What Difference Do It Make? (2 page)

And so the story goes on—men and women all over the country inspired by the story of Denver and Deborah to make a difference in other people's lives. Over the past three years, I thought I was making a difference too—traveling and speaking all over the country, “carrying Miss Debbie's torch,” as Denver calls it. And I suppose I was.

But in 2009, I learned that sometimes the most difficult difference to make is the one that's closest to home.

—
RON HALL
Dallas, Texas
July 2009

1

Ron

T
ennessee sour-mash whiskey defined my daddy. He pledged a lifetime of allegiance to Jim Beam, and ol' Jim never had a more loyal friend. As a boy, tucked into bed in a ratty blue-collar town outside of Fort Worth, I sometimes cried myself to sleep wishing my daddy loved me and my brother, John, as much as he loved Jim.

My father's given name was Earl F. Hall. The
F
didn't stand for anything, but over the years I assigned it lots of unprintable meanings. Earl was a chain-smoking, chain-drinking ladies' man, who slicked back his wavy brown hair with Vitalis and favored wife-beater T-shirts, pleated gabardine slacks, and wing-tip shoes. He was not a mean drunk and most of the time could walk a straight line and recite the alphabet if he had to. Once he even recited poetry till he sobered up.

When my daddy came home from World War II in '45, we all lived in his mama's little shack in Denton, Texas, until he could find a job. After a few months he found one working for Curtiss Candy, driving a 1947 GMC panel truck painted red and white like a Baby Ruth wrapper. Not long after that, we piled our meager belongings into the candy truck and moved them over to a one-bedroom bungalow in the West Fourth Street slums near downtown Fort Worth. The neighborhood was planted smack in the geographic center of a shabby circle formed by a rail yard, a hobo camp, a gravel pit, a junkyard, a dog-food factory, and a sewage plant.

Our neighbors were mostly workaday folks, bagging kibble at the plant or spelunking in the sewer lines. Except for Andy, who lived across the street. Andy was a Harley-riding professional wrestler who stayed home all day and wrestled at night. When he wasn't wrestling in the ring, he wrestled naked in his living room with his redheaded bombshell wife, Rusty Fay. For some reason Rusty Fay had never gotten around to hanging curtains in the front room, so the picture window that faced our street drew neighborhood boys like the hootchy-cootchy tent at an old-time carnival. We never could figure out how little Rusty Fay always managed to pin her big, brawny husband and wind up on top, but we all thought it was the best show in town.

From a boy's perspective, that was about the only thing my neighborhood had going for it. For one thing, the place stunk to high heaven. Smelly emissions from the sewage facility and the dog-food plant settled in the trees like an invisible fog with a combined scent that reminded me of a roomful of old men after a chili cook-off. Those fumes competed with equally unpleasant ones from hobo campfires, backyard chicken droppings, and the working outhouse that our next-door neighbors kept out back. Once, on a school field trip, I smelled the warm, cinnamon scent of a bakery and was jealous of any kids fortunate enough to live nearby.

Our house sat near a rail yard with acres of tracks planted like row crops that produced a year-round yield of multicolored boxcars and a round-the-clock clang of crossing bells. Day and night, the cars collided in a steady, drum-like rhythm as screeching engines slammed them together to form mile-long strings that chugged out of the yard with hobos in hot pursuit. (The good news about the rail yard was that my friends and I, through many scientific trials, disproved the old wives' tale that a single penny on the tracks can derail a moving train.)

Playing second fiddle to the rail-yard symphony were the grain elevators and the dog-food plant, each of which produced an uninterrupted, high-pitched whine. But none of these noises was as obnoxious or caustic as my parents' constant fighting.

I have heard it said that a thin line exists between love and hate. From the epithets I often heard floating through the open windows into the front yard, I thought Earl and Tommye Hall were hell-bent on erasing the line entirely.

Most of their screaming matches took place in mornings and afternoons since most nights Daddy hid out at the Tailless Monkey Bar. Then, just before midnight, he'd call home and make Mama come and get him. She'd wake us up and drive the mile or so to the Tailless Monkey. She'd honk, and he'd stumble out. After we were old enough to walk and talk, John and I would fight until the loser had to go in and get him. Earl would usually be sitting with his buddies at a table, sometimes with a woman on his lap. Daddy was handsome and attracted the barflies like ants to a family picnic.

