PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

A New Yorker cultivates a green thumb after moving abroad, creating for herself a garden of strength and serenity.

- VERONICA CHAMBERS

Growing up the daughter of poor Panamanian immigrants, I never had a garden. Then in college, I read Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, and to have a garden took on a new meaning for me. It became a metaphor for rooting myself and my work in the long history of Black-women activism, creativity, and the art of manufacturing possibility in the cracks between race, gender, and class that others ascribed to you. Walker's book is full of lush, powerful prose, but almost every Black woman I know can recite this line by heart: "Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."

In the summer of 2020, the United States saw the biggest protest movement in American history in Black Lives Matter. It was a hard summer, one in which I often went to bed crying and woke up crying. It was also when my employer, the New York Times, gave me the opportunity of a lifetime: to work in one of its foreign bureaus. So with social upheaval and a pandemic raging in the United States, my husband, daughter, and I moved to London.