University Place

The Story of Alice's Garden

– Good afternoon and welcome, my name is Venice Williams. And, I am told that I am the executive director of Alice’s Garden Urban Farm and Community Garden in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I give myself the title of the person who pulls the most weeds.
(audience laughs)
So I tell people all the time, never be impressed with this title. It means that I am blessed and gifted with being able to put my hands into soil, to see what comes up, to cultivate both soil and community in an incredible space in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As always before I begin a presentation, I need to ask an elder in the room to give me permission to speak. So if there’s someone, an elder who can just wave your hand and… Thank you, thank you. I always make it known too that that’s a setup request because yes, you’re giving me permission to speak, but now for this point out, you’re responsible for every single thing I say.
(audience laughs)
All right, so you get to hold this space with me as we talk about this place called Alice’s Garden. So I want to begin by showing you a YouTube video of Alice’s Garden called, I think it’s “Beauty and Blue Skies” that our son created for us. This video is really short. It’s a decade old, but it gives you a feeling of the space that we are about to explore.
(“Beauty in the World” by Macy Gray)

I know you’re fed up

Life don’t let up for us

All they talk about

Is what is goin’ down

And what’s been messed up for us

When I look around I see blue skies

I see butterflies for us

Listen to the sound

And lose it

In sweet music

And dance with me

‘Cause there is beauty in the world

So much beauty in the world

Always beauty in the world

So much beauty in the world

So shake your booty boys and girls

For the beauty in the world

Pick your diamond pick your pearl

There is beauty in the world

All together now
(cheerful acoustic music)

We need more lovin’

We need more money they say

Change is going to come

Like the weather

This ain’t forever

They say

So baby in between

Notice the blue skies

Notice the butterflies

Notice me

Stop and smell the flowers

And lose it

In sweet music

And dance with me

‘Cause there is beauty in the world

So much beauty in the world

Always beauty in the world

There is beauty in the world

So shake your booty boys and girls

Yeah, beauty in the world

Pick your diamond, pick your pearl

‘Cause there is beauty in the world

All together now
(cheerful acoustic music)

Hey you all

Throw your hands up and holler

Hey you all

Throw your hands up and holler

When you don’t know what to do

Don’t know if you’ll make it through

But remember that he’s given you

Beauty in the world

So love

Beauty in the world

Yeah love

Beauty in the world

There is beauty in the world

Beauty in the world

So shake your booty boys and girls

For all the beauty in the world

Pick your diamond pick your pearl

There is beauty in the world

All together now

Yeah love

Yeah love

Oh love

All together now

Hey baby when I’m lookin’ at you now

I know this fact is true now

It’s true

There’s love, there’s hope for us

And there’s beauty in the world - So that is Alice’s Garden Urban Farm.

We sit at 2136 North 21st Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As you look at that piece of video, what you saw was a community that has been cultivated for decades. You saw food and health and wellness and yoga and education and all kinds of learning. Very often people come into Alice’s and as they leave, they say, “I need one of those,” like it’s a sweater that they’re picking out from the store. Very often people say can you come and spend a week with us so that we can create a garden like that and I try not to laugh. A week, and then a garden.

The reason why this conversation in this moment is so important is that we have to understand that to cultivate a true community garden means that you’re cultivating not just soil, but you’re cultivating people and hope and more importantly, you’re cultivating the promise of not just a better vegetable crop, but the promise of a better tomorrow.

When you are in the urban context and you are growing community alongside of growing food, you have to be extremely intentional about every moment, about every program, about each and every project. How you design a layout of a garden, how you invite people in, what that looks like, and how everyone is invited to live into this. So as we explore Alice’s Garden for the next 30 minutes or so, I want to make it clear that community garden work for me is ancestral work. It’s ancestral work. There are none of us, no one in this room can say that you fed yourself throughout your entire life, yes?

No one in this room can say, I taught myself how to cultivate food, yes, yes. I’m going to help you since they can’t hear you on the mic.
(audience laughs)
So as I was called into this work of cultivating this farm by many people, I am very clear that the first people who called me to this land were my very own ancestors. My very own ancestors who were brought to this country, maybe not by their own choice. Most of them not by their own choice. But on my Choctaw side, they were already here.

And so any time we talk about land, no matter where we are in this country, we need to acknowledge that we are all living and breathing and enjoying our lives on land that belonged to someone else.

