by Ron Hall
I jumped out with the engine still runnin and started hollerin. “Bring it on! Bring it on! Come out! I’ll kill you!” It was late, but there was still a few people in the big courtyard. Most of em ran in their houses, the mamas snatchin up their children and hustlin em indoors.
Didn’t take long before lights started comin on. I knowed folks was callin the police on me, so I jumped back in the car and sped outta there. I had created a real problem and had to go hide out for a spell. The police come and took my friend’s Galaxy again, but they didn’t arrest him ’cause he swore somebody stole it. (I guess I had since I didn’t tell him I was takin it.) Besides, he didn’t match the eyewitness stories of the man folks said had crashed a flyin gold car into the middle of the projects.
If all that had a’ happened these days, somebody prob’ly woulda pulled out a gun and tried to shoot me dead. But back then, not a single one of them boys would come out and face me. I guess they thought a man crazy enough to jump a car into a place with women and children around might be crazy enough to kill em. They was right. If I’d a’ found em, I would have. ’Specially if I’d a’ thought to grab my gun.
I had to lay low for a while after that so I hightailed it back to Lousiana to let the heat die down. Took my pistol with me. That’s how I wound up in one of the worst hellholes ever invented by a white man.
I made it to Shreveport, but I didn’t have no money. I had that .22, though, and I figured if I waved it around at somebody who did have some money, they might give me some of it. I ain’t proud a’ this one bit now, but I decided to rob a city bus. All I had to do was wait on a corner till a bus slowed down and stopped. When the door opened, I jumped up on the steps and showed the driver my pistol.
“Open that box and gimme that money!” I hollered. There was just a couple of folks on the bus and they ducked down in their seats real quick. One lady started cryin.
The driver’s eyes got real big. “I can’t open it,” he said, his voice kinda shakin a little. “I don’t have a key. You can’t get the money out unless you break it.”
I looked down at the money in the box then at the folks hunkerin down in the bus. I could hear that lady, still cryin. I looked back at the driver and saw he was looking at my gun. Then I got off the bus. I was mean and bad, but not mean and bad enough to shoot a man just ’cause he showed up for work on the wrong day. But now I had the law on my tail in Fort Worth and Shreveport, so I decided to turn myself in. I didn’t tell the police my real name, though. Told em my name was Thomas Moore. But it wouldn’t have mattered to the judge if my name was Abraham Lincoln. He found me guilty of armed robbery and sent me to Angola prison for twenty years.
It was May 1968. Now in case you ain’t heard nothin ’bout Angola, it was hell, surrounded on three sides by a river. I didn’t know this then, but in those days, it was the darkest, most vicious prison in America.
A few days after I got there, a prisoner I had met back at the Shreveport jail saw me and reached out like he was gon’ shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a knife. “Put this under your pilla,” he said. “You gon’ need it.”
I was back in the fields again, ’cept this time I really was a slave ’cause that’s how they ran the prison—like a plantation. ’Cept it was prisoners workin crops all day in the swelterin sun. And there wadn’t enough guards, so they turned some a’ the inmates into guards, even gave em guns. They liked to point em at us while we worked. Lotta times the same fellas that was workin with me one day didn’t come back the day after that. And nobody ever saw em again.
In those days, a man in Angola without a knife was either gon’ wind up raped or dead. For the first few years I was there, at least forty men got stabbed to death and another bunch, hundreds of em, got cut up bad. I did what I had to do to protect myself.
I was on what you call two-for-one time. Judge locked me up for twenty years, but they let me out after ten. I was ashamed to go do somethin like try and live off Hershalee, so I went on back to Fort Worth. I knowed I wadn’t gon’ have no home or no job there, but I knowed how to get by. Word got around on the streets that I’d been in Angola and wadn’t nobody to be messin with.
I didn’t scare everybody, though. I slept in the doorway of that United Way over on Commerce Street for a whole lotta years. And every mornin for all that time, a lady who worked there brought me a sandwich. I never knowed her name and she never knowed mine. I wish I could thank her. Funny, though. That United Way buildin was right next door to a church, and for all them years, nobody at that church ever looked my way.
