The Mystery and Melancholy of the Streets

Sharing Our Stories: An evening of experience and ideas from folks who have been homeless & their allies — Tues. & Fri., March 16 & 19

2010-03-08T09:34:00.000-08:00

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tuesday, March 16, 7 p.m.
Live Oak Friends Meetinghouse (Quakers)

1318 West 26th St. (inside North Loop between Durham & Ella)

Friday, March 19, 7:30 p.m.

Houston Institute for Culture

708 Telephone Road (at Lockwood) (inside the Tlaquepaque Market, next to bohemeos coffeehouse)

The Understanding Poverty Project (UPP) continues its exploration into poverty and homelessness March 16 and 19 with the “Sharing Our Stories” panels^{: “}An evening of experience and ideas from folks who have been homeless & their allies.” Moderated by Joseph Benson and Ann Walton Sieber.

We are all so separated. We don’t often get a chance to know each other, all we diverse people — even we Houston neighbors traversing the same city streets, looking at the same skyline, reading the same headlines. We get to know other folks from similar backgrounds, similar schools, similar jobs, similar hobbies. But as for knowing people who fall outside this circle of familiarity, we’re left to guessing, stereotypes, the occasional news article.

Most people are concerned about homelessness, but few know what to do about it. We have questions and guesses. Do homelessness people want to be homeless? Should I give money to pan-handlers? How many mentally ill people are on the street? How many veterans? Can anything be done? Is there anything I can do, short of giving money (that won’t take over my life)? Might I end up homeless myself?

There are no clear answers, but we with the Understanding Poverty Project think an excellent place to start looking for the answers is to listen to those who have been there. We’ve invited people who have lived on the street to come tell what it was like for them, what was especially hard, what helped them, what support they wished had been there, what changes they’d like to see. We’ve also invited people who are allies to the homeless: Dr. David Buck who founded and heads Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston; Scot More, who went from being homeless to running the Community Outreach services for the Coalition for the Homeless; Joseph Benson, who went from being homeless to being a leader in the consumer advocate movement.

Co-sponsored by SEARCH, Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston and the Live Oak Friends Meeting

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About the Understanding Poverty Project

The Understanding Poverty Project is a long-term art and reporting undertaking by photographer Ben Tecumseh DeSoto and writer Ann Walton Sieber — with the inspired assistance of the UPP Collective — a humanistic inquiry into the life stories of those who have experienced homeless and the conditions in society that produce homelessness, documenting the effects of trauma on the street as well as the effects of understanding, help, and hope in changing all our lives.
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Ann Walton Sieber is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Images from the Understanding Poverty Project

2009-12-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

View 55 images by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto, from the Understanding Poverty Project. These were part of the exhibit that Ben and I had at DiverseWorks September 2008 (UPP at DiverseWorks), and they are currently available as a traveling exhibit around the city and the country.

http://www.zendfoto.com/
(Go to Portfolio -> Understanding Poverty 55 Exhibit Images)

The difference between a flower girl and a lady

2009-11-23T14:39:00.000-08:00

I keep coming back to an interview that Ben DeSoto and I did with Dr. David Buck, who is the founder and grand poohbah over at the excellent Healthcare for the Homeless of Houston. Although David’s experience and accomplishments are almost ridiculous (he volunteered with Mother Teresa, for goodness sakes!), I really like his sort of nerdy eager way of talking about what he’s passionate about, which is how to empower people on the streets enough that they don’t end up in one of his medical clinics.

To begin with, Dr. Buck strongly feels that one of Houston’s biggest problems is that most of the homeless organizations here do not have anyone on their boards who has actual experience of being on the streets.

“You [need] people who are formally or are currently homeless that would serve on the board. So that someone’s not seen as ‘oh he's the problem’ — but they're a part of the solution. So they start to identify themselves as part of the solution. And that's
why Mr. [Joseph] Benson is a part of our consumer advisory board and serves on our governing board. You know, it wasn't my idea to go get 1000 people who can vote, that was his idea. [Dr. Buck is referring to a voter registration drive among the homeless before the 2008 presidential election.] I actually discouraged it. But he was right.”

I had met Joseph Benson and he introduced himself to me as “Cowboy,” so it took me a minute to realize who Dr. Buck was talking about.

