What Difference Do It Make?

by Ron Hall

  “Them damn Republicans are responsible for everything bad in the whole world,” Daddy’d holler like he was speaking through a bullhorn from the back of a rail car on a whistle-stop campaigntour. He blamed the GOP for everything from communism to arthritis. And if he temporarily ran out of things to blame them for, he might throw in acne and ingrown toenails.

  The whole time Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, Daddy thought Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson was a sterling hero who could save America and ought to kick Ike out on his can. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960, Daddy didn’t much like him. But Earl was a yellow-dog Democrat who would vote for a four-legged canine of any color before he would vote for a Republican. So when November came, he held his nose and voted for JFK, even if the man was a Catholic and a Yankee.

  4

  Denver

  Ever Sunday, a field hand drivin a mule wagon wound down the dirt plantation road gatherin up colored folks to haul em off to praise the Lord . . . The preacher, Brother Eustis Brown, was just another field hand. But he was the onlyest man I knowed besides [my] Uncle James that could read the Bible . . .

  “Brother Brown, we done heard that message about a hun’erd times,” one of the older women would say, somebody with gumption like my auntie, Big Mama’s sister. “When you gon’ change the sermon?”

  Brother Brown would just gaze up at the [church’s] holey roof and shake his head, kinda sad. “I work out there in the cotton with y’all, and ever week, the Lord shows me what’s goin on in the congregation so I’ll know what to preach on Sunday. When I start seein some changes out there,” he’d say, pointing toward the plantation, “I’ll be changin what I preach in here.”

  That’s how I learned the Bible without know in how to read.

  Aunt Etha and Uncle James didn’t have a single book in their shotgun shack ’cept the Bible. I didn’t know how to read it, though, ’cause at that time colored children couldn’t go to school. I had heard of some colored children gettin some schoolin in some other places, but on my plantation in Red River Parish, we stayed home and worked the fields. There was one time when all the children worked, white and colored, and that was pickin time. When King Cotton came in, all the kids stayed home and helped.

  After we worked in the fields, the white kids would go inside their houses and get cleaned up for supper. But the colored kids would line up on the front porch, every one of us naked as a jaybird, to take our bath in a number-ten washtub. We all used the same water ’cause the water come from a cistern that catched the rain off the roof, and we didn’t have no water to throw away. We had some well water, too, from a well that I had watched three or four sharecroppers dig. But that water was as cold as snow. Wadn’t no way we wanted to take a bath in that.

  When I was a teenager, I started to earn a few pennies here and there scrappin cotton for the Man. There wadn’t no place to spend it ’cept at the Man’s store on the plantation, but I saved it anyway in a Prince Albert tobacco can with a hole cut in the top. I hid that can in the crawl space underneath Aunt Etha’s house, and I remember one time when we was gon’ go into town, I was real happy ’cause we hardly ever went to town. Now I was gon’ get to spend my pennies in a real store, not the Man’s store. But when I went up under the house to get the money, I detected a crime. The Prince Albert can was still there, but it was stone-cold empty!

  For a coupla minutes, I just hunkered there down under the floorboards with the dirt and the spiders, thinkin. After a while, I recollected a clue. Sometimes I had seen my brother, Thurman, walkin down the red plantation road eatin some candy or some cheese that he got. A coupla times, he had some cheese in his mouth and a stick a’ candy pokin out the pocket of his overalls like he was some kinda rich fella livin high on the hog. And now I remembered he wouldn’t give me none of it, and he wouldn’t tell me how he got it neither.

  Well, once I recollected that, I figured out that the money thief couldn’ta been nobody but Thurman, and I was sho ’nough peeved off.

  I stormed up out from under the house, hollerin, “Thurman! Thurman stole my money!”

  Well, Thurman must a’ heard me ’cause right then he come bustin through the front door of Aunt Etha’s, runnin like somebody’d set his feet on fire. Burnin mad, I picked up an old brick and chased my brother ’round an’ ’round the outside of the house like we was wooden horses on a merry-go-round. But he was older than me and a little faster, and I never could catch him. So I got smart and stopped by the corner near the cistern and waited. Things got real quiet, and I couldn’t hear Thurman runnin no more.

