St. Thomas Project
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
—James Weldon Johnson, the Black National Anthem
With all our belongings packed in a little truck, Therese St. Pierre and I drive up to Hope House—an old green house on the edge of the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans. Sister Kathleen Bahlinger and Lory Schaff, a Mercy Sister and founder of Hope House, come out to welcome us. A year earlier Lory had started an Adult Learning Center in St. Thomas—a way for high school dropouts to earn a high school diploma. Therese and I will be volunteering there. The first thing I notice is that we’re the only white faces around. In fact, some of the staff at Hope House are the only white folks in the neighborhood, period. A totally new experience for me.
It’s June in semitropical, humid New Orleans. A lot of the residents carry sweat rags, dabbing at foreheads, necks, and arms. Summer. Sweat time. Most residents of the project can’t afford air-conditioning. Even if they could pull off buying an AC unit, the utility bills would kill them. After fourteen hours of sun beating down on the three-story brick buildings, the housing units are like ovens, and by dusk people are heading out to front stoops, hoping for a merciful afternoon breeze off the nearby Mississippi River. Otherwise, they rely on cardboard fans, the kind the funeral homes give out with a pretty scene and a Bible quote.
Okay, it’s hot. People sweat, and we sweat with them. One time, sweating our buns off as we’re lugging piles of clothes out of a van for a rummage sale, Kathleen says, “Whooee, y’all, I know I don’t smell too good,” and Lory says, “It’s okay, we all stink together.” I haven’t heard the word stink since I entered the community. In our Southern, genteel culture the saying goes “Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow.” Well, we’re glowing, all right, like thousand-watt incandescent lightbulbs.
For the first time in my life, I have a chance to enjoy the close company of black people and begin to realize how much more varied and interesting and, well, colorful, life is: the laid-back, drawly talk in black dialect; the home cooking that forms the hub of every gathering, with plenty of extras for folks to take home; and the humor bubbling up, never far away, sandwiched into the bluesy tales and drop-dead, break-your-heart (endless, unstoppable) tales of justice betrayed, beatings wreaked upon bowed backs, and, O God, faith that rises, faith in God, in Jesus as a friend who plodded the path of suffering, the brother who “makes a way out of no way,” Jesus humiliated, scorned, nailed to two pieces of wood, Jesus, with ear bent, as close as a cry, a moan, a turn of the heart crying, Mercy, Lord, mercy.
I don’t know all I’ll be doing here. I’m one unseasoned, raw recruit. But I’m determined to learn all I can so I can be of service. Or, at least, as in the medical profession, to “do no harm.” In my journal I’m writing, “Be open, let go of preconceived ideas, everyone can teach me something.” God, save me from being a “do-gooder” nun, here to save poor, helpless people.
When I was growing up in the days of strict racial segregation, I never mixed socially with black people—not in school or church or restaurants or anywhere. And, as I’ve said, I never thought twice about it, just like it never crossed my mind to notice that when black men passed us white teenage girls on the street, they never looked us in the eye. For eons in the South, white women—especially young white women—have meant nothing but trouble for black men, and the savage murder of Emmett Till for supposedly flirting with a white woman is still writ large in every black man’s memory.
Lory points out that she has noticed that even to this day a black man approaching her on the street will lower his eyes. She makes it a habit to be the first to greet people when she meets them in public, and I make it my practice as well. Almost everyone responds with a nod, and many seem surprised. I have never actually thought about any of this. Maybe culture is like air you breathe, or glasses you wear that screen out what you see and what you don’t, with us whites justifying segregation by saying such things as, “Black folks like to be with their own kind, just like we do. There’s trouble if we try to mix the races in a way God never intended.” And you’re just a kid and you take it all in and don’t question. Even in Sacred Heart Church, “God’s house,” where I made my First Communion in my little white dress, black people had to sit in pews way over to the side of the church and had to wait to receive Holy Communion after whites.
Now, somewhat awakened, I look back in amazement at how ignorant I was. But I guess when you’re not awake, you’re not awake. Waking up to the suffering of people who are different from us is a long process, and has a whole lot to do with what community we belong to and whose consciousness and life experiences impact our own on a daily basis. I have a hunch I’m going to be waking up till the moment I die.
FROM DAY ONE at Hope House, I watch Lory. She’s my model. She taught at an upscale Catholic high school for white girls, and she was awakened to racial injustice in her own school when she tried to invite black girls from St. Mary’s Academy to come to the Mercy school for a religious project. It turned into a battle royal with administration and parents stringently protesting against “mixing the races.”
“Don’t we believe in the ‘one body’ of Christ?” Lory asked. “Why are we separating ourselves?”
The incident pushed her past boundaries that had always contained her. With permission of her leadership, she left her white, uptown convent, moved into one of the apartments in St. Thomas with another Sister, and launched Hope House. There they were, the only white folks in a sea of black faces. By the time I arrive here, ten years later, I get the benefit of the people’s trust that Lory earned. The kids call every white person “Sistah,” even men. You white? You a Sistah.
