Part II Day 221: September 28, 2010 (the "homeless hunter" finds disturbing news in Northport)

Position: The Homeless Hunter of Tuscaloosa

Before I set out on my mission to find the homeless camp under the Northport Bridge this afternoon, the words from my conversation with the poet Tim Skeen a few days ago haunted me: "Are you going over there alone? You're a brave man." And this is from a Hurricane Katrina Red Cross volunteer and an ex-army M.P. who performed clean-up duty on the German Autobahn; we're talking body recovery and watching people burn to death in their cars.

I put on what my brother Joey calls my "Whitesnake jeans"––my rattiest pair––and pull my driver's license out of my wallet and tuck it into my holey pockets, along with my camera and notebook. I don't want to carry money or credit cards, but I figure it's a good idea to have I.D. in case something bad happens or I get harassed by the police.

The bike ride over the bridge is nerve racking, because, even though there's a protected walkway, the four-lane bridge shakes with the weight of trucks and cars, and the rusty chain-link fence between me and the Black Warrior River below rattles, like it's all going to come apart. I make it across and turn right to head under the bridge. I pass the salivation-causing smells of Dreamland BBQ (the "fake" one, as people call it) and hear what sounds like urethane skateboard wheels clacking over sidewalk cracks on the other side of the raised bike path. For a minute I get excited, thinking maybe there's a hand-made cement skatepark, like Burnside in Portland, under this bridge. But when I reach the bike path, I realize it's just the echo of cars click-clacking over the small surface gaps on the bridge above.

Not only does the fantom skatepark not materialize, but there are no blue tarps covering scrape wood and shopping carts, no barrels for fires, no crates for sitting. No homeless encampment at all. There is only the overflow parking lot for Wintzell's Oyster House and some lawn.

I figure I must be mistaken, and I take the bike path east to continue my search. There's a parklike area and some schools but no homeless camp. I head back west, thinking the homeless must be under the railroad bridge to the west. I find the perfect spot for a small homeless camp––it even has graffitied walls––but there isn't a homeless person to be found.

The bridge continues overland a ways, so I decide to ride into downtown Northport and find the bridge's end, where the homeless camp must exist. I cut down a dirt path under the railroad bridge and onto Main Street, eyeing the bridge behind the industrial buildings for signs of the homeless. Nothing. I turn left on 5th St. and find the end of the bridge. To the south lies thick underbrush, and on the other side of a fence, a park which looks like homeless heaven. Even though it has a wooden picnic table, several "No Trespassing" signs mark the area. I think, If you have to go hunting for the homeless, then the town doesn't have a homeless problem. I decide this is the end of the line and the end of my search for today.

I ride back into Northport, the downtown of which looks something like Andy Griffith's Mayberry. (This is where people move to send their children to good public schools, so I've been told.) The downtown is a mishmash of art galleries, children's boutiques, a day spa, and expensive furniture stores, not to mention the best breakfast place in Tuscaloosa County, City Café.

It's the kind of town where the small hardware store is 101 years old (if these walls could talk, I don't think I'd want to hear what they say) and I expect to see Floyd the barber in the four-chair striped-pole barber shop.

Ironically, in this idyllic downtown, the Tuscaloosa News shouts a cover story from the newspaper stand next to the barber shop: West Alabama Lags Behind in Kids' Health. It turns out Tuscaloosa Country ranks 36th in children's' health, which measured "low birth weights, infant mortality rates, the number of births to unmarried teens, the number of children in single-parent families, children in poverty, and high school graduation rates." The most disturbing of these statistics is the high infant mortality rates; according to the article, Tuscaloosa County ranks 59th out of 67 counties, with 12.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, twice the national average of 6.7 per 1,000 live births.

And tomorrow's (September 29) edition of The Birmingham News will carry this cover story about how Alabamians are falling deeper and deeper into poverty. According to the article, "In 2009, 17.5 percent of the people in the state––804, 683––lived below the poverty level, well above the national figure of 14.3 percent and a 13.1 percent increase from 2008. . . . Of those, 340,000 lived in deep poverty, which is income below half the poverty level. " But even the rich aren't fairing well, as the number of people making over $200,000 per year in the state dipped from 2.3 percent in 2008 to 2.1 percent in 2009. That's 9,197 less rich people. So where are the homeless, Tuscaloosa?

Part II Day 196: September 3, 2010 (living in a song, rubber necking on the turkey necks, and locating the homeless)

I’ve been places in the world––Auvers-sur-Oise outside of Paris, France, where Vincent van Gogh is buried; the sunflower-filled countryside of Pisa, Italy––where I’ve felt like I was actually living inside of a painting for a short time. At the Community Soup Bowl, a free soup kitchen in Tuscaloosa, AL, I feel like I’m living inside of a blues song. I sit between two African-American men whose accents are so thick, the only lines I understand are when the older guy in front of me says, "Man, I’m so hungry today," and when, after saying it again a few minutes later, the other guy next to me says, "You eatin' like a bear today."

