Where Healing is Happening
by Courtney searcy
FEATURED IN VOL 6, ISSUE 2: home and garden
Anyone who knows Winfred Keith Davis knows there’s something to be discovered at every turn. To some, he is a yoga teacher, leading meditations and creating space to heal body and mind. To others he is a mentor, reading with a student at a local elementary school, or a voice in the community choir, or an actor on the stage at the Ned.
Standing in his garden, this kind of fullness of life is on clear display. It’s a teeming work in progress. There are trays of plants waiting to be planted in the earth, and a wheelbarrow full of mirrors that will be placed to reflect more light in the garden.
This home where his garden now thrives is the same home he grew up in. In many ways, coming back home was a return to painful memories, but it was also a return to healing.
His family moved to Jackson from nearby Bells, Tennessee in 1959, a time marked by grief. In the years surrounding the move, Davis’s brother died after being hit by a car. His father was killed, without answers for their family. There was the trauma of loss, but there was also the trauma of racism.
Davis was born in 1955, which was the year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He would be 9 years old before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made racial discrimination illegal, and 10 years old when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. For Keith, returning to Jackson meant returning to a place where this history was his lived experience.
“What you are conditioned to believe about yourself is what you live. I was taught to sit in the balcony at the movie theater, not to drink out of the fountain. We were forbidden. Society had conditioned us to believe that we were less than,” Davis said. This was his childhood. While he dreamed of becoming an Olympic swimmer or an ambassador, he faced the reality of a society that told him he could not be those things because of the color of his skin.
Yet he also recalls the vibrant stories of his childhood in this neighborhood, the “village” that raised him. There was a chef, a prestigious professor at Lane College, a rumored bootlegger, and a fortune teller. There were prolific gardens from which food was shared, and streets where children played together.
The experiences Davis had after he left Jackson to attend Tufts University in 1973 could fill more pages than we have here. He went on to live in places like Paris and Los Angeles, meeting thinkers and writers and artists and all manner of folks who shaped him into the person he is today — including being invited to have dinner at James Baldwin’s home in the South of France. Another story for another day.
When Davis returned to Jackson in 2014 to take care of his sick mother, her garden, which had always been notable, was in disrepair.
“A lot of this is about processing the past. When I decided to come back here to take care of my mom, I had crashed after losing my partner Chris Taylor to an aggressive cancer, and I didn’t have sufficient time to heal,” he said.
His mother had lost weight. She wasn’t eating, and her cognitive abilities were fading. He began by placing artificial flowers on the dinner table. She started to sit at the table to eat her meals, gaining back her weight, and regaining some mental clarity.
“This was her pride, this little house,” Davis said. People would often remind him of her legacy. “Are you a Davis? She had the most wonderful yard,” they would recall.
In the back of the house, he set up a chair for her by the window and got to work. He hauled hundreds of rocks from a demolition site to build a raised bed she could see from the house. She watched and offered advice through the screen, but not without a watchful eye. “Oh my Lord, you’ve just messed up my backyard,” she’d say. But he continued to plant, claiming things from trash heaps and roadsides, filling it with as much color as possible. The garden began to bloom.
One day, his mother called him over. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She replied: “It’s so beautiful.”
After his mother passed away, Davis continued to develop his garden. There’s a Frida Khalo-inspired garden bed, a meditation path, and roses and flowers peeking around mirrors and weaving around structures. The landscape of the front yard extends out into the dead end of his street, where he hopes to welcome neighbors and friends.
“Whatever I can do on a small scale — I just want people to come. It’s a bridge, if I can help someone overcome the fear of the ‘other.’ It’s a risk for me, because it stirs up a lot of stuff. Jackson stirs up a lot. I was conditioned to ‘other’ myself, to distance myself, and a lot of the people who were participants in that are still here,” Davis reflects.
He recalls teaching a yoga class not long after he moved back to Jackson, when a woman in the class approached him. “I know you. I was your teacher,” she said. He grew nervous. She was one of his teachers during a particularly difficult time. He felt the need to explain those years, but she extended her hand to him as they talked. A small gesture of understanding reaching through time.
“This is how the healing process is happening for me,” Davis says, looking around his garden.•
Through the window into my backyard, I can see my garden, which is a little more full this year than the last. There are bright spots of color dotting the corner of my driveway, from flower seedlings given to me by one friend and squash from another. They are planted in pots gained from a friend moving away and from a neighbor I just met. I have two heirloom tomato plants from a man a few streets over who set extras out on the curb. I returned from talking with Keith Davis to unload a Rose of Sharon, oregano, cone flowers, and daisies he had given to me.
A few blocks over someone, like Keith, has extended their garden outside of the borders of their fence and into their yard, lining the sidewalk with hundreds of zinnias. I waited expectantly for these flowers to bloom this year. These neighbors carved out a space for me, though they are strangers. There is something to be said for our efforts to cultivate the particular corner of the world we call home — especially when it bursts outside of our boundary lines to make a place that welcomes in strangers. So I water my garden, and repeat Keith’s words with hope: for myself, for my community, and for my country. Though the pain is deep and the road is long, This is how the healing process is happening for us.
Courtney Searcy is the Program Director of Our Jackson Home at theCO. Jackson became home after she graduated from Union University in 2014, where she studied Graphic Design and Journalism. She thinks the best things in life are porch swings, brunch, art, music, and friends to share it all with.
