Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [26]
One local mother-and-daughter team had been coming to Grace-Calvary for money since long before I arrived. I never knew if they were churchgoers themselves, but they knew their way around the county churches better than the Chamber of Commerce did. The grown daughter was allegedly diabetic, and the elderly mother routinely called for things that were not available from the community food bank, such as sugar-free chewing gum, cookies, cakes, candy, canned fruit, fruit juices, soft drinks, pudding mixes, ice cream, and pancake syrup.
Every couple of months these two did something that put them on probation at the food bank, which meant that they really did run short on staples from time to time. When I believed that such a time had come, I bought them some groceries, which kept me near the top of the mother’s calling list. Even when I said no, she took this not as discouragement but as a challenge to try harder.
“Martha is sitting on the toilet and we are out of toilet paper,” she told me on the telephone one afternoon. “If I came over right now, could you write me a check to the grocery store so she can get up?”
I also spent time with people I never saw again. One afternoon after everyone else had gone home I answered a knock at the door of the parish house, opening it to a ravaged looking young man who said he needed help getting home to North Carolina. He was taller than I was, with a recently shaved head of hair that was growing out at different speeds. Still acting on my lifelong and generally mistaken notion that most people want to be listened to as much as they want money, I asked him to come inside and tell me his story.
He shuffled inside and sat down in my office, pushing up the sleeves of his oily jacket so that I could see the scars on the inside of his arms. Then he told me about how he had just been released from the state hospital at Milledgeville and was trying to find some cousins of his who used to live in North Carolina. He needed to find them pretty fast too, he said, because he was out of everything, including the pills that the people at the hospital had given him when he left. When he started digging around in his pants pocket to find the slip of paper with his diagnosis on it, I gave him thirty-five dollars in cash and wished him luck.
After working so many years in Atlanta, I had to learn how to work in a town with no Traveler’s Aid office, no Salvation Army, no homeless shelter or poverty law office. There were no counseling centers either, but the few local people I knew who were in therapy said they would rather drive a hundred miles round-trip than be seen coming out of a therapist’s office in town, which explained that. When people in Habersham County got into truly terrible trouble, they went to the emergency room or the fire station. When they thought they had a little more time they went to a church, where they hoped to find someone more skilled than they were at getting God’s attention.
During my first year at Grace-Calvary, I talked with scores of people suffering from addiction, eviction, physical abuse, incest, bankruptcy, multiple personality disorder, depression, and AIDS, only about half of whom were members of the church. I not only learned that my new job involved caring for people who were not in the picture directory, I also learned that Clarkesville had a shadow side I had not seen from the sunny front porch of Grace-Calvary Church.
There may not have been homeless people sleeping in the bushes, but there were poor, illiterate, and mentally ill people living in trailer parks. There were unmarried teenage girls with two babies by different fathers buying formula with food stamps while their brothers got blind drunk on Friday nights as compensation for another week of backbreaking work at minimum wage. There were Laotian, Vietnamese, and Mexican immigrants moving to town for entry-level jobs at the chicken plant, and there were