I’m drawn to Lory’s spirituality. She has found a way for her prayer and meditation on the Gospels to inspire and energize every dimension of work at Hope House: a food pantry for the hungry; used, clean clothes at rummage sales (every piece 25 cents, whether a coat or a pair of shoes); emergency funds for rent and utilities, especially at the end of the month when welfare checks run low; sometimes simply a safe place to unburden your heart with someone who listens and cares; and a meeting place for community organizers to gather and strategize action plans.
Every staff meeting begins with prayer, aimed at opening our hearts to the cry of the people, to feel their suffering as our own, and to push past rushing in with Band-Aid solutions to the harder work of asking systemic questions. Who among the power brokers in the federal and Louisiana political and so-called free-market systems stand to benefit from policies that keep poor people poor? Budgets and tax codes make it clear who is valued in society and who is not. No wonder Martin Luther King was fond of calling a budget a “moral document.” This is all new learning for me, sparking my curiosity to learn how these systems operate. Because now I know people who get kicked to the curb when hurtful policies are enacted. And now as a Catholic I know that the “Real Presence” of Christ isn’t only in the tabernacle in church with the little red sanctuary candle burning that says Jesus is “in.”
I find that after all my years of religious life and studies at Notre Dame I’m also learning to know Jesus in a new way. His big theme was about how we show love for God through love for the neighbor, and he roundly rejected the super-religious types who prayed, Lord, Lord all the time and adhered strictly to ritual prescriptions of the law but ignored those suffering around them. I used to think prayer was about persuading God to intervene to correct things that were wrong with the world. (Now that I’m awake…no wonder honest people feel they must reject that kind of Super-God.) Now I’m learning that real praying means taking on other people’s suffering as my own, and letting the experience rouse me to action. Prayer doesn’t change God; it changes us. And it’s not always blissful. Just the opposite: It jolts us awake to pain and suffering caused by injustice and won’t leave us in peace until we do something about it.
I think back on a thirty-day silent retreat I made some years ago at Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where we were supposed to enter prayerfully into all the events in Jesus’s life. I did fine with the idea of encountering God in everything around us—and I was having special fun encountering God among the cows in the field, and learning how to ride a bicycle with no hands. But when it came to meditating on Jesus’s suffering and death, I felt like a dismal failure. We learned about what St. Ignatius called “the gift of tears,” which he obviously had. When he meditated on Jesus’s sufferings, he felt them so deeply that he wept. As for me, I knew Jesus died for my sins and the sins of the whole world, and I was truly sorry he suffered—but not enough to cry about it.
The tangible meaning of Christ’s suffering was awaiting me down the river. Meditating on Jesus’s suffering two thousand years ago wasn’t doing it for me. But as I begin to encounter the very real suffering of people I see day in and day out, I find that real tears come naturally.
And I’m learning how liberating it is when I finally rouse myself to act on an issue. The hard part—the paralyzing, confusing part—happens when I’m sorting through all the different, complex options of what I might do—or not do. But when I do act, no matter how small the deed, I can feel the life force coursing through me. And one thing I’m coming to realize is that for me to consistently act for justice is happening only because I am part of a community that lives and breathes and feeds on doing justice. I’m trying to ride the current of grace as it comes. Our founder, Father Jean Pierre Medaille, comes through again with a maxim I sorely need when I’m tempted to rush headlong into action: “Never leap ahead of grace.”
THE INTRICACIES OF poverty are exceedingly complex, and it’s not that people in St. Thomas bear no responsibility whatsoever for their situation: capable adults lazing about, sipping beer in early afternoon and not looking for a job; fathers walking away after the birth of their children, going to jail for disturbing the peace; young, uneducated single mothers passing up opportunities for self-improvement and raising families on welfare checks—or, maybe worst of all, wallowing in addictions and leaving their children to raise themselves. Figuring out the causes of poverty and possible solutions is way beyond me.
Lory is always talking about the cumulative effect of generation upon generation of poverty being so difficult for an individual to overcome. So many self-defeating habits. So many never-tried new ones. So many instincts of helplessness and defeat. No deeply ingrained work ethic. And not many role models to show the way. Except grandmothers. They’re the ones that seem to demonstrate the most enduring sense of responsibility. When I tell Lory about Julius, who showed such promise at the Learning Center, and about my three attempts to set up job interviews for him, all of which resulted in no-shows, she shakes her head: “My rule of thumb is that a comeback from long years of failed attempts is going to take as long as those years or longer.” Brand-new terrain for me. It was a lot easier to offer solutions when I didn’t have a clue about the gravitational pull of people’s daily struggle. Even easier when I could simply pray for them. I never stepped out publicly to stand with people who were victims of injustice. How could I? Until now I’ve never known real people in struggle.