“I just say ‘Mr. Benson’ because he was a patient at one point. It’s actually brought people to tears before, "You call me Mister, I'm not worth that." If I call you Cowboy, then I guess you would call me Dave, and you know I'm not comfortable if I'm your doctor, it would probably be respectful to be called Doctor. And so I'm going to call you Mr. or Ms.

“It was something I learned when I worked at a federally qualified health center in New Mexico. We didn't wear lab coats, we didn't wear ties, none of us did. Well the first thing my patients told me was that you all don't say Dr. and Mr. and things like that. We think that's like second-rate care. And we think that doctors should wear lab coats and they should wear ties. I was shocked.”

This reminds me of that great musical treatise on poverty, affluence, and class — My Fair Lady.

Eliza Doolittle [speaking to Henry Higgins mother]: Colonel Pickering… always showed what he thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a common flower girl. You see, Mrs. Higgins, … the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a common flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me like a common flower girl, and always will. But I know that I shall always be a lady to Colonel Pickering, because he always treats me like a lady, and always will.

(Photo by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto. Dr. David Buck on left, speaking with Ben White at the Palmer Church clinic operated by Healthcare for the Homeless Houston.)

http://www.homeless-healthcare.org/

“Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.”

2009-11-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

When George Orwell was a young man and still a comparatively unknown writer, he spent several years in destitution in Paris and then outright homelessness in London, tramping about from flophouse to flophouse. The first book he published was about this experience, Down & Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. It is one of my benchmark books and I have read it many times and pressed it on many friends. Here is some of what Orwell had to say about what he saw and what he experienced:

“It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your  life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely

squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of  poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.”

“…For, when you are  approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of  hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the  fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually  true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When  you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will  feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.”

“…There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a  gathering-place for eccentric people--people who have fallen into  solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or  decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as  money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives  that were curious beyond words.

“…Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more  like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one  had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one's blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted.”

“Nevertheless, he was a good fellow, generous by nature and capable of  sharing his last crust with a friend; indeed he did literally share his  last crust with me more than once. He was probably capable of work too, if  he had been well fed for a few months. But two years of bread and margarine  had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation  of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It  was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.”

“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human  beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society  takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential  difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men.

…I am not saying, of  course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they  are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it  is the result and not the cause of their way of life.   It follows that the 'Serve them damned well right' attitude that is  normally taken towards tramps is no fairer than it would be towards  cripples or invalids.

“At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

Under the Pierce Elevated

2009-11-16T20:29:00.000-08:00

We set out January 16 to talk to some people on the street.

It was a hard day for me, because it was the birthday of my mother, who had passed away unexpectedly 18 months earlier. Her presence and her loss still shadow me hourly. It was rocky for my photography partner as well, as he tries to persevere and raise a young family despite his changeable work situation. He’d just had a setback, so was anxious and wanting to administer the medicine of busy hands and good work. I was crying and shaken, but pulled myself together and bundled in the car, game to face whatever fate and the cold wind placed in front of our lens and our pen.

It was a cold day, and still damp from the rains that had poured on the city all night long. With Ben driving, we circled over to where the freeways crisscross on the south and east of downtown. Ben is drawn to this area, for the Pierce-Elevated freeway had served as a 24/7 refuge for the city’s homeless throughout the 70s and 80s, sometimes 200 people at a time. There used to be a public park under the freeway. What a quintessentially Houston thing, a park under a freeway.

It was here that Ben met Judy, when she was just a little over 18 (now she’s in her late 30s) and bursting with ragged heart-broken vitality as she panhandled, her sign reading “Please. Just a little help,” an impish grin on her face. Nevermind that her parents had ditched her in a hotel room when she was 10, and she’d been mothered by a tall tribe of Montrose transvestites – she had the freewheeling joy of a 16 year old swaggering through life enamored with her innocent-jaded carny gusto, even as the free fall of her days terrified her when she stopped long enough to notice.

Now the park and its residents are gone, thanks to a tall metal fence erected by the city. When we drove the area a few days earlier, several clusters of homeless people were still to be found, pushed past the limits of the fenced area. Ben had been particularly struck by a couple nestled with blankets up against a chain link barrier, their choice of situation as seemingly aimless as a tumbleweed caught by a prairie fence.

But today, fewer people were out, hardly any, it was so damned cold. We guessed it was just the rookies, the newbies, who didn’t know where to find refuge when the Houston winter sent its occasional bitter chill. We passed one woman, an African-American woman who looked better groomed than your typical street citizen. Her clothes weren’t faded yet by exposure and dirt. She also looked dazed or maybe even terrified. She was crouching by a fence, the freeway above protecting her from the penetrating drizzle. We parked close by.

