Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In ninth grade, my friend John walked the neighborhood early mornings with his father and two brothers. They scoured the streets in the dark for empty bottles and aluminum cans that they sold at a scrap yard on Ridge Avenue. John’s father suffered from a work-related injury which disqualified him from many jobs. Yet, it seemed he always found a way to earn a dollar. The dull clack of a crushed soda can or the bright ping of a glass bottle landing into an old rickety grocery cart often woke me up, as it did other boys in our crew.

The first time we learned it was John and his siblings making the noise in the pre-dawn hours, he denied it. One guy, Artrice, teased him all the time during lunch break, which made John feel ashamed of his family’s lack of resources. Eventually he stopped coming to the basketball court where we gathered after school.

But the truth was that all of our parents sought some kind of way to cut corners, to save or make extra money: a side job on the weekends, food coupons, hand-me-down clothes, a small plot in the community garden. My mother even called John’s family “industrious.”

Today’s poem dignifies the lives of people in low-income neighborhoods whose early practices of thrift and ingenuity created intrinsic values of sustainability, personal style, and care for human habitats.

eco-hood
by Melania Luisa Marte

i learned environmentalism from my hood.
i learned sustainability from my hood.
i learned to be frugal and fly from my hood.
i leaned to reuse tupperware, repurpose t-shirts, 
tie plastic bags to my head.
this be a shower cap, an umbrella, luggage,
a container for more bags.
this be a conversation starter, an educational tool,
a reminder to do what you can with what you got.

i learned environmentalism from my hood.
i learned to make aluminum jars pretty vases and pencil holders
i learned to not hoard, to be creative, to be brilliant.
i learned scraps of wood make tables from my cousin manolo.
i learned t-shirts can be dishrags from my mother-in-law.
i learned to throw seeds back into soil from my abuelita.

i leaned they blame the hood and not the heist by conglomerates.
i learned that the most vulnerable are the most targeted.
i learned real taste is not taxable, only renewable. 
you can’t buy this kind of intrinsic desire to make
one man’s trash another man’s dream.
at the edge of a landfill is a hood repurposing waste.
my favorite environmentalists don’t call themselves 
environmentalists, they just honor the earth and the land.

“eco-hood” by Melania Luisa Marte from PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING, © 2023 Melania Luisa Marte. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.