“Gimme some sugar,” he would slur, trying to kiss me on the mouth. I'd wiggle out of his grip and turn my head because I hated the way beer and smoke smelled on his breath.

Daddy didn't set out to destroy me, and I didn't let him, though there was no avoiding his influence. I promised myself I'd never drink or smoke, and I managed to make it to age five before I started smoking grapevine and age six before I started smoking Kool menthols stolen from Elizabeth Henson's daddy, who drove a dump truck for the neighborhood gravel pit. I had my first drink, a Pabst Blue Ribbon, at the age of fourteen. It is sometimes a sad irony of boyhood that sons can emulate their fathers and simultaneously loathe them.

2

Denver

L
otta times, people look at homeless folks the way they used to look at me: they'd kinda eyeball me up and down, and I could see them wheels turnin in their heads, wonderin, how'd that fella get that way?

See, that ain't the right question to be askin 'cause it might be that ain't none a' our business. Our business is to find out is there anything we can do to bring a change in their life. To bring opportunity. To bring hope. Sometimes that might mean gettin a man off liquor or drugs. It might mean helpin him find a job.

Here's my story. When I showed up in Fort Worth, Texas, I couldn't read, couldn't write, and couldn't do a lick a' rithmetic. I had growed up on a plantation in the Deep South and never went to school a day in my life.

I was born in Red River Parish, Louisiana, in 1937, a time when whites was white and blacks was “colored.” Officially, there wadn't no slavery, but that didn't mean there wadn't no slaves.

All around the South we had what we called sharecroppers. Now, my daddy, BB, wadn't no sharecropper. He was a railroad worker, I think—I never did know for sure—and a ladies' man that couldn't set foot in the New Mary Magdelene Baptist Church on Sundays 'cause he'd been steppin out with some of the women in the congregation. But BB got stabbed to death one night in Grand Bayou right out there by Highway 1. My grandma, Big Mama, had already burned up in a house fire by then, and me and brother, Thurman, went to live with my Aunt Etha and Uncle James. They was sharecroppin on a plantation down there near Coushatta.

When you is croppin, here's how it works. The Man that own the plantation give you everthing you need to make a cotton crop, 'cept he give it to you on credit. Then you plant and plow and chop that cotton till pickin time. And when you bring in that cotton, you s'posed to split that crop down the middle, or maybe 60/40, and the Man take his share and you take yours. 'Cept somehow it never did work out that way 'cause by the time you pay the man back for all he done loaned you on credit, ain't nothin left outta your share a' the crop. In fact, most a' the time, you in the hole, so you got to work another season on the plantation to pay back what you owe.

From the time I was a little-bitty boy, I was a cropper. Didn't know how to do nothin 'cept plantation work—plowin, plantin, choppin, pickin, and whatever odd jobs there was to do, like tryin to nail scrap boards in the floor of the shack the Man let us live in.

I worked like that all the way till the 1960s, all without no paycheck. Then one day when I was grown, I realized I wadn't never gon' get ahead. I wadn't
never
gon' be able to pay the Man back what I owed. So I hopped on a freight train that come runnin through the country and wound up in Fort Worth, Texas. Even though I hadn't ever been outta Red River Parish, I'd heard there was plenty a' work in the cities. But once I got there, I found out there wadn't too many folks willin to hire a colored fella who couldn't read, couldn't write, and couldn't figure.

I got me a few odd jobs here and there, but it wadn't enough to pay for a place to live. So I wound up homeless.

Now, let's say you walked up to me on East Lancaster Street in Fort Worth and asked me, said, why you homeless? Why you down on your luck?

If I told you about BB and Big Mama and the Man, if I told you that I used to work plantations like a slave almost up until the time America put a man on the moon, what you gon' say?

“Here's a dollar”?

“Good luck and God bless”?

