Same Kind of Different As Me (17 page)
“I’m not going in there!” she told Alan.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Why not? My gosh, just look at their house! They’re millionaires—what could we possibly have in common with them?”
So the Davenports sat in the car with the air-conditioning blasting and debated whether to stay. Soon the triplets, by then fifteen months old, and Jay Mac, their three-year-old, were wailing. Decked out in swimsuits and floaties, their dials were tuned to “SWIM,” and they didn’t like the sound of the conversation up front. In the end, Mary Ellen lost the battle, and I remember them walking into our backyard for the first time, Alan grinning nervously and the smile pasted on Mary Ellen’s face as fake as a Rembrandt painted in Chihuahua.
But Deborah rescued the afternoon. “I’m so glad to finally meet you!” she said, greeting Mary Ellen with a warm smile. “I’ve been praying for you and your family for
months
.” Then Deborah, the “millionaire’s” wife, offered to babysit the triplets so that the Davenports could get organized in their new home. At that, Mary Ellen threw down her weapons. Gracefully, she accepted the offer, launching a close family friendship that would last decades.
From Mary Ellen, Deborah learned boldness. Deborah had never been bold, just persistent. Mary Ellen was bold
and
persistent. So when Deborah invited her friend to join her in volunteering at the mission, Denver’s misery was “doubled,” he later said, since that meant two white ladies were pestering him instead of just one.
At Sister Bettie’s urging, Deborah and Mary Ellen began teaching and singing a day each week at the mission’s women’s and children’s chapel service. But it was Sister Bettie’s service at the Lot that drew Deborah like a magnet.
The Lot itself is a lush little refuge, dotted with red crepe myrtles, rough-hewn benches, and a cross made of railroad ties topped with a crown of thorns someone fashioned from barbed wire. The area
surrounding
the Lot, however, is a model for urban decay: rusted chain link, buildings boarded up and condemned, adjoining lots clotted with johnsongrass that hid bodies that barely oozed life. Next door to the Lot, Sister Bettie’s free-lunch customers stumble out of Lois’s Lounge, a dark little den where they blot out their waking lives by drinking cheap liquor purchased with panhandled funds. I’m not judging them: It’s just a simple fact that in America drugs and booze cost money, but food is free to anyone willing to snooze through a gospel message.
Scores of them do, dragging themselves to the Lot each week, some riding rusting wheelchairs pushed by others who can barely stand, others carried on the backs of men more sober than themselves. Often, following an afternoon there, Deborah would return home in tears, her heart broken by encounters with drug addicts and alcoholics, people busy paying a very high price for very low living.
Before we ever connected with him, we sometimes glimpsed Denver there, standing across the street, stock-still and trying to blend in with a telephone pole. I asked Sister Bettie about him. “What, specifically, is his problem?”
“Denver?” she replied in that soft way of hers, smiling. “Oh, he’s very helpful. Keeps my little truck running. And he can sing beautifully!”
From time to time, she said, she could coax him into doing so at the Lot, or at the chapel service where she taught on Thursdays. “With Denver, you must ask him only at the moment you want him, because with any warning, he’ll slip away and disappear.”
Though we’d become friends, Denver hadn’t entirely abandoned his vanishing act. Now, he felt guilty facing people on the street, many of whom he had, at one time or another, threatened to kill. They feared the old Denver, but the one that was emerging scared even him. So he would often disappear when asked to do “Christian” things, like sing for Sister Bettie. Deborah and I served as constant reminders to him that change was under way—change he could have lived just fine without.
Meanwhile, following hard after what she felt was her call to serve, Deborah blossomed. In twenty-nine years of marriage, I had never seen her happier. I can also attest that as a couple we had never been more deeply in love. The peace forged in counseling and the early years at Rocky Top had mellowed into an upbeat contentment.
We might’ve gotten there a lot faster if I’d been willing to recognize the truth of an old saying: “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” But we got there. And from the summit of our relationship, Deborah exported a fresh and contagious joy to the Lot. There, under the giant and ancient elm that shaded the benches, she always found some pearls hidden below the amber sea of crushed beer bottles and syringes.
