Of the South Unseen

I’m not writing this for congratulations. I really doubted the truth of the man’s story in the first place about how he needed $231 to satisfy a five year old debt to the Housing Board so he could re-apply for section eight housing. I’ve gotten cynical, I’m ashamed to say, having heard the myriad and sometimes bizarre reasons people fall onto hard times. His story got more complicated. His wife who was at least half his age has three children in foster care. She was in Mobile for a meeting, he said,that I later learned was a probation hearing…She and the new baby were in the car outside. I told him that I didn’t have any money available, and he left. A few minutes later he, the wife and infant were back in the lobby; their car, that they had bought just two days before wouldn’t start. He used our phone to call the car dealer who also had a towing service…there’s an irony, I thought. He hung up the phone and told me the tow truck was on its way. That was at two thirty in the afternoon. At three thirty he asked to use the phone again…the tow truck he was told, again, was on its way. At four thirty  he was back on the phone…I heard him say,  “what about our baby?”…he told me that the truck wasn’t coming…never was. Why would they treat you like that? I asked. The man said he didn’t like my attitude, he answered. “Sir, please…Would you please take me and my wife and baby back to Grand Bay? Grand Bay!, I thought… There was desperation in his voice.

I didn’t know if anything he told me were true…I still don’t, but K and I drove them home….down highway ninety…the same route upon which Osceola’s people were hustled from the lush glades of their homeland to the Southwestern deserts…blessed be the poor in Spirit, a voice said. We traveled past fallen dwellings and barns and service stations with Bahia growing where there once were gas pumps, an old country store, its name once stenciled above the entrance faded into nothingness, its door ajar at the hinges…all grown derelict under the weight of incalculable poverty…an old carcass of a tractor, or what used to be a tractor… rusting with indignity….a nameless dog slinking along the shoulder of the road, his ribs showing…his attention on survival now…oblivious to us. This is the South unseen….a mean landscape…the dark shadow reality of our romantic notions of this place we call home…this bitter poverty that besets us and yet is forever being ignored….and of course this poverty is not just peculiar to the South…it plagues our world…and it is so easy to not see it….but this day there was nowhere to which I could avert my eyes.

We turned off the highway onto what seemed like a paved road….old macadam of a forgotten age…It was rutted and full of pot-holes….vines snaked into the crevices in the asphalt…a way forgotten by the county and the world entire…Welcome to Grand Bay, the man said…We arrived at his house, or what was left of a house…They thanked us…They were in high spirits having come home, such as this home might be. He told me he had hope…that things were going to work out…I didn’t know if that were true either. The baby gurgled and cooed, so innocent…no knowledge of the dire predicament he was in….and why were the three older children taken from this woman? We parted tenderly, for sadly tender was this moment in truth.

Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble…these crucifixions…these innocent trampled upon…the weight of the world that always finds the poor first….wearing them down…eroding their dignity…rendering them nameless… But they are of us…brothers and sisters, same genus and species…their futile scheming and their impossible dreams notwithstanding…but their hope is honorable…all hope honorable….May we keep it alive even if hardly seen? I don’t know; I can only hope….blessed be the poor in spirit…let us hope so.