Have you ever been homeless?
Have you ever taken a cardboard box and flattened it, then place it on the the cold concrete of a sidewalk, then lie down on it and hope you wake up tomorrow?
Have you ever encountered homeless people? Have you ever talked to them, spent time in their company?
I have.
In Houston, TX in 1992. On Prescott Street in downtown Houston. A veritable sea of black men who called this two-block stretch their home.
I got out of my white rental car and started to walk across Prescott Street where I saw a congregation of black men standing. As I began to cross the boulevard, one black man began to hurl verbally vile epithets at me like a machine gun would incessantly fire bullets. I kept walking. The man keep verbally attacking me. For some reason, these bullets of hate did not threaten me. They seemed to **** by my head without doing any harm. I walked right in front of this understandably tormented soul until I reached the congregation of men.
In this group of men, I found “Rambo,” who, I was told, was the de facto sheriff of this community. I introduced myself to him, using my real name as I always do. Rambo was a giant of a man. When I shook his hand, his hand enveloped mine; it was twice as big as mine. Rambo was so big and strong, he could have, with one arm, swung me easily two blocks in the air. I told him I was both a poet and a human-rights advocate, and I was taking a year out of my life to tour America and see for myself the gross reality of homelessness, hunger, and hopelessness that pervaded our country, and then to speak out about the pain of our people.
While I was speaking with Rambo, the man who had continuously cursed at me as I had walked across the boulevard was still cursing at me, until Rambo looked at him and said in a stentorian voice, “Don’t you realize what this man is trying to do?” The man who had been constantly cursing at me immediately stopped.
I spent the next two hours walking down two blocks, crossing the boulevard, then walking two more blocks to reach my car, all the while stopping to speak to those homeless men who wanted to talk to me, but never bothering anyone who I could tell didn’t want to.
When I reached my car, I opened the car door and started to get in when I saw the man across the boulevard who had greeted me two hours earlier with an unending stream of swear words. Our eyes met. Then that man waved his arm at me. I waved back. Then I heard him yell to me “God bless you.” I yelled back “God bless you.” Obviously, I have never forgotten those two hours. They remain one of the highest points of my life.
So you have asked me “What part of homelessness appeals to people?”
I believe you need to take your own walk through homelessness, endure the initial vitriol, introduce yourself, shake hands perhaps, talk with the human beings who live homelessness, and maybe, in the end, be blessed, as I was, to hear a man who had originally been filled with rage yell to you “God bless you.”
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet and human-rights advocate his entire adult life.