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

by Wayne, Jimmy

  The officer gave me a look somewhere between suspicion and pity. “Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll take you to your sister’s.” He opened the trunk and told me to put my boxes in there. I started to get in the front seat when he stopped me. “No, get in the backseat.”

  He opened the back door, and I got in the backseat, a heavy wire screen separating us. I sat back in the seat. But when the officer pulled out, he drove in the opposite direction of where I told him my sister lived. He didn’t say much until we arrived at the police station. Then he looked at me and asked directly, “Are you a runaway?”

  “No, sir,” I said with every bit of sincerity I could muster, but I didn’t give him any more information than that.

  I waited inside the police station and after more cross-examination and paperwork, the officer finally drove me to where he had located my sister’s address, off Old Stanley Highway.

  We arrived at her trailer around three o’clock in the morning, so the police officer got out of the patrol car and knocked on her door while I waited in the backseat. Steven answered the door. He and the police officer stood on the porch and talked for several minutes. I could tell by the look on Steven’s face that he wasn’t thrilled to see me.

  Finally the officer walked back to the patrol car and opened the back door. I got out, and he retrieved my boxes from the trunk. He said good-bye, I thanked him, and I walked inside Steven’s and Patricia’s trailer.

  Patricia was standing in the living room, dressed in her pajamas. She hugged me, then stepped back to look at me. “Are you hungry, Jimmy?” She knew I was famished, so she made me a bologna and cheese sandwich. As she stood there, watching me devour that sandwich as if I hadn’t eaten in years, tears trickled down her face. “Do you want another one?” she asked before I even finished with the first sandwich.

  Patricia was wise beyond her years. She knew that Mama had abandoned me.

  After I had eaten, Patricia and I talked for a little while before she said, “You need to get to bed. We’ll be getting up again in less than four hours. We’ll need to enroll you in school today.”

  I washed up, and Patricia settled me into a bed. It felt fantastic. I was glad to be “home.” It seemed I had barely gotten to sleep when she was gently shaking me awake again. I was still tired, but I got up and dug through my small cardboard boxes and picked out a pair of pants and a shirt that I’d worn to school last year. The clothes weren’t new, and they certainly weren’t clean. Nor did they fit well, but they were the best I had for my first day in junior high at a new school.

  Nineteen

  FACING THE BULLIES

  A LOT OF TEENAGE KIDS CAN BE CRUEL, BUT JUNIOR HIGH kids can be downright vicious.

  It was tough enough being the new kid at W. C. Friday Junior High School in Dallas, North Carolina, the school closest to Patricia’s home. The trailer park where Patricia and Steven lived was a dump, with enough space for about five or six old trailers. I had spent most of my life in trailer parks, but this place was so rundown, even I was embarrassed for any of my classmates to know that I lived there.

  While waiting for the bus, I stood across the road from the trailer park in a driveway that led to a nice house on a hill. When I got off the bus in the afternoons, I waited by that same driveway till the bus drove out of sight before I crossed the road and went back to the trailer park.

  One day as I was preparing to get off the bus, a smart-alecky junior high kid asked loudly enough for everyone on board the bus to hear, “Why do you get off at that house? You don’t live there.”

  I didn’t respond and just stepped off the bus. But I knew that he knew. And now so did all the other kids on the bus. Of course, it was hard to fool anyone when I wore the same clothes to school every day.

  ABOUT THREE MONTHS LATER MAMA AND TIM RETURNED to North Carolina after being on the run from the law. Charlie and Cathy may have dropped the charges, or maybe because of their own issues, they never pressed charges, but Tim was never arrested for shooting Cathy. He and Mama moved in with Tim’s sister, Kay, in a two-bedroom mill house in Belmont, North Carolina, right behind Stowe Mill. I had been living with Patricia and Steven during Mama’s spree, but when Mama said it was okay for me to join them, I was elated.

