TENEBRAE

They carry bags. They all have bags. Once in a while one doesn't have bags; rarely. We mark it in the name we call them, "bag ladies". They are known, classified, categorized by the bag they carry. It's a badge. A policeman wouldn't be able to claim his authority without his badge. Firemen wouldn't fight fires without their badge, a helmet. A baseball player without a bat and glove, isn't one. Nuns without habits, priests without collars are dedicated avowed people, but without their badges they don't count the same. They don't count the same in a community of strangers. In a place where each person is known to each other, badges are not necessary; the web of relationships, a person's status, obligations, responsibilities and authority is widely known and generally respected.

Not too long ago I owned a series of well-used cars. Mike Odabashian owned a Sunoco Station and did his best to keep these old cars safe and working for me. Now I own a new car, a Chevrolet, and I take it to the dealer's service department. The man I talk with wears a shirt and on his shirt is a sign that says "Mr. Goodwrench", below that is a plastic badge that pins to his shirt and says his real name, which I don't remember.

The most remarkable thing about Mr. Goodwrench is that his clothes aren't covered with grease and his fingernails are clean. Mike Odabashian's clothes were clean when I saw him early in the morning, but by 9:00 a.m. they weren't. His fingernails always had crescents of black grease. Even at five when I pick up my car, Mr. Goodwrench has clean fingernails. It's hard to trust a mechanic with clean fingernails and whose name doesn't get top billing on his clothing. Mike Odabashian's blue greasy coveralls had a sign on them: it said "Mike". Sometimes it said "John". Mike has a brother-in-law John who works with him. Sometimes there would be no name at all on his clothing. I knew that if something went wrong with my old cars, I could go to Mike, even on days when he had John's coveralls on and he would take responsibility. It would be much harder to nail Mr. Goodwrench down. First of all, he isn't the man who actually fixes the car and secondly he isn't really Mr. Goodwrench. Mr. Goodwrench isn't a person at all but an advertising campaign, the point of which is to get me to believe that a real person is responsible for fixing my car. I do get fooled. But on reflection I know that there is no person responsible for fixing my car: a corporation is. The tricky thing in talking to corporations about defective belts that broke and caused other mechanical failures is that corporations disappear into large offices staffed by people who never had greasy clothes or black lines under their fingernails.

Badges are what they are and in a community in which most people are strangers to one another, badges are necessary, absolutely necessary, signposts allowing us to make assumptions and have expectations with a reasonable chance of being fulfilled. But we need to know what badges are not and we should know what we must give up and what we gain when we make a community functioning by way of badge identification instead of person knowledge.

In her book "Shopping Bag Ladies", Rousseau (Rousseau, 1981) asserts that the bags carried by bag women are their home. It's their material possessions, it's their only sure claim beyond their bodies to the physical world. It's their piece of the rock. Betty Thompson has one of those wheeled carts that fold up; people use them to bring groceries home from the supermarket or laundry to and from the laundromat. Mrs. Thompson has all her earthly goods in the cart and she keeps it close to her. On cold nights I've seen her in the doorway of Gola Electronics on Chestnut St. bestirred by a cold wind to extract another blanket from the cart and a section of newspaper for insulation below her feet. Other women carry a heavy burden of paper shopping bags, hefty bags, integral handle plastic bags, sometimes valises.

Jontilla Smith didn't carry bags, she wore what ordinarily would have been its contents and, in the many pockets of the various layers of clothing she stored what couldn't be worn.

Men don't carry it all in a bag. The name we call the folks complementary to the bag ladies is "vent men". At one time I thought the reason we didn't call them "bag men" was because that term is already in use for accomplices to bank robberies, cocaine deals, etc. But then I noticed two things. One--the men don't typically carry bags, and two--the women don't sleep on the vents. The last statement is only partly true. I know Marion S. Fletcher sleeps on the vent at 18th and John F. Kennedy Blvd., but she doesn't sprawl on it. I've never seen a woman sprawl across a vent, but I have seen men, ordinarily so, fully extended across the vents.

Women we've abandoned to the streets comport themselves differently than the men. Rousseau takes the bags to be the vestige and remainder of hearth and home; warmth, connection, the final physical traces of all conjured by the term, mother. I picture ancient Greek women with large urns on their heads; black women in National Geographics bejeweled ears to feet; I see Tibetan women with heavy burdens and tump lines pressing into their forehead; Sioux women with papoose in back packs; and women with hip babies gleaning fields. When we say "she's carrying" we mean much.

These bags carry heavy freight, the stuff necessary to protect from the elements, the vestiges of home, the remainder of a vision of woman, and also badge of status with a claim of protection.

It was October '83, the weather was beginning to get cold, I knew Miss Hohner was still on the streets. She had taken advantage of our offers of shelter last winter and had remained at the boarding house until springtime. She then announced she was going to St. Petersburg, Florida--within a couple of days she had gone. I saw her with bags about her in August on a bench on Ben Franklin Parkway. She said she had gone to Florida, didn't like it, went to Wilmington, Delaware and Baltimore, Maryland and recently returned here. In August she wasn't interested in any shelter, she said she was waiting for a check. Throughout that season she stayed out on Ben Franklin Parkway. On rainy nights she would come into the Drop-in Center and sleep in a plastic chair in the basement, have breakfast and go. She always read the morning newspaper and if I wanted to catch up with her there was good likelihood that in the morning on a bench near Logan Circle she would be reading the morning newspaper.

Putting down the newspaper she started to empty the contents of one of three hefty trash bags she had with her. There was nothing in the first bag but old newspapers and some used empty plastic and paper bags. In the second bag was more newspapers and more bags and a small plastic bag from Rite Aid and inside it a brown windowed envelope and a Social Security check made to Miss Hohner for $2,385.00. This set into motion a series of actions for three days during which time Miss Hohner and myself found out that no bank in Philadelphia will cash a $2,385.00 government check presented by a bag lady whose only identification is three months worth of old Inquirers and one vouching social worker. All would accept the check for deposit to a new account (no withdrawals for seven to ten working days). "Crooks" said Anna.

While she was emptying the first bag on the Parkway and before I believed that there was any check, I asked her why she carried these bags around full of nothing but other bags and old newspapers? "So nobody bothers me", she said.

Miss Hohner carries those bags as protection. With her bags she is saying "I belong among those who are worthless, who have no value, I have nothing to give, there is nothing to be taken from me that from me has not already been stripped". The bags are her badge. In our world of strangers, in our community of complex strangerhoods and non-personal encounters, the intersection of people connected to one another by only cash relationships, fees for services, third party payments, the bag lady's bags demand we remember the women we've abandoned, the home she doesn't have and identify for us the status we grant this person--worthless, untouchable.

Bag Lady