Mrs Kidd and the Collard Greens Thief
Posted by Alice Pennington on Wednesday, September 23, 2009
On a recent Hinges of Hope tour, my colleagues and I met one of those women you could sit and listen to for hours. Mrs. Kidd, a 96-year old woman who migrated to Toledo for work in 1942 from rural Mississippi, is clearly a force of strength in a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of changes and devastation over the 60 plus years she’s lived there.
Mrs. Kidd, a 96-year old woman who migrated to Toledo for work in 1942 from rural Mississippi, is clearly a force of strength in a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of changes and devastation over the 60 plus years she’s lived there.
A lifetime gardener and brilliant cook, she is the perfect advocate for the edible garden she hosts in her backyard. She brushes off her role in the garden as unimportant, but it’s clear it would be a completely different place without her there to comfort and cultivate not just the plants but also the kids who work there.
She invited us to sit in her “parlor,” a cluster of white lawn chairs scattered across the blocks of cement leading up to her front steps, to tell us a quick story. One evening last week she caught a young man hurriedly pulling up collard green plants from the garden. She grabbed her cane to rush towards him, but he quickly fled the scene.
“He thought I was going to scold him, and all I really wanted to do was show him how to clip the plants properly so they’d grow back and produce more food.”
Mrs. Kidd’s response to the collard greens thief was one of her ways to help her community find long-term solutions to hunger.
September 23, 2009 | | Tags: change, hinges of hope, hunger
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