  “Li’l Buddy?” he called out. That’s what everbody called me then.

  I kept my mouth shut, quiet as a squirrel hidin from a bobcat.

  Right then, Thurman stuck his ugly head out from around the corner of the house, and I let that brick go flyin.

  Bull’s-eye! Hit him square upside the head!

  I was mighty proud a’ standin up for myself. Thurman wobbled like a drunk man, and I even drew blood. But Uncle James wadn’t proud at all, and he gave me the worst whuppin of my life.

  From that time on, I was discouraged ’bout trustin folks, even the ones you s’posed to be able to trust, like your brother.

  5

  Ron

  The first time I saw Deborah, I began plotting to steal her. Not for myself at first, but for Sigma Chi, the fraternity I pledged after transferring from East Texas State to [Texas Christian University] . . . It was the spring of 1965, and I was on academic probation. Deborah, meanwhile, was a sophomore on an academic scholarship . . . I planned to make her a Sigma Chi sweetheart, a little inter-frat coup that carried with it the novel perk of adding an intellectual girl to our table at the Student Union.

  In the spring of 1969, I asked Deborah to marry me. Early on, we discovered that we were not able to have children the old-fashioned way, though trying was an awful lot of fun.

  When we told my daddy that we were unable to have children, he questioned my manhood. When we told him we had put our names on the list at the Edna Gladney Home to adopt two children, his face turned grim, and he pointed an index finger in my face: “That’s a real big mistake, Buddy-roo,” he said. “You’ll be sorry.”

  Earl Hall was against adoption and in favor of orphan homes and prison. In his opinion, there was no way in hell a person would give up a child for adoption unless that child was going to be, to use his words, “ugly or a retard.”

  To his way of thinking, there was a good chance of our winding up with a child who was both.

  Thankfully, he lived to eat those words as God blessed us with Regan and Carson, who we believed were perfect little babes who had been tucked under dewy leaves in the garden of Eden, just waiting for us and meant to be ours.

  Daddy never once called them or came to see them. (At least he was consistent.) But we took the kids to see him, and they loved and honored him in spite of himself.

  ABE

  The Ripple Effect

  It took a few years, but Emily Alexander has learned never to say never. We heard about Emily and her husband, Moody, through their friend Mandy Elmore, another Same Kind reader. (Mandy has her own story, which you can read about beginning on page 118.

  ) Married for fifteen years, the Alexanders, who live just down the road from us in Arlington, Texas, intentionally built themselves a good-sized family. Their oldest son, Hill, was born thirteen years ago. Then they had Wick, another son, now eleven, followed by daughter Avery, now ten, and little Isabelle, seven, whom they call Issy for short.

  And that was that.

  When people would ask Emily whether she was done having kids, she wouldn’t just say yes. She’d say, “Done, done, done! Four is enough!”

  “We were content with our family size and felt fulfilled,” Moody says, adding that he had taken medical steps to keep it that way.

  But then Emily also said she’d never homeschool—and she started homeschooling Hill at age six. “The Lord often has a plan far different f
rom our own,” she says.

  In early 2007, Emily read Same Kind of Different as Me; then she passed it on to Moody. Both of them felt what she calls a “proper unsettling,” a sense of no longer being content with the status quo. “I remember calling my sister and telling her that I was afraid of having regrets, of getting to the end of my life and knowing I could’ve done more to make a difference—but didn’t.”

  Emily and Moody began praying, searching for a place to make that difference, a way to help. “I thought maybe it would involve driving right down the road and helping out at the Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth,” Emily says.

  Instead, the Alexander grown-ups found the answer right under their own roof.

