A Story About a Plant: Part 2

A Home…

I moved into this apartment in January of 2019 but I first saw it in fall 2018 when word came to through friends that the person who had lived here for ten years was in Brazil and might be moving out altogether. It was a coveted space, part of a house that had been home to Black artists, dancers, creatives, and weirdos ever since a Haitian actor named Jesu had inherited it from their mother who bought it in the 90’s when everything in Oakland was much cheaper and you could theoretically buy a whole house with the money you earned helping activists, drug dealers, and other enemies of the state fake their own deaths. Not saying that happened, just that it theoretically could have.

Jesu grew up in Oakland, fell in love with dance, music, and performing, and when their mom died and the house fell into their hands, they turned it into a place where their artist friends could live and rehearse and eat community dinners in loud groups and play African drums late into the night without being gentrified out of existence by little sidewalk libraries and Black Lives Matter signs. Rent stays low. Jesu makes do. People help one another. My apartment is tucked in the back of the building which is a rambling Edwardian with so many crevices, twists, and turns that even though I’ve lived here for years, I still don’t quite know which rooms in the main house are on the other side of my walls. The bedroom is a glass-enclosed add-on that looks out over hills and trees and, increasingly, condos for tech kids in their early 30’s. I first…