Weathering the Storm

His face was battered. He squinted to see through the slits in his swollen eyes. Shades of black and blue surrounded his orbital bones. He’d taken a beating.

I wanted to turn away in horror. I wanted to ask him to stop staring at us.

A guard called out to him. “Keep it moving.”

He let his eyes close as he tilted his face upwards. A ray of sunshine beamed down on him.

“I’m just enjoying the garden,” he said softly. “I’ll get moving.” He drew a deep breath, smiled, then turned, disappearing through a doorway and down a hallway.

I thought about all we’d been through to get that prison garden program started. The days spent in the freezing winter wind assembling the greenhouse that came with no directions. The hot summer days spent tilling the soil by hand with shovels and hoes. The blisters and sweat and miles driven.

The man with the bruised face wasn’t one of our students. He was just another prisoner passing through, one of the 15,000 or so who enter the Georgia prison system every year. He was going through the diagnostic and classification progress to determine his security level. Then he’d be shipped to some remote region of the state to serve out his sentence.

Every male inmate in Georgia passes through this particular prison. Last year, HeartBound offered to build a garden and maintain it for the men who stay at the prison to maintain its operations. Of the 2,500 or so prisoners there, only 10 are in our “Roots to Reentry” horticulture program.

The man’s time in prison clearly hadn’t been going well. Someone had beaten him, for reasons I do not know. I didn’t know a thing about him, not his crime, not his name, not his hometown. But I knew his pain because I could see it all over his swollen, bruised face.

I thanked God for the garden. For the cold freezing wind and hot summer days. For the sweat and the Georgia clay and the hundreds of emails it had taken to get the horticulture program started.

For a few moments, that man was able to step outside, feel the warmth of sunshine on his skin, and behold the sight of a beautiful garden. Rows of cabbage and bok choy glistening in the sun. Blackberry vines putting out their first flowers. The lone surviving blueberry bush budding out. The clover in full bloom, buzzing with fat, hungry bees.

For a few moments he’d enjoyed peace and quiet and sunshine. And then he stepped back inside, back to the horrors that lie waiting, the dim-lit corridors and cell blocks where the lights never shut off and the smoke from welded iron cages hangs in the air.

For a few moments, this man knew goodness. For in that garden, he saw God, whether he knew it or not.