Walk to Beautiful: The Power of Love and a Homeless Kid Who Found the Way

by Wayne, Jimmy

  But I hadn’t done it.

  When, Jimmy? When are you going to get involved? When are you going to do something? When will you do anything to help someone other than yourself?

  I’d had hit songs on the radio and performed in some of the finest concert venues in America. I had been on tour with a country music superstar and had sung and recorded with rock stars. My name and music had topped the prestigious Billboard charts for three straight weeks at one point in my career. By every standard in the music business, I had made it.

  Yet I hadn’t kept my promise to those kids. I felt like a fraud.

  My heart pounded; my mind raced. You’ve forgotten; haven’t you?

  Had I forgotten what it feels like to scavenge for food, shivering in the cold? How could I have forgotten that dreadful rejection and abandonment I felt when my mom drove off into the night, leaving me to fend for myself in a strange city, hundreds of miles from anything vaguely familiar to me? All those times in lonely, dark places, hands and bodies that weren’t mine moving against me? My days spent wandering desolate roads, my nights spent crying tears that refused to form with my eyes wide open, my sleep-deprived body lying awake in fear?

  Standing there in my warm house, staring at the frigid conditions outside, I felt the cold reality slap across my face. I haven’t kept my promise.

  Oh, sure, I’d performed a few concerts in foster homes; I’d done one not long ago for a small group of kids at HomeBase, a foster care facility in Phoenix. I was always willing and quick to say yes when people asked me to help raise money for foster care–related charities. But I wanted to do something more, something significant. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids who have been told over and over that they are nobodies, nothing more than trash, and that their lives are meaningless and don’t count. I wanted to help kids who are lonely, hungry, and cold.

  Lonely, hungry, cold. At Christmastime . . . or anytime.

  Thoughts of Santa Claus cluttered my mind. But instead of Christmas cheer and gifts, the images reminded me that I was as much of a fake as Santa. Basking in the warmth of my home, with friends and fans galore, I had forgotten what it feels like to be lonely. With my belly full, and probably in need of losing a few pounds after poor eating habits on tour, I had forgotten that horrible ache in my stomach as it screamed for food. And as my hands wrapped around my warm coffee cup, I didn’t even want to think about how it must have felt for those kids who slept outside in the cold last night.

  Where’d you go, Jimmy Wayne Barber? What happened to you? Who are you anyhow, and why are you here?

  I knew the numbers. Thirty thousand kids every year age out of the foster care system the moment they turn eighteen. Many of them will become homeless, addicted, or imprisoned. Some will never see their twenty-first birthday. I knew I wanted to help those kids the way somebody had helped me. But how? What could I do? It couldn’t be simply another benefit concert. In Nashville we have benefit concerts out the wazoo. Every week a group of music artists is raising money for some worthy cause, and no doubt that is one of the reasons our music prospers. But I wanted to do something more than mere music. I wanted to do something bigger, something on a grander scale that would raise awareness about the plight of foster children who would soon be homeless with nowhere to go.

  It has to be something big, something to catch people’s attention.

  In what seemed like a shot out of the blue, I suddenly had an idea. In a fraction of a second, I knew! It struck me that one of the foster care homes in which I had done volunteer work was Monroe Harding, located in the posh Nashville community of Green Hills. Another facility was HomeBase in Phoenix. To raise awareness for these foster kids I could walk from Monroe Harding to HomeBase. I realized that would be like walking halfway across America; I could simulate being homeless the entire way. The whole idea seemed to come together from out of nowhere as though all the myriad pieces were being drawn together by a powerful Master Planner.

  Thinking of the homeless kid I used to be and the many kids I knew were still out there in the cold—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—I realized God had more for me to do than to hang around drinking expensive coffee. I needed to get back out on the road, this time not in a tour bus but on foot, sleeping wherever I stopped for the night, whether in the home of someone kind enough to invite me in or on the freezing ground. Just as I used to do, when I was homeless and on my own, away from foster care.

  The at-risk kids who age out of the foster care system are not able to do it all by themselves; they need somebody to meet them halfway.

