Eat the City(16)
These days, it seems bees can show us the mystery of urban living: We are so tightly packed, yet we often don’t understand how much of an impact we have on one another. We often don’t know what is down the street or upstairs from us. Some of the Red Hook beekeepers who worried about the bright red substance in their bees and in their hives lived or worked right around the corner from the cherry factory, but didn’t even know it was there. The bees knew.
What else do they know that we have not been able to figure out? Bees find all kinds of things. They can be trained to identify environmental hazards, and have been used to sniff out radioactive materials, explosives, cocaine, and various pollutants, and also to detect land mines. Colony collapse disorder itself may be the symptom of an environmental imbalance we don’t want to acknowledge but that the bees can’t help but confront. “Beekeepers are knowledgeable through their bees,” says David Selig.
But Andrew Coté doesn’t think much about that. He looks forward to the next summer, when his bees will do what bees do, and fly out of the hive every morning in search of nectar from a flower. They will zoom past hot tar and stinking asphalt and, he hopes, resist the sweet temptations of spilled Cokes, splatted ice creams, spoiled milk shakes. All over the city, his bees will find the growing things, the blossoming things, the places where sweet, wet nectar awaits their collection drive. And Andrew, in turn, will collect, and sell, and profit.
VEGETABLES
THE TOMATOES ARE SMALL, hard baubles dangling off the vine: pale, early, orange veined with green. The corn grows six, seven feet tall, with leaves that rake your skin when you squeeze past. There are slender, fuzzy okra plants, two kinds of leafy, spreading collards, and puffy, purpled eggplants. It’s ten o’clock in Harlem on a Saturday night in June. A steady hip-hop beat thumps from a BMW parked outside the garden gate. Inside the garden, moving from the Miracle-Gro tubs to the plant beds to the toolshed and back, with a slight limp and a single-minded deftness, Willie Morgan slips bright young collard plants into the soil.
“You can’t plant in the middle of the day,” he says. “It’ll wither.”
Willie first began growing a fruit and vegetable garden as a front for his gambling operation. That was back in 1969, when he ran an illegal numbers joint in a storefront on 118th Street between Fifth and Madison, and the long stalks of corn and curling vines of tomatoes seemed like good cover. He was lithe, with an easy smile and snappy clothes: custom-made suede pants and cashmere coats he also sold at a separate boutique. Back then, almost every block of Harlem had a numbers spot where people played the illicit local lottery. An enterprising numbers man—controller was the job title—had to devise ways to appear generous to the customers and legitimate to the cops. Vegetables, Willie thought, could be the answer. He went to the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs and got a license to operate a greengrocer. He bought a scale and set up tables in his storefront to look just like a vegetable stand where he could give out free produce as a bonus to customers. Trouble was, he didn’t have any vegetables. Then he came upon the idea of growing his own.
Forty years later, Willie has a slightly shy, slightly sly smile, warm eyes the same brown as his skin, a good-natured affability, and a black suede applejack cap. He will remember your phone number and birthday the first time you tell him—which makes sense, given his career memorizing bets to avoid a paper trail. Then, as now, his business depends on customer relations. In his current community garden on city-owned land, he’s always glancing toward the gate and jumping up to meet someone calling, “Willie! I want some eggplants! I want ’em soft!” “Your corn tastes like sugar. You got some to sell to me?” “You got any herbs for carpal tunnel or for pain?”
Over four decades, Willie has refined his agricultural techniques in skinny, shady strips of land between tenements all over Harlem. He rotates his crops with a professional’s precision to take advantage of every inch of soil and every minute of sun. “I’m on my third crop of turnips!” he says one day when I visit. In the southwest corner of his current 28-by-76-foot lot, as the growing season progresses, turnips follow turnips follow turnips. In the northeast corner, after the corn, collards. Because tomatoes are his best seller, he starts in at the beginning of the season, planting Early Girls in the southwest patch as the first of a succession of tomato varieties that will produce a steady crop all summer long. His soil yields zucchinis, cabbages and carrots, spicy and sweet peppers, stevia and basil, parsley, mint, and sage. He sells his produce to neighbors for cheap, because seeds and soil cost little and he doesn’t need to worry about marketing, storage, refrigeration, or transportation. “Fresh okra is two ninety-nine a pound in the store,” he says, raising his eyebrows at the scandal of it. “I sell it for one fifty,” he assures, and even at this discount, the farm earns him a nice supplement to his Social Security check.
Willie’s mind’s eye holds maps of Harlem’s past, and he likes to recount the landscape of a healthy economy of vice. Walking down 120th Street past graceful brownstones, he points out his own very first numbers joint, which thrived at Number 317, where he paid a lady to let him work out of her living room. Another numbers spot operated at 304, and the Bolivar and Tulsa bars on the corner gave Willie a place to step in for a vodka cognac or vodka with orange juice. In those early days, he said, most people he knew were still working some kind of a job, and there was plenty of money to be had feeding people’s proclivities for risk and reward.