I had been sleepin there for a long time when the Fort Worth police put up no-loiterin signs all over the place and made me have to move my sleepin spot. I found out later some rich white folks was “revitalizin” downtown. Raggedy black fellas sleepin on the sidewalks wadn’t part of the plan. The police told me I needed to be goin down to the Union Gospel Mission. After sleepin on the streets, I dunno, maybe fifteen, twenty years, I wadn’t fixin to move indoors just like that. So I put my blankets on the concrete next to a old empty building across from the mission. Mr. Shisler, the manager of the mission, told me over and over I didn’t need to be sleepin outside in the weather. After some years went by, I let him give me a bed. He let me clean up around the mission for my keep.
18
When Deborah was six years old, she started a fire club. To get in, her friends had to steal some matches from their mamas’ kitchens and hand them over to Deborah so she could show them how they worked. During one such lesson, she almost burned down an oil-field camp in Premont, where she lived—a near disaster resulting in a leather-belt spanking from her daddy that kept her out of a bathing suit for weeks.
Another time, just to see what would happen, she collected a bucketful of bullfrogs and dumped them into the laps of three ladies who were playing bridge with her mama. What happened was shrieking ladies, upended iced tea, and another spanking.
So here we were in our fifties, with me hoping some bums in littered alley-ways would scare her when the only things on earth she really feared were black ice, yellow jackets, and rattlesnakes. Not exactly your shrinking violet.
She did have one other fear, though: missing the call of God. And she felt called to work at the mission. I wish I could say I felt God had tapped me for the assignment, too, but I didn’t. But I did feel called to be a good husband, so I went.
The Union Gospel Mission sits just beyond the beauty of the restored section of Fort Worth, a city that became a national model for downtown revitalization, thanks to the billionaires who loved it. In that part of town, soaring glass towers pulse with legal intrigue and high finance. Nearby, warmer-looking buildings refaced with brick and brownstone line sidewalks graced with raised iron flowerboxes, manicured trees, and—afterall, it’s Texas—topiaries of longhorn cattle. A cultural district spans three city blocks, housing three world-class museums, the Kimbell, the Amon Carter, and the Modern. A mile east, cafés open onto cobblestone plazas where dazzling urbanites can sip lattes and mineral water, and watch cowboys amble by in their boots and spurs.
Travel farther east, though, and the colors and flora of restoration fade into hopelessness and despair. Drive under the I-30/I-35 interchange, pass beneath an impossible pretzel of freeways called the Mixmaster and through a tunnel that efficiently separates the haves from the unsightly have-nots, and there are no more plazas or monuments or flowerboxes and certainly no more dazzling urbanites. In their place: tumbledown buildings with busted-out glass. Walls scarred with urine stains and graffiti. Gutters choked with beer cans and yellowed newspapers. And vacant lots blanketed in johnsongrass tall enough to conceal a sea of empty vodka bottles and assorted drunks.
Driving out of that tunnel shocks most people into realizing they made a wrong turn. But on a sun-splashed Monday in the early spring of 1998, Deborah and I drove out there on purpose, she propelled by her passion to help the broken and I propelled by a love for my wife.
As we passed out of the dark tun
nel onto East Lancaster Street, we witnessed a curious one-way migration, a streaming of people, like tributaries all flowing east into a single, larger river of souls. On our left, a string of shabby men staggered from the johnsongrass that covered a lot. To the right, a parade of women and children in dirty, mismatched clothes shambled along, dragging green garbage bags. One boy, about eight, wore only a man’s undershirt and black socks.
“They’re going to the mission!” Deborah said, beaming, as if the entire ragtag bunch was long-lost TCU alumni and she just couldn’t wait to catch up. I managed some sort of agreeing noise and a thin smile. To me, they looked as if they’d somehow found a portal from the Middle Ages and squeaked through just in time to escape the plague.
