Deep in Bayview among the empty warehouses and heavily tagged, boarded up storefronts, past the scratched, dull plexi-glass skeleton of the abandoned guard booth, 
and the old police sub-station, its emblem fading on the grey stucco, past the broken bicycles glinting in the bright sunshine and the old couch with its innards spewing out, t and the green and yellow two-story buildings—some with their windows and doors boarded up—Jackie Williams sits in her garden. She smokes long cigarettes hungrily, looking at her handiwork, dreaming of rich black earth. Rows and rows of vegetables stretch out before her minds-eye—orderly gopher-free beds of collards and beets and mustard greens.
She is dreaming of a brick barbecue pit large enough to roast a whole pig.
“Well I know I’m not gonna get it like I would really like it—everything just perfect, you know? But if it was left up to me I’d get it,” Williams, known as Miss Jackie to most, says.
In the afternoons, when the kids have left and the hardest work is through, when the tools have been put up—or not put up, because, says Jackie with a half shake of her head, “sometimes those kids jus’ leave tools lyin’ out to rust and I guess I’m gonna have to start dockin’ their pay,”—Miss Jackie holds court for friends and neighbors who want to stop by and chat.
She runs the Alice Griffith Community Garden in the middle of Alice Griffith Housing Project, better known as Double-Rock. The garden, a vestige of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), was reborn five years ago. She got the job through her friend Maurice Moret, who runs Peacekeepers, a crisis prevention center located at Double-Rock that helps youth there stay safe. Peacekeepers is a part of Hunters Point Family, a private non-profit youth program in Bayview that offers many support services including tutoring, leadership training and job training—that’s where Miss Jackie fits in. She teaches five or six youth at a time to tend the garden on Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Double-Rock housing projects are considered by many to be the most run-down, crime-ridden of the HUD projects in the United States. Situated in an idyllic spot adjacent to the Bay and Candlestick Park, Double-Rock was built to house military personnel and in 1974 was transferred to the Housing Authority. These homes were once the most sought-after low-income housing in the Bay Area. Miss Jackie has lived there for over 30 years. She said it was hard to get into Double-Rock back then. Although it has degenerated—no jobs with the shipyard closing for good in the late ‘70s and then the crack coming in the ‘80s (“I don’t know nothin’ about no weed or crack,” she says. “I don’t even know what it is, but I do know that at some point there were young men lurking in the shadows to steal your purse.”)
It’s Miss Jackie’s home though, and she isn’t scared. “I loved it here. It was very nice here and it’s just the different generations that come in. You know, ‘cause I mean, the buildings—they’re just here, but it’s the different generations come in—they’re not taught by their parents,” she pauses, turns and aims the sprayer she’s holding at a bush with purple and white flowers. “Then children are having children, you know, and it’s a tough situation. But I respect them, and they respect me because of that.”
Miss Jackie has run this organic garden for five years, hiring teenagers from Double Rock and the surrounding neighborhood to do the work. Her small salary comes from Peacekeepers, which is funded by the S.F. Housing Authority and the Mayor’s Office for Criminal Justice. Though she will be 64 on January 20th, she needs the job and can’t afford to retire. 21 years at Hartford insurance company doing clerical work earned her a paltry pension, and she needs to wait to collect her social security, so she can get a little bit more every month.
She shows the kids how to prepare the beds, plant and harvest the crops, and in turn they get $9 per hour and all the vegetables they want. (Which usually isn’t much, but volunteer Naomi Goodwin reminds Miss Jackie that teenagers don’t usually like vegetables. In this neighborhood, kids are more likely to go to a ‘candy house,’ someone’s home where candy, soda and ice cream are sold. The nearest corner store is blocks away.)
One day recently sister Stephanie (“we are all sisters here,” says Goodwin, who’s been working at the garden for four years, “it doesn’t mean anything but us all being friends. That’s why we call her sister Stephanie.”) from the Double-Rock Opportunity Center approaches calling, “Hey Miss Jackie, how you doin’ today, girl?” They talk about her seven-mile hike up mount Tam in Marin. She says she went out to a club the night before even though she never goes out to clubs anymore. Stephanie is building up to something and Miss Jackie helps to pull the story out of her, peppering it with strategic “Mmmhmms” and the occasional “oooh, yeah?” Stephanie goes on about the music at the club and how wonderful it was. Finally, she dishes, saying “…and I met a man there,” Jackie and Naomi cut her off with explosive whoops and Jackie cries, “I knew that was coming! I was waiting for that. Well, now tell us about this man.” And so sister Stephanie tells about the new man, who she met at the club.
Another old acquaintance comes by to say how sorry she is about Miss Jackie’s mom, who died in mid-September. The memorial was only four days previously, and it was beautiful, Jackie says, with a video of her mom as a baby and a nice eulogy. Jackie thanks her for her wishes and they talk about how hard it is to lose a parent and how even though you can see it’s coming, you are never really prepared for it. Her mom was in the hospital for two years before she died, the last four months in a coma, so her death was probably a blessing of sorts. But Jackie doesn’t say so. They shake their heads in tandem, sighing heavily.
