Same Kind of Different As Me

by Ron Hall

  24

  “If you is lookin for a real friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.”

  As Denver’s words echoed in my head, it occurred to me that I could not recall ever having heard any pronouncement on friendship more moving or profound than what I’d just heard from the mouth of a vagabond. Humbled, all I could do in return was make a simple, but sincere, promise: “Denver, if you’ll be my friend, I promise not to catch and release.”

  He put out his hand and we shook. Then, like a sunrise, a grin lit Denver’s face and we stood, facing each other, and hugged. In that moment, the fear and distrust that had hulked like an iceberg between us melted on the warm patio outside Starbucks.

  Beginning that day, we became the new odd couple, Denver and I. A couple of times a week, I’d swing by the mission and pick him up, and we’d head out to a coffeehouse, a museum, or a café. Deborah, meanwhile, urged me on, praying deep roots for the friendship she’d prayed would bud in the first place. After our catch-and-release chat, Denver’s sulking silence thawed into a gentle shyness. “Did you see how Denver said hi in the supper line?” she’d say, eyes shining. “I think you’re really making progress.”

  No longer just Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday, Deborah and I began going to the mission even more often. She’d stay and work with the women and children while Denver and I went somewhere to hang out. If I planned to take him to a nice restaurant, I’d call ahead to the mission to give him time to slip into his preppie disguise. If we were going to Starbucks, though, he dressed to his own liking. Usually, that meant conspicuously poor—soiled shirt, buttoned crooked; holey pants; and beaten-up leather shoes he wore like house-slides, his heels smashing down the backs.

  It was at Starbucks that I learned about twentieth-century slavery. Not the slavery of auction blocks, of young blacks led away in ropes and chains. Instead, it was a slavery of debt-bondage, poverty, ignorance, and exploitation. A slavery in which the Man, of whom Denver’s “Man” was only one among many, held all the cards and dealt them mostly from the bottom of the deck, the way his daddy had taught him, and his granddaddy before that.

  More than half a century before Denver was born, Abraham Lincoln had formally declared that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free.” That was all well and fine, but white plantation owners did not go quietly into the night. First, Southern statehouses passed “Black Codes,” laws that used legal tricks to keep black people slaves, forcing the federal government to break up the state legislatures and put the army in charge of the stubborn South. After state lawmakers promised to try to be good, planters and the people they once owned tried a new arrangement: sharecropping.

  That turned out to be a devil’s bargain. Not only did sharecropping spawn poverty and hopelessness among both blacks and poor whites, it also opened up an ugly, festering crack in the plantation South into which people like Denver Moore fell, some forever.

  That fissure ran through Red River Parish, where Denver’s Man was a shrewd dealer. Not wanting to lose his labor supply, he kept the aces to himself. He dealt the card of meager sustenance, but withheld the card of American progress. He dealt the card of backbreaking labor, but withheld the card of education—the get-out-of-jail-free card that would have liberated men like Denver. In the twentieth century, slaves were free to leave the plantation, but their debt and lack of education kept them shackled to the Man.

  I listened to Denver’s story with fifty-year-old ears that had been touched by the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King. Later, I found out that the Ku Klux Klan in Coushatta, Louisiana, a town in Red River Parish, had once plotted to assassinate Dr. King. The FBI had wanted to swoop in and foil the plot, but J. Edgar Hoover refused to let them.

  The more I learned, the more I hated the Man and wanted to right the wrongs of Louisiana’s modern-day slave masters. I sang Denver’s story like a songbird to anyone who would listen. Then one day, a thought hit me like a right cross to the head: My own granddaddy had not been so much different from the Man. Fairer, yes. An honest and decent man in the Texas of his day. But the wages he paid were still no excuse for the pitiful way we treated the folks who worked his land.

  Amazingly, though, Denver kept telling me that a man providing jobs has a right to earn a profit. Denver had lived in an unplumbed, two-room shack with no glass in the windows nearly until the time his country put men on the moon. But he still maintained that the Man wasn’t really a bad fellow.