Land that belonged to someone else. Anyone else around the country might be able to deny that, but you can’t live in Wisconsin and deny that, because almost every single city that we have comes back to a native tribe. Almost every single body of water comes back to the name of a native tribe. We live and breathe a path, a journey, that we carved out on land that never belonged to us. That is so important for me to understand, whatever I do at Alice’s, I am doing it on land that I need to honor as sacred. Land as sacred. So for us at Alice’s Garden, as we are building and continue to build this incredible space, we do so acknowledging that the word culture and agriculture is front and center.

The word culture and agriculture for us is front and center. The culture of the peoples who came before us and who tended to this land. The culture of a city, whatever that culture may be. We are growing food and growing community in the city of Milwaukee that has many subcultures and all of that converges at Alice’s Garden. The culture of the plants itself. Ethnobotany is really front and center in our work. The relationship between plants and people, that historical relationship. If I were able to at this moment to have you name one or two vegetable or herbs that your family has cultivated for decades, there are stories and relationships and recipes that go with those plants. That is ethnobotany. So if you are growing anything, you are an ethnobotanist.

So if you’re retired, but you’re growing something, you can no longer say I’m retired. I want you to introduce yourself now as an ethnobotanist. And you’re going to start right when you leave out of this room. What do you do for a living, I am an ethnobotanist. Why is that important? Because as we grow community gardens and farms and all of the relationships that we have, if we don’t honor our connection with the entire natural world, we’re doing a dishonor to the land. So at Alice’s Garden we like to say that we use gardening as the carrot, pun intended, to get people to come through the gates to impact their entire quality of life.

Their entire quality of life. So is it about cultivating food, you bet. Is it about creating a decrease in that weekly grocery bill, uh-huh. Is it about teaching a community to learn again how to preserve food and share food, yes. Is it about setting a table of welcome in the city, in the midst of a place where probably some of you may be afraid to come into after five p.m. Yes. Is it about reclaiming the city and all that is good in it and putting a fence around it and saying welcome, this is safe, come and bring all of who you are, yes. But most importantly the work that we do at Alice’s Garden is bridgework, it’s bridgework. A community garden has to be about building bridges, building bridges of truth. So when we are at Alice’s Garden and we are in the midst of programs, so if we are doing our Field Hands and Foodways Program, which if you have been to Old World Wisconsin, which I am going to assume that some of you have, we have a section of our farm called Field Ways, I mean Field Hands and Foodways. And it’s a recreation of some of the land and some of the living of our ancestors, some during that time of enslavement and sharecropping. But most importantly the work we do at Alice’s Garden reminds, reminds our community that we come from people who were agrarian in the most beneficial of ways before we even arrived here. Our agrarian and culinary roots were so deep that almost every place you go into now you are eating the food of our ancestors. Now our ancestors weren’t charged as much as some of you are charged to enjoy those delicacies, but we understand that a lot of the foodstuffs at Alice’s Garden came from African people and we are in the business of relearning the pride of a people, unapologetically.

Sometimes when we look at different cultures and that word again culture in agriculture, we get confused so Alice’s Garden has been created to build bridges of understanding. So you can come into that farm on a Tuesday evening when our artisan market is in session. And you will see creators, vendors, entrepreneurs from all over the city who are selling the things they made with their hands and most often, that represents their culture. On that same evening you will see people in their plots, folks who come from all over the world, so when we do our registration form, our re-enrollment form, for our rental plots, we are 2.2 acre urban farm. So it’s just a little bit bigger than the average community garden. We have 120 rental plots representing 80 families and community organizations. So when we do that form, where people renew their plots and there are the boxes, the first year of that form it said in the section of ethnicity, I had African America, Latino, Asian, Native, and then it said white. White, is that an ethnicity? I don’t think so, so the very next year when that form went to print and I said Italian, Irish, and went through the whole thing, the reception of the people of white in the garden was so huge because once again, culture was recognized. Culture was recognized. So this might come as a big surprise to some of you, but guess what? You’re not white.
(audience laughs)

You’re Italian, right, you’re Irish! You’re German, you’re Norwegian. We have to begin to change the language of culture and this is some of the work that we do at Alice’s Garden. Everyone is welcome. Everyone comes into that space and it’s safe. So if you are a part of a community garden, I think that one of the miss-services we have done historically when it comes to community gardening is we have rented out plots and that’s it. And maybe at the end of the season, we have end of the season harvest, after everything looks pitiful and you’ve harvested most of them, right? A community garden presents an opportunity to heal. An opportunity to unlearn stereotypes, stereotypes that we all have about someone. So maybe you thought this little short brown woman, how is she comin’ up here talkin’ about gardening? That’s okay, you don’t have to admit to it. Maybe you’re sitting next to someone, you’re like, “Hmm, never knew that she or he would be someone who gardens.” Maybe the stereotype goes deeper.

