by Ron Hall
“I was hoping you’d go with me,” she said, smiling and tilting her head in a way so irresistible I sometimes thought she should register it for a patent.
The mission, on East Lancaster Street, was tucked deep in a nasty part of town. While it was true that the murder rate in Texas had been falling, I was sure that anyone still doing any murdering probably lived right around there.
I smiled back. “Sure I’ll go.”
But secretly, I hoped that once she actually rubbed shoulders with the kind of skuzzy derelicts that had robbed my gallery, Deborah would find it too scary, too real, to volunteer on East Lancaster . . .
I should’ve known better . . .
That night, she dreamed about the mission . . . and this time, about a man.
“It was like that verse in Ecclesiastes,” she told me the next morning over breakfast. “A wise man who changes the city. I saw him . . . I saw his face.”
I remember when Mr. Ron and Miss Debbie started comin down to the mission. This couple was dressed real nice—not fancy or nothin like that but nice enough to make a lot of us wonder if Mr. Ron was the law.
Funny thing about it was, they started comin one Tuesday and never did stop. Now, we was used to some groups comin ever now and then, or maybe on the holidays, like Thanksgivin or Christmas. Ain’t nothin wrong with that, ’cept it makes the homeless feel like they ain’t nobody special unless it’s some kinda special day.
I can’t blame nobody for just comin on the holidays ’cause most folks work, and they can’t do nothin but come when it’s a vacation day or maybe on the weekends. I can’t sling no mud about that ’cause I ’xpect most people doin all they can do. ’Course, if that ain’t true, maybe they need to think about that.
Them’s the folks I scratch my head about. I just can’t figure out why folks go all year without reachin out to help a brother or a sister ’cept on Thanksgivin or Christmas or Easter. It’s almost like a light goes on, a lit-up sign in their mind that says, “It’s Thanksgivin. I’m gon’ serve God,” or “It’s Christmas. I’m gon’ serve God.”
What about when it ain’t Thanksgivin or Christmas? Is people hungry on other days besides Thanksgivin? Does they need shoes on other days besides Christmas? God treasures the things we do, not because it’s a special day or a special time. All things is special when you doin it for God.
But when you reachin out to folks, ’specially if you just reachin out when other folks expects it, you got to ask yourself—is you doin it for God, or is you doin it for you? The things you do for nothin is the things you keep forever. ’Cause when you servin down here ’cause you ’xpect somethin—maybe like your friends is lookin at you like you is some kinda saint, or it’s the holidays, and you feel guilty ’cause you ain’t done nothin for nobody all year—then you ain’t doin it for “nothin.” You doin it for somethin. If you doin it for somethin, you already done got paid. God don’t pay no overtime.
Don’t give yourself credit for what you do. Don’t let your right hand know what your left is doin. If you lookin for pride and prestige and glory, you lookin for trouble. We got to put our pride aside and take care a’ God’s business.
I ain’t got no way to read the mind a’ God, but I ’xpect part a’ His business is makin it Christmas for somebody ever day. If all the Christians—I mean all of ’em—got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we’d shut the city down.
We’d shut down hunger.
We’d shut down loneliness.
We’d shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don’t deserve a kind word and a second chance.
9
Ron
“I’m gon’ kill whoever done it!” he screamed. “I’m gon’ kill whoever stole my shoes!” Then he sprayed the air with a volley of curses and advanced into the crowd, roundhousing his fists at anyone stupid enough to get in his way . . .
“I think you should try to make friends with him.”
“Me!” My eyes widened in disbelief. “Did you not notice that the man you want me to make friends with just threatened to kill twenty people?”
[Deborah] laid her hand on my shoulder and tilted her head with a smile. “I really think God’s laid it on my heart that you need to reach out to him.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying hard to ignore the head tilt, “but I wasn’t at that meeting where you heard from God.”
After Denver and I struck up our unlikely friendship at the mission, we had a bargain. I was going to show him how to get along with the country-club set, and he was going to show me how to get along in the ’hood. When Deborah first dragged me down to serve at the mission, my biggest worry was catching a disease or some kind of creepy-crawly infestation. But after a while, my heart toward the homeless softened up to the point where I actually started going out into the streets with Denver to reach out to the homeless.
And yet for all of my brand-new do-gooding, I was still a judgmental varmint. I wish I could say that “deep down” I was a judgmental varmint. But no, it was pretty much right there on the surface.
I remember one day in particular when Denver and I went out on the streets surrounding the mission. I had maybe a couple of hundred bucks in cash, and I’d visit with people, ask how they were doing, and bless them with a few dollars.
