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Adventures in Mutual Aid New Jersey

I added my name and number to the NJ Mutual Aid Google Doc when the virus first hit our area, and we knew it was going to be tragic. It was the start of the lockdown, and we didn’t know what it was going to be like, but we understood our most vulnerable communities would be hit hardest, and so we start forming a safety net, building our community, making our connections visible and animated. 

Back in April, I did a shopping and delivery for a family in Kearney. The organizer of NJ Mutual Aid reached out to me by phone. We had an awesome conversation, and I was invited to join a local Saturday zoom of teachers and artists and was connected to Cosecha for the shopping and delivery. They texted me the shopping list and address and sent me the money through paypal. It was still early in the pandemic before we flattened the curve and shopping in ShopRite was intense, especially for another family because I had to find things and keep track of the budget. But then I was done and was able to make the delivery, and it was lovely. A nice sunny day and a bunch of the family members of all different ages came out and helped unload the car. 

Then it was quiet from Cosecha for months. In the meantime, I joined the mutual aid zoom which magically morphed into a dreamy May Day Committee that organized a motorcade in Newark to spread the message that capitalism is the disease and spread power to the workers. Those of us organizing flyered on the route before the march. We spent several meetings debating and designing the flyer and was able to fit the history of May Day, a critique of capitalism, an explanation of communism, and next steps all on a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. The day I was flyering, I was also delivering flyers to some comrades. One was at the Panther food distribution on South Orange Ave and 7th Street. It was awesome. The Panthers were all wearing their blue tee-shirts, black logo and font, tables and boxes taking over the sidewalk and folks would drive by and pick up a box of vegetables. Like a drive-thru. It was popping and the energy high. Even a fire fighter raised their fist to the Panthers. 

           

Then as soon as the semester ended I got sick. And was home as everyone else was taking to the streets in mighty protest. I even missed the big one in Newark, opening rally not a mile from my house. Didn't even know it was happening until the next day. Maybe if I hadn’t been hit with a wave of exhaustion that afternoon after going to the farmer’s market and planting mint in the backyard as I listened to a book group discuss Emergent Strategies, I would've known. While thousands marched, I napped deeply. 

And then I got better and started following my social media and checking my ECC email that gets the POP updates. I went to the POP rally on June 8 but had to leave before the energy of the rally erupted into a march down Broad Street past City Hall to Military Park. I went to the Newark Water Coalition’s Black Lives Matter Mutual Aid March where they harvested vegetables from the community garden and distributed the vegetables, water, and baby supplies as we took over all four lanes of Clinton Ave in the South Ward. 

And then today, I get a text from Cosecha asking if I can do deliveries, I said yes but I had to be back home to Newark for a 2pm meeting. They texted me the address to the mosque. I got there at 11am, but Cosecha wasn’t there yet. The sister who let me in chatted briefly and offered me dates. When I only took one, she said I could take more. I didn’t but in retrospect I wish I had. In the big room with wood floors and many windows were 56 shopping bags of vegetables. Heavy. Squash, yams, scallions, onions, lettuce, swiss chard. In the back of the room were still stacks of boxes to make more bags. I was given my list quickly—while I waited I helped divide the big bags of scallions into three smaller bags and chatted with someone from the Newark Water Coalition. He was the one who made me realize I wanted to write a quick post about my activisms during the lockdown. We both agreed the importance of highlighting how the Newark Water Coalition March was also distributing food that they had just harvested from a community garden. 

I have never done just deliveries before so I had no idea when I was given a list of 21 addresses on a spreadsheet print-out, and my station wagon 100% filled with the 21 bags, and sent on my way with instructions to call the number, and if they’re not there, just move on to the next one, that I had a full day’s work driving on the side streets of a part of Jersey I’d never been before. 

Other than that, the operation was tight. Cosecha wasn’t sure why they were so short on drivers this time. Maybe because a lot of the drivers are teachers and doing end of year graduation. Maybe because it was in a different neighborhood. People don’t always like going out of their comfort zone. I was given a carefully designed list of addresses that started with the one closest to the mosque and then navigated me around Union City and North Bergen in a  logical way. All the addresses and all the numbers were correct. 

My process for delivery was consistent. I would first plug the address into my phone to see how far away it was. Then I would call the number to make sure they were home and ready for the delivery. Sometimes the person who answered spoke English just about as good as I speak Spanish and so we would have these lovely conversations in both languages. Hablo espanol muy male. Laughter on both ends. The first time I made a call and the machine answered, the message was in Spanish. I used google translate to figure out how to say food delivery and texted “quiero entregena de comida ahora? gratis. de la mosque.” And I waited about five seconds and called back. They answered, and I made the delivery. 

