The Hundred Story Home Page 11

  Jay’s apartment was next door to Samuel’s, so I thought that might be a line of conversation. “How’s Samuel?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “A good neighbor?”

  “Yes, ma’am, real fine.”

  I wasn’t sure what else to ask him, so we drove in silence the rest of the way to the grocery store.

  Frank’s Supermarket was not like the grocery store in my neighborhood. There was no mini coffee shop as we entered, no delicatessen with fancy cheeses, no café tables. The produce section was not overflowing with exotic options, like kiwi and passion fruit. Just the basics, like apples, oranges, onions, potatoes, and tomatoes. The shelves were not bulging with products, and the aisles did not have colorful promotions encouraging the consumer to stock up for the latest holiday. This was a utilitarian grocery store, and many shelves were bare. I had never seen such an empty store in my neighborhood, except in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo.

  Jay pulled a wrinkled list from his pocket and began methodically filling it. I was a little self-conscious tagging behind him in the aisles, but it got easier as I asked him questions about his purchases.

  “Are those collards?”

  “Yep,” he said, looking at me funny. “You didn’t know that?”

  “No, Jay, I’m from West Texas,” I admitted. “I have never seen or eaten collards.”

  “What?” He laughed. “You fooling me?”

  “Nope. My mom didn’t cook them, and I’ve never made them. Never ordered them either.”

  “What? You are missing something!” he said and started to explain how he cooked them, just like his mama used to make them steeped with backfat and Vidalia onions.

  We continued through the aisles, getting other things I had never shopped for: black-eyed peas, ham hocks. The whole meat cooler was a revelation. Beef tongue? Did they even sell that in my store? What was most eye opening was the way Jay shopped. When I went to the grocery store, I hurried through, throwing things in my cart as fast as I could, not checking prices or even caring if it was on my list. Maddie and Emma would always attempt to hide things in the cart when I wasn’t looking, hoping the Cocoa Puffs and cheese balls would make it through unnoticed at the checkout line.

  Jay was deliberate and thoughtful. It finally occurred to me he was painstakingly doing the math as he shopped, making sure the total would match the dollars in his pocket. At the checkout counter he added cigarettes almost as a reward for staying within budget.

  We loaded his things and got back in my car.

  “Jay, you seem to be doing really well since you got out of treatment.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think I am,” he said, making that pleased secret smile again.

  We rode in silence a minute.

  “You know, growing up my sister told my mama she heard voices in her head,” he said. “My mama let them send my sister to the state hospital. When she came back, I didn’t even recognize her. I don’t know what they did to my sister in there, but I never told my mama I heard voices too. I just started drinking. That made them quieter.”

  I glanced over at Jay, but he was staring out the passenger window. That brief glimpse into his world said everything about poverty, mental illness, and homelessness. A drink might drown the voices until they drowned you. I knew my mom heard voices, but that was the first time I considered the fact that she had never turned to a bottle to escape. She had turned to the pages of her Bible instead. Our lives would have been much more complicated had she chosen differently.

  Jay’s newly achieved sobriety was a marked change, and each Homeless to Homes tenant that summer was going through similar transformations. Just as the Prince George tenants didn’t look homeless, our residents were returning to “normal” in those first weeks too. Each resident, once they had a solid month of sleep, food, and showers, looked remarkably well. Clear eyes, combed hair, clean clothes, and reduced drinking softened them into four surprisingly average tenants.

  They began asking Joann for help with issues they could never address while homeless. Ruth saw a dentist for the first time in her life. Raymond got his first pair of eyeglasses. Jay met with a psychiatrist and finally got a prescription to help with those voices he heard. But the metamorphosis of Samuel was one of the most dramatic.

  After living in the men’s shelter for seven years, Samuel had a long list of health problems. With Joann’s help he received much-needed medical care and could finally take his medicines consistently for the first time in years. His diet improved as well now that he cooked for himself and took nutritional supplements. Samuel was the first of the four tenants to express an interest in doing something more productive with his days. Now that he was no longer in survival mode wondering where his next meal would come from, Samuel had time to reflect and imagine a different life for himself. Samuel imagined he’d like to go back to school.

  Joann helped him enroll at the community college in a math course that would be the first step on the path to his GED, the high-school-equivalency degree. Samuel regretted not graduating, and he was going to take care of that now. He had been in class a few weeks when I saw him at the UMC.

  He was in the dining room at lunch, sitting at a table talking with some Neighbors who had obviously known him awhile. Samuel was clean shaven, wearing a white knit shirt, knee-length plaid shorts, and basketball shoes. He casually slung his backpack over his shoulder. For the first time, it wasn’t full of clothes or food—just a couple of books for his math class. Samuel was clearly enjoying the positive attention and his almost celebrity status.

  I smiled as I watched him. He was so proud of his new path. Lauren would be starting her freshman year at Vanderbilt University in a few weeks. Although it was late summer, she constantly wore the sweatshirt we had purchased in the bookstore when we visited her dream school last year. Now, every time she talked about heading to Nashville, her face lit up and her smile full of promise stretched across her face just like Samuel’s.

