What Difference Do It Make? Read online

  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.

  Reta Barnes, meanwhile, observed her daughter’s philanthropy with amazement. No one had suggested to Lucy that she do any of this fund-raising. She did it all on her own. Reta thought her little girl was setting a very grown-up example.

  Between her family, neighbors, and lemonade customers, Lucy had raised a little under ninety dollars. At first, she wanted to take the whole sum and deliver it to one homeless person. But Reta suggested an alternative. Maybe they should take the money to the rescue mission in Mobile. “The people there will know how best to use the money to help the homeless.”

  Lucy thought that was a good idea, so her mother called Carrie, the volunteer coordinator at the mission, and set a date to visit a couple of weeks in the future.

  The day before the trip, the telephone rang at the Barnes home. It was Miss Lott, Lucy’s second-grade teacher. “Reta, I just wanted you to know that Lucy has written a letter to her classmates saying she’s going to the rescue mission,” Miss Lott said. “She told the other kids that if any of them have any money or clothes they want to donate, she’ll be happy to take it to the rescue mission when she goes.”

  Once again, Reta was astonished. She had thought Lucy’s fund-raising drive was over. But then, without fanfare, Lucy just kept going. The morning of the mission trip, some of her classmates brought clothes from home, along with a few dollars, for Lucy to take to the mission. And so that all the children could participate in the giving, Miss Lott broke a twenty-dollar bill into singles and let each student contribute a dollar.

  Reta was amazed at the chain reaction caused by her daughter’s initiative. Lucy’s small acts of determined kindness were like stones in a pond, the ripples spreading out to her family, neighbors, and classmates, even her teacher. By the day of the mission trip in May 2008, Lucy had raised $113 in coins and
cash, including one very exciting twenty-dollar bill. She proudly tucked her treasure into a Ziploc bag. Until that day, she had never even seen a homeless person. But that day, she toured the mission and even helped serve a meal.

  “I saw a lot of brown men, like Denver on the book cover,” she remembers. “It was really fun because I got to give them fruit!”

  She also got to give Carrie, the volunteer coordinator, the Ziploc bag filled with money. Inside the bag, Lucy had tucked a note for the homeless:

  I love you, and God does too.

  3

  Ron

  Daddy started out a comical, fun-loving man who retired from Coca-Cola after forty-odd years of service. But somewhere during my childhood, he crawled into a whiskey bottle and didn’t come out till I was grown.

  My daddy, Earl, was raised by a single mother, Clarabell, and two old-maid aunts, Edna and Florence. None of them ever drove a car; they walked to their jobs as maids at the laundry for the Southern Hotel and the Texas State College for Women. Their little house never saw a coat of paint inside or out. They had no telephone, heated the place with a four-burner kitchen stove that I never in my life saw turned off, and considered air-conditioning a dream on par with someday owning an estate like John D. and Lupe Murchison, the richest people in Texas.

  Mama Clara and Aunt Edna and Aunt Florence dipped Garrett snuff. Between the three sisters, they went through a whole jar of it every day. The smell was nauseating, and it ran down their chins and dried deep in the wrinkles. I would rather have had a leather belt whipping than kiss one of them. But once a month, when we visited the three sisters in their little shack across the tracks in Denton, Daddy made me say hello and goodbye with a kiss on the mouth. I squinched my eyes shut, made my lips as thin as I could, and endured it. Maybe Edna and Florence knew it was a trial for me because they always gave me a jar of pennies as a kind of reward.

  But they were mighty sweet, and Son, as they called Daddy, was all they had.

  My grandmother, Clarabell, wore the shame of being a single mother like a leper. She seldom made eye contact with anyone but her sisters. I recently read a book about single mothers, Holding Her Head High, by the actress Janine Turner. I wish Mama Clara could have read it and held hers high, but I don’t believe she could read, and because of her shame, her chin always rested on her chest.

  When he was seven years old, Daddy had to go to work to help make ends meet. He wound up washing bottles in a 7-Up plant. Mama Clara and the aunties strictly forbade him to ask for any information about his father. Later, when I came along, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was still in force.

  I remember sitting on the front stoop with Aunt Edna and Aunt Florence one day when I was about eight, each aunt with her little lump of Garrett causing her lower lip to poke out like a permanent pout. With the Texas sun heating up the porch and the seat of my dungarees, I was feeling a little brave.

  “Tell me a story about my granddaddy,” I ventured.

  The sisters barked in unison, “You don’t have one!” Then Edna turned her head and spit in the yard.

  As I got older, I realized it couldn’t be true that my daddy didn’t have a daddy, as there was only one virgin birth ever recorded. Once, my brother, John, told me he thought Aunt Edna was our grandfather.

  In any case, all his life, when Daddy asked who his father was, the sisters gave him the same answer. Finally, when he shipped off to fight the war in the Pacific in 1942, he quit asking. He was seventy-five years old when his mother died. Florence, the oldest aunt, was on her deathbed when she told him his father was named Wanda and that he was from Stephenville, Texas. But it was too late to go looking for him, even though there could not have been another man named Wanda in all of Texas.

  My mama raised us like a single mom with no help from Earl. As opposed to Mama Clara, she held her head high, leading by example. She taught us the Bible and dragged us off to Sunday school and church every week—no excuses, no absences unless one of us was broken out with chicken pox or measles.