And it goes into things that we have learned in our own homes, the things that our parents or grandparents said about the other, whomever the other may be. At Alice’s Garden Urban Farm, we are very clear that we have created a space to unpack all of that. We have created a space to build bridges across stereotypes and in the midst of it we garden. The gardening is secondary. The gardening is secondary, do I need to say that again? The gardening is secondary, the healing comes first. So whether you are in a space where you have a vacant lot on your block, right, or a vacant lot in your neighborhood, there are some bridges that need to be crossed. And Alice’s Garden historically has always been about crossing bridges. So the land that we sit on was, of course, originally Native land and we honor that. And soon after that came a man by the name of Deacon Samuel Brown, Deacon Samuel Brown. He was one of the founding fathers of Milwaukee and the land we rest upon is part of his original 40 acres. And so he had 40 acres of land, but he wasn’t the average founding father of Milwaukee. He was an abolitionist. He was a strong Christian man who understood that everyone was born free. So in summer of 1842, when a young 16-year-old freedom seeker by the name of Caroline Quarrels who had escaped enslavement in St. Louis, Missouri, and that is a longer story, but as she made her way to Milwaukee, this incredible founding father of Milwaukee named Samuel Brown took her in.

She found refuge on his land. And as she moved from safehouse to safehouse, the Underground Railroad in the state of Wisconsin was birthed on this land and other parcels of land. She did make it safely and went through Detroit and made it to Canada. And as her third great-granddaughter Kimberly Simmons tells the story, as her third great-grandmother was on that river and crossing over into Canada she was waving at the bounty hunters that were hot on her trail. Because once she hit that water she was safe. Fast forward, as the great migration came about in the United States of America and black people left the south going anywhere but south, we often say coming north. Our ancestors left that land and descendants and they went north, they went east, they went west, they left the country. But Milwaukee was part of the second wave of the Great Migration and when you landed in Milwaukee you were not allowed to live north of North Avenue. So if you’ve ever been to Milwaukee, North Avenue is pretty close on the south side of the city and so our land is north of North Avenue. It became part of Milwaukee’s Bronzeville. So it was an area that was populated with incredible homes and people with incredible talents and professions who occupy those homes. And then the city decided to build a highway, claimed eminent domain, and uprooted that community. And the highway was never built.

And so what I understand as a person born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and coming to Milwaukee, when I began to hear these stories, I began to understand what happened to the African American community in Milwaukee. The village was dismantled and you still weren’t always welcome on the other side of North Avenue. So many businesses left, many families left and those who remained had to try to find a way to remain in this city. But now you have this vacant land.

What do you do with it, you put in Johnson’s Park. So Johnson’s Park is a Milwaukee County Park that is part of Alice’s Garden, or better yet Alice’s Garden is part of Johnson’s Park. So Johnson’s Park came first. It is named after Clarence and Cleopatra Johnson who were two very prominent people in the African American community who had moved during the Great Migration and were part of Milwaukee’s Bronzeville. Mr. Johnson worked with George Washington Carver at what was then Tuskegee College. You all know George Washington Carver, the peanut man, right? So Mr. Johnson’s love for land and plants was so that this park was named after him and a couple of years later, the Garden was put in. At the time, the Garden was run by Milwaukee Cooperative Extension. There in the city of Milwaukee the garden was three acres. Alice’s Garden was named after Alice Meade-Taylor. She was the director of Milwaukee Cooperative Extension and her family was from Jamaica. Her husband was from Jamaica, she had come back from a trip literally was at a meeting on what to name the garden, because at that point the garden was something like fancy like Extension Garden number 26 or something like that. And Alice was at a meeting, she had just come back from visiting her husband’s family. She did not feel well, she went home sick, went to sleep and never woke up. And so the very next day, the garden was named Alice’s Garden. So I have a picture of Alice Meade-Taylor in our kitchen where I spend most of my time. And it’s on my board there and most mornings, I’m really nice to her, but sometimes I think what in the world did you get me into?
(audience laughs)