At Hope House I’m meeting lawyers, civil rights activists, and black educators who are actively engaged in exposing injustice and helping people claim their basic rights. They’re teaching us white folks the way racist attitudes insinuate themselves into our institutions, such as our school system (superior Catholic schools for whites who pay tuition; inferior public schools for indigent black people), banks (“redlining” people in poor areas to prevent them from getting loans), housing (gentrification that raises rents sky-high, screening out poor families); and—back then, I was totally blind to this—racially inflected language. The word white, like “lily white,” always associated with purity, but black, like “blacklist” and “blackball,” with something sinister or bad.
Barbara Major and Ron Chisom, local African American civil rights leaders who head up a group called the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, teach a course called “Undoing Racism,” in which they (patiently) teach us white folk about the ways racism is operative in our society. I hear the term white privilege for the first time in my life. I know I’m not a bad person, nor my Mama and Daddy, either, nor many of my white friends and colleagues, including the nuns who taught me. No, not bad people, but also often not awake to the way we are advantaged in this society simply because we show up with “white” (really, we’re kind of pink) skin. More important, not brown or black. It’s rare that we whites ever have to deal with people who look at us askance or treat us differently simply because of the color of our skin.
In the United States we whites are the norm setters, and it’s our perceptions and values that get woven into institutional systems, such as the courts, business practices, healthcare, education. To give one example: In the criminal justice system, over 90 percent of judges and prosecutors are white. Dark-skinned people often are the “other,” who scare and threaten us. When a person of color excels and rises to the top of the social ladder as a banker or professor or politician, we point to them as beacons of possibility for all black people, when, in fact, they often are rare exceptions. For us whites, when we work hard, we expect to do well, and when we do, we feel like we earned our success. Even in becoming a nun, at least among Catholics, I expected to be exceptional (and holy to boot).
As Barbara Major tells it, “As a woman of color, every time I walk into a room with a lot of white people I have to watch if somebody’s going to look at me funny or insult and bait me to get me to react.” Barbara takes us through a litany of white privileges we never think twice about:
• When you write a check or use a credit card, ever have somebody question your financial reliability simply because you’re white?
• When you hear about national heritage or even “civilization,” what color are the people you assume are being talked about as having made it happen?
• When you’re facing a challenging situation and you handle it well, ever have anyone tell you that you’re a credit to your race?
• When, in a department store, you ask to see the person in charge, what race do you expect them to be?
On and on. I have plenty to write in my journal.
Before Hope House, I had some sense that racial injustice existed but in a general kind of way. I always thought things such as social preference just happened naturally, that it’s in our genes to identify with and gravitate toward our “own kind.”
Now, I look around in St. Thomas at the ceaseless struggles, especially among the young people, and I have no earthly idea of what to do. I think of the mile-wide Mississippi River that bends its way through New Orleans, on the surface looking smooth and wide, effortlessly flowing toward the sea. And I want to say to every kid in St. Thomas, “Hey, kid, this is the river of opportunity for everyone, rich and poor alike, including you. This is the Great American Dream, and you can put your little boat in, follow your dream, and glide all the way to the sea. Everybody born in America can do it, kid. Just believe you can and be determined and work hard. Just put your boat in, kid, and start paddling.”
But just below its shining surface, the river swells and lurches, teeming with hidden eddies and whirlpools and sudden hazards like craggy rocks. I look at the kids in St. Thomas. Even if they get a high school diploma, the only careers that await them are minimum-pay, dead-end jobs on the back of a sanitation truck or cleaning motel rooms or unloading and shelving groceries or doing low-end housekeeping in a nursing home. Even a young woman who gets a cashier’s job at a department store will be hired only part-time, which means no retirement pension and no health insurance. Upward mobility? Sure. You just have to paddle your boat a little harder, kid. Maybe a lot harder, to beat the odds.
I always thought that jobs were the way out of poverty. Now I’m learning the meaning of working poor. I’m watching how easy it is for a young kid to “run a bag” of white powder down the street for a quick twenty dollars. When you’re a kid with nothing but bleak prospects and you look around and the only person you see who’s somebody is dealing drugs…what do you aspire to? Forget the law. Being law abiding has never gotten you anywhere, anyway. Just follow the money.
Hands down, the teachers that impact me most are the residents themselves. I have never in my life heard such stories, nor met people facing such intractable obstacles, such loss, such grief. Like one young mother, who within six months had two sons shot and killed. The police never investigated, nor did she expect them to.
I feel like I’m in another country. And in a way I am, even though I’m a fraction of a mile from the motherhouse in the suburbs. Everything feels different. Without warning, the crack of gunshots erupts from time to time, and once or twice the rat-a-tat of an automatic rifle.
The first time I walk through the projects by myself, I’m as nervous as a cat. I’m walking, looking around, super alert, knowing how gunfire can erupt out of nowhere. Then…what’s this? Is that bacon I smell? “Hey, Sistah, how you doin’?” A lady is cooking breakfast on a grill on the sidewalk outside her apartment. The most delicious whiff and greeting of my life, thanks to Lory’s steady presence, which prepared the way for my welcome.