  The Alexander kids had never cottoned to their parents’ idea that four kids was enough. Over the years, they’d clamored for more siblings, reminding Emily and Alexander how much fun it would be to have a baby around the house. Especially Avery, who absolutely adored babies and wanted one of her own to care for. Even Moody’s medical guarantee against a bigger family proved no obstacle for the Alexander kids, who lobbied for adoption on a regular basis.

  Later in 2007, one of Emily’s college friends, a woman named Kristin, went on a summer mission trip to Zambia.

  Excited for their friend and still searching for some larger purpose in life, the Alexanders sat down to watch a DVD about the mission. The video featured dark-skinned, chocolate-eyed children with faces like cherubs . . . and with no parents. Kristin was going to work in an orphanage.

  Little Isabelle spoke up immediately. “Why can’t we just bring one of those kids home?”

  “No,” Emily told her. “We feel like our family’s complete.”

  The children pointed out that some family friends of the Alexanders had adopted children from Africa.

  “Well, that’s so great for them,” Emily said, smiling. “But I don’t think that’s what God has in mind for our family.”

  Then Hill, the oldest boy, said to his mother, “Well, will you at least please pray about it?”

  And what do you say to that but yes?

  A series of circumstances and events—the kids’ longing, the tugging on their own hearts when they saw the plight of African children, and their own search for a larger purpose—convinced the Alexanders to take the adoption plunge. A little research showed them that even though twenty-five million orphans live in Africa, Ethiopia is one of just a handful of African nations that allow international adoptions. And most of the time, Ethiopian children are adopted by twos, threes, and fours since it is the government’s policy not to split up siblings.

  So it was settled. The Alexanders would apply to adopt an Ethiopian child—and not just one child but two.

  “We actually liked the idea of adopting two children,” Moody said of the children they hoped would become part of their family. “We thought it would help with the transition. Plus, our kids couldn’t decide between a little brother and a little sister!”

  So Emily and Moody requested a brother/sister set between the ages of one and five.

  The Alexanders began saving money for a family trip to Ethiopia to take place in the summer of 2008, and the kids were overjoyed. But Avery, who was eight years old at the time, was not about to let either her parents or the Ethiopian government decide she was going to have just a little brother and sister. She wanted a baby.

  B-a-b-y.

  One day, while feeding a bottle to the adopted baby of Alexander family friends, a little boy named Silas, Avery began to cry. She told Emily that she wanted a baby from Africa, not a toddler—or worse, somebody already well on his or her way to being a big kid.

  But Emily didn’t want Avery to be under any delusions. “I continually reminded her that we wouldn’t be receiving a referral of an infant,” she says. “I knew where we were on the wait list, and I knew several families ahead of us who were specifically requesting infants in their sibling groups.”

  Emily gently told Avery not to get her hopes up.

  Avery walked away, telling Emily over her shoulder, “Well, I can still pray for a baby.”

  In May 2008, the Alexanders received amazing news. Adoption officials in Ethiopia referred to the family a two-month old baby boy.

  “Here’s the baby you prayed for,” Emily said when she placed the baby in Avery’s arms.

  The Alexanders’ story doesn’t end there. After caring for Abe for several weeks, the family noticed that the baby seemed developmentally delayed. He wasn’t sitting up yet, had zero head control, and didn’t seem to have a normal range of movement for a child his age. At first the Alexanders chalked the problems up to the lack of nurturing a child would receive in a nuclear family. But soon they suspected it was something more.

  After an extensive series of medical tests, doctors delivered their diagnosis. It appeared Abe had suffered several strokes inside the womb. The baby had a form of cerebral palsy. Worse, his brain was missing its entire frontal lobe.

  “The day we got Abe’s diagnosis, we were devastated,” Emily remembers. She and Moody had to work hard not to allow their minds to wander off into worst-case scenarios. Still, Emily cried over what she felt in some ways was a broken dream.

