What Difference Do It Make?
Page 8
It might sound strange to say this, but Angola Prison was a dynamic and precious thing. Down there in the bayou, they specialized in makin men outta boys. Funny thing about it was that even though all I did was hold up a bus, the Man decided to send me to prison in style. They packed me onto one a’ them little ol’ aeroplanes and flew me down. Plane landed right on the property.
Once I wound up there, the Man sent me to the worstest camp they had. They called it the “Bucket a’ Blood,” and I’d only been there one day ’fore I figured out why. Somebody got killed there ever night.
My first night in Angola, a great big brother came up to me and looked me up and down. “What you need from the store, man? I’m goin over there right now.”
I thought maybe he’d heard about me from the fella that give me the knife in Shreveport—like maybe he was lookin out for me. So I said, “Bring me some cigarettes and two or three candy bars.”
He brought ’em to me at my bunk, which was in a big ol’ buildin shaped kinda like a barn. Purty soon, I found out them things wadn’t free.
That night I was layin in my bunk on my back, starin up at the ceiling. I could hear rats in the walls, and somewhere way off, a man screamed. Wadn’t no lights on where I was at, and the cell was blacker than the bayou on a new moon.
“You ready?”
That big brother was standin right by my side. He’d slipped in real quiet and sneaked up to me in the dark without me even knowin he was there.
“You ready?” he said again, his voice a little lower. A little deeper. Right then, I knew what he was after.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I said. “But I got to go to the toilet first.”
I swung my feet down onto the floor, and brother-man stepped back to let me get out of bed.
“You go on and lay down,” I said. “Put the sheet over you. I’ll be right back.”
I walked away from the bed into the pitch dark. I heard a whispering sound as his pants crumpled to the floor, then a creak-creak as he laid down on my bunk. The toilet was on the other side of the room. I walked over there and unzipped my britches, let him hear that I was doin what I said I was gon’ do.
“You want a cigarette?” I said. “For after?”
“Sure do,” he said, kinda cocky. I could hear him chucklin in the dark. So on my way back across the room, I stopped at the little shelf where I had stashed my cigarettes that he’d done bought me. It was also where I’d stashed my knife.
Brother-man screamed when I stabbed him. Screamed like a woman ’cause I ’xpect I turned him into one, right through the sheet.
I bent down close to his ear and growled real low. “You or any a’ your friends come ’round here again, I’m gon’ finish the job.”
While he was howlin and cryin and, I ’xpect, holdin what was left of his manhood, I saw lights go on outside. Then I heard boots poundin and guards drawin down. But they stopped outside the door to size up the situation.
“Moore! Who you got in there?”
“This fella’s done gone crazy!” brother-man screamed. ’Cept he didn’t call me “fella.” “Get in here and kill him ’fore he kills me!”
They sent me to the hole for that. But didn’t nobody try to make me his woman no more.
That’s why, though, when I think about Miss Debbie reachin out to me, my chest gets tight. I had told her straight up that I was a mean man, but she didn’t have no way a’ knowin how mean. I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.
DON
The Art of Homelessness
Most of the thirty or so men sitting in a circle at the Union Gospel Mission in Saint Paul, Minnesota, didn’t look like they’d been acquainted with a comb for a while. Their clothes were clean, Don Thomas told us, but they didn’t quite fit. Some of the men were addicts and ex-cons. Some were just down on their luck. Don wasn’t sure such a rough-looking batch of guys would be interested in what he had come to say.
“I’m here to see if any of you would be interested in learning a little about art,” said Don, a designer for an architectural firm in Saint Paul. “Drawing, painting, that kind of thing.”
Some of the men threw each other skeptical sideways glances. Others kept their eyes trained on the floor. But one man with a ruddy, wrinkled face and approximately four good teeth spoke right up. “We ain’t gonna weave any of them [expletive] baskets like we did in prison, are we?”
“Oh, no,” Don replied with a smile. ‘We’re going to draw naked women.”
The whole circle burst out laughing, and a show of hands revealed that every man present was suddenly, miraculously, interested in what Don had to teach about art.
I believe art can make a big difference in anyone’s life. After Deborah died and Denver moved in with me, I suggested he try his hand at painting. He thought that was a good idea, judging that he couldn’t do any worse than some of the multimillion-dollar pieces he’d seen by Jackson Pollack and Pablo Picasso when I took him to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. And once he started, Denver took to painting like a bull rider to a rodeo. Since Same Kind of Different as Me came out, he has sold more than three hundred paintings.
Art had made a difference for Don Thomas too. In fact, it had been his salvation.
After his mom died when he was a teenager, his dad raised him. A proud Marine, his dad numbed the pain of his loss with alcohol, and Don was left alone a lot. “By junior high, I was making bad decisions, drinking, being cavalier about relationships with girls,” Don says. “It’s amazing I didn’t get myself in trouble for fathering a child too young.”