Kenny Singleton, our next-door neighbor, got no such welcome. A couple of weeks after I move in, he gets a bullet to the heart. Sister Therese and I watch in disbelief from our second-story apartment window. One minute, Kenny is arguing with another guy about sunglasses. They are yelling right into each other’s faces. It all happens quickly. The other guy runs up the stairs to his apartment and comes back with a gun. Bang, bang, bang. Kenny drops to the sidewalk. Kids gather quickly. Shootings like this—blood on the sidewalk—are their big drama of the day. The ambulance comes, the police come. The shooter has fled.
Did that just happen? Lory knows Kenny’s family. She’ll wait awhile, then visit his mama, ask how we can help. The next day we hear Kenny’s family is asking for contributions. Time of wake and funeral will be announced later, so the family has enough time to collect money from neighbors for funeral expenses. A little kid, maybe nine years old, says to a news reporter about the killing: “I’m too young to understand all this.” It’s the way I feel, too.
MY MOVE TO the projects is a brand-new experience for my family, as well—especially Mama. Our Sisters at Mama’s parish, St. Thomas More in Baton Rouge where she attends Mass, say with a chuckle that everybody knows my ministry from my mama’s prayers at Mass.
“When you were at Joseph House, your mama prayed for God to send us more nuns. Now you’re in St. Thomas and your mama’s praying—loudly—‘for protection of my daughter in the ghetto!’ ” It helps that I’m here with my childhood playmate Sister Kathleen Bahlinger. Her mama encourages Mama to venture into the ghetto for a weekend, and now she’s talking bravely to Sister Lory, saying that she’s not nervous at all, that she sees the good work of Hope House and can feel the people’s respect for us nuns.
Meanwhile, her friends, far, far away from the violent, drug-ridden ghetto and very nervous about Mama’s descent into the valley of evil, promise to pray “like mad” for her safety, which doesn’t exactly bolster her confidence. But visit us she does—joining in the cooking and evening prayers, supervising after-school playtime of the children, sewing on buttons and mending our clothes—and returning home safe and sound. A few months go by and Mama’s visiting us again and telling Sister Lory how nervous she had been on her first visit. “But, Mrs. Prejean,” Sister Lory says, “you told me you weren’t nervous at all,” and Mama grins and says, “I was lying through my teeth.” Yep, that’s Mama.
We nuns take a vow of poverty and talk a lot about “simple living,” but it’s poor residents in this neighborhood who live the vulnerability of real poverty: eruptions of violence, the raw need for safety unmet, and the ever-present, gnawing worry about unpaid bills, children failing in school, sons in trouble with the police, kids stealing drugs, selling drugs, doing drugs, daughters pregnant at fifteen. Residents talk of having “bad nerves” and taking “nerve pills,” and say things like, “That man is gettin’ on my last nerve.” Not much about goals reached, dreams realized, children to be proud of.
We at Hope House are volunteering to live here, and we’re free to leave whenever we choose. Residents in St. Thomas, as well as residents in nine other public-housing projects in this city, don’t have that choice. Jaraldine Johnson, a long-time resident and staff member, tells me how she worries about her kids and would love to move but can’t begin to afford the rent in another part of the city. “We got no choice. We gotta stay here like we’re on a reservation or something.”
First lesson: Poverty reduces choices. And when experienced by the second, third, or even the tenth generation in a former slave state such as Louisiana, poverty’s undertow seems so powerful that it begins to feel permanent, inevitable, a fact of nature. Many young men expect that prison awaits them. Their mamas expect it, too. I used to say things like: Why don’t poor people keep their kids in school—don’t they realize it’s the only way to keep them out of poverty? And Where are the men? Why are the women left alone to raise the family? And Why are they always eating junk food? Why do they always trash things and litter? Why don’t those people…?
I’m still asking the questions, but now with more urgency and the beginning of understanding, because I know real people in the struggle. Good people who love their children, good people with good hearts and sincere desires. Like my mama.
When Louie was six months old and had contracted double pneumonia and almost died, Mama was like a mother bear, calling, begging, summoning every doctor she knew from her nursing days at Our Lady of the Lake to help her dying son. They did, and Louie lived. But who does Jaraldine turn to for her sixteen-year-old son when he’s grabbed by two policemen as he is jogging to his after-school job, jerked into the back of a police car, and taken under the Mississippi bridge with a gun jammed in his face and told, “We know you robbed a warehouse. Tell us who was with you or we’ll throw you into the river and nobody will ever know”? Or Patrick’s mama, just finding out her son has serious hypertension—she didn’t know he had “high blood,” he never felt bad, she and her five kids never got medical checkups—and the unseen, unfelt high blood pressure has taken out both his kidneys and he’s going to need dialysis several times a week for the rest of his life. He’s twenty-one years old.