  Steven did not want me living with them, anyhow, and I knew it. Patricia and I were only a year apart in age, so like many siblings, we were prone to arguing with each other. But from Steven’s perspective, I was a homeless kid they were helping out, and now I was fighting with his wife. So when the opportunity came for me to move in with Mama again, Steven sure didn’t beg me to stay.

  There wasn’t much space in Kay’s house, but I was happy to be back with Mama, even if it meant sleeping on the living room floor beside the gas heater. Mama or Tim never offered an explanation for why they abandoned me at the bus station in Pensacola, and I didn’t want to destroy their newfound goodwill by asking.

  Living at Kay’s meant that I had to switch schools, changing this time to Belmont Junior High School. I was the new kid once again, so I was a target, a punching bag for almost every bully in the school.

  The badgering intensified when I ignored a pretty girl who liked me. I wasn’t rude; I simply wouldn’t talk to her. Butch, a guy nearly twice my size, one of the more notorious school thugs, thought I was acting arrogantly, snubbing one of the local sweethearts.

  “Do you think you’re too good to talk to my buddy’s sister?” Butch asked.

  “No,” I responded, “that’s not it at all. You’re out of your mind.” Truth is I didn’t want to be around any girl. I had to wear the same clothes to school every day. I was just too embarrassed to be near a girl. I had zero self-esteem.

  Butch was a pack leader, a bully who lived in the same neighborhood as I did. He led a group of boys who took fistfighting seriously. The kids on Vance Street and in the trailer parks fought, too, but Belmont was a new world to me. These kids wanted to fight over almost anything.

  Since Butch thought I was stuck up, he initiated the first fight with me at the bus stop, and from that point on, I fought someone different every day. Butch and his sidekick—a loudmouthed runt reminiscent of the punk in the movie A Christmas Story who wouldn’t have dared say a word had it not been for Butch—stalked me every day when I got off the school bus. Fear built inside of me every afternoon as the bus approached our stop. Seeing Butch and his cohorts waiting for me was worse than my fear of snakes.

  I knew that once I stepped off that bus and it drove away, I’d better run, or I was going to get beat up. But I didn’t run; I never ran. I was too stubborn and prideful to run. I’d rather be laughed at for getting beat up than for being a coward.

  Sure enough, Butch and his buddy ganged up on me again. They both punched me in the face and head with their fists. Butch held my arms like Mama did when she’d whip me, and his runt hit me again in the head. Pain seared through my head, and it seemed they had no intention of letting up, so I finally reached into my pants pocket and pulled out a knife.

  When I flashed the knife, Butch and his friend backed up. They finally left me alone and ran home. I picked myself up, dusted off, and walked home as well. I was angry at myself for not fighting back. I could have easily beaten Butch’s runt, who was my size, and I knew I could be just as mean as Butch, but I hadn’t done much to defend myself.

  Still brooding, I walked inside Kay’s house and stood beside the heater, staring at the floor and thinking about what had just happened. I still had the pocketknife in my hand when Tim walked into the living room.

  “Whatcha got there?” he asked, when he saw the knife. “Let me see it.” He stretched out his hand.

  I thought he wanted to see the knife and maybe have a fatherly heart-to-heart talk about dealing with bullies. Instead, when I handed him the knife, he threw it in the corner of the living room and, in one sweeping motion, turned back around. Catching me completely off guard, he punched me full force in the face on the side of my head. He grabbed me by my
hair and pulled me around the living room, over to the couch, where he slammed my head down onto the furniture’s wooden arm.

  Between blows, I could see Mama standing in the kitchen, watching.

  “Mama!” I screamed. “Make him stop!”

  But rather than stopping Tim or trying to calm him down, she stepped out of view, and Tim continued choking me and pummeling me with his fists.

  His sister ran into the living room, yelling, “Leave him alone!” Grabbing onto Tim, Kay forced him to stop and release me.

  I wiggled free and ran into Kay’s bedroom and waited. A few seconds later Tim stormed into her room and headed toward me with his fist balled up. Then without saying a word, he stopped short, turned around, and walked out. I flopped down on the bed and nursed my wounds. I was bruised and scratched from my encounter with the bus stop boys, and now my head felt as though it were swelling up to the size of a basketball.