When we reached the mission, I bumped our truck over the driveway dip where a brown-trousered fat man dangled a cigarette from his lips and stood guard at a rusted chain-link gate. I offered my friendliest east Texas grin. “We’re here to volunteer,” I told him.
He flashed back a toothless smile, and I swear his cigarette never moved, just clung to his bottom lip as though he’d tacked it there with a stapler.
I had pulled into the parking lot wondering how quickly I’d be able to pull out again, but Deborah suddenly spoke in a tone that you learn to recognize when you’ve loved someone for years, a tone that says, “Hear me on this.”
“Ron, before we go in, I want to tell you something.” She leaned back against her headrest, closed her eyes. “I picture this place differently than it is now. White flowerboxes lining the streets, trees and yellow flowers. Lots of yellow flowers like the pastures at Rocky Top in June.”
Deborah opened her eyes and turned to me with an expectant smile: “Can’t you just see that? No vagrants, no trash in the gutters, just a beautiful place where these people can know God loves them as much as He loves the people on the other side of that tunnel.”
I smiled, kissed my fingertips, and laid them against her cheek. “Yes, I can see that.” And I could. I just didn’t mention that I thought she was getting a little ahead of herself.
She hesitated, then spoke again. “I had a dream about it.”
“About this place?”
Yes,” she said, gazing at me intently. “I saw this place changed. It was beautiful, like I was saying, with the flowers and everything. It was crystal clear, like I was standing right here and it was the future already.”
Inside the mission, we met the director, Don Shisler. In his early fifties and stocky, with a short beard and close-cropped hair, he looked more like a banker or an accountant than a caretaker of the homeless—though I’m not sure what I thought one of those was supposed to look like. Don introduced us to Pam, the volunteer coordinator, who led us on a tour of the common areas, including the kitchen and the chapel.
Both were dirty and windowless, and reeked of body odor, old grease, and other not-quite-identifiable odors that made me want to turn and flee. In the kitchen, we slid like roller skaters along the greasy floor, straight into the sweltering office of a chain-smoking live wire named “Chef Jim.”
Jim Morgan was the kind of fellow who, like any self-respecting Baptist, passes up handshakes and goes straight to hugs. He first wrapped me in a backslapping embrace like an old college pal, then gave Deborah a kinder, gentler squeeze. Thin and graying, he looked sixty-five but might have been younger. He wore checked pants and a chef ’s tunic, surprisingly unstained.
Chef Jim gabbed with us enthusiastically about God, homeless folks, and to a lesser degree, food. Extremely articulate, he used words I’d never heard before, and he didn’t fit my notion of a homeless person, which at the time was someone who was probably uneducated or at least not very smart for having gotten themselves in such a fix in the first place.
As it turned out, Chef Jim was a fellow TCU alumnus whose teenage son had died tragically, an event that landed his wife in a mental institution. Jim, by contrast, numbed his double-dose of grief with rivers of liquor and drugs, which cost him his job as head of catering at an international hotel chain, then his home. Now, he was at the mission plying his trade for room and board while attempting to rebuild his life.
Jim shared his story with self-deprecating humor and without an ounce of blame or self-pity. Then he encouraged us to come on down and dish up supper for the homeless once a week.
“Infect em with love!” he said.
He couldn’t have used a more appropriate word, since infection was probably my greatest fear. Spending hours each week captive in a kitchen that smelled like rotten eggs boiled in Pine-Sol was bad enough. But I fervently did not want to be touched for fear of the germs and parasites I suspected floated in every particle of the air.
Chef Jim and Deborah chatted easily while I mentally balanced the ledger between pleasing my wife and contracting a terminal disease. I had to admit that his idea seemed like an easy way to start—serve the evening meal once a week, and we’d be in and out in three, four hours max. We could minister from behind the rusty steel serving counter, safely separated from the customers. And we could enter and leave through the rear kitchen door, thereby minimizing contact with those likely to hit us up for money. The whole arrangement seemed like a good way for us to fulfill Deborah’s desire to help the homeless without our touching them or letting them touch us.