At Hope House, I join Kathleen and Sister Lillian Flavin (Irish as they come; just try serving her tea that didn’t come to a roaring boil) as teachers at the Adult Learning Center. It’s not like a regular classroom in which teachers teach regular classes. We work with each student individually to master the subject areas—reading, math, English, science—that they’ll need to get a high-school-equivalency diploma. When students achieve success, it’s a big deal, with a full-fledged cap-and-gown commencement ceremony in the neighborhood gym. A big deal, because it’s rare. Attrition is sky-high. Residents come through the door with high expectations. They think that because they have made a decision to finish high school it’ll be a snap. They have no idea of all they don’t know. They also live in the most distracting, conflicted environment imaginable. Few have ever read an entire book, and at home there’s constant noise from TV, people talking, arguing, music blaring, in a living space designed for four in which six or even eight people live.
Study habits? Concentration? A quiet place to study?
One day into our Adult Learning Center walks Frank. I introduce myself to him and explain that I’ll be working with him individually on subjects he needs to freshen up on to pass the state high-school-equivalency exam. His head’s down, I can’t see his eyes, and I have to ask him his name and how far he made it in school several times before I decipher a mumble: “junior.” This seems supremely hopeful to me, and I have my pep talk ready saying that with only one year to go before graduation, he’ll be done in no time, so what we’ll do first is check out his math, English, and reading skills. I flash back to my own junior year at St. Joseph Academy, when I was writing prize-winning essays and beginning to get good at public speaking.
Frank’s reading test stuns me. He can barely stumble through a third-grade reader. Here he is, one year from graduation, and he’s functionally illiterate? How did this happen?
I know very well the school Frank attended. It’s one of the all-black public schools that are always being written about in The Times-Picayune: crumbling buildings, paltry teachers’ salaries, violence on the school ground, and the highest rate of student dropouts in the nation. I’ve been vaguely aware of the sad, bad statistics about public education in Louisiana, but until now I’ve always been part of the tuition-funded Catholic-school system with its highly motivated teachers, the stellar ranking of its students in national merit scholarships, and virtually 100 percent graduation rate. And, it almost goes without saying: mostly all-white student populations.
Now, for the first time, it’s dawning on me that I’m not the virtuous, special-to-God person I thought I was. Everything has been handed to me gratis. I didn’t have to struggle to have it: my loving family, a good education, and my unfettered freedom to choose a vocation. Take away my cushions and privileges, and who am I? What makes me think I’d be any different from the sixteen-year-old girl who came into the center, cradling her doll-like baby in her arms and saying, “Now I finally have something of my very own”?
Sister Lory told us the first day we arrived that, although we may live among poor people, “we’ll never really be poor.” Our education will always put us among the privileged. Time to kiss that privileged, special, bride-of-Christ-self goodbye and join the human race. For me, now, being of service isn’t virtue—it’s flat-out justice. For years and years, black people served me. Now I serve. Long overdue.
EVEN WHEN I’M a hundred years old, I’ll still be “too young to understand” the long-standing assault on people of color in my own home state. But learning I am, scribbling furiously in my journal. Mostly I’m sitting at the feet of my new teachers, the residents in St. Thomas. Like Ms. Ruby, seventy-five years old, who has just come to the Adult Learning Center to learn to read the Bible before she dies. As a child she worked in the fields, birthed a bunch of babies, and raised children and grandchildren, with nieces and nephews along the way, never “gettin’ round to book learnin’ ” face-to-face. She always did want to know about Moses, she says, and before she dies, she wants to read God’s word with her very own old eyes.
One day, Kathleen and I happen to be on the porch at Hope House and watch a scene unfold between Bobby Leonard and two policemen. Bobby, black and over six feet tall, did time in federal prison for bank robbery but was lucky to land in prison in Atlanta, which collaborated with local colleges to offer degree courses. Unable to read when he was tried and convicted, now with a college degree under his belt, Bobby is fiercely investing his every waking moment to cajole, persuade, or wrangle kids to stay in school. Having just finished talking to our students at the Adult Learning Center, he’s nailing a notice on a tree about a meeting for families with loved ones in prison. Suddenly, two policemen drive up and start arguing with him. Kathleen and I watch everything.
First, a loud argument, and then the police handcuff Bobby’s hands behind his back and push him against the police car, and he’s yelling to us, “Sisters, y’all are my witness, I got no drugs on me, they gonna try to plant ’em in my pocket, I got no drugs.” And off they drive with Bobby in the backseat.
Kathleen and I look at each other. I follow her lead. She’s already grabbing the car keys. We arrive at Central Lockup and Kathleen asks (demands, really; she’s made of strong German stock) to see the officer in charge. Poor Bobby. Here he is, a strong, smart black man having to rely on two white women to intercede for him. He accepts our help and later thanks us. He well knew what would have awaited him at Central Lockup. He’d be searched, the drugs “found” in his pocket, and he’d be charged for possession and maybe intent to distribute. An impossibly high bond would be set, and he’d be thrown in jail to await trial. Which may not have happened for a year or two or even three.
