Seven community gardens are producing cucumbers, squash, okra and other vegetables in south Cape Girardeau neighborhoods this summer. The gardens are the work of Robert Harris, Jr., a master gardener who dedicates himself to helping those in need.
Harris walks through his vegetable garden near the corner of Sprigg and William Streets in Cape Girardeau. This lush, green patch boasts plump, bright yellow squash that will soon go to a food pantry about 100 feet from the garden. From there, it will be distributed to people who need it.
“I grew up gardening,” Harris said. “But as we got older, and you think about things in your past and you think about the people that you saw who were hungry, as I got older the desire to want to give something back got stronger. And so here I am, doing this.”
Harris was born in a sharecropper shack near New Madrid, the oldest of five siblings. He worked from an early age in the cotton and watermelon fields of the Bootheel. It was hard work, he said, and it made him grow up fast.
Like many African Americans, his parents moved north from Mississippi to Missouri before he was born. They settled in Haywood City. His father later became a minister and moved the family to Cape Girardeau.
“A lot of us moved from the Bootheel up to Cape in the mid-’60s, late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And so it was like a migration north,” he said. “And a lot of older people I still see and I know them. But then I see they worked hard all their lives. And they took whatever jobs that they could get.”
Harris drives a bus for Cape Girardeau public schools. But in the 1980s, he started to get interested in gardening, and found he has a gift for growing plants.
“I would go in the store, and I found myself staring at the plants. In the ‘80s, you know, it wasn’t considered a guy thing, really, to be growing plants,” Harris said. “So a lot of times when I would get a plant, you know, and kind of put it to the side and ease up to the register and make sure no one is looking, you know. And then I would slip out of the store with the plant.”
Now, he’s a master gardener and puts his talents to use by growing vegetables for the elderly and those in need. Many of those people he serves, he said, are the same sharecroppers he watched work the cotton fields every day. But not long ago, Harris was the one who needed a helping hand.
“I’m a five year cancer survivor. What was thought of as being terminal, you know, I’m still here,” he said. “Your physical strength at the time- you look and you see that you’re not able to do anything hardly. Somebody has to help you do these things. And then you get to where you slowly pull yourself back up.”
Robert Harris said his experience with cancer gives him more compassion to help those who are sick and elderly and in need of help.
“Sickness and death and things can be so big that you need help,” Harris said. “And then when you see that you have a chance again at life, you need to use every day in the best way that you can.”
Harris has seen hunger, and he’s haunted by those 65 and 70 year olds who continued to work the fields to earn a little money for something to eat, well after their bodies loss the strength to chop cotton.
That’s what drives him, he said, to use his gift for plants to stave off a little hunger now.