Her bright laugh pulled my attention back into the room. “I think that sounds great, Jim!” she was saying. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t start tomorrow. In fact, let’s just say you can count on us to serve every Tuesday until you hear otherwise.”
“Praise the Lord!” Chef Jim said, this time giving Deborah a great big Baptist hug. It did not sound great to me, but Deborah had not asked me what I thought. She never did do much by committee.
Driving home, she reflected aloud on how society generally regards the homeless as lazy and foolish, and maybe some were. But she felt there was so much more below that surface image: dysfunction and addiction, yes. But also gifts—like love, faith, and wisdom—that lay hidden like pearls waiting only to be discovered, polished, and set.
That night she dreamed about the mission again—and this time, about a man.
“It was like that verse in Ecclesiastes,” she told me the next morning over breakfast. “A wise man who changes the city. I saw him.”
She gazed at me warily, as if she was afraid I wouldn’t believe her or that I might think she was losing her mind. But I knew she wasn’t the dreams-and-visions, mumbo-jumbo type. I poured fresh coffee into her cup. “You saw the man in your dream?”
“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I saw his face.”
At first the daisy chain of wilted souls who shuffled by for their Tuesday handouts depressed me. The first in line were mamas with their children, most of whom wore stained, ill-fitting clothes and looked like someone had cut their hair with a kitchen knife. Next came a string of women ages eighteen to eighty-five, followed by the “old” men, many younger than I, but with creased and haggard faces that made them look ancient. After that, the younger men, some beaten and sullen, some hiding behind a loud, false cheer meant to mask their shame. These were the ones who wandered the streets all day, then slept at the mission.
Last to eat were the undiluted street people, shabby and pungent. It took me a while to get over their smell, which floated in their wake like the noxious cloud around a chemical plant. The odor seemed to stick to the hairs inside my nose. I swore I could see the hair on some of their heads rustling, jostled by hidden armies of squirming lice. A couple of the men had stumps protruding where an arm or a leg used to be. One long-haired fellow wore a necklace fashioned from several hundred cigarette butts tied together with string. He wore black plastic garbage bags tied to his belt loops. I didn’t want to know what was in them.
On our first day, Deborah, surveying the street people, looked at me and said, “Let’s call them ‘God’s people.’”
I was thinking they looked more like the extras in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Everyone who ate at the mission earned their free meal only after going into the chapel to sit like dead men on hard benches while a white-haired and nearly blind preacher named Brother Bill roared about the saving power of Jesus and the unpleasant consequences reserved for the unredeemed. From the kitchen side of the chapel door—locked to prevent altar-call escapees—I could hear the hellfire-and-brimstone, tough-love message that I agree often cracks hard cases. But it seemed manipulative to me to make the hungry sit like good dogs for their supper. And it did not surprise me that even when Brother Bill split the air with one of his more rousing sermons, not a single soul ever burst through the chapel doors waving their hands and praising Jesus. At least not while we were there.
The men and women we served seemed pleasantly surprised to have a smiling couple with all their teeth serving them supper. I’m sure they thought Deborah was on amphetamines, or possibly running for mayor, as they had likely never seen anyone who smiled and asked after them as much as she did.
“I’m Deborah, and this is my husband, Ron,” she’d say as though welcoming visitors into her home. “What’s your name?” Often, she received blank stares. Some looked at her slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, as though she’d just landed in the parking lot on a spaceship from Mars.
Some fellows answered Deborah, though, and from that day on she was forever telling rough-looking characters with names like Butch and Killer, “Oh, what a pretty name!”
Of the hundreds we served on that first day, only a handful told us what people called them. Deborah wrote down their names: Melvin, Charley, Hal, David, Al, Jimmy—and Tiny, an affable fellow who stood six-foot-five, weighed 500 pounds, and wore Osh-Kosh overalls, fuzzy blue house slippers, and no shirt.