Somewhere along the line, a public defender, shouldering an impossible load of a hundred cases and horribly underpaid, would be assigned to defend him. And it may well be that Bobby would not lay eyes on his defender until the very day of his trial. In all probability there would be no trial at all. In 95 percent of criminal cases, justice is served up bargain-basement style by plea bargains struck between prosecutors and defense lawyers. If your lawyer urges you to take a deal of fifteen to twenty years—saying it’s the best the prosecutor is offering—and you say “But I’m innocent,” no matter. Here we have the corrupt mess in our justice system in which innocent and guilty alike—overwhelmingly black people and always poor—are thrown into our state prison, Angola, for impossibly long sentences, never to be heard of again. Trouble, trouble, trouble. Poor people have nothing but.
To be sure, policemen on the St. Thomas beat have more than their share of trouble, too. Called to scene after scene of human carnage, including little kids killed in drive-by shootings—like three-year-old Kevin, shot to death while sitting next to his mama on the living room couch—and often in confrontations with fleeing armed suspects, their own lives on the line, how can police possibly not be inured to trauma and its crippling consequences?
I’m taking a fresh look at the American Dream and who gets to live it and who doesn’t.
One of the people who is helping me to open my eyes is Bill Quigley, an impassioned civil rights lawyer, who has been meeting with our staff at Hope House to share stories about poor people’s struggles for justice—basic justice, such as paved roads, healthcare for kids poisoned by lead-based paint, a long list of unmet maintenance needs in public housing. He and other lawyers become my first teachers of the nuts-and-bolts ways that ordinary people can organize to claim their rights.
Denny LeBoeuf, a lawyer with the ACLU, tells us of a recent lawsuit the civil rights organization filed against the Louisiana Department of Corrections for inhumane conditions in a rural jailhouse, where two young black men died of heat stroke after being locked in cramped steel “hot boxes” for disciplinary infractions. Denny grew up in New York City, and it seems she must have started marching in social justice protests as soon as she learned to walk. I count her as one of the most dedicated, stellar human rights advocates of our day.
Denny and Bill soon become my close friends (they still are), and it is they who introduce me to Amnesty International, the international human rights organization, from whom I first hear the idea of “inalienable human rights.” Inalienable meaning that human beings, simply by being persons, have certain rights that cannot be “alienated,” or taken from them, by a government or anyone else. These include the right to life and the right to not be subjected to cruel and degrading punishment or torture. This foundational moral principle of inalienable rights implants itself in my soul and will become the motivating fire that drives my life’s work.
During one of our educational staff meetings, Bill and Ron Chisom tell us about their recent involvement with the struggle of black citizens in rural Ironton, Louisiana, to get running water in their tiny town. Maybe I remember every jot and tittle of the story so vividly because I was so motivated to learn how to translate constitutional ideals into flesh-and-blood action.
Here’s what happened: Until the public protest in Ironton, backed by a class-action civil rights lawsuit filed by Bill and other lawyers, every Saturday morning Ironton residents had been forced to wait in long lines for the water truck to come. One by one, the people filled their buckets, pails, and plastic jugs with water. The citizens of Ironton had long been cowed by powerful white folks who basically owned the town and made all the rules. The community organizing effort took a long, fear-filled year. The town had been oppressed so long, and the people were so afraid of losing homes or jobs or being beat up or worse, that it took a whole lot of church prayer meetings and training sessions for people to gain courage and trust in one another to stand together as a united front.
Bill shows us a large black-and-white photograph of the people, eight abreast, holding their signs up high as they marched down the main street of the town: WATER FOR IRONTON NOW. Everybody was scared, Bill says, but the community’s leaders walked tall as they led the demonstration, and everybody knew what to do if law enforcement moved in to make arrests. The leaders had secured a legal permit to march, and those who marched knew the main rule—to keep moving—so they wouldn’t be arrested for blocking traffic. Every marcher had a lawyer’s phone number written on his or her arm, and knew their right to make a telephone call if they were handcuffed and taken away. Everyone knew how to curl up and protect their heads if the police moved in with billy clubs.
Bill ends the Ironton story with a quote from Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men that want crops without plowing up the ground….Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
As the months roll by at Hope House, my work with Bill and his wife, Debbie, draws us close, and they invite me to join a small group of friends who meet to pray, reflect on the Gospels, and support one another in efforts for justice. I feel at home. Everyone takes justice seriously. At last I feel that I’m learning to translate Christian ideals into concrete action. I’ve always known the Christian mandate to love God and my neighbor. But which neighbor? That’s the rub. Just the ones like me in my neighborhood? Love them how? Simply by being nice and charitable? I’ve tried to do that for years. It was never enough.