But it’s an honor for me to be serving in a space that’s named after a woman whose sense of community and love for community was so strong. The school which is right next door– I’m doin’ this like you can see it. But I see it!
(audience laughs)

The school is right here and guess what the name of the school is? Brown Street Academy, named after Deacon Samuel Brown. The school wanted to expand its playground and so it asked the county for, “Can we purchase an acre of land?” And the county said to the city who owns the school, you don’t even have to purchase an acre of land. If you put in an irrigation system for the garden you may have an acre of land. And that is why we are irrigated. One of the few large parcels of land that has an irrigation system for community garden. We had 14 spigots, but we did an incredible, incredible feat this past growing season and we installed a 20,000 gallon cistern. A 20,000 gallon cistern, we are harvesting water off of the playground of that school. We have created a bile swell and all of that. I can tell some of you know what I’m talking about. I’m just saying the words, I have no idea what I’m talking about.
(audience laughs)
But if you’re nodding, I’m getting it right. Okay.
(audience laughs)
And so we will now harvest this water, come off the grid a bit and begin to cultivate and continue to cultivate our relationship with the elements, right? So very often in an urban context, and especially when you’re talking about a community garden, you, and I don’t mean you, I’m not talking to you in that beautiful red shirt. I don’t mean you specifically. But very often what we do is that we put those who live in an urban setting in a box. And we say it’s so nice that they are learning how to grow their own food.

Well, I come from people who have always grown their own food.

Very often when we talked about the urban context and we’re looking at community gardens, we say, “Oh, it’s so nice that they have a place “to go to and that their kids can go there.” Well, we’ve always had places to go to and created safe spaces for our children. What is my point, my point goes back to what I said. Alice’s Garden is about dangling that carrot to impact all pathways of life. And so when we look at our relationship to the environment, when we were putting in this 20,000 gallon cistern, I had one of these incredible partners who came through, a partner who helps to fund this garden, and they’re like you know what? Don’t you think you’re wasting money on this cistern? I mean do you really think that this is what your people should be concerned with?

We drink water.
(audience laughs)

The rain falls on us. We use water. We water our gardens. What is my point? My point is, again, a community garden in an urban context is a place of learning for everyone. So even though I wanted to say something that I probably should not ever say to anyone to this gentleman, instead, what I invited him to do was to go into the garden and to meet some of those people. I did say that, “Why don’t you go meet some of those people?” Why don’t you go see what you have in common with those people? And by the way, we are concerned about harvesting water. We are concerned about growing soil. We are concerned about the quality of air and the quality of our lives and we don’t have to pick and choose which one we want to be about.

Because the culture of a community garden is an ideal place to help people to understand all of that, how it’s all interwoven together. And so Milwaukee Cooperative Extension was leading the garden. In 2004– I’m smiling because somebody in the back of the room probably should know what’s getting ready to come. In 2004 or so, actually the first time was 2002, my husband was the 4H and Youth Development Agent for Milwaukee Cooperative Extension. And he said, by profession– I didn’t say this– by profession I’m a Lutheran lay minister. So I’ve been serving with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Milwaukee, it’ll be 30 years come June first. And this farm is a part of my ministry. At the time I was doing a city-wide youth ministry called Seed Folks Youth Ministry. Seed Folks is a book by Paul Fleischman that I’m sure some of you have read. And so my husband said to me, “Can you come “to the garden and work your magic?” And then I like to say he left me there and people think we’re no longer together. But he’s actually in the room and he’s in the back and after this we’ll sing happy birthday to him because today is his birthday, right?
(audience applauds)
Ah-hah, got ya!
(audience laughs)

And so he brought me into this space and I’m thinking I’m coming in to do a little bit of this and not a whole lot of that. But as time went on, along with the help of an incredible organization here in Milwaukee… I mean in Madison, I know where I am. in Madison… called the Center for Resilient Cities. The Center for Resilient Cities was invited into Milwaukee by the NAACP for the greater Johnson’s Park Initiative and began to transform that corner of the world. If you are not familiar with the Center for Resilient Cities you may want to become familiar with the organization that is right here in your front yard.

And so as this garden became transformed into a true strong community garden, the garden was the caring for this piece of land is now officially a part of our ministry, Milwaukee Cooperative Extension no longer runs the garden. But my ministry, The Table, a first century style community in the 21st century. We are a farm to church movement, right? So the farm came first and the church came later. So I moved out of one position to really help birth this farm church that we love, that worships in the garden on Wednesday evenings around many tables. And again, it is about building bridges.