  “He was just doin what he was raised up to do,” Denver said. “Besides if everbody was rich, who gon’ do the work?”

  That kind of homespun, practical way of looking at things hooked me. After our catch-and-release conversation, I gave him my phone number and told him where we lived, breaking a cardinal rule for mission volunteers. The truth is, prior to my Starbucks fishing lesson, I never thought Denver and I would form a real friendship—at least not one carried on outside his neighborhood.

  I hate to admit this now, but I had pictured myself more as a sort of indulgent benefactor: I would give him a little bit of my valuable time, which, had I not been so benevolent, I could have used to make a few more thousand dollars. And from time to time, I imagined, if Denver stayed cleaned up and sober, I’d take him on field trips from hobo-land to restaurants and malls, a kind of peep show where he could glimpse the fruit of responsible living and perhaps change his ways accordingly.

  I was aware I might cause him some therapeutic torment over the fact that he would probably never own some of the high-end toys we had, like a horse trailer with sleeping quarters. He would certainly never own a ranch or a painting by Picasso. I was amazed when that didn’t bother him a bit—especially not the Picasso part, after Denver saw some of his work.

  One afternoon we visited three art museums—the Kimbell, the Amon Carter, and the Modern. At the Modern, he thought I was playing a joke on him. As we viewed one of Picasso’s less, shall we say, organized works, Denver looked at me as if the museum curators were trying to pass off some kind of snake oil.

  “You just kiddin me, right?” he said. “Folks ain’t really callin this art, is they?”

  I had decorated my own house with similar works and, as an art dealer, the modern masters were my niche. But as we strolled through the Modern that day, I tried to look through his eyes at the bold geometrics, splashed paints, and huge canvases dominated by “negative space.” I had to admit: Some of it could be construed as junk.

  The Kimbell was Denver’s favorite. Old Master paintings drew him like magnets, especially those that were centuries old and depicted Christ. When we stopped in front of a large Matisse from the 1940s and I told him it cost $12 million, his mouth fell open.

  “Well,” he said, eyeing the work in dubious wonder, “I don’t like it much, but I’m glad the museum bought it so somebody like me could see what a $12 million picture looks like.” He paused, then added: “You think if the guards knowed I was homeless they’d let me in here?”

  With the museums, the restaurants, and the malls, I was showing Denver a different way to live, a side of life in which people took time to appreciate fine things, where they talked about ideas, where raw yellowtail cost more than cooked catfish. But he remained absolutely convinced that his way of life was no worse than mine, only different, pointing out in the process certain inconsistencies: Why, he wondered, did rich people call it sushi while poor people called it bait?

  I knew Denver was sincere when he told me that he would not want to trade places with me for even one day. His convictions became clear to me when I laid my key ring on the table between us at one of our earliest meetings for coffee.

  Denver smiled a bit and sidled up to a cautious question. “I know it ain’t none of my business, but does you own somethin that each one of them keys fits?”

  I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. “I suppose,” I replied, not really ever having thought about it.

  “Are you sure you own them
, or does they own you?”

  That wisdom stuck to my brain like duct tape. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced we’d enjoy life a whole lot more if we owned a whole lot less. In some ways, Denver became the professor and I the student as he shared his particular brand of spiritual insight and plain old country wisdom.

  I also came to realize that though his thirty years on the streets had sewn a thick hide on the man, they had also forged in him staunch loyalty, a strong spirit, and a deep understanding of what beats in the heart of the downtrodden. Though wallowing in the sin and addictions of street life, he claimed in his solitude to have heard from God. His brain had filed away everything he had seen over the years, and it seemed he had just been waiting for someone willing to listen. I was privileged to be the first to lend an ear.

