Marion Fletcher abides at 18th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard here
in Philadelphia. When I first met her four years ago, she spent
her nights in a cove of an airline office entrance doorway, "Come down
to Jamaica" said the sign in the window above her head. Some
nights a security guard at the Sheraton Hotel would invite her to sleep
in the side entrance vestibule of the hotel where it was safer and warmer.
But the hotel changed ownership. Since then she has lived across
the street from the hotel on a steam grate. Mrs. Fletcher has
a face with the bone structure and appearance I associate with the aboriginal
inhabitants of this place, almond eyes, straight nose, high cheek bones,
light brown skin. Sometimes she seems 50 years old, maybe younger,
other times 65 years old, maybe older.
On a January night this past winter, it was snowing. Street
lights and landed snow gave bright lighting to this intersection.
Cars, headlights lit, moved slowly north on 18th street. Then
with the changing of the light, cars on John F. Kennedy Blvd. would move
west. Marion Fletcher dwelt in a pile of blankets on the vent.
The vents are access portals to large insulated pipes carrying by-product
steam from Philadelphia Electric Company's generating plant out near the
Schuylkill River. The steam comes through the pipes to heat
large office buildings in center city and the university area.
Steam does not escape from these pipes. Or, when it does, the
company sends repairmen to fix the leakage, But the insulation
covering the pipes is not perfect, and when water falling from the street,
through the vents touches the pipes, it turns to steam. This
steam is hot but invisible. As it rises to the sidewalk it
cools, coalesces and lower in temperature is visible as a rising cloud
of water vapor. On dry nights, through the vent rises dry air
warmed by the pipes below, but on wet nights the warmth offered by the
vents is laced with wet vapor and hot steam. Marion Fletcher
was sitting up draped and surrounded by blankets. In our Art
Museum there is a painting of Renaissance Italy showing the Assumption
into Heaven of the Blessed Virgin: The Madonna is seated and
below her throne is a billowy cloud supporting her ascent.
The steam was out of Marion's grate, she was seated on a plastic milk box
and around her were draped her coverings. Snow fell and I could
watch it fall from the level of the street lights down to her.
Marion Fletcher has told me that she doesn't want to leave this place.
She is always courteous to me when she turns down my offers of shelter,
she always leaves the possibility of tomorrow. "No thank you
I don't want to leave just now" or "Well let me think about that".
Mrs. Fletcher has told me that she wishes to stay here because her son
is below this ground. That there was a large tear, something
was split open and he fell into it, or he is under this earth and she is
waiting here. I sometimes think she is guarding this place.
This place is sacred to Mrs. Fletcher. In some way this place
belongs to her and she to it. And she abides in it.
On any given day, summer or winter, ten thousand people pass through
this place. Large multi-hundred room hotels fill with salesmen
going to the airport, coming from the airport. It's a five
lane feeder street for cars, trucks, buses and taxis passing into and out
of center city. Below the pavement are ten commuter railroad
tracks abreast and on the south side of this place are twenty-five storey
office towers. To the northwest are apartment house blocks.
People work here and live elsewhere, some, in the apartment blocks live
here nearby and work elsewhere. In some sense only one person
of these thousands dwells herein, who is possessed of this place and for
whom this place is home; the homeless woman, Marion Fletcher.
To be homeless is a condition that is profoundly tragic.
Being without shelter is a painful penultimate result of homelessness not
its only or even necessary characteristic. I want to make a
distinction between those without shelter and those of us who are homeless.
Many more of us are homeless than those of us without shelter.
I don't want to diminish the suffering and neglect of persons on the streets
by equating in some facile or metaphorical sense their painful objective
condition and a more general condition of rootlessness, of not belonging,
that afflicts us all. What I do want to assert is that their condition
is naked and observable and ours somewhat disguised but moving to the same
end.
From my grandfather- in-law, Mike Bystura, a miner in Freeland, Pennsylvania,
I got the story of the canary. The birds were brought into
the mine in cages and hung from support beams near the working face, near
the miners. If the canaries began to fall from their perches,
dead to the floor of the cages, the miners would evacuate the mine:
deadly coal gas was about. This gas was without smell or taste
but it could kill and did. The canaries with their high rates
of respiration and metabolism would fall before the humans.
