“If you is lookin for a real friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.”
As Denver’s words echoed in my head, it occurred to me that I could not recall ever having heard any pronouncement on friendship more moving or profound than what I’d just heard from the mouth of a vagabond. Humbled, all I could do in return was make a simple, but sincere, promise: “Denver, if you’ll be my friend, I promise not to catch and release.”
He put out his hand and we shook. Then, like a sunrise, a grin lit Denver’s face and we stood, facing each other, and hugged. In that moment, the fear and distrust that had hulked like an iceberg between us melted on the warm patio outside Starbucks.
Beginning that day, we became the new odd couple, Denver and I. A couple of times a week, I’d swing by the mission and pick him up, and we’d head out to a coffeehouse, a museum, or a café. Deborah, meanwhile, urged me on, praying deep roots for the friendship she’d prayed would bud in the first place. After our catch-and-release chat, Denver’s sulking silence thawed into a gentle shyness. “Did you see how Denver said hi in the supper line?” she’d say, eyes shining. “I think you’re really making progress.”
No longer just Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday, Deborah and I began going to the mission even more often. She’d stay and work with the women and children while Denver and I went somewhere to hang out. If I planned to take him to a nice restaurant, I’d call ahead to the mission to give him time to slip into his preppie disguise. If we were going to Starbucks, though, he dressed to his own liking. Usually, that meant conspicuously poor—soiled shirt, buttoned crooked; holey pants; and beaten-up leather shoes he wore like house-slides, his heels smashing down the backs.
It was at Starbucks that I learned about twentieth-century slavery. Not the slavery of auction blocks, of young blacks led away in ropes and chains. Instead, it was a slavery of debt-bondage, poverty, ignorance, and exploitation. A slavery in which the Man, of whom Denver’s “Man” was only one among many, held all the cards and dealt them mostly from the bottom of the deck, the way his daddy had taught him, and his granddaddy before that.
More than half a century before Denver was born, Abraham Lincoln had formally declared that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free.” That was all well and fine, but white plantation owners did not go quietly into the night. First, Southern statehouses passed “Black Codes,” laws that used legal tricks to keep black people slaves, forcing the federal government to break up the state legislatures and put the army in charge of the stubborn South. After state lawmakers promised to try to be good, planters and the people they once owned tried a new arrangement: sharecropping.
That turned out to be a devil’s bargain. Not only did sharecropping spawn poverty and hopelessness among both blacks and poor whites, it also opened up an ugly, festering crack in the plantation South into which people like Denver Moore fell, some forever.
That fissure ran through Red River Parish, where Denver’s Man was a shrewd dealer. Not wanting to lose his labor supply, he kept the aces to himself. He dealt the card of meager sustenance, but withheld the card of American progress. He dealt the card of backbreaking labor, but withheld the card of education—the get-out-of-jail-free card that would have liberated men like Denver. In the twentieth century, slaves were free to leave the plantation, but their debt and lack of education kept them shackled to the Man.
I listened to Denver’s story with fifty-year-old ears that had been touched by the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King. Later, I found out that the Ku Klux Klan in Coushatta, Louisiana, a town in Red River Parish, had once plotted to assassinate Dr. King. The FBI had wanted to swoop in and foil the plot, but J. Edgar Hoover refused to let them.
The more I learned, the more I hated the Man and wanted to right the wrongs of Louisiana’s modern-day slave masters. I sang Denver’s story like a songbird to anyone who would listen. Then one day, a thought hit me like a right cross to the head: My own granddaddy had not been so much different from the Man. Fairer, yes. An honest and decent man in the Texas of his day. But the wages he paid were still no excuse for the pitiful way we treated the folks who worked his land.
Amazingly, though, Denver kept telling me that a man providing jobs has a right to earn a profit. Denver had lived in an unplumbed, two-room shack with no glass in the windows nearly until the time his country put men on the moon. But he still maintained that the Man wasn’t really a bad fellow.
“He was just doin what he was raised up to do,” Denver said. “Besides if everbody was rich, who gon’ do the work?”
That kind of homespun, practical way of looking at things hooked me. After our catch-and-release conversation, I gave him my phone number and told him where we lived, breaking a cardinal rule for mission volunteers. The truth is, prior to my Starbucks fishing lesson, I never thought Denver and I would form a real friendship—at least not one carried on outside his neighborhood.
I hate to admit this now, but I had pictured myself more as a sort of indulgent benefactor: I would give him a little bit of my valuable time, which, had I not been so benevolent, I could have used to make a few more thousand dollars. And from time to time, I imagined, if Denver stayed cleaned up and sober, I’d take him on field trips from hobo-land to restaurants and malls, a kind of peep show where he could glimpse the fruit of responsible living and perhaps change his ways accordingly.
I was aware I might cause him some therapeutic torment over the fact that he would probably never own some of the high-end toys we had, like a horse trailer with sleeping quarters. He would certainly never own a ranch or a painting by Picasso. I was amazed when that didn’t bother him a bit—especially not the Picasso part, after Denver saw some of his work.
One afternoon we visited three art museums—the Kimbell, the Amon Carter, and the Modern. At the Modern, he thought I was playing a joke on him. As we viewed one of Picasso’s less, shall we say, organized works, Denver looked at me as if the museum curators were trying to pass off some kind of snake oil.
“You just kiddin me, right?” he said. “Folks ain’t really callin this art, is they?”
I had decorated my own house with similar works and, as an art dealer, the modern masters were my niche. But as we strolled through the Modern that day, I tried to look through his eyes at the bold geometrics, splashed paints, and huge canvases dominated by “negative space.” I had to admit: Some of it could be construed as junk.
The Kimbell was Denver’s favorite. Old Master paintings drew him like magnets, especially those that were centuries old and depicted Christ. When we stopped in front of a large Matisse from the 1940s and I told him it cost $12 million, his mouth fell open.
“Well,” he said, eyeing the work in dubious wonder, “I don’t like it much, but I’m glad the museum bought it so somebody like me could see what a $12 million picture looks like.” He paused, then added: “You think if the guards knowed I was homeless they’d let me in here?”
With the museums, the restaurants, and the malls, I was showing Denver a different way to live, a side of life in which people took time to appreciate fine things, where they talked about ideas, where raw yellowtail cost more than cooked catfish. But he remained absolutely convinced that his way of life was no worse than mine, only different, pointing out in the process certain inconsistencies: Why, he wondered, did rich people call it sushi while poor people called it bait?
I knew Denver was sincere when he told me that he would not want to trade places with me for even one day. His convictions became clear to me when I laid my key ring on the table between us at one of our earliest meetings for coffee.
Denver smiled a bit and sidled up to a cautious question. “I know it ain’t none of my business, but does you own somethin that each one of them keys fits?”
I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. “I suppose,” I replied, not really ever having thought about it.
“Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?”
That wisdom stuck to my brain like duct tape. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced we’d enjoy life a whole lot more if we owned a whole lot less. In some ways, Denver became the professor and I the student as he shared his particular brand of spiritual insight and plain old country wisdom.
I also came to realize that though his thirty years on the streets had sewn a thick hide on the man, they had also forged in him staunch loyalty, a strong spirit, and a deep understanding of what beats in the heart of the downtrodden. Though wallowing in the sin and addictions of street life, he claimed in his solitude to have heard from God. His brain had filed away everything he had seen over the years, and it seemed he had just been waiting for someone willing to listen. I was privileged to be the first to lend an ear.