last time as she waved, and I guessed that her smile would be the brightest thing most people in the dayroom would see today. I found myself wanting to hang out in the dayroom awhile, just for the sake of that smile. But Roger was already pulling away from the curb.
He made a quick right at the corner of Jackson and Gay, taking us through a block of upscale lofts and condos tucked into high-ceilinged brick warehouses and retail stores dating from the early 1900s. Some of these stylish urban residences sold for half a million dollars or more, and I couldn’t help commenting on their ironic proximity to the dayroom and its homeless clientele.
“That’s not all,” said Roger, pointing to the building right on the corner. “Volunteer Ministry Center has sixteen apartments in this building”-transitional housing, he said, for people trying to get back on their feet. The rest of the block revolved around fancy condos, galleries, design firms, and a trendy sushi restaurant. I was guessing that the clientele for the businesses came from the lofts and condos, not the dayroom or the transitional housing.
“As you can see, there are two very different worlds here,” he said,
“and those worlds collide just about every day. The police get a lot of complaints from the merchants and residents in this block. Sometimes they’re legitimate-cars getting broken into, drunks wanting to use the bathroom or the telephone. But sometimes it’s just harassment-the haves wanting the have-nots chased away.”
“Chased to where?”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “It can turn into a shell game. They get forced out of downtown, so they head up Broadway, toward the Kroger and the pawn shops. Or way west, to the truck stops on Lovell Road. Or they just hang out in the bushes or under bridges. Here, I’ll show you.” He made two more rights, turning north on Broadway. As we passed beneath the eight-lane viaduct that carried I-40 past downtown and my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw twenty or thirty people in the gloom-some standing in clusters on the sidewalk, some sitting on a low wall that bordered it, others stretched out on the barren ground farther back. Some had backpacks or duffel bags or trash bags filled with possessions; others had just the dingy clothes they wore. A few stared at us as we idled past; some ignored us, intent on conversations with other people or with voices in their heads; others slept or stared off into space. “The businesses down here
Emerging from the shadow of the viaduct, we came to the missions. The Salvation Army, on the west side of Broadway, ran a large thrift store fronting Broadway-a store where many of my graduate students over the years had bought cheap clothing, worn furniture, or battered kitchen gadgets. Behind the thrift store were other buildings-offices and a modern dormitory-style building. Strictly speaking, the Salvation Army wasn’t sheltering street people or transients, Roger said. Like Volunteer Ministry Center, the Salvation Army provided transitional housing, for families in crisis and for people enrolled in Operation Bootstrap, a six-month program designed to treat drug or alcohol problems and find people jobs. “In general, the Bootstrap people aren’t the ones you see roaming around or hanging out during the day,” said Roger. “They’re inside, or off taking a class or working a job.”
Across the street, facing the Salvation Army, was Knox Area Rescue Ministries, which Roger referred to by the acronym, KARM. It was one letter shy of “karma,” I noticed. KARM had renovated an old church, converting the education building into an overnight shelter, Lazarus House, with more than 250 beds. “The shelter doesn’t open until suppertime,” he said, “so a lot of those people under the viaduct are waiting for that. The police come through every couple of hours and chase folks away, but five minutes later they start congregating again.”
Roger headed north another few blocks on Broadway, then angled left onto Central, another artery radiating out of downtown. Like Broadway, Central had largely gone to seed, at least in this section, though its downtown stretch had gotten gentrified over the past couple of decades, the century-old brick buildings transformed into a two-block cluster of restaurants, bars, and boutiques called the Old City. The northern boundary of the Old City was a clear and rough-hewn one: a bumpy two-track railroad crossing, just before the White Lily flour mill and the Greyhound bus depot, another Knoxville crossroads for the downwardly mobile.