There are people who come to Alice’s Garden from all over the city and they say if the city that exists outside of this fence could look like the city that has been birthed inside of this fence, Milwaukee would be a stronger, healthier more beautiful space. I am here to say there is no reason why that cannot be. What we can learn from community gardens and urban farms, no matter what city they rest in is major healing and promise for any and every city. But the Alice’s Garden model teaches that you should not even be gardening in a silo. I don’t mean that in the farm sense, right? You should not be gardening in isolation. If you have a community garden or an urban farm and everyone in that space, and you live in a diverse city, and everyone looks like you, then you have a garden. You don’t have a community garden.

The invitation, and I will say the challenge, that I present to most community gardens is birth something that you never thought was possible. Birth something that you didn’t even think could happen on your block or in your neighborhood or in your city. Look at what exists if you already have a garden and ask yourself who and what is missing? Who and what is missing? So I began to know that we were beginning to cultivate what we are called to build in cities when I looked up one day and 13 different languages were being spoken in that moment. And the hue, the skin hue of the people who were in that garden at that time spanned everything possible. When I looked up and a Milwaukee police officer was gardening next to someone who had just been released from prison two days before, when I looked up and a Mung gardener who three years earlier as our son, our little boy, he was really little at the time, he was four years old and this Mung gardener, his grandson was playing with our four-year-old son. And they were playing on a huge pile of mulch and I was gardening in my then little plot. I should’ve just stuck to that little plot. And I saw this farmer run and grab his grandson and say we don’t play with them. We don’t talk to them. And I saw the pain in our son’s face, ’cause he didn’t understand and I didn’t understand. And again, I wanted to react because you just hurt my child. But instead I waited, and I explained to Demetrius Junior what may have been going on. And then a few days later, after I had calmed down… ’cause I wasn’t trying to make the news.
(audience laughs)

But I would have. I reminded him of what he had done and asked him why. And then he told me a painful story of something that had happened to him that made him judge all black men.

To this day, right now, that same gardener at Alice’s will see me and he will say, “I’m learning more.”
(audience laughs)
I’m learning more, and he is still there. So when I see him, not just gardening alongside of Mr. Jackson or Mr. Cain, but they’re sharing seeds and stories and recipes, I know that we have birthed what a community garden should be about. When I see people come in and they have never gardened before and you have never seen them before, but you go over there and you give them every single thing that you could possibly have, you recognize your bounty and you share your bounty and your bounty isn’t just about seeds and compost, but it’s about “This is my granddaughter.”

And look, “We just made this for lunch.” And, “We brought this, would you like some?” This is the gift of community gardening. And so if you have a community garden or if you want to be a part of a community garden, these are the things that you need to be about. You need to be about honoring culture.

You need to be about honoring the culture of every single person there, no matter how hard it is. No matter how hard it is. I share all the time that every single year when I think, “Oh, the garden has settled in. We’re good.” Everyone’s working so well together. The Creator’s sense of humor kicks in and sends me another gardener that’s just going to test my patience all season long, all season long. It happens every year and we just had our first garden meeting and I know who it is. I could see it, I know.
(audience laughs)

I’m not namin’ names, and I just chuckled. Because it is a reminder to me that a community garden is never done. It’s never finished, just like your gardens. So you may have a successful flower garden or herb garden or vegetable garden, but the next year you don’t plant the same things the same way, right? The same is true for a community garden. You have to be open to change. If you want to cultivate real community, you must be open to change. And for us, so I’m going to gender blast us, because as a woman, I know everything.
(audience laughs)

Right, Demetrius?
(audience laughs)

I know everything. I know where I want things. I know how this program should be. But yet my job, my call in this space, is to be the most flexible person in the garden. My call is to be the person who says yes. Yes. Now again, as a woman that’s hard sometimes. Can you do that, yes. In my mind I’m thinking but I wouldn’t do it that way. But who cares. So as a person who wants to cultivate a community garden, you must honor culture. You must be flexible and be willing to change at any moment and you must understand that land itself is about healing. That food is about healing, that setting tables, literal tables of plates and cups and real napkins. Stop using those darn paper napkins, but that’s another speech.

Setting tables of welcome, that’s what a community garden is about, but most importantly, most importantly, we must again begin to understand every single person as sacred. Every single real food as sacred. And every moment that we can share in any space as sacred. So I’m going to end there so we can do some questions and answers. Thank you.
(audience applauds)