Time moved easily but a little too fast. It was just after 1pm, and I was only a third a way through my list and had to head back home to Newark for the zoom. I got a text from Cosecha, checking in, which I appreciated. They agreed that 21 was a lot of bags and said I could finish deliveries tomorrow. 

I was very hungry and craving pizza. I missed my entrance to the turnpike and had to loop through Union City again driving my station wagon with the karma of the volunteer and swag of a grand prix. Really hoped Robert’s was reopened as we are slowly coming out of lockdown. I called when I got to Newark. They were. I asked for two slices, they only had one left. I took it. Found parking nearby, money still in the meter. I was famished and wanted to order something else—they had lasagna but won’t have meatball subs until next week. 

I was almost ten minutes late to the meeting. Caught the tail end of something important to me, which immediately solidified my commitment to attending. How might colleges of humanities and social sciences reimagine what we do or make more visible what we do in terms of our role in producing a kind of student who knows how to create a system for delivering food during the economic fallout of a global pandemic during late capitalism. Not that you need a college degree to do that. But often times it is in college where we gain access to the ideas and meaning-making as a process of freedom, community, and love that is part of laying a foundation for radical resistance to oppression. And, here I’m not talking about the ivy and liberal arts elites with the handful of scholarships. I am talking about the public universities in cosmopolitan centers with students from all different classes and races and abilities and genders and cultures and languages some of us may have never even heard of. Students who are pursuing the American Dream even as anxiety rises that what we're chasing may be a nightmare we don’t have the words or confidence to name because the K-12 Common Core hasn’t found a multiple choice option for that. 

After the meeting, I drove back to the mosque. I decided I would do another seven deliveries. Before heading out, I texted myself the addresses and phone numbers for each delivery. That way, I wouldn’t have to manually enter the data while on the road. I was texting with someone who said they would pick up my extra bags, but when I called it turned out she had 30 and hadn’t even gotten on the road until 3pm because she had been packing bags. Everyone at the mosque was so understanding. I’m trying to respect my boundaries and be gentle with people in the process. I was apologetic, but also explained, I had never done this before so I had no idea the time commitment 21 bags would take, and I only knew about it this morning. I also spoke to Cosecha who also totally understood. I explained I had a busy work day tomorrow. They asked me to spread the word if anyone could do deliveries tomorrow. I did. So far no takers though. One of the reasons I wanted to write this is to make visible a process of being involved in mutual aid projects. Stories are one way to make the unknown familiar. 

The second seven went very different. There were a lot more no answers. One delivery wanted to go through the bag and only take what she wanted. I said no, I have too many deliveries to accomodate like that. She was like maybe I could give it to a neighbor. I said exactly. I still did my thing of the phone call; if no answer then a text in the language of the voicemail; then follow up phone call. People didn’t answer the follow-up phone calls but then started calling me back. So it did get a little hectic and I wish I had a better system for taking notes on the spreadsheet. But it worked out fine. One person asked if someone else was on the list. She wasn’t but because of the no answers I had extra bags, so I was able to deliver one to her. People were sweet. Oftentimes waiting at the door so the delivery could go quick. Sometimes people were at work so they’d text me the number of the family member at home. Sometimes I could tell the bag of food was arriving just at the right magical moment. The mood was appreciative not desperate at all. I must say I am worried about our already vulnerable communities as the impact of the lockdown on our economy continues to manifest. I am glad I am in communities teaching me the different ways to organize food deliveries. 

Ways to Deliver Food to the Community:

Individual Shopping and Delivery 

Pre-bagged vegetables Delivery

Pre-bagged vegetables pick-up location 

Distribution of vegetables during march through neighborhoods

Things I still need to learn:

When we don’t grow the food ourselves, where do we get the food? Is it donated or is it bought using cash donations?

How do we get the list of families who want food deliveries?

How do we recruit volunteers?

How do we get the bags for the deliveries?

When I got home, I still had two bags in my car. I went across the street where a bunch of neighbors were hanging out and asked if anyone wanted a bag of food. One person did. So then there was one left. I went inside, heated up the rest of the lasagna and my phone rang. It was someone calling me back. She had been a work. But she’d be home all day tomorrow. I decided I would make one more trip out to Union City between my two scheduled zooms to deliver her her bag of vegetables. 

And then I get a phone call just now from someone who got two bags delivered asking if I could come by and pick one up. I was like, I’m just a volunteer, got a phone call this morning asking if I could help out, but now I am back home in Newark. I was like you can be part of the effort—maybe you have a neighbor. Also, I was remembering being at the farmers market last Saturday, my friend giving me a bunch of swiss chard I was reluctant to take. She was like just saute it up and freeze it. So I suggested that she could make extra food and freeze it. Or make a soup. We laughed as I said people tell me to do that, but then I never get around to it, the swiss chard still there almost a week later. I guess I have a busy cooking day tomorrow too. As we hope our abundance doesn’t go to waste.