Roger turned left off of Central, taking us around the back side of the national cemetery-a neatly mowed veterans’ burial ground, its hundreds of graves marked by precise rows of identical white tombstones: the soldiers uniformly outfitted and holding perfect formation, even in death. Just behind the cemetery, after crossing another set of railroad tracks, Roger turned off-road again, jouncing onto a wide gravel service road that ran alongside the tracks. On the left, the tracks bordered a row of industrial-looking buildings that I guessed to be machine shops. On the right, out my window, was a wall of greenery. He stopped the Honda and led me into the trees along a broad, well-worn path. The patch of woods was surprisingly large-it sprawled for fifty yards or so to the banks of First Creek. Along the path, we passed shirts and pants hanging from branches, piles of bedding nestled in small clearings, heaps of trash and garments everywhere. “Until a few days ago, this was a pretty big camp,” Roger said. “Probably two dozen people in here. The railroad had some big metal culverts stacked along the edge of the trees back there, and there were people sleeping in the culverts, so the railroad called the police and asked them to clear the whole area.”
“How do they do that? A bunch of cops come in and arrest people, or drive through with the loudspeaker on, telling them to get moving, or what?”
“It’s not quite that harsh,” he said. “The police tell the missions and the social-service agencies they’re about to shut down a camp, so then the social workers come out and warn people, tell them if they’ve got stuff they don’t want to lose, they should pack up and leave beforehand. The railroad’s already hauled the culverts to somewhere else, and the city will probably send a crew to clear out everything else here in a few days or weeks or months. Meanwhile, the people find some other place to camp.”
“The shell game?”
“The shell game.”
We walked back to the Honda and bounced along the gravel, back toward town. Up ahead, I could see the rear of the Salvation Army complex approaching, and the looming concrete supports and decking of the I-40 viaduct. We’d come almost full circle, although we were off-road still, a hundred yards west of Broadway, approaching a large graveled area beneath the interstate. Earlier I’d been surprised at how many people were gathered under the viaduct where it crossed Broadway; now I was astonished at the bustling scene taking shape. It was almost as if I’d wandered down a staircase and found myself in the service tunnels hidden beneath Disney World-a realm I’d barely known existed, yet one alive with people and activity.
Dozens of cars and trucks were pulled off to one side of the graveled area beneath the viaduct, which measured roughly the size of a football field. Near the parked vehicles sat a steel storage unit, of the heavy, corrugated type carried by container ships. The yellow container was labeled LOST SHEEP MINISTRIES, though if I’d been naming the program, I’d have called it “Worker Bee Ministries” or “Well-Oiled-Machine Ministries,” because I’d never seen such efficiency. A steady stream of workers, mostly fresh-faced teenagers and young adults, ferried folding chairs and tables from the container’s interior and set them up, row on row, facing a portable lectern or pulpit. A bank of high-intensity lights-the sort used by highway construction crews at night-switched on, banishing the gloom beneath the viaduct. As Roger and I watched, the space beneath the rumbling viaduct became an impromptu assembly hall, filled with dozens of tables and hundreds of chairs. Several tables were set up end to end farther back from the pulpit, and a separate squad of workers began loading these with restaurant-style steam tables, hundreds of soft drinks, stacks of sandwiches and potato chips.
“This is amazing,” I said to Roger. “If the U.S. military moved with this much speed and focus, we’d have been in and out of Iraq in one week.”
He nodded.
I caught a whiff of beef stew wafting from the steam table, and it smelled better than any of the convenience foods I’d microwaved for myself this week. A ragtag band of humanity converged on the food tables from every direction-scores of people, then hundreds, emerging from the bushes and railroad tracks and sidewalks and streets-and began queuing up neatly for food. One of the first in line was a young woman with a pair of children, a boy and a girl who seemed to be about the ages of my grandsons. The mother and children appeared clean and healthy, but they had a wary, weary look in their eyes, even the kids, and that grieved me-to see them beaten down so early in life. Behind them in line was a man who moved with uneven, shuffling steps; his head and right arm twitched periodically as he mumbled, steadily and incoherently, to himself or to some unseen companion.
A public-address system crackled to life, and I heard a woman introduce herself over the noise of the traffic overhead as Maxine Raines, the founder of Lost Sheep Ministries. She quoted a passage from the Bible-“Trust in the