  25

  Me and Mr. Ron started spending a fair amount of time together, me takin him out into the hood to show him what’s what, and him takin me to museums and restaurants and cafés and such. I learned a lot on those trips—like the difference between a taco and a enchilada. The taco is the crunchy thing, and the enchilada is that long thing that kinda flops down beside the taco. (I usually just eat the inside a’ the taco, though, ’cause I ain’t got that many good teeth.) I also found out the difference between a restaurant and a café: A restaurant is where they roll your fork and your knife up in a fancy towel that you use for a napkin. In a café you just have a regular ole paper napkin and ain’t nothin rolled up in it usually.

  First time Mr. Ron took me to a restaurant, I couldn’t find no fork for the longest time till I saw him unroll the dark red towel he had on his side of the table. He caught me gawkin and told me the towel was a napkin, which I thought was crazy ’cause who gon’ wash em all?

  Me and Miss Debbie started talkin a li’l more, too. I didn’t burn off when I saw her no more, and when she asked me how I was doin’, I’d say fine. She was always real nice to me, asked me about my life and what was I gon’ do that day and did I need her to bring me anything. I’d see her down at the Lot, and I’d help out her and Sister Bettie and Miss Debbie’s friend, Miss Mary Ellen.

  I met Sister Bettie before I met Miss Debbie. She ain’t no nun or nothin like that. We call her “Sister” ’cause she’s a real spiritual woman.

  I don’t know how old Sister Bettie was when I met her, but right this minute she got a crown a’ hair just as white as a cloud on a summer day, and twinklin eyes as blue as the sky them clouds go sailin in. When she’s talkin to you, she’ll lay a hand on your arm like she’s knowed you all your life, like maybe you was her own child. And even if she keeps her hand there awhile, it don’t bother you none. You just feel happy God saw fit to drop a lady like that into this world.

  Sister Bettie lives at the mission, but it ain’t ’cause she don’t have nowhere else to go. A long time back, she lived in a regular neighborhood. But after her husband died, Sister Bettie felt the Lord tuggin on her heart, tellin her to spend the rest a’ her life servin the homeless. She sold her home and everything she had except for a little bitty Toyota truck, and she asked the folks at the Union Gospel Mission could she set up housekeepin down there.

  It didn’t take long ’fore most a’ the homeless folks in Fort Worth knowed Sister Bettie. She’d go to restaurants to ask em for their leftovers, and stores to ask em for socks and blankets and toothpaste and such. Then she’d haul her old bones up and down the nastiest streets, offerin help to men so mean they’d as soon tear your head off as look at you. That didn’t scare Sister Bettie none ’cause she believed God’s angels camped all around her and wadn’t gon’ let nothin bad happen to her. And if it did, she said, that would be God’s will.

  She never carried no purse with her, just whatever she had to give out that day and her Bible. After a while, it got so it didn’t matter what Sister Bettie believed about God’s angels: Even the meanest man on the street wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her, ’cause he’d get beat down if he did. To this day, that woman could walk naked on the railroad in the hobo jungle at midnight and be as safe as if she was tucked in her own bed.

  After I’d been at the mission awhile, I started helpin Sister Bettie with some things. We never did have no conversation, but if she needed somethin, she knew she could ask me and I’d do it. Like I helped keep her little truck runnin, changed the oil and the fan belt, that kinda thing.

  I also started helpin her at the Lot, a place street folks calls “Under the Tree.” It’s over on Annie Street in one a’ the worst neighborhoods in the city, spillin over with crackheads and criminals and ragged, empty-eyed folks livin so low they’re surprised ever time they open their eyes and find out they done lived through another day.

  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.

  I tried not to drink too much on Tuesday nights, though, ’cause I liked to help Sister Bettie out the next day. Ever Wednesday, she fed 200 or 250 folks at the Lot and it was always some kinda miracle, like that loaves-and-fishes story in the Bible. Nobody really knows where all the food come from, but ever week you can smell it two blocks away: big, steamin pots a’ beef stew full a’ carrots and peas and potatoes. Baskets a’ fried chicken. Fresh-cooked pintos and kettles of chili. All of it’s home-cooked. Seems like folks just show up with it outta nowhere.