As we approached her she nodded her head and smiled in welcome, part friendliness, part shock. There were so many things in that nodding and those smiles. If you had been abandoned at sea, surrounded by unknown and dangerous creatures, no source of food or shelter, and occasionally boats passed by your outpost but did not pick you up, you might give this sort of nodding and smiling to another boat as it approached. Hello, hello, the nods and smile said, I acknowledge the approach of a fellow human. I’m out here in the cold for all to see, I’m lost, I need help, I terrified, but I’m not assuming that you are going to do anything. I’m really cold, the nodding said, but I am still civil. This is just the surface of what those big eyes — that contained hysteria, that look — all said to me.

Ben asked if it was okay to approach her and she nodded nodded nodded and smiled. We crouched down beside her and told her that we are journalists working on a book. Her name was Jacqueline. She would reach out and touch my shoulder as if she couldn’t help herself. I reached back. I felt like we communicated with touches and eyes, but when we talked we were less successful. I was shy, I didn’t want to impose. I felt badly that I couldn’t give her what she needed – I was just going to talk and leave. It was very hard to hear with the freeway overhead.

In the first minute I was aware of other people approaching. Not wanting to be trapped in Jacqueline’s alcove if they had ill intent, I stood and turned to talk. It was a man with a suspicious look, probably making sure that we weren’t hurting Jacqueline, and an overweight woman who looked like she might have Down’s syndrome. I talked to the man for a bit and he seemed somewhat satisfied.

When I talked to Jacqueline again, I asked her what brought her to the streets and she looked stricken. I said if it was too painful she didn’t need to say. She’d been there three weeks, and it was her first time. I didn’t know what else to ask her. All I felt like doing was patting her. I would have liked to take her someplace warm for a meal. Maybe next time.

Another man started coming towards us. I didn’t much like his look – he was young, and looked distant. When he saw me taking notice of him, he turned around and left again. I did not have a sense of how to be safe here. If what we were doing was foolish in terms of danger. Just didn’t know.

Another man roused himself from a bundle of blankets. He was friendly and interested. His name was Frank Smith, and he said he’d been taking care of another woman, who still lay bundled. He said her name was Ms. Smith, although I don’t think they are married. He told us she had COPD, that difficult impairment of the lungs, and she looked miserable and sick. I approached her and first she said, “I’m not doing anything, I’m not doing anything.” When I reassured her I wasn’t with the police or going to endanger her, she said she didn’t want to be bothered. She looked in a bad way. Frank offered to help us in any way he could, for which I was grateful.

After a while we rose to leave, bidding adieu of Jacqueline, the Smiths, a deeply dirty old man with thick dirty fingernails who asked for some change. I gave him a little. About 30 cents, then off we drove.

We got on the freeway, for we needed to go to the Galleria. A minute later we were soaring on the Pierce Elevated, a hundred cars a minute passing over where Jacqueline and Mr. and Ms. Smith and the old man were huddled, ourselves among the endless river of cars. We drove out of downtown on the Southwest Freeway, caught the 610 Loop, and quickly arrived at the exit for the upscale Galleria mall, driving down and around through the labyrinth of the parking garage, leaving our car and making our way through Marshall Fields department store. The entrance was through the perfume section, and as we wove our way through the various twinkling displays and kiosks, I was aware for the first time in my 46 year old life how very polished the floors were. My boots still have mud from underneath the freeway, and I worried that I was leaving marks as I walked. I tried to be incognito, but I felt like the faces I’d left were shining out from mine. Look at Jacqueline, look at Mr. and Ms. Smith, look at this old man. They’re over there, underneath that freeway. They’re easy to find.

All week everywhere I look there are homeless people. There are a LOT of homeless people. Of course I know this. Of course they are always there. And of course I have done what so many people do who have homes, who have routes, who have a lot of things to get done, who are good and kind and bewildered, I have trained myself not to notice this part of the world. Why? Oh, that is a desperate question. Because I don’t know what to do if I do notice them. I can’t hear you, the freeways’ too loud. I don’t know how to help you. I only have 30 cents in change. I feel half crazed myself. I am just barely hanging on by my own fingernails.

To be continued…

Photograph by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto

"The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street," by Giorgio de Chirico

2009-11-16T19:31:00.000-08:00