It’s important to draw a distinction between “blessing” the homeless and “helping” the homeless. I used to think I was helping by serving a meal or giving them some clothes, but I found out that for the most part I was just helping myself, making myself feel warm and fuzzy and philanthropic.
To be sure, it is a blessing to the homeless when they see people who care. But to really help, you’ve got to get down in the pit with people and stay with them until they find the strength to get on your shoulders and climb out. Helping someone is when you find out how to help them move toward wholeness and then hang with them until they make a change.
So when Denver and I walked the streets of Fort Worth, it was with the specific intent of bringing blessing. Of stopping to talk to people who are used to folks crossing streets to avoid talking to them. Of being a bright smile, a touch of humanity.
It was a crisp, autumn afternoon, and we were heading back toward the mission. I had already made like Santa Claus and passed out almost all the money I had. All I had left was a twenty-dollar bill. Well, we turned a corner and came upon a Hispanic man who looked drunk enough to fry ice cream with his breath. Probably in his fifties, he looked seventy, with gnarled hands and brown skin wrinkled like a crushed grocery sack. Wearing smudged jeans and a threadbare flannel shirt of red lumberjack plaid, he lounged so hard against the brick wall of a streetside warehouse that I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to hold himself up or keep the wall from falling down.
Still pretty new to the streets, I pasted on a smile and, with Denver at my shoulder, said to the Hispanic man, “What can I do for you today?”
As the man tried to focus his eyes on me, a thin strand of drool slid from the corner of his mouth and began traveling south. “I needsh a reedle moony,” he slurred in a heavy Spanish accent.
I didn’t quite catch what he said and asked him to repeat himself.
“He say he needs a little money,” Denver said over my shoulder.
I am not giving a drunk a twenty-dollar bill, I thought as I watched the drool reach the Hispanic man’s chin. Smiling away, I dug into my pants pockets, feeling for smaller change.
Finding none, I pulled out the twenty-dollar bill and surreptitiously showed it to Denver. Glancing back at my mentor in the ’hood, I tried intently to telegraph a message with my eyes: If I give him my last twenty, all he’s going to do is go down to the liquor store and buy some more booze!
Suddenly Denver leaned in, and I felt his breath at my ear. “Don’t judge the man,” he said, low and quiet. “Just give him the twenty dollars.”
Reluctantly, I held out the money, and the man took it. Just at that moment, the southbound drop of drool de
tached itself from his chin and hurtled toward the sidewalk.
“Shank ew,” he said.
I had never stopped smiling, but now my grin felt as fake as a plugged nickel. I felt like I’d just given a push to a suicide jumper.
Denver and I bid the man good-bye and headed down the street toward the mission. We hadn’t gone thirty yards when Denver stopped. “Turn ’round here and look at me, Mr. Ron. I wanna tell you somethin.”
I stopped and faced Denver, and in a way that was becoming familiar to me, he pinned me with one eye while squinting the other like Clint Eastwood. “That man you just gave that money to—his name is José. And he ain’t drunk. He’s a stroke victim. And he’s one a’ the hardest workin men I ever knowed.”
Denver went on to tell me that before a stroke got him, José had been a bricklayer and a rock mason who worked hard, lived cheap, and sent all his money home to Mexico to support his family.
“He don’t even drink, Mr. Ron,” Denver said. “He depends on people like you to eat.”
Immediately, I thought of Deborah. From the moment we set foot in the mission, she had looked beyond the ragged clothes and the scars and the dirt and the smells. It was as though God had given her X-ray vision to see right past all that to the people underneath.
She never asked them, “How did you get in the shape you’re in?” Her thinking was, if you condition your offer of help on how a needy person got that way, you’re probably not going to help very many people. The question Deborah asked was, “What is your need now?”
Now Denver completed his verdict and gave me an ultimatum. Keeping me pinned with that eyeball, he said, “You know what you did? You judged a man without knowin his heart. And I’m gon’ tell you somethin. If you gon’ walk these streets with me, you gon’ have to learn how to serve these people without judgin ’em. Let the judgin be up to God.”
Denver’s pronouncements on judgment reminded me of a letter that the painter Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother, Theo. The subject was idleness and whether anyone can truly look at a man who appears to be lazy—or drunk or otherwise indigent—and make an accurate judgment:
Sometimes . . . [a person’s] right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you . . . Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first . . .
I should be very happy if you could see in me something more than a kind of . . . [an idler]. For there is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.
A caged bird in spring knows perfectly well that there is some way in which he should be able to serve. He is well aware that there is something to be done, but he is unable to do it . . . “What a idler,” says another bird passing by—what an idler . . . But then the season of the great migration arrives, an attack of melancholy. He has everything he needs, say the children who tend him in his cage—but he looks out, at the heavy thundery sky, and in his heart of hearts he rebels against his fate. I am caged, I am caged and you say I need nothing, you idiots! I have everything I need, indeed! Oh! please give me the freedom to be a bird like other birds!