  A longtime UMC staff member who had known Samuel for years came up beside me.

  “I cannot believe that is Samuel,” she said, shaking her head. We watched him together a minute more before she spoke again. “I always thought he was a lost cause.”

  That was our lesson that summer. No one was a lost cause.

  At the time, I never fully envisioned that housing could produce such radical change. Promising Denver those beds, I had imagined only a more comfortable living situation for the street homeless—a more humane circumstance. I didn’t have the faith to consider that people really would change given the chance.

  Every day those four Neighbors proved me wrong. Having a home wasn’t just about comfort; it was true conversion. Just as Denver had been transformed from thirty-years homeless into a best-selling author, possibility resided in every single life we could touch.

  Samuel and each of the Homeless to Homes tenants were demonstrating that housing represented hope. We didn’t need to wait two years to “prove it.” We had our proof.

  It was like having the cure for cancer but waiting two years to give it to more people.

  Dale and I decided we should move up the timetable with a two-tiered strategy. We would continue to fill the pilot program, but with only thirteen tenants, not fifteen, saving some money so we could also move ahead with developing our own building.

  Scaling back from fifteen to thirteen pilot-program tenants made each choice even more critical. For the time being, only nine more people would receive the gift of hope and housing that Raymond, Samuel, Ruth, and Jay now shared.

  We tried to be systematic about it, considering specific factors for each potential candidate: years on the street, health risks, background. But the truth was, so much emotion was included in all those harsh facts. There were so many layers, hundreds of stories that we couldn’t know until we met with each potential candidate. Joann did most of the interviewing and tried to select the neediest cases.

  After one particularly heart-wrenching intervi
ew, Joann sat down heavily in the chair across from me. “I know I don’t really get a pick,” she admitted, “but if I had one, this would be my guy. There’s something special about him.”

  She was talking about Eugene Coleman, and he had been coming to the UMC since it opened in 1994. I am sure I served him dozens of times in the soup line, but because I was trying to hide behind the counter, I hadn’t noticed that he thought he was invisible too.

  “Got a cigarette?”

  Eugene Coleman looked up from his sleeping bag at his campsite, a filthy hole of a place under a highway overpass near downtown Charlotte. He had a cigarette, but he wasn’t about to share it with this guy. “Sorry,” he said and turned his back, trying to rest his head on his arm. It was the middle of the day, but Coleman needed to get some sleep. The nights were brutal: trains rolling by, cars overhead. The worst was trying to sleep with one eye open so that in the middle of the night nobody took what little he had. Coleman had been beaten more times than he could remember defending his campsite. It was what you did on the streets to survive, and it had been his life now for longer than he could remember.

  Coleman had been one of twelve children growing up in Winnsboro, South Carolina. He was the firstborn male after five daughters, but as the number of mouths to feed grew to a dozen, his exalted status wore off. With no father and bored with school, Coleman left home at fifteen to live with his uncle Leroy, traveling the South working a series of construction jobs. Along the way he fathered a son, Elkin Eugene Smith, but he drifted out of his boy’s life, moving from one construction job to another.

  Eventually he worked his way up to supervisor at a carton company. Coleman loved the physical labor, and when the forklift was too tedious he oftentimes used the quicker method of lifting shipments with his strong back. Through this manual labor, Coleman developed a hernia, which required a simple surgery. But that operation was the beginning of a long, dark slide for Coleman.

  When he came out of the anesthesia, he knew immediately something was wrong. Coleman couldn’t feel anything below his waist, and doctors confirmed he was temporarily paralyzed. The spinal tap used to anesthetize him had gone horribly wrong. After three or four weeks in the hospital, he could finally sit up without pain and go home, but his life was forever altered.

  Along with drastically limited mobility and dependence on pain medication, Coleman took home an intense distrust of doctors. He swore no one would ever operate on him again.

  Back at work Coleman could not be the hardworking supervisor he once was. The pain dogged him, and he took more medicine than prescribed to numb it. Months later he developed a new problem—a cyst had started to grow on his left shoulder. At first only Coleman noticed it, but each month it doubled in size. Soon his employers questioned what was on his shoulder, and each time Coleman promised to get it looked at but didn’t. There was no way he was going back to a doctor and risk another surgery. It started to become painful, and using his shoulder was more and more difficult.

  As the cyst grew, so did Coleman’s lies to himself and those around him. He missed days at work to stay home and relieve his pain by drinking and smoking pot. Escaping with substances also numbed the fear of going back to a hospital to remove the cyst, which was now the size of a baseball.

  The downward spiral that began with a botched hernia procedure hit bottom when Coleman lost his job, his income, and then his apartment. He became homeless sometime in the early 1990s. After that, Coleman came to the Urban Ministry Center every day for food but rarely talked to anyone. He resigned himself to his homelessness and living under a bridge, the place he called “the hole I lived in.”

  Coleman thought things couldn’t get worse until he read a newspaper obituary in a random copy of the paper he’d picked up on the streets he wandered. The death notice was for Elkin Eugene Smith, his son, shot dead at seventeen.

  The hole got blacker and deeper after that.