The pearl she found one day glistened in the smile of a grizzled street veteran who lived under a railroad trestle in a cardboard box shaped like a casket. This man ate from garbage cans, an unpleasant truth you knew automatically if you had a nose. His beard was matted with dried vomit and the remnants of his last few meals, and he reeked so strongly of booze that it seemed he might explode if someone got too close and struck a match.
Here was a man whose life seemed disposable. Yet he found a reason to smile. Drawn to him, Deborah offered him a plate of home-cooked food and a prayer. Then, truly puzzled, she asked him, “Why are you so happy?”
“I woke up!” he replied, eyes twinkling in his haggard face, “and that’s reason enough to be happy!”
Deborah rushed home to tell me what he’d said, as though she’d been given a treasure that needed to be deposited immediately in my memory bank. From that day on, three words—“We woke up!”—were the first to come out of our mouths, a tiny prayer of thanksgiving for something we’d always taken for granted, but that a derelict had had the wisdom to see as a blessing fundamental to all others.
We greeted each other that way every morning, never suspecting that each morning would soon be a precious gift we could count on one hand.
It wadn
’
t
long ’fore Miss Debbie and Miss Mary Ellen started askin me would I sing in their chapel service. I would, if they was smart enough to catch me. I’d sing some spirituals I brung with me in my heart from the plantation. Other times, I’d sing some songs I made up on my own. Like I said, I know plenty a’ Scripture.
It didn’t take long, though, ’fore Miss Debbie started gettin bossy again. She got a burr under her saddle ’bout somethin she called a “retreat.” Said her and a bunch of her Christian friends was goin up to the woods to “hear from the Lord.”
“I’ve been praying about it, Denver,” she’d say whenever she seen me, “and I believe God’s telling me that you should go with us.”
I asked some of the fellas round the mission if they knowed what a retreat was and not a one of em had any idea, ’cept Mr. Shisler. He said a retreat was some religious thing where you go off someplace lonesome and talk and pray and cry all weekend. I knowed for sure I didn’t want nothin to do with that. But Miss Debbie wouldn’t let up. I just shined her on, though, ’cause wadn’t no way in the world I was fixin to drive up in no woods with no carload a’ white women.
Well, then I guess she put Mr. Ron on the case. One day at Starbucks, he started in, talkin ’bout “retreat” this and “retreat” that. Said it wadn’t gon’ be just women. Men was gon’ be there, too.
“Think about all the nice folks you’ll meet,” he said. “And all that free food!”
“Not from Jump Street!” I said. “I ain’t goin! I ain’t goin
nowhere
to
no
retreat to meet
nobody
! And I ’specially ain’t goin to no retreat with no white lady that’s somebody else’s
wife
!”
Just so we’d be clear on the whole thing, I eyeballed him like he was crazy.
I ain’t real sure what he told Miss Debbie after that, but the very next time I went through the servin line, she blowed out from behind that counter like a streak a’ lightnin. And here come that skinny finger in my face again. “Denver, you
are
going with me to the retreat, and I don’t want to hear you say anything else about it!”
Now here I is, six feet, 230 pounds, a mean sixty-two-year-old black man, and this skinny little white lady thinks she can make me mind. Not even Big Mama talked to me like that. There was fixin to be a problem—a big problem.
Finally, the day come for the retreat and Miss Debbie drives down to the mission lookin for me. I was doin my best to hide out, but some helpful fellas spotted me and told her where I was at. She convinced me to at least come on out to the car and see who all was goin. I didn’t want to be ugly to her ’cause we was gettin to be friends and all. So I walked on out in front of the mission.
I looked in Miss Debbie’s Land Cruiser and sure ’nough, there was
four
other white ladies sittin inside. In my life, I had bad enough luck with just
one
white lady. And here was four, all smilin and wavin at me. “Come
on
, Denver! We want you to go with us!”
Right about then, one of the street fellas sittin on the mission steps started sing-songin like a little girl: “Yeah,
Denver
, you go right on!” and busted out laughin.
Then his friend piped up and started singin’: “Swing low . . . sweet chariot, comin for to carry me home . . .” And they both busted up.