Too Much Midnight Arrives

Her book arrived in a thunder of banging and ringing. My neighbor worried the package on my stoop there now a second day even though she knew I had been out yesterday because my car moved.

I don’t even know if it’s mine as I picked it up it was mine, and my neighbor talks worry again sometimes just bang on the wall and say I am here

yeah the same, you can always bang on my wall and ask if I’m okay or bang or ring like you did 

we are standing there maybe a little less than 6ft between us 

without masks 

after a month 
only the second day 

I didn’t leave the house. 

It’s been hard to get my exercise now that they’ve closed both my parks. After a week the mind easily congratulates for staying inside along with support of the propaganda. 

We would’ve exchanged phone numbers but neither of us had our phones. 

I knew what it was but didn’t as well. a wonder as I ripped open cardboard and the yellow spine like a children’s book for our kind of children. Of course. Love. Arrives in a thunder and a worry. I had been watching the Tiger King. Drinking the last dregs of coconut rum neat, smoking the last American Spirits menthol, the last crumbs of a little gifted baggie of weed, meditating on this as the possible last night of that. I build up a lather and wash my hands for 20 seconds. 

In the dining room I turn on the lamp by the crate and pull out Donna Summers live, Bach’s Magnificat, Queen Latifah on now, and Sun Ra for Call. I sit in the white leather arm chair by the lamp in the living room feet up on the brass and glass coffee table by the baby blue haze of Elsie’s Plate and the tall green blades of a sod of wheatgrass. 

I read every word that my eyes can make out. I pause for colors and patterns and cuts and the gallery wallpaper pastedown. 

I stop and flip sides, change discs, gently lay the needle. make tea.

It was a mission tonight of the most urgent. I’m holding in my heart my friend Josh Singer who just died and Monica Hand who died four years ago and Michael Brown who died six years ago.

I can respect a book that begins with a manifesto ars poetica, 

I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice.

and ends with a call,

It is You. Here’s a mirror. Look behind You, beyond You. Here’s a portal. Jump through it. Make Magic. 

I can adore a book of poetry with the pacing of an art book with introductory essays at the front, 

Read aloud. Pay attention to what your skin tells you. Breathe. Do not stop breathing no matter the pain or joy you feel in places you have denied fear and desire. And love. -Maria Eliza Osunbimpe Hamilton Abegunde

To read this book of collected poems and collages is to experience an artist’s multitudes in symbiosis. Her words cut. The images speak. -Jamila Woods 

Too Much Midnight is a long-awaited opus of conjoined miracles for Franklin’s cult of admirers, devotees, and disciples. -Greg Tate 

The Prussian blue of the cyanotype becomes other kinds of blues. Can we just sit with the blue for a moment? For many moments?” -Cauleen Smith

and at the back an interview with our beloved poet artist, Krista Franklin,

Some days, the realization that I’m still alive and can find moments to laugh with abandon in this brutal world is a transformative experience to me. 

Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin is published by Haymarket Press 2020. Get your copies here!

Learning the Limits of Canvas

The Enormously Useful Art of Chloë Bass

I am writing this blog post because I need the help of Chloë Bass. I am currently putting together an album of photographs from my eight months being a foster parent to a three year old. My story is sad. The state removed her from my home abruptly a year ago, and we haven’t seen each other since. Best practice tells us that photo albums are a useful part of the healing process for kids in foster care to regain access to their time in former homes and the parts of their life that they experienced there and during that time. I am the keeper of eight months of her life.

Right now I am at an impasse with the process of making the albums because I don’t feel like I have the skill set to manage the grief. 

The task I set is also hard. I am making two copies of the album; one that I hope will get to her, and one that I will keep in case the first gets lost. I have finished the first one, but putting together the second is laborious because I don’t have doubles of all the photos. As I create the replica, i am taking notes on which photos I need to reprint. Every photo for which I don’t have a double feels like a failure.

I had the idea this evening that maybe sitting with my memories of Chloë’s project with family photos and home movies may help me overcome the impasse.

Chloë began Obligation to Others Hold Me in My Place, an investigation into family, in January 2018 as she was finishing up her previous project The Book of Everyday Instruction which investigated dyadic relationships.

Obligation is an archive project. She sent a call out to her communities and friends for their old family photos. She also spent time exploring various archives of home movies and photographs. She had a residency at Recess Analog where she posted photos and text from her research mostly focused on interracial families including her own. She hosted Family Home Movie Nights where guests were invited to bring their own family photos and videos to show along with selections from the archive she has been compiling. Additionally she has been developing THIS IS A FILM which weaves text and clips from public archives of home movies including the Chicago Film Archive.