  I walked back to the kitchen and placed my nearly full cup of coffee in the sink. I picked up the phone and called Jenny Bohler. A journalist who had cut her teeth in the Nashville music community as a writer and editor at Cashbox magazine, Jenny later served as Reba McEntire’s publicist, then moved to MCA Nashville Records, where she continued to promote Reba along with other artists, such as Vince Gill, George Strait, and Trisha Yearwood. She eventually opened her own company and now, along with Mike Kraski, managed my career.

  I could anticipate Jenny’s response to what I was about to tell her, so I mentally prepared my case: I’m going to walk halfway across America to raise awareness about foster kids who age out of the system. It won’t take long; I’ve looked at a map, and it doesn’t look that far. I’m pretty sure I can make the walk in three or four months. No, I’m not going to walk halfway across Tennessee. I’m going to walk halfway across America and invite people to join me. I’m going to call the walk Meet Me Halfway.

  I rehearsed my lines as Jenny’s phone rang. As well as anyone in the business, Jenny Bohler knew that for me to take a quarter of the year to do a walk like this, I could well be walking away from a thriving career in the music business. Moreover, she had worked hard to help get me what millions of hopeful, struggling music artists would give nearly anything to have—a career making music.

  But I knew I would spend most of the winter writing songs, gearing up to go back out on tour in late spring or early summer. Now was the best time.

  I already could hear Jenny and other people telling me, “Jimmy, your star is on the rise. Why don’t you wait until you are a superstar, and then do the walk? You can have an even greater influence.” I appreciated their confidence in me, but I was also aware that the music business could be quite fickle. A rising star today can fizzle overnight and be snuffed out in the ashes tomorrow. I had a platform now. I might never be able to create greater visibility than I could right then.

  Jenny answered her phone.

  “Hey, Jenny; it’s Jimmy.”

  “Hi, Jimmy.”

  “I’ve got this idea,” I said, making sure I had Jenny’s full attention. “I’m going to walk halfway across America.”

  There was a long pause before Jenny finally said, “What?”

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2010, WHILE MOST OF AMERICA WAS getting ready to enjoy a smorgasbord of football, food, and halftime shows, at 9:44 a.m. CST—I checked—I left my warm, comfortable townhouse and went across town to Monroe Harding foster care home where, after a brief talk to the kids, I began walking halfway across America.

  Along the way I met some good people—some wonderful, fascinating, amazing people—and I had some incredible experiences, some fun times and some downright frightening ones. By the time I finished, I had walked seventeen hundred miles on foot, taking one excruciating step after another, facing everything from freezing temperatures in Tennessee to rattlesnakes on the road in Arizona. And in true dramatic fashion, I traversed the final fifty or sixty miles on a broken foot. It was the most incredible trip of my life.

  But it wasn’t the toughest journey I’d ever taken.

  Part Two

  THE CRAZY YEARS

  Three

  LIFE WITH CARROLL

  MUSIC AND MAMA COMPOSE ONE OF MY FIRST VIVID MEMORIES of life in the Carolinas. Unfortunately, it isn’t a good memory.

  I was three years old and standing
in the street, watching the taxi roll away. My mom sat in the backseat of the cab, yelling at me through the window to get back in the yard. I heard Glen Campbell singing “Rhinestone Cowboy” on the taxi’s dashboard radio as I stepped back on the grass and the car pulled out of the trailer park where we lived. I stood there alone, silently calling out for Mama to come back. It wasn’t the first time she had left, and it would not be the last time I would experience a similar scenario during my early childhood. Indeed, it was the type of good-bye that set the stage for the rest of my life.

  Although I was born in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, a little more than a year after my sister, Patricia, the three of us moved to Johnsonville when Mama met a handsome, dark-haired, blue-eyed gentleman named Carroll Collins. Patricia’s and my real daddy had abandoned us and was long gone before I could say my first word, but Mama was never without a man for long. A petite, hazel-eyed beauty, Mama was a bona fide man magnet. She and Carroll met and married the same year Elvis Presley died, and shortly after that, we moved out to the country and settled in a small but picturesque two-bedroom, white farmhouse nestled in the middle of a tall, green cornfield. At five years of age, I could not imagine what was in store for me beyond those straight lines of cornstalks or where the two-lane road in front of our house might lead. I just sensed that Mama and Patricia seemed happy, so I was too.

