in Philadelphia, Added Value in Brooklyn, and People’s Grocery in Oakland all run similar programs that incubate entrepreneurship and opportunity. For two summers, we at Alemany Farm ran an after-school, job-training program for teens from the housing projects: Ray Twine’s little brother, Ray Qwan-Twine, was one of the kids on the youth crew.

And while these private efforts are helpful, they are the social-justice equivalent of the finger in the dyke. With unemployment continuing to fester, there’s only so much the non-profit sector can do. Addressing the crisis in America’s poorest communities will require a massive, national commitment to equality of opportunity, something that only the federal government has the resources and reach to accomplish.

Last year’s federal stimulus bill was a good start. The jobs programs in the stimulus package have been a lifeline for households in Alemany. I know many people who have spent the last year working with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department maintaining green space or working with the Department of Public Works making street repairs. One of the kids who used to be on the Alemany Farm youth crew, Darryl Kelly, Jr., has a job doing solar installations, funded in part by the stimulus package. Each of those jobs is honest, honorable work, part of the task of rebuilding our country. They are also antidotes to violence. As any decent beat cop knows that jobs are the best crime-prevention program.

Too bad, then, that the stimulus funds will expire in fewer than 30 days, and that many of Alemany's residents — and citizens across the country, for that matter — will be thrown back out of work.

That bitter fact was thrown in my face when Ray Qwan-Twine came to visit his brother’s memorial shrine just as we were packing up the CSA stand last week. I hadn’t seen Ray in couple of years, and I was shocked at how he had shed his baby fat and had grown up into a young man, as tall as me and broad in the shoulders. I told him how very sorry I was. Then I asked him how he was doing. “I’m OK,” he said so evenly that I could tell it was as a lie. His eyes were locked on the shrine with a hardness that's out-of-place for a person still in his mid-teens, and then he said again, “I’m doin’ OK.”

As he turned to get into his mother’s car, I told him to let me know if there was anything I could do.

“Hey, Jay,” he said, “I need a job.”

The TANF Emergency Contingency Fund helps states provide assistance, short-term benefits, and jobs to families living in poverty. The Fund will expire on September 30th unless Congress takes action to extend it. Sign our petition, and ask your elected representatives to protect this important source of funding.