Fortunately, a high school art teacher reached out to the young man and helped him find a different path. “To be able to draw what I was feeling and seeing, to express some of my anger—I believe it changed my life.”
Don went on to become a principal at a prominent Saint Paul commercial architectural firm while also pursuing fine art as an avocation. Every year around Thanksgiving, his firm would pass the hat among the employees for donations to the mission; then management would match those donations and write the mission a check.
But something about the way all that was handled bothered Don. “In the end, I thought it was a little disrespectful,” he says. “It was like we were saying, ‘We’ll give you the money, but we don’t want to see your people or hear about what you do.’”
So, in 2008, Don toured the mission and found himself amazed at the dedication of the staff, at the work being done.
There were addiction recovery classes and classes on life skills such as parenting, budgeting, and computers. There were job skills training programs and connections to agencies that could help with transitional housing.
After his tour, Don knew without a doubt that writing a check just wasn’t going to be good enough for him anymore. He had to share with these men, give of himself, make a difference.
That’s when he piped up and offered to teach a class on art.
Now he found himself in a roomful of homeless men, sharing a little about his own tarnished past and how art helped him cope with the pain and heartache of his mom’s early death.
“I have no clue why art works, why it helps,” he told his world-weary audience. “I’m not a therapist. All I know is that it’s powerful for me. And if I can give any of that to you, to be able maybe just to see the world a little differently, it will be worth it.”
The following week, about a dozen men returned. One guy in the program, Dave, was a real talker. Dave liked to draw, but he liked to talk even more. He came for a couple of sessions, but after the third, he walked up to Don and said, “I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m not going to come in anymore. I’ve decided to focus on another part of the program.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Don said, wondering whether he hadn’t made the class interesting enough.
Somehow, Don’s commitment to teaching the men art had inspired Dave to honor that commitment by taking responsibility—something addicts rarely do.
Don remembers another man, Alex, an alcoholic who was extremely talented at a particular style of drawing.
After Don complimented his work one day, Alex asked him, “Do you think I could make money at it?”
“Well, your stuff looks like tattoo art,” Don said. “I know a guy who gets eight hundred bucks anytime someone uses one of his drawings for a tattoo.”
“Maybe I could do something like that,” Alex said, adding shading to a dragon figure he was drawing.
Alex didn’t come back the next week . . . or the next Later, Don heard he’d started drinking again. Still, their conversation suggested a glimmer of hope. “Alex was looking beyond the next hour, the next drink, at what the future might hold.
When he first started teaching at the mission, Don had hoped to uncover some hidden talent—the next Picasso or Remington, undiscovered, wrapped in rags instead of a fancy art degree. Perhaps inside one of these broken men lay an artist who had only been waiting for the right nurturing.
Soon though, Don realized that it wasn’t the art itself that was making a difference to these men but “the doing of the art, the stories surrounding the art.”
Drawing and painting calmed the men down, helped them express themselves in a different way. “You don’t have to put everything into words,” Don says. “Sometimes you don’t have words.”
Beautiful gardens surrounded the mission—flowers, vines, and trellises sheltered in leafy canopies of shade. One day, Don took a handful of men outside and told them, “Pick anything you want to draw. But whatever you pick, you’re going to draw it eight times.”
It was an exercise in commitment. “Commitment and follow-through is hard for addicts,” Don said. “They want something that’s immediate. When something doesn’t work quickly, they move on to something else.”
One man picked a vine-covered trellis. But as he sketched and sketched, he focused on the trellis itself, struggling over and over to render the spots where the thin, white wood crossed. It was as though he didn’t see the vines or the leaves or the flowers at all. Meanwhile, he became more and more frustrated and impatient.
“Slow down a little,” Don coached him. “What else do you see here? Do you see leaves? Shadows? Colors?”
The man tried again, this time relaxing a little, sinking into the moment, less intent on the hard detail and more open to the total picture. After a few more tries, he showed his piece to Don, who was impressed with what the man had achieved in the end.
Art, said Don, teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: “To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.”
15
Ron
When Same Kind of Different as Me finally came out, I took Mama and Daddy a copy and wrote inside: “Thanks for being who you are. If it hadn’t been for you, there would have never been me! Love, Ronnie.”
Mom read the book first and declared it a literary masterpiece. Of course, my mama had also declared me handsome that time she sewed me a matching shirt and short set from blue and black plaid, a new outfit she made special for my first date with a sorority girl from Texas Christian University.
Dad started reading the book a few days later and stopped on page 18 after reading, “Somewhere during my childhood, he crawled into a whiskey bottle and didn’t come out till I was grown.”
A couple of days later, I pulled into their driveway. They were sitting on the porch in their wrought-iron rockers, and Mama was working a crossword puzzle.
“Why did you say what you did about me?” Daddy asked the instant I walked up.
“What did I say?” I said, knowing without asking which part he was referring to since it was about the only time I referred to him in the book.
“About me crawling in a whiskey bottle,” he said, taking a sip from his Jim Beam and Coke.