I didn’t think it was funny. But I had to make up my mind. There was all them white ladies in the car tryin to be so nice to me, and there was them fellas sittin on the steps singin me a funeral song. I guess I knowed I was takin my life in my hands when I got in that car, ’cause it was a cold day in January, but I was sweatin like a hog in August.
While
I’d been getting to know Denver, my art business percolated profitably, with clients seeking out my partners and me, instead of the other way around. We worked with an elite group of clients who were interested only in the finest works. Even so, in the fall of 1998, I received the kind of call of which art dealers’ fantasies are made.
The call came after Denver and I had begun making the rounds of museums. I had just dropped him off near the mission when my cell phone rang. The man on the line headed a large Canadian real estate development firm that had purchased a thirty-six-story bank building in downtown Fort Worth. Fortunately for the Canadians, the deal included “Eagle,” a forty-foot sculpture by the twentieth-century master Alexander Calder, one of only sixteen monumental stabile sculptures the artist executed in his lifetime.
At that moment, Eagle was firmly nested eighteen inches deep in the concrete plaza outside the bank building, a spot that dominated the heart of the city. The citizens of Fort Worth had long considered the master sculpture public domain, a symbol of the city’s place in the world of art and culture. The new Canadian owners, however, weren’t so sentimental; the man on the phone said they wanted me to sell it.
My heart raced as I thought of the possibility of making this seven-figure deal—likely to be the biggest of my career at that time or ever—especially since a Calder sculpture of that category would almost certainly never be for sale again. At the same time, I realized that if I did sell it, I risked being run out of town. I knew that to be a fact because the prior owner, a bank in crisis, had asked me to explore a sale only a couple of years earlier, but had ultimately backed down, bowing to citizen pressure so formidable that even local museums had declined to buy the Calder and left it in the city instead. But the Canadians, the man on the phone said, wanted a deal that was clean, fast, and silent. And, as it happened, I had a buyer.
We developed a plan shrouded in secrecy that included code names, as well as “The Phoenix,” a Delaware corporation my partners and I set up just to handle this very special transaction. We hired two eighteen-wheel trans-port trucks, along with crews and drivers who would jackhammer and disassemble the twelve-ton sculpture under cover of darkness. I joked that if word leaked, the workmen might need to wear body armor. But maybe I was only half-joking: So great was the need for absolute secrecy that the plan included the proviso that the crews would not be told where they were taking “Eagle” until they crossed the Texas border into Oklahoma.
We set the date for the move: April 10. Months passed as my partners and I hammered out the details. Meanwhile, I worked on my relationship with Denver. In late December, I’d started trying to talk him into going to the mountain retreat with Debbie. But by January, I’d pretty much given up on that idea. Deborah and Mary Ellen were still going, but I wasn’t there to see them off since the retreat coincided with the Palm Beach Art Fair.
That’s where I was when my cell phone rang just as I was attempting to sell a Matisse drawing to a fancy couple wearing matching pink slacks. It was Deborah, calling to tell me that she’d convinced Denver to go to the retreat. Our son, Carson, by then twenty-two and aiming toward a career dealing in art, had joined me on the trip, so I excused myself and let him take over. In light of Denver’s “Jump Street” speech, I couldn’t believe he’d actually gotten in Deborah’s car—or, even more amazingly, that he had stayed at the retreat the whole weekend.
The highlight, Deborah chattered over the phone, was the last day when Denver—urged on by all the white ladies—sang. Reluctantly, he sat down at the piano in the worship area and belted out a song he made up as he went. His audience gave him a standing ovation.
“I wish you had been there,” Deborah said.
“I wish I had, too.” On the other hand, I thought, if I had been, maybe Denver and I would have been off fishing when God wanted Denver to be singing. “On second thought,” I said, “I think everyone was exactly where we needed to be.”
I couldn’t wait to hear Denver’s take on the retreat—the horrors of hanging with white ladies and all that. But that Tuesday when we went down to the mission, I learned that no one had seen him since Deborah had dropped him off on Sunday. And the next day, still no Denver. That night at home, Deborah and I had started to feel like a family member had gone missing when the phone rang. It was Denver—calling from a hospital.
“I’m okay,” he said. “But when I got home from the retreat, I was hurtin so bad, I walked to the hospital and checked myself in.”