A lotta homeless folks has been hurt and abused since we was little bitty. At one time or another we loved or was loved by somebody. We had hope. We believed. Then hope flew out the door, and everthing we had was gone. For a lot of us there come a time when nobody was willin to take us in. Nobody was willin to help in no kinda way. All the doors was slammed in our faces, and next thing you know, we just sittin on the curb with ever-body passin us by, won't even look at us.

Even though you is still a human bein inside, even though you mighta been a little boy once with a mama, even though you mighta been married once with a house and a job, now you ain't nothin. And once that happens, people rather come up and pet a stray dog than even say hello.

Sometimes we becomes homeless 'cause we done some real bad thing, somethin so bad that everbody in our life just stop lovin and trustin us. And when you ain't got no one to love you and trust you, you becomes like a wild animal, hidin and livin in the dark. Even when you see them homeless fellas on the street that look real cheerful and happy, that's just a mask. Underneath is a swamp of misery, but they puttin on that mask so they can get through the day. Maybe scare up a dollar or two so they can get somethin to eat or a half-pint to take the edge off the pain.

No, if you'd a' seen me back then, you prob'ly wouldn'ta believed my story. You mighta even just rolled on by and said to yourself, “Idle hands is the devil's workshop! Why don't that lazy fella get a job?”

LUCY

Love in a Ziploc Bag

“Mama, who is that brown man?”

When seven-year-old Lucy Barnes went to bed the night before, her mama had been sitting in an overstuffed chair, reading a book. When Lucy woke up, her mama was tucked into the same chair with the same book. Now Lucy wanted to know about the man on the cover.

“His name is Denver, and he is a homeless man,” Reta Barnes said.

A puzzled look furrowed Lucy's small face. “What's homeless?”

A little embarrassed, Reta suddenly realized she had never explained homelessness to her daughter. It wasn't that she was sheltering Lucy. It was just that the subject had never come up. In their tiny town of Fairhope, Alabama, she had never seen anyone sleeping on the streets. Later that year, we would read about Lucy in an Alabama newspaper. But on that morning she was just a little girl asking questions.

Reta looked at her daughter and tried to keep her explanation simple.

“There are men and women and children who don't have homes,” Reta said as Lucy peered at her with serious eyes. “They don't have food, they don't have jobs, and they can't afford homes. So they find the best place they can to sleep, maybe under a bridge or on a park bench. They sleep with their coats over them and make do with what they have.”

Lucy reflected on this for a moment. Then she said, “Why can't they just get a job?”

Reta paused. She knew that some homeless people
could
get jobs but didn't want to. But that would confuse the issue beyond the capacity of a seven-year-old. Reta decided to teach her daughter about the truly needy.

“Some homeless people who can't get jobs are women who don't have any place to leave their children,” Reta said. “Some can't get jobs because they're sick. Some lost their homes because they were out of work, and now they can't get a job because they have to keep moving around to find a place to sleep.”

Then Reta explained that there are places called rescue missions where homeless people can go to get help. “There's one right across the bay in Mobile,” she said.

Lucy Barnes did not ooh and aah or receive this information with wide eyes. She just took it all in. But the next thing Reta knew, Lucy had gone to every member of her family and hit them up for cash.

“I'm raising money for the homeless!” she would say cheerfully. She even braced her grandmother, who lives in a nursing home.

A couple of days later, Lucy popped into the kitchen where her mother was fixing lunch. “Can I have a lemonade stand?” the little girl asked.

A half hour later, armed with a pitcher of Crystal Light lemonade and a homemade sign, Lucy started flagging down folks driving through her neighborhood while Reta looked on from a folding camp chair.

Lucy kept up her pitch: “I'm raising money for the homeless!” She was charging twenty-five cents a cup, but her customers always threw in a little extra since it was for a good cause.

By the end of the afternoon, Lucy's impromptu enterprise had added a few dollars to her fund, and Reta thought that was probably that. But Lucy wasn't finished yet. The next day, she and two young friends went door-to-door in her neighborhood, repeating Lucy's now-familiar refrain: “We're raising money for the homeless!”

One family thrilled the girls when they chipped in twenty dollars in one whack. “We were, like, whoa! That's so cool!” Lucy remembers.