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The Back

Toni Schlesinger, the author of Five Flights Up, has spent the last year visiting and photographing the homes of people who have been hit by the economic crash—people who lost their money, their savings, their terrors, their dream-lives, and their pluck. Step inside their lives with "House Calls."

One day in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Reverends Robert and Devanie Jackson discussed hunger.

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The Pantry

There are different people in our food lines these days, say the Jacksons, who founded the Brooklyn Rescue Mission and food pantry in 2002 and then started a farm in the back. “They are younger people who you would never anticipate would be in a food line—Mexican, Asian, Indian, white—a whole spectrum of people,” Robert says. “They don’t live in the neighborhood but they’ve found the pantry.”

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The Mission

Robert: “We have phone calls, e-mails, so many reaching out. Somebody e-mails using a library computer, ‘Where are you, I’m hungry.’ The new people are displacing the old people. The people who’ve been coming for years are having to compete more for the same bags.”

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The Food

Devanie: “We might have done 200 bags a week a year ago but they are not the same people. They are being displaced by people who show up earlier, who are hungrier.”

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The Farm

Robert: “We started the farm a year after the pantry. The state says we’re a bonafide farm, not just a garden. The produce goes to market. Seven to l4,000 pounds a year—tomatoes, eggplant, collard greens, kale, okra, grapes, figs, strawberries. In summer months, 50 percent of the pantry bags have the fresh farm products. Each bag has three meals for three people for three days. One day a week is the Senior Pantry Program."

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The Flowers

Devanie: “We worked in the homeless shelters for the city for a lot of years. We graduated from SUNY at Purchase, took our caseworker exams. We’re from Brooklyn, the projects. We’re associated with Gospel Rescue Missions. The missionary work we do, they call it urban missions. I say to people, if we were reverends and we were in Nicaragua or someplace, they would totally get this work we do, opening a place for food.”

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The Tilling

Devanie: “They would get tilling the land, putting in rainwater harvesting systems and teaching people about backyard gardening, food sovereignty, and seed saving that are part of the global movement. We have a lot of neighbors laugh at us—get a goat, get a sheep. They laughed at Noah while he was building his ark.”

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The Parlor

Robert: “The economy’s impact on us? Huge! Grants dried up. Funding was difficult before. The way this program is structured, we carry most of the bills privately, out of our savings, our pensions. I hear a lot of people complaining about how they have no money. They have other sources of income. We don't. This parlor is where we mostly hang out, where we’re always working. The whole house is dedicated to the mission.”

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The Stairs

Robert: “Up here? We don’t have a living space. We have a bed with bags of laundry around it.”

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The Basement

The basement is where they keep the food. One day there were 45 cases of salmon!

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The Juice

Devanie: “A food pantry is only a part of the puzzle. We have too many people in this country who are hungry. There is no reason for people in Alabama lining up at food pantries when they’ve got all that rich, beautiful soil. When they’ve forgotten how to grow, they’ve lost touch. People in Louisiana, in Tennessee—they’re starving.”