  Not even circumcision was an excuse. When my brother was five, he got circumcised on a Friday and bled like a stuck hog. On Sunday morning he was no better, so Mama wrapped his penis in a sock, looped Scotch tape around the package three or four times, and hauled us off to church. Sitting on the front pew, I was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom for fear of what other creative uses my mama could find for tape and a sock. So I just sat there and pooped in my pants.

  I never remember my daddy ever setting foot in church, except once or twice on Easter when I was in junior high and high school. I don’t have a clue what he did on Sundays when the Monkey was closed, but we never saw him. In fact, I can’t remember him ever driving us anywhere, except when he moved us to the slums in the candy truck. Sometimes he would go with us when we went somewhere, but my mother was always the designated driver so he could be the designated drinker.

  Mama taught us how to throw a baseball, and she also helped coach our games. We’d drop Daddy off at the Monkey before the games and pick him up after.

  “Paste that ol’ pill!” he’d command as the door slammed on our ’49 Pontiac. What he really meant was, “Hit the ball.” Later he’d ask, “Did you paste that ol’ pill for your daddy?”

  That was Earl Hall’s definition of involved fatherhood.

  My mama, Tommye, was a farm girl from Barry, Texas, who sewed every stitch of clothing we wore, baked cookies, and cheered me on at Little League . . . Tommye, [her brother] Buddy, [and her sisters] Elvice and . . . Vida May . . . all picked cotton on the blackland farm owned by their daddy and my granddaddy, Mr. Jack Brooks.

  We were poor but not the charity kind. My mama, Tommye, was a resourceful old farm gal who raised chickens in the backyard and sold the excess eggs and roosters to the neighbors. We always had plenty to eat, a rich diet of yard bird, fried Spam, and Van Camp’s pork and beans. Mama bought those beans by the case and stored them in the garage like she was preparing for Y2K. Our daily dose of them produced indoor smells to rival those indigenous to the neighborhood. Daddy always tried to blame the smell of his farts on the neighbor’s outhouse. But when I messed in my britches that time at church and tried the same thing, Mama said we were more than a mile away from there and not to be acting like my daddy.

  My parents slept on a fold-out sofa in the living room of our tiny asphalt-shingled bungalow. Outside we had a dirt yard. The dirt was smooth and powder-fine, perfect for playing with a toy dump truck—except we didn’t have one. Still, our little place looked downright fancy compared to the tar-paper shacks and unpainted lean-tos that perched precariously on bois d’arc stumps around the gravel pit nearby. The kids who lived in those sad-looking homes were even lower on the social totem pole than we were, dirty little ragamuffins who depended on handouts and sometimes had to scrounge in the trash. I heard their daddies were mostly former employees of the gravel company.

  At least they have daddies, I thought. John and I may have been living higher on the hog than the gravel-pit kids, but I would have traded places with them to have a real daddy.

  Once, we took a vacation to Monterrey, Mexico, because Daddy had heard American tourists there could drink free Carta Blanca beer all day long. At Earl’s insistence, my mother drove for two days straight through, across the Texas and Mexican deserts in a four-door ’49 Pontiac sedan, so that he could drink free in the beer garden at the Carta Blanca Brewery. That was years before air-conditioning was an option.

  We’d drop Daddy off at the brewery in the morning, and John and I would swim all day at a semipublic pool near our cheap tourist court. Mama didn’t know how to swim, so she just sat in a chair, never taking her eyes off us and holding a life preserver just in case. Right at closing time, we’d pick Daddy up.

  The whole “free Carta Blanca” thing was a real losing proposition for the company because Earl Hall never drank that brand at home. In fact, his buddies at the Monkey called him “Earl the Pearl” because he always had his finge
rs wrapped around a cold can of Pearl beer. He loved to show off how he could crush the cans with one bare hand. That was long before the days of aluminum, when Alcoa steel cans ruled.

  Once when John was in the seventh grade, the junior high was having a donkey basketball game. In case you never saw one, the fathers rode donkeys and played against the sons. John was tall and had made the basketball team.

  Somehow, he convinced our dad that all fathers were required to ride. Dad got home early that day, and with the help of a pint of his buddy Jim Beam, he mustered up the courage to crawl up on a donkey.

  Things went pretty well the first few times the donkeys ran back and forth down the court in a smooth gait like a Tennessee walking horse. Dad made a pass or two and attempted to block John’s shot. Then something went terribly wrong. Dad’s donkey got a burr under its saddle and launched him like an astronaut. After a back flip with a double twist, he landed on his elbow, crushing it like an empty Pearl can. I’m sure it was painful because I think Dad was crying, but John and I laughed our butts off. That was the most fun we ever had with him.

  I can’t remember whether he came to any of my high school or college graduations . . . but probably not. By then, I was glad he didn’t show up because he was a stranger whose only purpose, as far as I was concerned, was to embarrass me.

  But other folks didn’t feel that way about Earl at all. He was well liked by his employer and associates, who appreciated his wit and his don’t-give-a-crap attitude. His buddies said he was as funny as Jackie Gleason and laughed from the gut every time he started spinning a tall tale. They guffawed especially loud went Earl went on a tear about the Republicans.