The work of working in the archive is that you have to keep going and that as you go through the archive you are hit with emotions and your own thoughts and memories. The art that Chloë makes perhaps then is a form of her processing. 

The form of THIS IS A FILM manifests the relationship between archive and processing a personal response to the archive. Its first iteration, THIS IS A FILM 1.0 was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was part of the Friday night series where the museum bring contemporary artists to respond to the exhibits. Chloë was responding to the History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift exhibit, and she gave a lecture-performance that wove descriptions of footage from the archives with quotes from writers including Lauren Berlant and bell hooks. The audience was given headphones so that they could walk around the exhibit and look as they listened although a few took off their headphones and gathered in front of Chloë as audiences do. 

As THIS IS A FILM progressed Chloë revised the text by deleting sections and adding new ones, and she included video projection of clips from the archive. Often the clips are from parties where people are dancing. 

I have a short video from THIS IS A FILM 1.3.1 that she performed at CRUSH #9, the reading series Susanne Goldberg hosts at Woodbine. Chloë sits on a chair reading from 8 1/2" by 11" white paper: “All the way up to $74.95, for young couple in love 1948 strange found family photo snapshot good looking cute. Like every other l…”  Above her high on the wall near the gold-painted tin ceiling, one black man in what looks like a pink shirt has his arm around another black man in a red shirt. They are smiling. They are dancing. 

The last and final THIS IS A FILM was performed at the Bronx River Arts Center as part of an event for the group show TABLEAU curated by Chad Strayrook. I missed THIS IS A FILM 1.9, but I did catch the show which included a television screen that looped THIS IS A FILM (1.2.1) and We say love (Tryptich). The center image of We say love has two images and text. The background is a black and white image of the belly and thighs of someone in a plaid shirt and pale trousers with a hand. The foreground is a color photo of what could be an interracial family: the father, black, in yellow shirt, construction hat, and large belt buckle, big smile, holding a brown toddler;  the ginger mother in pink and white striped teeshirt her left arm draped across her brown daughter who stands in front of her and her right arm on the back of her husband. Underneath the images the text reads, “We say love like love solves problems, as if we never do terrible things to the people we hold in its name.” The picture looks like a picture of such a happy family, but the text underneath invites us to contemplate our initial reading of the image and the limits of images to tell the story of family. 

I think my impasse is one of the discipline it takes to work in the archive. For me the moment of analysis, of starting to talk about what I am seeing as I look more closely is the enjoyable work. Or that’s what I’m ready to do now that the first album is finished. But, I can’t yet. I want to make sure I have the two copies and so the discipline of compiling the archive at times is emotionally challenging as I put organized method over immediate desire. Or, putting together the first album is putting together a photo album; putting together the second album is a confrontation of the reality that I need to put together the second album. If this were an interview with Chloë that’s what i’d ask her about. What was it like going through the archives? What were the hardest moments? What did you do to get through them? How did you balance the work of reading through the archive to compile your own with the work of writing about and making you own art from it?

Creative Thinking

NSA Power Mapping Curriculum

Power Mapping Curriculum

Week 1

Friday, July 15; 9am-12pm (play monopoly/history of copyright)

 

Week 2

Prep: prepare for Friday's session by taking stats on your block: how many lots, how many lots have houses, how many are vacant? how many houses are vacant? In other words when home, take a moment to look around and assess the real estate potential as if their block was a monopoly board... Either count one by one or just eyeball for a guesstimate.

Friday, July 22; 10am-12pm (what properties to put on our monopoly boards; discuss role of revision)

 

Week 3

Monday, July 25; 9am-12pm (Hall of Records visit)

Wednesday, July 27 11am-12pm (Currently free-space but would perhaps like to do a follow up from Monday’s field trip to Hall of Records on the research and how to present it. Otherwise there is a long gap between the research on 7/25 and what we plan to do with it on 8/5.)

 

Week 4

Friday, August 5, 10am-12pm (discuss how to present research--what is the project of Monopoly--what is our project--do we want to challenge/complicate value system at work in Monopoly? How to do that in form and content?)

 

Week 5

Friday, August 12, All Day Field Trip to Atlantic City

 

Week 6

Monday, August 15, 9am-12pm (build monopoly prototypes)

Friday, August 19 11am-12pm (perhaps use free-space for playing the prototypes that were made/discussing what now)

Supplies Needed

Monopoly

Poster board

Index Cards

Markers

Rulers

Color pencils

Pencils

Erasers

Scissors

Xacto knives and blades

Glue

Index cards

Pens