From out of nowhere, my Mama cut in like a linebacker intercepting a pass. “Because it’s the damn truth, Earl!”
My mouth fell open. I think it was the first time I’d heard her cuss.
Earl stuck out his chin, defiant. “Is that what you think of your old man?”
“Daddy, I’ve forgiven you for that,” I said, without really meaning it.
“Well, I’m not gonna be reading the rest of your book,” he said.
Neither, it seemed, was anybody else. When Same Kind of Different as Me appeared in bookstores, we thought it had Oprah written all over it—or at least the Today show, Good Morning America, or, as a backup, Jerry Springer. We thought if no one wanted to talk literature, maybe Denver could slug it out with a preacher caught in a sex sting.
But nothing happened. We sold a few copies here and there, but Oprah never did call. In fact, we dedicated a line to her from that old Randy Travis song, which said something like, I guess if my phone’s not ringing, it’s probably not you.
After a big Texas book fair chaired by relatives of mine refused to feature Same Kind, I got seriously discouraged. If you can’t count on some good old-fashioned nepotism to help sell your book, what can you count on?
“Denver, what are we going to do?” I fumed one night as we sat on the deck at Rocky Top, watching fish pop from the Brazos River under a silver moon.
“I’ll tell you what we gon’ do,” he said. “We gon’ stop right here and bless all them folks that turned us down. They done did us a big favor. Mr. Ron, we didn’t write this book for no book fair or no TV show. We wrote it for Miss Debbie, and we wrote it for God.”
Then Denver pinned me with his drill-bit squint, his eyes catching moonlight. “Now, you listen to me real good. You hear me?”
“Yes . . .”
“Don’t you never ask nobody to do nothin for this book ever again. This is God’s book! You let Him take care a’ His business, and you and me will be doin just fine. Did you hear what I said?”
In that second, I wished I had his faith—faith like I used to have. But I was afraid he might cut me with his eyes if I expressed any doubt.
“Yes, I heard you,” I said.
“Then stop your complainin,” Denver said. Then he turned back to watch the fish.
About a month later, we got a call asking us to appear on a morning television show in Boston. The host had read our book and taken a shine to it. A few days later at five in the morning, we sat in the studio, listening to the lead-in.
“Live in Boston, good morning!” the host said. “Today we have with us two men from Dallas, Texas, with a beautiful story about friendship.”
Then he turned to Denver, who suddenly looked exactly like a rabbit frozen in the path of an oncoming semitruck.
“Mr. Moore,” the host said, “can you tell us a little bit about your book?”
Stone silence.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
I was about to jump in and answer when Denver spoke up. “Now, sir, I’m gon’ tell you the truth. I don’t read, and I don’t write, so I didn’t write that book, and I ain’t never read it. Now, what is your next question?”
On the outside, I grinned like an idiot. Inwardly, I crumpled. My mind flashed back to Denver telling me, “This is God’s book!”
That’s a good thing, I thought, because God help us if we ever get invited to another TV show.
16
Ron
God did help us. In late 2006, as Denver and I traveled from city to city, we began to hear stories of people whom we considered our “ground zero” readers, people who picked up Same Kind of Different as Me and instantly grasped the simple arithmetic of Deborah’s life: loving God means lovi
ng people, and loving people means making a difference for God.
Take Jill Bee from Dallas, for example. She sent the book to her friend David Smith, who lives in Atlanta. Over the next nine months, he bought sixty-five hundred copies of Same Kind of Different as Me and passed them out for free—seeds planted that would later yield an incredible crop. In the tenth month after reading our book, David hosted a fund-raiser that became the largest ever held in Atlanta. That gathering in the Georgia World Congress Center raised nearly a million dollars that benefited several homeless missions in the city.
Or how about the woman who checked Same Kind out of a public library in Syracuse, New York, because she saw it on the new-release table and liked the cover? It was a seemingly random act. But it would radically change lives thousands of miles away in the Pacific Northwest.
After reading Deborah’s tale, this woman called her brother, Don, in Pasco, Washington, and told him that though she didn’t go in for religion the way he did, she really enjoyed our little “God story.”
Don found a copy of the book in his local bookstore and, after reading it, passed it along to his pastor, Dave, at Bethel Baptist Church. Within a week of receiving it, Dave read Same Kind of Different as Me two and a half times, then began writing a sermon series on compassion, forgiveness, and loving the unlovable.
Now, don’t give up on this story because this next part is going to look like I’m bragging about selling a truckload of books. That’s not what it’s about at all, so just hang in there.
On the last Sunday of September 2006, Pastor Dave preached the first of his six sermons, telling his congregation of more than twenty-five hundred that he wanted every one of them to read his book. Within hours, his phone rang. On the other end of the line, the manager of the local Barnes & Noble said, “What did you tell all these folks about this book we’ve never heard of? We’ve taken orders for nearly a thousand copies!”