  That’s why I couldn’t understand why Mama always wanted to leave. Anytime a man treated her well, she’d get antsy and feel suffocated. She’d bolt, sometimes with Patricia and me and at other times leaving us to fend for ourselves.

  But Carroll was a good man—a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy—and he sincerely loved Mama, so he always took her back.

  When Mama wasn’t suffering from what later came to be called bipolar disorder—whatever that was—ours was an idyllic life, almost like a scene out of one of those black-and-white sitcom television shows. A chicken coop and tool shed stood behind the farmhouse in the backyard. One day I decided to crawl under the shed, where I found a batch of hen eggs along with an old, dirty army helmet. I filled the helmet with eggs then scooted back out to take them inside and give them to Mama. She was thrilled with my gift. “Oh, Jimmy, I love you,” she said as she pushed me away.

  Out in the country we made our own entertainment. For instance, Carroll stretched a clothesline across the backyard and clamped empty milk jugs to the line with wooden clothespins. He and Mama enjoyed target shooting at the milk jugs—and with a shotgun, Mama couldn’t miss.

  This was where I first caught lightning bugs in a jar and where the sound of the cicadas filled the air, creating their own music. It was where I caught and held a fish for the first time and where I picked a watermelon, along with peanuts and green beans, from the garden Mama tended. This was where my hands first shelled corn on an antique, cast-iron corn-sheller that sat in the corner of Carroll’s welding shop.

  This was the place where Carroll taught me to use a hammer and saw and later how to steer a go-cart and ride my bike without training wheels on our horseshoe-shaped sand driveway. This was also the place where I fell chin-first on a huge rock in the front yard while waiting for the bus to arrive and take me to the private Christian school that Carroll paid for Patricia and me to attend.

  Oh, sure, there were those few weeks in the hospital inside an oxygen tent, recovering from pneumonia, and the time I had my tonsils removed. There was the time Mama accidentally closed the door on my left-hand ring finger—an important appendage for a future guitar player—and we had to race to the doctor so he could sew my fingertip back on. Some bad things happened during those years, but they never overshadowed the warmth of love that filled our farmhouse.

  Always smiling, Carroll was a fantastic stepdad; he spent nearly every weekend with the family. He took us boating on Saturdays and to church every Sunday and every Wednesday night. Patricia and I participated in the church Christmas plays, and there were lots of gifts for all of us on Christmas morning.

  This was life with Carroll, a safe, secure existence—a place where dreams could come true. Love and happiness flowed consistently, like a calm Carolina river. Even at five years old, I could tell the difference between the life we had left behind in Dixie Village Trailer Park and the new one we had in the middle of that cornfield in Johnsonville. To this day, I don’t know why Mama never figured it out.

  It was the calm before the storm.

  PATRICIA STARTLED ME AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night by shaking my arm. “Mama wants us in the car,” she whispered.

  “Wha . . .” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes and trying to blink the sleep out of them.

  “Just hurry.” Patricia repeated orders I recognized as coming directly from Mama.

  In the darkness I crawled down from the top bunk bed and headed toward the front door. Even though I was barely awake, as I passed by Mama and Carroll’s bedroom, I noticed that Carroll was still asleep in the bed. I crept silently past the doorway and outside to the car, where Patricia already had the door open for me.

  For what felt like a long time, Patricia and I waited quietly in the car, wondering what happened, where we were going, why we were leaving, and why Carroll wasn’t coming with us. Mama offered no answers. Instead she ran out of the house, carrying an armful of clothes. She threw them in the trunk and climbed behind the wheel.

  Mama drove nonstop through the night, heading toward Crowders Mountain, North Carolina, to Grandpa’s place. She wasn’t in the mood for talking, and Patricia and I knew better than to ask questions. We simply shut our mouths and our eyes and tried to sleep. By midmorning we arrived at an old house sitting on a hill. When we walked in, it was impossible not to notice that the dark house reeked something awful—a combination of foul smells from pipe smoke, a waste chamber, and a musky basement.

