From the Shelters: The Choices of Women

Revolutionary Worker #1224, December 28, 2003, posted at
http://rwor.org

The RW received this correspondence from a reader.

Heat rises from the pavement like a wave. The sweat runs down my
forehead. I sink back onto the rugged brick of the wall.

The heat is everywhere. It seems to rise from the filthy sidewalk,
mingling with the smell of sweat and poverty. My most precious, my
son, Cody is here next to me.

Everything I have is in four bags that I can barely carry. They sit
around me like pieces of my life. I can't leave them for a second.
When I go into the nearby bathroom I know what it feels like to be a
refugee.

I am sick. It is hard to put one foot in front of the other. My
joints are swollen, and I try to ignore the pain. It is hard to catch
my breath.

Cody tells me that he is hot and thirsty. And hungry. I don't have an
answer. The stairs seem too high to climb, even to fill our coke
bottle with water. I sink down onto the large bag filled with my
clothing to wait.

He asks if he can go fill up the bottle. I'm terrified to let him out
of my sight. Can I lose him too in the middle of this nightmare? And
if I did, if something happened to him, what would be left? But, of
course, one of us has to go for water. I watch the bags. He returns a
few minutes later with the water and some candy that someone has
given him upstairs and settles down on the worn backpack beside me.

I suddenly realize that just around the corner, in the shade, the
whole sidewalk is filled with women, like me, waiting for the bus to
the women's shelter. We grab all our stuff and join them.

There's a cop car parked across the street, with an officer sitting
inside just watching. Not much later another cop car pulls up.
Someone mentions: "They are always here." I rub the bruise on my face
that Frank gave me with the huge ashtray and look again at that fat
cop glaring over the steering wheel. How many times has HE bruised a
woman? And then complained about "that bitch" over a drink?

Believe it or not, tourists pass by this spot in groups, on their way
to the museum. I feel like an attraction in a zoo --and I actually
hear the tour guide say "don't give them anything" as people pass us.
Some things make you feel alone even when surrounded by people. Some
people make you feel guilty, even when you are simply fighting to
survive.

Cody starts playing with one of the children. This kid's mother is
thin, light-skinned, and pretty. She has a bandage covering a whole
side of her face. I want to ask. I don't know how. But she begins to
speak. "The other night was our anniversary," she tells me. "I got 15
stitches. Kayla saw it. He just smashed me with a beer bottle right
there in the living room."

I must have looked shocked, and she added, "If it wasn't for Kayla,
I'd just find a bridge to jump off of. He kept saying he would
change, and then this.'"

A few details are different, but it was my story. What could I say
but "I understand. I'm glad you got out."

It is a hard, bewildering reality to have a home one day, and to be
sitting here the next. To have a bedroom, and a dinner table, to have
a TV where Cody can play his video games, to borrow a car to run to
the store, to have neighbors, and a phone--then, suddenly, to be
sitting here with four bags.

What is the choice.or the price? How many slaps and punches does it
take before that old life is intolerable? And what exactly makes THIS
moment, sitting homeless on the sidewalk, tolerable?

"You'll be ok" are words that I haven't found to be reassuring. But
these are words Cody has tried to use to comfort me. One asshole
former-husband used to say, "God clothed the lilies of the field."
But I just don't believe there is a god holding his hand over us. We
will have to fight to "be ok." And out here, for the moment, alone
with Cody, that looks like a very hard alone .

Suddenly the woman on the sidewalk next to us spoke-- all in one gush-
-as she nervously tugged her short blue dress down over her pale
white legs. She is bone-thin, scratching, nervous, wired--and
obviously sick, with sores running down her skin.

It was as if the last days of her life just fell out there, on the
street, in front of us to share, to be understood: "I've had one of
those! Let me tell you, I've had a lot more than one of those! My
first boyfriend, he was a fucking addict, but so am I! All the money
kept disappearing, then one day I came home and the TV was gone. Then
he comes walking in with the TV. He was so pathetic he couldn't even
sell our TV on the street to get himself a fix. So he gets mad at me
because I told him how pathetic he looked walking back in with that
TV. I had to laugh. I couldn't help it. It was just one of those
moments. Well, you know he threw it at me and that was that! My next
boyfriend, he got angry when I caught him screwing in my bed and then
that was the end of that. My last one, he gave me AIDS. But oh I
could tell you some stories in between. He had me fuck his friends
for money, but he always said he loved me. Can you believe I always
called myself not putting up with men's shit! Why is it they think
they can do anything they want?"

She shifts uncomfortably, tugging at her hem and adds, "Maybe it's
just god's way of getting me right with him because now he's all I
got left."

The bus arrives and she tells us to be careful. She won't be going
with us to the shelter tonight.

I watch Cody struggle up the steps of that bus, loaded with bags of
our shit. And my mind was jolted back to a photograph that someone
once gave me. It was a picture of a young Palestinian boy sitting in
front of the rubble that was once his home.

I carried that photo with me for a long time. The boy reminded me of
Cody. I had felt a connection. I had thought: What if this was my
child? How would it feel?

Our column of women refugees climb into the rundown bus, and it pulls
away. Cody leans against me and I stroke his hair as he drifts off to
sleep.