The lady says, “Miss Jackie, I sure could eat more of that zucchini you gave me last week. Those were so tasty.”
“Mmhmm,” Miss Jackie says, “okay then, you come down later this week and pick some for yourself. But you got to do some weeding or watering while you’re here. I don’t mind if people take from the garden, but you got to put something back in.”
They say their goodbyes and Miss Jackie lights another cigarette. “Hay Naom, bring me that bottle of water from over there!” she calls to Naomi across the garden, which is about as large as a Wal-Mart parking lot. It’s a pain in the neck to keep forgetting tools and having to cross and re-cross the garden every time you need to fetch something, Jackie explains. So they holler to each other or call on their cell phones to save a trek across, sometimes.
Her phone is strung around her neck in a case like a set of reading glasses. She wears a knit cap with a brim, though it’s Indian summer, the hottest season here in San Francisco. A long-sleeved sweatshirt covers her trunk and arms, sweatpants her bottom half, her daily uniform along with sneakers on her feet that have been worn until they are nearly shapeless and the same color as the garden dirt. Her oval wire-rimmed glasses reflect the sun and obscure her eyes, making them hard to see. 
She is stoutly built, with strong, straight un-gnarled hands that can pull weeds, hold a trowel (“why don’t they just call this a hand-shovel? I don’t understand why they need all these fancy names for normal things in Horticulture,”) or yank a recalcitrant hose out of a knotted pile to water the orchard outside the chain-link fence of the main garden (kids climbed over several times and committed the usual mindless teenage deeds of petty vandalism, pulling out leeks and scallions and littering them all over the garden.“I asked housing to build me a higher fence, but no, no, they can’t do it. I don’t know why. I asked about barb-wire on the top, too, but of course they wouldn’t hear of that,” she says.) Her voice is clear and loud, with has just the right amount of rasp to hold the ear. She never mumbles, enunciating each syllable she utters. It’s easy to tell from the way she uses her voice that she is accustomed to getting her way. Decisive is one word that comes to mind.
Not everyone comes to the garden just to socialize. Two young teenage girls are digging small, shallow holes in the dark brown earth furrows, putting in five-inch cauliflower plants, 
then sweeping earth up around the bases and pushing them down with flat hands. They work at a steady pace in the hot afternoon sun.
“There’s some days that I don’t want to come to work but there’s some days when I know it’s going to be fun,” says one thirteen-year-old girl, “like when we’re planting and pulling out the weeds and stuff.” She has been working at Double Rock garden for about a year. She says she thinks she might like to be an architect later in life, but for now this is one of the only jobs around. Most employers require working papers, which she can’t get until she is sixteen. Her expression is neutral as she talks about Miss Jackie. She gives a little one-shouldered shrug, “Sometimes she can be hard on us but it’s just how you have to get the job done.”
“She has her rough sides,” says Goodwin, “but she’s from the old school, which is nice,” but sometimes, she says, they battle it out together and she has to say “This is now, Jackie.” Naomi says her old-school attitude works with managing the youth at the garden.
“One day,” remembers Miss Jackie, crumbling dirt with her leathery hand,
“when I was a teenager, a tomato plant came up through the sidewalk. I cut it down and took it home to my mom’s house and stuck it in the ground. I had tomatoes that big,” she says, holding her fist in a ball and shaking it for emphasis. She smiles. She has been gardening ever since and considers this job at Double Rock her lifetime favorite job. She works many more hours than she is paid for, but says it’s worth it to her. Many afternoons she sits on a bench under a shade tree just looking at the garden.
(in a nice way, the street looks pretty safe—no kids will be hit by cars here, their potential perils are much more complex than that), one man calls over and asks me what I’m doing. He looks curious—I go over to chat with him. Sometimes people here assume I’m a cop.
(in a nice way, the street looks pretty safe—no kids will be hit by cars here, their potential perils are much more complex than that), one man calls over and asks me what I’m doing. He looks curious—I go over to chat with him. Sometimes people here assume I’m a cop.
(Bayview has the largest population of kids in San Francisco, but only one pediatrician and Double Rock only has one playground and that’s for the Church near the opportunity center—the pregnant woman says it isn’t open to the general public. The playground half a block away was burned to the ground by vandals and never replaced. I guess that’s why the children here are all playing on the sidewalks and in the streets. They look like they are having fun, though. There is a basketball court near the community garden, but so far, I have never seen anyone using it. 
(Bayview has the largest population of kids in San Francisco, but only one pediatrician and Double Rock only has one playground and that’s for the Church near the opportunity center—the pregnant woman says it isn’t open to the general public. The playground half a block away was burned to the ground by vandals and never replaced. I guess that’s why the children here are all playing on the sidewalks and in the streets. They look like they are having fun, though. There is a basketball court near the community garden, but so far, I have never seen anyone using it. 