The female dining room volunteer stops by and asks the older man how his wife’s doing. "Hard-headed," he says. They have an exchange that I can’t follow, then, as she’s walking away, she says, "I’m gonna hafta come over there an’ talk to her ass." He looks at me and says, "Hospital ain’t nothin’ to be messin’ with." I nod in agreement, and continue eating my meal of chicken salad, peas, corn, Saltine crackers, mixed salad, and a Styrofoam cup of fruit punch. The old guy says, "Don’t tell me I’m gonna eat all this." He pauses. "I ain’t gettin’ no seconds." (People are allowed to get two plates of food, and some do, but you'd have to be really hungry to want seconds.)

When I arrived this morning, the dining room was almost exclusively African-American men of various ages. Since then, a 55-year-old white guy with prison tattoos and his wife came in, a few African-American women, a pair of Latino laborers, a couple of white women who looked like possible meth addicts, and an entire African-American family--tomorrow is the daughter's thirteenth birthday. Surprising to me, many of the people were overweight.

Amy, the kind diminutive white woman who runs the kitchen, was talking about how she couldn't feed kids healthy meals when she was in charge of school children somewhere: "They wouldn't eat the green beans or other vegetables I made. They wouldn't even eat mac 'n' cheese because I made it with real cheese. No wonder we have an obesity problem." When she said that, the man serving the peas and corn turned around and said, "We've got an obesity problem 'cause we're fat." We all laughed.

I called the other day to ask about volunteering, and Amy said, "We're on Greensboro, right between the Piggly Wiggly and Church's Chicken." I've only heard of Piggly Wigglys through Steve Yarbrough's books, but since I arrived at the center early this morning, I decided to check this one out.

Somewhere along my bikeride over here, I passed an invisible color line in town; maybe at 15th St. With the exception of one white customer, everyone in the Piggly Wiggly was African-American. I strolled the aisles, enjoying the air conditioning, and when I reached the butcher's section, the raw meat "family packs" with bright orange stickers caught my eye: turkey necks, neatly arranged in rows; pigs' feet, four or five per pack; and some dark red bits labeled "stew meat" all sat wrapped in clear plastic. I'd never seen anything like it.

When the door of the Community Soup Bowl opened, Amy took me into her office. She said they serve between 100 and 150 lunches daily, seven days per week, but that today would be slow because people receive their Social Security and disability checks on the first and third of each month. "We'll be busy again on Monday." She tells me about a few of the 29 homeless agencies in town, which were mentioned in this article in Tuscaloosa News about the Homeless Advisory Group, who counted "223 homeless people in Tuscaloosa, including 41 children" this past January.

(I've also found out about a strange program that my bank, Albama Credit Union, does called "Secret Meals for Hungry Children," where they surreptitiously stuff food into needy children's backpacks at school. Seriously. You can read about it in this article from Tuscaloosa News. The Secret Meals program says that 20% of Alabama children live below the poverty line. Paradoxically, Tuscaloosa's 8.6% unemployment rate is below the 9.5% national average, as well as Alabama's average of 9.7%.)

But, as I asked in my previous post, where are all the homeless people? Amy says the people not living at the Salvation Army's facility or the VA Hospital live under the Northport Bridge on the Northport side of the Black Warrior River (apparently, I was looking on the wrong side of the river) and behind the Wal Mart on Skyland Blvd. on the south side of town. I'll probably check out the Northport homeless camp on Sunday.

In the meantime, it feels like a tight community here in the Community Soup Bowl. None of these people seems homeless--two guys even wear their flourescent worker vests--but you never know. As when I arrived, there are only African-American men left in the dining room. They all know and greet each other by name as a new person walks in or someone leaves. The old man in front of me says to a tall thin elegant man, who's name would be "Slim" if this were a novel, "Just keep walkin’ like you don’t know no one." When the tall man, wearing a nice shirt and fitted pants and a baseball hat and sunglasses, smiles, the old man says, "What’s up, pimp daddy?”

Not only does the Community Soup Bowl provide meals for whomever walks in the door, the Alabama Retarded Citizens group comes in to wash the dishes every other day. They are a jolly bunch, and their presence and enthusiasm brightens the kitchen. The men in the group all shook my hand when I walked in--one said he hadn't seen me in a long time--and now that they're leaving, one of the men gives all of the women volunteers from various churches hugs and the men, including me, handshakes.

When I finally go to leave, Amy shouts out, "Be sure to tell your students to come here and eat. They can write about it." As she told me before, everyone's welcome. So come on down and meet your neighbors, Tuscaloosa.