  One day somewhere along the way, Sister Bettie found out I could sing and she asked me would I come down and sing at the Lot. First, I was a little worried about it, but when Sister Bettie asks you to help out, ain’t too much you can do but help out.

  26

  In Sister Bettie, Deborah sensed someone who would lead her into a new spiritual dimension, a level of service more fearless, more sacrificial than what she could perform inside the walls of the mission. She wanted to share the experience with her best friend Mary Ellen Davenport, whom Deborah called a “prayer warrior,” which is to say, she’d stop and offer to pray with anyone about anything for as long as they would let her.

  Plucky is a silly-sounding word, but Webster’s defines it as “spirited” and “brave.” It should’ve included a picture of Mary Ellen. A registered nurse, she and her husband, Alan, a physician, became our friends in 1980 when we threw a July 4 pool party at the Williamsburg-style home we’d moved into in Fort Worth two years earlier. We’d invited our friends, the Hawkins, who asked if they could bring their friends, the Davenports.

  Alan and Mary Ellen had recently moved back to Fort Worth from Galveston, where Alan had completed his medical residency. We didn’t know them personally, but Deborah knew of them. She had heard that Mary Ellen had had a difficult pregnancy with triplets, and she had been praying for her by name.

  But when the Davenports pulled up to our address on the day of the party and Mary Ellen spotted our sweeping porch, tall white columns, and a three-car garage that looked bigger than their whole house, she threw a fit.

  “I’m not going in there!” she told Alan.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Why not? My gosh, just look at their house! They’re millionaires—what could we possibly have in common with them?”

  So the Davenports sat in the car with the air-conditioning blasting and debated whether to stay. Soon the triplets, by then fifteen months old, and Jay Mac, their three-year-old, were wailing. Decked out in swimsuits and floaties, their dials were tuned to “SWIM,” and they didn’t like the sound of the conversation up front. In the end, Mary Ellen lost the battle, and I remember them walking into our backyard for the first time, Alan grinning nervously and the smile pasted on Mary Ellen’s face as fake as a Rembrandt painted in Chihuahua.

  But Deborah rescued the afternoon. “I’m so glad to finally meet you!” she said, greeting Mary Ellen with a warm smile. “I’ve been pray
ing for you and your family for months.” Then Deborah, the “millionaire’s” wife, offered to babysit the triplets so that the Davenports could get organized in their new home. At that, Mary Ellen threw down her weapons. Gracefully, she accepted the offer, launching a close family friendship that would last decades.

  From Mary Ellen, Deborah learned boldness. Deborah had never been bold, just persistent. Mary Ellen was bold and persistent. So when Deborah invited her friend to join her in volunteering at the mission, Denver’s misery was “doubled,” he later said, since that meant two white ladies were pestering him instead of just one.

  At Sister Bettie’s urging, Deborah and Mary Ellen began teaching and singing a day each week at the mission’s women’s and children’s chapel service. But it was Sister Bettie’s service at the Lot that drew Deborah like a magnet.

  The Lot itself is a lush little refuge, dotted with red crepe myrtles, rough-hewn benches, and a cross made of railroad ties topped with a crown of thorns someone fashioned from barbed wire. The area surrounding the Lot, however, is a model for urban decay: rusted chain link, buildings boarded up and condemned, adjoining lots clotted with johnsongrass that hid bodies that barely oozed life. Next door to the Lot, Sister Bettie’s free-lunch customers stumble out of Lois’s Lounge, a dark little den where they blot out their waking lives by drinking cheap liquor purchased with panhandled funds. I’m not judging them: It’s just a simple fact that in America drugs and booze cost money, but food is free to anyone willing to snooze through a gospel message.

  Scores of them do, dragging themselves to the Lot each week, some riding rusting wheelchairs pushed by others who can barely stand, others carried on the backs of men more sober than themselves. Often, following an afternoon there, Deborah would return home in tears, her heart broken by encounters with drug addicts and alcoholics, people busy paying a very high price for very low living.