  I grappled with what was happening, unable to comprehend it, but it was obvious that this wasn’t a pleasure trip to see Grandpa. I wanted to ask Mama, but she was acting strange. Her facial expressions were different; her demeanor was different. I couldn’t figure out why. We stayed there for a week or two before Mama decided to go back home to the farmhouse and to Carroll.

  After the seventh or eighth time this happened, Carroll stopped taking Mama and the rest of us back. He simply said, “I’ve had enough,” and he banned us from ever returning to that farmhouse in the middle of the cornfield, the place where dreams lived and thrived.

  I never understood why Mama left the wonderful man who treated her like a queen. But I slowly came to understand why he didn’t take her back anymore.

  Something wasn’t right in Mama, and even a good man like Carroll could not cure her. Only God could do that—and back then He seemed a million miles away.

  TODAY, A BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTO OF MAMA SITS ON MY dresser. I keep it there because it explains a lot of things in her life and mine, and it helps me, all these years later, empathize with Mama and maybe understand some of the erratic things she did. She’s approximately three years old in the tattered photo. Her eyes are sad, and she’s frowning. Her hair looks as if the barber placed a bowl on her head and trimmed around it, leaving her sandy brown bangs a half-inch above her thin brows. She’s wearing a floral print dress and holding a hard plastic baby doll by the leg. She’s staring upward to the left of the camera lens, as though trying to please someone she must obey.

  When I look at this photo, I see an innocent little girl who appears to be afraid of much more than a photographer. I would be an adult before I found out that during her childhood, Mama had been treated badly by a number of men. Maybe that’s why she had such a love-hate relationship with so many men—including me.

  Four

  VANCE STREET VICE, MAYHEM, AND MURDER

  MAMA AND CARROLL EVENTUALLY DIVORCED. I WAS SEVEN, and they had been married only a few years. Mama, Patricia, and I moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, a city of about seventy thousand people, located a few miles west of Charlotte. Gastonia has a long history in textile manufacturing and was h
ome to the largest textile mill in the world, the Loray Mill. Author John A. Salmond exposed the horrible conditions of the industry in his book Gastonia 1929.

  Similar to many inner-city areas surrounding factories in America, the local neighborhood went downhill as the manufacturing center took over. By the time we moved to Gastonia, the Loray Mill was an enormous five-story, red-brick structure with green windows, and the entire complex was surrounded by a high, rusty, chain-link fence. Inside the enclosed area the textile mill flourished; outside the fence the locality turned into nothing short of an American war zone. Mama found a place where we could live, an inexpensive, pale yellow house on Vance Street, in the industrial section of West Gastonia, right across the street from the mill. Mama thought she had scored a bargain; nobody told us it was the most dangerous section of town.

  To say the least, Vance Street was not the best neighborhood in which to grow up. “Greasy Corner,” as we called the intersection on the north corner of Vance Street and Franklin Boulevard, was the hot spot for the local prostitutes. I had no idea what the word prostitute even meant, but I was fascinated by the women who stood out on the corner at all hours of the day or night, dressed in tight pants and wearing lots of makeup while chain-smoking cigarettes. When Mama saw me staring at the women, she warned me, “Now, you stay away from those women. Do you hear me?”

  I didn’t understand why she’d say such a thing since the women seemed so friendly. After all, they waved at everyone who drove by.

  Late one night a male friend of Mama’s brought one of those women to our house and asked if they could stay the night. Mama made Patricia and me spread a quilt on the hardwood floor. That’s where we spent the rest of the night, on the floor right beside our bed, while mom’s friend and the friendly woman used our bed to have sex. When I woke up the following morning, they were still lying naked in our bed, on top of the twisted sheets and blanket. The woman’s right leg draped over the man’s left leg. She stirred, woke up, and caught me standing at the foot of the bed, staring at her. She smiled but made no attempt to cover herself.