  But little Avery held the dream up in a new light. She had spent hours with construction paper and glue, creating a collage composed of pictures of her new baby brother, especially pictures of Avery and Abe together. Also, she painstakingly cut individual letters out of magazine headlines to create a title for her artwork:

  For This Child I Prayed

  When Emily saw Avery’s finished project, she read the title out loud—“For this child I prayed”—and realized that there was nothing accidental or broken about Abe’s presence in the Alexander family.

  “I got to a point pretty quickly after his diagnosis that of every mom in the world, God chose me to be Abe’s mom,” Emily remembers. “The Lord has given me an incredible amount of patience. For example, Abe doesn’t sleep, so I don’t sleep. But things that at one point seemed like a big deal just aren’t a big deal anymore. Abe has simplified our lives in the best way.”

  Had he stayed in Ethiopia, Abe would not have survived. But here, in America, he is making so much progress that neurologists say he is literally defying modern medicine. Responses that would normally travel through the frontal lobe seem to have found a back road in Abe’s brain.

  “He’s super alert,” Emily said. “He tracks with his eyes, has great facial recognition, and he can hear and verbalize.”

  One doctor told the Alexanders, “If I hadn’t seen Abe before I saw his MRI, I would never think it was the same child.”

  By April 2009, during occupational therapy sessions, Abe was beginning to be able to move his left leg and arm, creating new neurological connections and confirming for his amazed family that God was at work.

  “[Abe] was super determined and not nearly as miserable as some of the faces he managed to make,” Emily wrote on the family’s blog. “Keep praying—we see Him working daily.”

  Everyone is so quick to say that Abe is blessed that a family like the Alexanders adopted him, Emily says. “But our family is so much more blessed to have Abe. He is this fourteen-month-old teacher. Sometimes just opening his hand takes an enormous amount of effort and energy, but Abe works so hard in therapy, and my other kids get to see this determination. He just has this little, bright light, radiating an inner joy that you can’t explain.”

  The Alexanders like to talk about “the ripple effect” of Abe’s adoption. Like throwing a pebble in a pond, it has brought people together who have gone on the journey with them, both physically and spiritually. Through Abe, the Alexander children have learned to pray more consistently and more specifically, and they have passed that lesson along to others. A young boy named Jeremiah, the son of family friends, called to say there is a tree near his home that blooms red in winter and reminds him of Abe. Jeremiah prays for Abe every day when he passes the tree on his way to school. In May 2009, th
e Alexanders received an e-mail from dear friends who said that after watching Abe and his new family, they, too, have decided to adopt a child. The same month, the Alexanders completed their paperwork for a second adoption from Ethiopia.

  6

  Ron

  Every couple of months, Deborah and I would take Mama and Daddy to a nice restaurant. He would grab the first waitress he laid eyes on, whether ours or not, and in a voice much louder than necessary, say, “Honey, before you do another thing, I need a whiskey—Jim Beam and Coke, not too much Coke!”

  I remember one night at a restaurant when I’d had enough of his disrespecting my mama, and I let a disgusted look creep onto my face. He looked back at me, puzzled, as though I were an alien specimen from an unknown universe.

  “What have you got against drinking?” he said, sure that had to be the problem.

  “Nothing, Dad. Sometimes I even have one.”

  “Well then, why won’t you drink with your old daddy? You think you’re too good?”

  Never did I let him see me take a drink. I even quit drinking altogether for a couple of years. That was after Carson, who was an otherwise perfect child, came home drunk in high school and wrecked his room with a boat paddle from Kanakuk Christian camp. When I was sure I never craved alcohol, I started again, allowing myself wine with a fancy dinner.

  By 1975, I was working in investment banking in Fort Worth, where I first made my mark as a fine-arts dealer. I quickly got too big for my britches and, in 1986, decided we needed to move to Dallas in order to grow my business and be truly appreciated by the art-world elite.

  That’s where Deborah and I started to grow apart. While I stormed the art world and collected a closetful of Armani suits and custom-made boots painstakingly handmade from the skins of various animals, Deborah plugged into God, pursuing a passionate spiritual life that included working with AIDS babies and hours spent on her knees in prayer.