Their death was an accurate prediction of what would happen to the miners
if they remained and if the gas was not pumped out of the mine and replaced
with good air. The homeless person in some way marks for us
the consequences of isolation, of not belonging, of not belonging to anyone
but himself, for whom no one is responsible, a person who is of no use
to anyone, who is responsible to no one, for no one, and who sometimes
is not responsible or held responsible even for himself.
I'm not suggesting that anyone uses the homeless as a canary in a mine,
but I'm asserting that these folks do manifest a social condition of atomization,
individualization, hyper-individualization that may augur the consequences
for all of us of those patterns of change in our social formation that
have brought widespread homelessness about.
Who appears before me is not the Madonna or only so. She
is not impoverished or only that, not just a bag lady, client, CMI (an
acronym for the chronically mentally ill), homeless patient or citizen.
All such categorizations may be true, but their truth creates safe positions
for me, those categorizations make me a social worker, healer, helper,
counselor, public servant. These are all roles and jobs I can
give up at the end of the day and go home to my home and family.
What came before these relational categories? Mrs. Fletcher
is a woman and I, a man, and we live in the same time and place.
The other connections named social worker/client, public servant/citizen,
CMI/counselor, concerned citizen/homeless person generate obligations and
performances that she and I can and do discharge, and at the end of it
she is still on the vent in the night and I am in my chair at home.
But she remains a woman, a woman uncared for and stands as remonstrance,
plaintiff and threat to me. I take it as given, an assumption
about which I can't argue if you disagree with me that we are to look after
one another. Words like "human society", "community", "family",
"brother", "son" don't seem to make much sense if that's not so.
I start from the position that we belong to one another, in diverse but
absolutely real ways. Behind that assertion is no metaphysic,
faith or epistemology; such stuff flows from it. If I am right
about this then Mrs. Fletcher's abandonment accuses all and each of us
of primal failure.
That she is a woman who is trying to make a home on a vent on a pavement
and no man protects her must shame half of us.
Ivan Illich writes:
" To live somewhere is to make a home, by bringing children into
the world no less than by planting trees and building walls.
Rare are the words that designate human action - the verbs - that do not
also refer to homemaking. All living is dwelling, the shaping of
a dwelling. To dwell means to live in the traces that past
living has left. A home made by people, not for them, is a space engendered
by the bodies of its inhabitants . . . The home is neither breeding ground
nor well-equipped safe; it is the reflection in the milieu
of men and women." (Illich 1982, pages 120, 121)
The home is not a manufactured space something we can buy, move into
or out of. It is some materialization of the border between
the loves of men and women that envelopes them and takes on their distinct
shape. Home is not address numbers on a lot plan of a ward
map.
"No matter how the local mythology depicts the creator of the world
- as mother, father or androgyne . . . the special space (and the time
that corresponds to it) that sets the home apart from nest and garage
is engendered only by women, because it is they who bear living bodies
. .
.
By being turned into economic producers - paid or unpaid, on
the job or at home - women, like men are deprived of the environmental
conditions that allow them to live by dwelling in a place or by dwelling,
to make a home. To the degree that they both become more productive economically,
both men and women become homeless."
(Illich, page 122)
Mrs. Fletcher stands alone. She bears the cost of our civil
rights and liberties. We won't care for her because it would
be a violation of a civil right that we don't want the state to infringe.
As citizen in relation to the state, she is free to remain in the cold.
But what of her rights as mother - what son would allow the snow to fall
on his mother, and what of her claim as neighbor, who would let their sick
neighbor remain on the steam grate? And what of her womanhood?
In our unisex equalitarian place that claim doesn't exist anymore, we don't
know how to speak of men and women without meaning male and female. This
is a sad place, this snowy corner that we have shaped with this scorned woman,
Marion Fletcher, to be her home.
Joe Ferry
Copyright
First North American publishingrights belong to THE OTHER SIDE, Philadelphia
