Purple Kingsessing

The legumes are one family that leaves the soil more enriched at the end of its tenure than it inherited at the beginning.

—Leah Penniman, Farming While Black

The name on the seed packet— purple Kingsessing—was familiar, like an old family name. We had amassed a stockpile of seeds over the years, expired leftovers from the community in northeast Georgia where we’d lived and worked for six-and-a-half years. A few winters back, we found a small farm to call our own, just half a mile away. At the first signs of spring in our new place, my husband and I began to turn over the soil. I shuffled through the envelopes of seeds, wondering if I could coax some growth out of any of them, especially these beans with a name that sounds like home. I can buy dry beans cheaper than I can grow them, but this planting would not be for food.

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Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods and, for eleven years, the Kingsessing neighborhood was my home. On the map, it is shaped like a headless bird in flight. The bend of the wing is formed by train tracks that carry R-3 commuters and Amtrack trains downtown, and the wing tip is just above the piece of Cobbs Creek that snakes through Mount Moriah Cemetery. The Schuylkill River outlines the breast, and Bartram’s Garden, a historic botanical garden and public park, is a fifty-acre green patch on its belly. When the Quaker naturalist John Bartram built his home and garden along the river in 1728, all of Kingsessing was a sylvan retreat, a lush riparian environment with perfect soil for growing food. Although it was miles from the tight cobblestone streets of what we call Old City Philadelphia, Kingsessing is the oldest neighborhood in the city. Swedish settlers made their homes there in the 1640s, and before that, the Lenape people had been farming, fishing, hunting and trading there for innumerable generations—their oral history remembers the mastodons.

The Kingsessing Recreation Center is a nine-acre green rectangle where the wing meets the shoulder. Until 1913, it was the site of the Belmont Cricket Club. Now the number thirteen trolley stops with a squeal at every numbered street, past the playground, fields, tennis and basketball courts at the rec center, past row houses, store-front churches, beauty shops, and restaurants along Chester Avenue, which bends into Kingsessing Avenue as it winds its way out of the city. My older children learned to swim at the Kingsessing pool and to shout in unison at the command of the lifeguard: “No peein’ in the pool! No poopin’ in the pool! No runnin’ in the pool! No fightin’ in the pool!” When the city was trying to cut funding to libraries, I added my name to a class-action lawsuit to protect the Kingsessing Library, one of the buildings Andrew Carnegie designated in 1919 to be “used forever.”

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I’m not from Philadelphia, but I was conceived near there, in a colonial farmhouse that once belonged to my grandmother’s friend, Layle Lane. Lane was born in 1898 in Marietta, Georgia, about a hundred miles east of where I live now. Her father was almost lynched for being a pastor and educator who talked and looked “too white.” Lane’s family joined the throng of African Americans who, beginning in the early twentieth century, left behind land and dreams in the American South for refuge in Northern cities. She became an activist and leader in the socialist party; she helped plan the first March on Washington in 1941. As a schoolteacher in New York City she wanted to start a farm camp for city kids. Her white-passing brother signed the deed to enable her to purchase land in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a northern suburb of Philadelphia. She named it La Citadelle, after the fort where General Toussaint Louverture secured liberty for Haiti.

Long after the camp had closed, my grandmother befriended Lane and frequently visited her land to escape the...