  At school the next day the kids laughed at me, talking about the marks on my face and neck that Butch and his friends put there. Actually, the marks were caused by Tim’s hands.

  The abuse at school continued, so I decided I had to stand up to those bullies and physically fight back. I filled a two-liter plastic soda bottle with sand, tied a clothes hanger around the top of the bottle, forming a makeshift punching bag, and hung it from a tree limb in the backyard. I spent hours each day punching that bottle with my fists and kicking it, karate style.

  I had watched David Carradine on television and figured if I could learn one of those karate kicks, I could win a fight. It wasn’t long before I had my chance.

  Carlos—a big, West Coast Hispanic tough guy, who was trying to gain respect from the East Coast rednecks—approached me in the school hallway outside the gymnasium. Carlos and I had never met, but he wanted to make an impression on Butch, the ringleader of the bullies. He walked toward me with his fist balled up, and almost instantly a group of kids surrounded us, anticipating a bloody spectacle—composed mostly of my blood.

  I had no quarrel with Carlos, but I knew that if I was ever going to put a stop to the bullies picking on me, now was the time. As I stared at Carlos, his face morphed into a sand-filled, two-liter soda bottle right before my eyes. I knew what I had to do. The moment Carlos moved in on me, I jumped up in the air, spun my left leg around as hard and fast as I could, and smashed Carlos smack in the face with the side of my foot. Just like David Carradine taught me.

  It was a lucky stroke, but it was perfect luck. A loud pop! reverberated throughout the hallway as my shoe connected with Carlos’s face. Carlos never knew what hit him; he dropped straight to the floor with a splat.

  The crowd of onlookers let out a collective gasp, “Oooh!”

  Carlos lay moaning on the floor, with a foot-sized red welt rising on the side of his face. Word spread quickly throughout the school that little Jimmy Barber had knocked out tough-guy Carlos.

  For some kids, this news was hard to believe. So, not surprisingly, another challenge followed quickly on the heels of my lucky kick. The next day another tall boy approached me in the bathroom, crouching toward me in a threatening manner with his fists balled up, ready to fight.

  I didn’t wait for him to throw the first punch but jumped up and kicked him in the forearm. “Owww!” he hollered, holding his arm to his chest. His arm swelled up immediately, and the look on his face was like that of a little boy who wanted his mommy. He grabbed his arm and held it, desperately fighting back the tears and trying not to cry in front of me.

  I never found out if I had broken his arm, but no one else at Belmont Junior High, including Butch, messed with me ever again. In the bullies’ minds, I had been transformed from “Little Jimmy Barber” to “Jimmy Wayne Barber, ninja warrior!”

  Twenty

  FAITH FARM

  THE MORNING OF MARCH 18, 1987, MAMA SAID, “JIMMY, you’re not going to school today. We’re going down to the Gastonia courthouse.”

  “Why, Mama? What’s going on?”

  “We’re going to see about getting your daddy to take care of you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, Jimmy, I’ve been taking care of you all these years, so it’s time for your dad to take care of you for a while.”

  Her words hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut. I didn’t understand why Mama wanted me to be with my biological father all of a sudden. I didn’t even know the guy. He’d never been a part of my life, so why now?

  We went to the courthouse and walked into an office, where Deputy Superior Court Clerk Sharon Hawkins was sitting in a chair behind a large desk. She had a serious look on her face.

  “Please sit down, Jimmy,” she said kindly, but by the way she said it, I could tell it was not an optional matter. I sat. “Do you know why you are here?” the woman asked me.

  “Yeah, Mama said we were coming to see about my daddy taking care of me for a while,” I responded naively.

  Deputy Hawkins looked sternly at Mama and asked, “Is that what you told him?”

  Mama hedged. “We had to tell him that or he’d run away,” Mama lied.

  “Wha . . . ?” I was confused and looked at Mama and Tim and then back at the woman.