A kind of idler of a person resembles that kind of idler of a bird. And people are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage . . .
A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls . . .
Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives. Moreover, the prison is sometimes called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, suspicion . . .
If you could see me as something other than a idler of the bad sort, I should be very happy.
DARLENE
Skid Row Samaritan
During the Gold Rush, Sacramento, California, was a thriving place, the westernmost stop for stagecoaches and wagon trains, for the first transcontinental railroad and even the Pony Express. Sacramento still thrives today, but like many cities, it has also become the last stop in life for thousands of homeless people.
Homelessness is not new to the city, but in early 2009 it was getting worse. National attention focused on a tent city that had sprung up on the city’s outskirts. As many as fifty new people a week moved in, some of them as a result of the avalanche of home foreclosures, a phenomenon that hit Sacramento harder than most US cities.
But the tent city was not the only part of Sacramento where homelessness was a problem. The wedge of town west of the capitol was a motley mix of redevelopment and still-derelict, a place where attempts at gentrification competed with rundown motels that doubled as low-income housing for transients. The city was working to fix up the area, but for longtime Sacramento residents, those streets still meant drugs, prostitution, and shabby bands of the hardcore homeless. It was a part of the city, Darlene Garcia told us, that she preferred to avoid.
But Darlene, age sixty-six, did find herself driving through west Sacramento on her way home from on errand on a cold, cloudy day early in 2009. And sure enough, as she drove along a seedy thoroughfare near the Pickwood Hotel, she saw a man sprawled on the ground in a narrow vacant lot between buildings.
“He was lying on the ground close to the sidewalk,” Darlene remembers. “If he had been under the tree that was nearby, I would have thought he was lying there sleeping because that’s what people do in that area.”
As it was, Darlene’s first thought was that the man was probably a drunk who had passed out in public. But something about the way he was lying there stirred her concern. Then Denver Moore flashed into her mind, and something about his story, which she had just read, helped her think twice about snap judgments.
Darlene slowed her car. “There was a lot of traffic, people driving right past this man, walking past him on the sidewalk.”
Forced to keep driving because of the flow of traffic, Darlene sped up again. But the farther she advanced down the block, the more she knew she had to go back.
Darlene circled the block and returned to the spot near the Pickwood. The man hadn’t moved. She parked along the curb, cars whizzing past, and got out, intensely aware of being a lone woman on foot in a “bad” part of town.
She walked to the man and stood over him. He appeared to be sleeping. His clothes were older but not ragged. He appeared younger than Darlene, but his face was haggard and pale.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
The man opened his eyes very slightly and whispered, “I’m having a heart attack.”
Darlene’s pulse quickened. “How do you know?”
He raised his hand to his chest. “Because it . . . hurts . . . right . . .
here.”
Darlene snatched her cell phone from her purse and quickly punched in 911. Then she ran to the curb, waving her arms, trying to flag down help. An older gentleman stopped and joined Darlene; his presence made her feel a little safer. The two waited a few more minutes as emergency crews rolled up to the scene and began treating the man.
When she saw he was in good hands, Darlene got in her car and drove home. On the way, she reflected on the step she’d just taken. She had helped people all her life, spending decades teaching preschool in a state program for low-income families and even buying shoes, clothes, and food for some families who had none. But before she read about Denver, she says, “I would never have had the nerve to go back. I wouldn’t have felt safe stopping in that area. But this time I wasn’t scared. I thought, I have to do this.”
Darlene went home and telephoned her best friend to share what had happened. “I think I might have saved someone’s life today,” she said.
“That’s good,” her friend replied. “But you have to be careful in that neighborhood.”
“I know,” said Darlene and smiled.
10
Denver
Don’t get me wrong. Wadn’t like I was clean and sober all the time, neither. Just ’cause me and Mr. Ron was friends don’t mean I turned into no overnight saint. We might a’ been goin out to fancy places in the daytime. But at night I’d still go out to the hobo jungle and pass around the Jim Beam with the fellas.
Now, I ain’t sayin that ever time you see a drunk you got to give him a dollar. I’m just sayin everbody you give a dollar to ain’t necessarily a drunk. I remember that time Mr. Ron didn’t wanna give José that twenty-dollar bill, and I told him to quit worryin about what the man was gon’ do with the money and just be a blessin to him.
I know a lotta people worry ’bout the same thing. If I give that homeless man some money, what he gon’ do with it? Buy hisself a half-pint or a beer?