I’m just beginning to delve into politics, but I do know this: From here on out my perspective will be guided by the effect political policies have on poor and vulnerable people. What’s different for me is that now in St. Thomas, in company with neighbors who are suffering the effects of these policies, I can no longer read the misery statistics of my state and nation in a detached way. Doing justice is no longer a superfluous extra in my spiritual life. Taking even small steps, such as going to a community meeting or writing a letter of support for a mother’s son in trouble at school, feels integral and right. I’m beginning to actualize my faith, one small act at a time. I’m also learning that getting involved with poor people in the struggle for equality means that controversy starts following you like a hungry dog.
And my nights are different now. Before coming to Hope House, I’d spend most evenings watching TV. Now I spend most evenings going to community meetings or lectures or helping at our Adult Learning Center. Chris and I stay close. She’s been right there for me in my move to Hope House, and she visits when she can. I’ll always remember her standing up for me at the community meeting when I proposed the fantastical idea of a young people’s training center out in the woods. As shy as she is about speaking in large groups, she rose to her feet that day and in her soft voice attempted to explain what she saw as my sincere desire to help young people, despite the impracticalities of my plan.
Chris’s speaking up for me at the community assembly was something of a reversal of roles. Usually I’ve been the one to encourage and support her, as I did by encouraging her to expand her horizons to become a medical doctor. And over seven years’ time, with (alleluia—at last!) the blessing of leadership, Chris gets her undergraduate degree from Nicholls State University (she savored the humanities) and, against all odds, gets accepted into Louisiana State University School of Medicine and becomes a family practitioner, the congregation’s first physician: Ann Barker, MD. On the day of her graduation from LSU School of Medicine in 1979, we had one big, over-the-top, rollicking celebration—sisters, friends, and our families, including our two mamas. What is it—Doctor Sister or Sister Doctor? Fun, happy talk.
Where would I be without Chris? Now here we are in the 1980s, seasoned friends of twenty years, like a couple of oaks growing side by side.
One day while Chris is in New Orleans for a visit, we attend a lecture at Loyola University by Doug Magee, who tells about his protest in Florida against the 1979 execution of John Spenkelink, the second person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. I don’t know much at all about the death penalty, and, until now, I haven’t given the issue much thought, so I have to say I’ve supported it, at least by default. The Catholic Church’s teaching that the state has the right to execute dangerous criminals to defend society has always sounded morally right to me. I figure that if we allow the state to conduct violent warfare to defend us against foreign enemies, it makes sense to allow government to use violence against dangerous criminals in our own country. In this mindset, Christ’s mandate to forgive enemies is solidly put on hold.
Louisiana hasn’t executed anyone for the past twenty or so years, even though we have a state statute allowing it. But the mood is rising. I hear it in politicians’ and prosecutors’ rhetoric—plenty of talk about being “tough on crime,” and, with violent crime on the increase, needing the death penalty to “fight fire with fire.”
Doug Magee’s protest of Spenkelink’s execution invites me into a level of engagement I’ve never thought about before. Here’s a young guy whose conscience was so deeply moved by the killing of a convicted criminal that it led him to engage in civil disobedience and get himself arrested. I’ve read about the priest brothers, Dan and Philip Berrigan, who went to prison for civil disobedience against the Vietnam War, but this is the first time I’ve actually met someone who knowingly broke the law to protest injustice.
Doug got to know Spenkelink, along with the other Florida death row prisoners, through a photographic assignment for Life magazine. It was a simple enough task. Each death row prisoner consenting to be photographed showed up in a small room, exchanged a few words with Magee, who took his picture, and then returned to his cell. What was it in that simple, fleeting exchange that so fired the soul of Doug Magee and led him to chain himself to the front gate of the governor’s mansion? All he did was meet the man briefly to take his picture. I leave the meeting wondering about that. I admire Magee for putting himself out there for something he believed in. I don’t yet know what that experience feels like, but I want to—I’m longing to catch fire like that.
MEANWHILE, ONE AFTERNOON in the Adult Learning Center, Kathleen and I get some coffee in the kitchen, and Kathleen asks me if I remember that youth program I had proposed to the community.
Augh! Do I remember? About a hundred million times before breakfast. But here’s the grace—the sweet, glorious grace. It was the crash of that unreal proposal that has brought me, the latecomer, to be here with the people of St. Thomas.
Kathleen says that maybe we could do a youth program in St. Thomas and invite Catholic suburban kids (white, of course) in the summer months to spend a week or so here with the residents, who will be their teachers. Not us—we’ll just be guides, learning along with them. And maybe, just maybe, young people’s encounter with real African Americans’ struggle will strike a spark of passion in their hearts to join their brothers and sisters in their quest for “equal justice under law.” Or at least awaken them to acknowledge the opportunities they’ve been handed carte blanche (pun intended), which may rouse them to become forces of social transformation.