  She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Jimmy, you are here because your mother and stepfather have filed a court petition on you, claiming that you have been skipping school, fighting, breaking the neighbors’ windows, and fighting your stepdad.”

  I let out a loud, “Huh?”

  “You’ve been belligerent, and you’ve been suspended from school . . .” the woman read from a paper.

  “That’s not true!” I interrupted. I was shocked that Mama would tell such lies about me. I simply could not believe what I was hearing.

  I quickly attempted to inform Ms. Hawkins that Tim had beaten me up. I admitted to her that I had skipped school one time, when I was scared of getting beat up again at school. But other than that, I was there.

  She listened but remained unconvinced. Nothing I said mattered. The woman moved a few pieces of paper around on her desk, marked on some others, and then handed Mama a piece of paper. I later learned that the paper had my court date on it—for the next day!

  We left the courthouse and drove back to Kay’s house. It was an awkward drive, to say the least. No one spoke. Mama stared out the passenger window, just as she had done that evening in Texas. I sat in the backseat, as I had for most of the trip until the night Tim pulled up to the bus station in Pensacola. I felt hurt and betrayed by Mama for lying about me and especially for not defending me against Tim’s accusations. But I didn’t say a word for fear that Tim would knock my teeth out.

  The next morning at 9:00 a.m., we arrived at the Gaston County Courthouse and proceeded to the assigned courtroom. The judge soon entered, dressed in a black robe, and took his seat behind a raised bench. Tim stood behind a table and told why he filed the petition against me. The petition said I had threatened my stepfather with bodily harm.

  The judge then asked me to step forward and share my side of the story. I stood in front of the judge and, pointing at Tim, everything spewed out, like the burst of a geyser. “He gave me a gun to load,” I said, “and then he shot my brother’s wife. He’s the one who’s been beating me. He beat me up in the living room the other day for no reason!” I didn’t even want to pause to breathe for fear the judge would stop me, so I kept talking as fast as I could. “I don’t break people’s windows in the neighborhood. I’ve never been expelled or suspended from school; you can see my school records.”

  “He’s lyin’,” Tim interjected. “He lies all the time.”

  The judge simply stared at me as though he thought I was lying or on drugs or something, but I wasn’t.

  After a few minutes the judge and Deputy Hawkins signed and exchanged some papers. He put down his pen, looked up at the group in his courtroom, and read, “On Jimmy’s behalf, for his safety, the State of North Carolina is going to remove Jimmy Wayne Barber from the home due to his abusive s
ituation and place him in the custody of Gaston County Department of Social Services.”

  Sadness covered me like a heavy blanket. I looked over at Mama, sitting with Tim. She turned her head away from me. I could not believe that she was allowing this to happen. Why won’t she stand up and tell the truth?

  Adding to the weirdness of the scene, Tim, Mama, and I left the courtroom together that morning and went back to Kay’s house. For the next two weeks Mama and Tim and I actually got along. Mama treated me well, and things felt comfortable, almost like what I thought a normal home life might be. It wasn’t an over-the-top love fest, but at least Tim wasn’t hitting me, and Mama wasn’t screaming at me.

  I thought, Hey, maybe Mama has changed her mind!

  She hadn’t.

  One day Mama told me, “Jimmy, a social worker will be coming to pick you up tomorrow and will take you away, so you need to have all your things packed and ready to leave.”

  No! I wanted to scream, but of course, I didn’t. I was so confused. I thought we had gone to court so we could get on track. I didn’t understand that I was being sent away to another home. Or maybe a part of me did know that I was being sent off to live somewhere else. I just didn’t want to accept it. I was only fourteen years old; I didn’t want to be separated from my family again.

  Being sent away was almost worse than the feelings I had experienced after the bus station incident, where Mama had left me in the parking lot. We had been reunited, and I thought she wanted me around. But now it was clear that nothing had changed. At the same time, I was hopeful. Maybe this was the escape route I’d been searching for. Even if it meant going to a group home, it was worth it to get away from Tim.