  With no calendar, no family, and no purpose, the years bled into each other. It all changed that day the stranger asked him for a cigarette. As Coleman was turning away, trying to get comfortable in his sleeping bag, he heard the man say, “I got a train to catch.”

  Minutes later he heard that train start rumbling through—a noise he had heard every day, several times a day for years. But this time it was different. This time over the deafening roar of the train, he could hear screaming. Coleman ran down the tracks but soon wished he hadn’t. The man who wanted a cigarette and had a train to catch had been cut in two after falling on the tracks. That bloodied, dead body was a startling wake-up call for Coleman.

  Lying awake that night, Coleman prayed to a God he didn’t believe in. “Lord, I don’t want to die out here like this.”

  He wasn’t sure how to get himself out of that hole, but he knew he was going to need help. And he didn’t like asking for help. He heard rumors at the soup kitchen that the UMC had started housing homeless people. Coleman had been going there for years and never heard anything like it. Sounded like a scam to him. Probably rich people trying to make money off the backs of poor people. But he took a chance. He wasn’t going to die out here.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, you got a minute?” he said to Joann. “Are you the lady that gets people off the streets?”

  I still have a photo of Coleman taken the day he moved into his Homeless to Homes apartment. In the picture he has short dreadlocks fanning out under his baseball hat. After twenty years on the streets, his eyes were wildly bloodshot, but his grin, missing many teeth, stretched across his entire face. Joann had just handed him a key. Nothing fancy, just the standard silver key that looked like any other on a plain stainless-steel ring.

  Coleman had stared at it in his palm in amazement. “I can’t remember the last time I had a key to anything,” he said.

  He held up the key with two fingers in his right hand and smiled as I took the photo.

  The camera didn’t capture his words, but I will never forget them.

  “This is a Kodiak moment!” Coleman said.

  Coleman’s story was one of the first that helped me truly understand how homelessness might happen to someone. Before I met him, on some level I believed the myths that some people chose to be homeless or that they liked living outside or that they had done something to deserve their situation. Coleman had been rising above the home he grew up in, just a working guy, when a medical mistake altered his life forever.

  Certainly there were twists in his story, different choices he could have made, but it began with a blindsiding collision with the unexpected. That, I understood.

  fifteen

  HOME ALONE

  Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  —James Baldwin1

  The Neighbors at the center no longer felt like strangers now that I was there every day, learning their stories. Chilly Willy regularly greeted me in the parking lot. Like Jay, Chilly Willy used alcohol to drown voices and memories. On a good day he would proudly say he was going to be a sober man, but on a drinking day Chilly Willy could keep a person tied up in his dysfunction. One day it was clear that Chilly had been attempting some serious drowning, and his buzz was wearing off.

  Sitting with him on an outside bench, I didn’t really know where to start with Chilly Willy, but I knew he needed to be heard. The only details I knew about Chilly’s life I had learned in pieces from his brother, Johnny, and from Liz. Chilly once had a girlfriend who was killed, but I didn’t know the specifics. That day Chilly Willy willingly filled in those blanks and many others with unnerving honesty.

  “You know my daddy was a preacher.”

  I was stunned. “Really?”

  “Yep.” Chilly shook his head and looked away. “He didn’t know what to make of me.”

  We let that sit between us.

  “I had a wife once too. Her name was Crystal. She was two months pregnant when she was hit by a car and died. Some days, all I want is a good Christian woman and a guitar,” which he
pronounced gee-tar, with a thick southern accent and a laugh. “But look at me, what good Christian woman would marry me?”

  We were quiet a moment. It was hard to imagine this gentle bear of a man pining for love could also be the same guy who had gone to prison at seventeen.

  “Mom!”

  My twins, Maddie and Emma, now teenagers about to enter high school, were headed toward us from the parking lot. Their summer job was volunteering for the UMC: organizing mail, filing records, and serving during lunch. Today, they were finishing up a mural they had painted in my office. The entire wall facing my desk was now a giant kaleidoscope of color leading to these words in the center: Amazing! Keb’ Mo’.

  They decided to paint that reminder on my office wall so I would never forget that first True Blessings and that first move-in day.

  “Hey, pretty girls!” Chilly Willy said. “Can I have a hug?” Maddie and Emma smiled and dutifully gave Chilly Willy a one-arm hug with one twin on each side.

  “This your mama?” he asked.

  “She is!” Maddie told him.

  “You do like she tells you,” Chilly Willy told them solemnly. “I didn’t listen to my mama at your age and look how I turned out.”

  Sadly, Chilly Willy was not one of the final tenants chosen for Homeless to Homes. We worried he was still too unpredictable to live in an apartment without twenty-four-hour security as the Prince George building I’d visited in New York has. Gradually we filled all the remaining spots in the pilot program. Coleman, Teddy, Johnny, Edna, Chuck, Debra, TJ, James, and Christine all moved off the streets and came home.

  The program operated quietly in Mark’s apartments and two other units in another part of the city. We didn’t announce our presence in either neighborhood for a reason: all thirteen were no longer homeless—they were housed. They were now just people who had finally lost the stigma of that word homeless and were trying to quietly rebuild their lives.