*****

This is part of life in this society that I have never seen before
and now I'm part of it. I cry as I realize how many of us there are!

We arrive at the shelter, kids pulling their own, ragged bags up the
long, back flight of steps.

Raw, hurting and afraid, we are processed like so much meat. It
starts with a grilling about personal details, done in public like we
are in a jailhouse line-up: "Do you have custody? Don't you have any
family?"

We are moved through the bureaucracy, and all end up sprawled on the
floor in a huge garage-like space. Just lying back on my bags, with
Cody there, feels like a moment of relief. I am in their hands--and
though it is impersonal and even humiliating, for a moment it also
feels safe.

This shelter is the end of the line in the whole system. For many it
is the "last stop" before they end up living under a bridge. This is
where you go when they kick you out of the other shelters- -for being
too "crazy" or too upset. Many roads led women here. Many
were "reformed" off welfare, and ended here with nothing.

The woman next to us has six kids with her. She's 27, younger than
me, but I mistook her for much older. The rough hands, deep lines in
her face and the graying hair give me the impression that she could
be at least 10 years older.

Her kids play as if they are at home. In a way they are. She has been
homeless nearly two years now. Most shelters, she told me, will not
take women that have more than four children. Her youngest child was
born homeless.

She tells me how she got a job and got off welfare. She had moved out
of public housing but then she got sick and missed work and couldn't
make the rent. She told me, "I'm not a welfare mother anymore--I'm
just plain broke-and-homeless, bringing my kids up in this shit."

We roll out our mats, we eat, then sleep. Morning comes early, and my
whole body is sore from the last days.

The Staff Lady comes in, starched, and has us all get up and hold
hands in a circle. She starts a prayer over us:

"Dear Father, we ask you that you bring your blessings on these women
and that you help to heal and make right the choices that they have
made in their lives. Many of them have strayed from your service, may
you bless them and show them the path to your glory since these women
do not have a husband or a father now to take care of their needs; we
pray that the father will take care of their needs at this time."

She renders her verdict, delivered as a plea to her god.

Is that the solution: a new husband? a new man? divine help? better
choices? My neck stiffens. As it will every morning when I hear these
words.

Yet heads are bowed in respect. One woman near me whispers, "Yes
lord! Yes lord!"

They run us by strict rules -- that are designed to make their work
and control easier. But also to send the message that we are suspect
women, who probably need discipline and more domestication.

Every day I'm there, I break rules I don't even know about. I'm not
good at my chores. They don't like how I roll up my mat. I mop
the "wrong" way.

"Didn't your mother teach you anything?!" the Staff Lady snaps at me.
My mother taught me to get beat, I think. She taught me to blame
myself. Isn't that enough?


*****

A few days later and we've moved again. To a different shelter in an
old school building. Cody and I have a bunk bed among the rows of
bunk beds that fill the gym.

Over on the next bunk, there is a beautiful old blue quilt, in many
shades, draped across the bed. I smile at the woman there, and tell
her how pretty it is. "I made it myself," she says, "out of old
clothes." And for a second she describes to me the many places she
and that quilt have gone together.

Suddenly her voice turns harsh, and I see tremors in her
hands. "Don't fuck with my stuff, you hear?" Startled, I just nod.
Her hands shake. "The last white woman here, she stole my shit. Don't
fuck with my shit! Just because you're white, don't mean you can get
away with it. This isn't a playground!" She stalks off, still
shouting.


*****

Inside the shelter, everything is regimented. When we shower. When we
sleep. Lights out by 9.

During the day, we are free to go outside--which raises simple
questions that never crossed my mind before. What do you do for 7
hours in the day, if you have no money, no house to clean, no job to
visit, no man to handle?

I feel cut off from the world. At every point I try to find some
space. Some time to think. Some peace of mind to focus on the larger
world, to write.

I strain to find the ways to stay connected to the revolution. I
sneak out of the shelter, and try to continue my work. But sometimes,
I'm just overwhelmed, too tired, and I sleep, and I just can't find
the strength to connect.

The place echoes with the constant yelling of children. For them,
life goes on. They play, and tumble, and race back and forth. The
mothers discover each other. We take turns watching over them. One
woman walks up to me and says: "Today I had my turn at the used
clothing closet. I found something for Cody."

Here we are, sitting surrounded by our broken lives. Many of us sick.
Many of us heading back to desperation. But we are, at the same time,
here together. Rubbing raw against each other, but also able to share
and comfort.

I think in my mind: a dozen shelters in this city, a hundred cities
in this country, a world outside of that, with beaten women, homeless
poor and desperate women. Women, like me, who had only choices no
sane person would pick.

And they pray over us, they blame us, they isolate us, and treat us
like criminals -- even while they give us a roof, some food, and a
place to catch our breath.

How does this all end? All the handouts and used pants in the world
won't free Cody from what he has seen. And nothing here will protect
these women from the horrors to come.

I have stolen moments here for politics. I have crept into the
library to read the Revolutionary Worker online. But to me, this is
not just my lifeline to sanity. It is more than my connection to a
community of people. It is not just the world and life that I want to
get back to. It is what I promise to do for my sisters here. And it
is what I have to offer them and all of humanity. It is, for me and
for them, the hope of the hopeless.






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This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker
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