Kathleen explains that there’s already a program that Lory designed called Pathways of Poverty. It takes suburban folks through the criminal justice system, welfare and work, healthcare, education in public schools, religious practice (attending Mass at an African American Catholic church), and an afternoon reflection on the U.S. economic system and how poor people of color fare in it. In the final days of the program, participants go into residents’ homes as guests to share an evening meal, and on the very last day participants enjoy an afternoon with neighborhood kids at Audubon Park. Each day of the program begins and ends with Gospel reflections and prayer.
We’ll call our program BRIDGES. We bang out the program with incredible ease, thanks to Lory’s groundwork, and send invitations across the United States to Catholic high school seniors and college students and wait. In the invitational brochure, we stress that participants will not be engaged in projects to “help” poor people but rather, in a humbler vein, are being invited to “sit at the feet of neighborhood residents to learn from them.”
The first responses trickle in, but then flow in steadily, and BRIDGES is launched in the summer of 1982. Over the next four summers, five hundred young people travel to New Orleans to experience a direct personal encounter with African American residents in St. Thomas.
It doesn’t take long to understand that it’s the personal encounter with residents that fires hearts. Or not. It’s hardly automatic. I withhold judgment. Just do your part, Helen. Bring them together and leave the results up to God.
But when I visit white friends in the suburbs, all I meet in their questions about my new neighbors is a barrage of stereotypes: Why don’t those people get jobs? Why don’t they keep their kids in school? Why do they let their kids get hooked on drugs? Why do they rob and steal and end up in Angola? (I get it. I used to ask the same questions.)
I try to tell them stories of people I’ve met and what they’re up against from every side. I try to take them through the experience of going through a job interview as a person of color in contrast to what they or their sons and daughters might experience. I’m usually not very successful. They have too many preconceived notions—not unlike my own when I lived in the suburbs. Too much translation is needed. What can be done, short of bringing people bodily to Hope House to meet the people directly? What’s my personal responsibility to communicate what I’m learning and experiencing?
Statistics about inequality and injustice in the different systems are nonstarters. People don’t trust statistics. You give one, they’ll counter with another. Sheer, raw data about thwarted lives and untimely deaths seem particularly ineffective at changing hearts and minds. What I’m coming to—what’s slowly rising up—is the idea that the way to build bonds of compassion between people of very different backgrounds and experiences is going to be through stories. But how to do that? I know storytelling is an art, not just something you dash off. But I’m seized by the idea. Others write stories. There must be a way to learn to do it—a specific craft that can be passed on from veterans to neophytes.
Enter my life James Hodge, a fellow Catholic and reporter at The Times-Picayune. He’s over at Hope House one day covering a story and we begin talking about the writing process, and as we talk I wonder out loud about maybe starting a small newspaper that would put faces on the struggling residents of St. Thomas and tell real stories of the people and the systems that enmesh them. What motivates them to keep putting one foot in front of the other?
Two things I like about Jim: He knows how to write good stories, and he believes faith in Jesus is all about getting in there with the “least of these” to strive with them for a dignified life. Right up my alley. Without any set plan, Jim and I start meeting at his house, and he becomes my first writing teacher. From him I learn the cardinal rule of good journalistic writing: Show, don’t tell. And from Hemingway: simple, pared-down sentences, just nouns and verbs, no adjectives or adverbs, no descriptive, pumped-up words. Long on scenes, short on personal commentary.
Soon after Jim and I start meeting, we draw in Bill Quigley and Sister Barbara Breaud, O Carm, a Sister of Mount Carmel from the Hope House staff, and launch Flambeau: A Catholic Voice for Justice. We choose Flambeau for its association with the Mardi Gras night parades, led by African Americans, who hold the burning flambeau (torches) high. We want to communicate the spirit that working for justice is not a sad, droopy, serious thing—that when you put your hand on your part of the life rope and start pulling, hope and energy flow through you, and you feel alive.
THINGS HAPPEN IN life and you don’t always see them coming. The river that carried me thus far, from Mama and Daddy’s loving home to the convent in New Orleans, where I studied maxims of perfection, ironed a thousand guimpes, and learned to pray, has led me on a journey I would not have imagined. Along the way, I had to grow up—to find out who I truly was, learn to love, and find deep friendships that nourished my soul and challenged me to grow and push past old boundaries. The river was fed by historical events, by changes in the Church and culture that turned so much of my world upside down. After vowing to be a bride of Christ, I came to know Jesus in a new way, through encounters with poor and struggling people. But some lessons never end.
I’m feeling a fresh sense of purpose and aliveness now, as my life and work continue at St. Thomas. But the river’s course is about to take a new turn. I accept an invitation to write a letter to a death row inmate in Louisiana, and a towering new wave rises up in the river. My little boat catches that wave, and I’ve been riding it ever since.
Here this part of my journey ends, unfurling into the first words on the first page of Dead Man Walking:
When Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks me one January day in 1982 to become a pen pal to a death row inmate, I say, Sure. The invitation seems to fit with my work in St. Thomas.