"There’s more to my story than you realize:"
Building Self and Community through Narrative Presentation in the Faces of Homelessness Speakers' Bureau.

By: Tara Kennon
English 311
George Mason University

Origins

"Now before I start, let me say one thing: don’t judge my story. My story is my story–it’s not the story of all homeless people." Joanne speaks quietly, but with force. She does not yell. She does not cry. She does not wave her arms, stamp her feet, or deliver prose from a teleprompter. Yet her audience is captivated. Drowsy college students lounging in beat-up sofas on this rainy Tuesday afternoon begin to lean forward, straighten their shoulders, and grip their hands anxiously on their knees. Students planted on armrests and wedged in sofa corners emerge together from daydream and gaze intently at Joanne as she begins to tell the story of her experience as a homeless woman in our nation’s capital. This is not boring.

As we shook the thunderstorm rain off our jackets before her presentation and made our way down the dimly-lit hallway to this room in the basement of a towering greystone church in downtown DC just a mile or so from the Potomac river, Joanne told me that even though she has delivered talks all over the Northeast United States, her favorite gig was right here in DC at an elementary school for children with attention deficit disorder. "No way!" I remember exclaiming. "A school full of little kids who don’t sit still? How. . .?"

"As soon as I started talking," she said, "they just got real quiet. I mean, they were quiet. Then later the principal told me it was the most he ever saw those kids pay attention to anything." Why is everyone listening so closely?

Joanne speaks with the Faces of Homelessness Speakers' Bureau, a group of homeless and formerly homeless individuals who share their stories in panel discussions around the country in an effort to "put a face on homelessness," to help housed Americans glimpse the diverse reality of living daily without a home, and to affirm the stories of their life by speaking them. They speak to educate, they speak to build confidence, and perhaps most essentially, they speak to end the sense of silence and invisibility that I’ve heard presenter after presenter describe as more painful than bitter cold and an empty stomach. The Bureau’s copy-paper promotional brochure explains that "most people have never had a conversation with a homeless person or learned what their life was like before, during, or after homelessness." By creating a shared space where homeless and housed individuals can interact naturally over conversation about breakfast cereal as well as about social issues, panel presentations embody the ideas promoted by the Bureau’s sponsor, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), that ending homelessness "will only happen through the continued involvement of those persons who are currently or formerly homeless. It is important to listen to them because they are the ‘real experts’ on homelessness."

"These are the people we need to be asking about homelessness!" exclaims Luke, an NCH program facilitator, at 11:00 one Monday night to a floor packed full of high school students from across America who have traveled to DC to spend a week learning about democracy, justice, political representation, and . . . homelessness. Homelessness has become as much a part of DC’s landscape as the newly renovated Washington monument. This evening these students will speak with Americans who are homeless; tomorrow morning they will rise early and trek across town to speak with Americans who have been elected to Congress. Restaurant tables have been cleared away to make room for all of the students to sit cross-legged on the floor–more people can fit this way. "I mean, otherwise, it’s like having a conference on women’s rights and not inviting any women!" Want to talk about homelessness? Then talk to someone who does not have a home. It is an idea radical in its simplicity, incongruous in this age of social task forces, think tanks, and statistical analysis. On the other hand, it is the perfect fit for a society obsessed with reality TV, where the personal memoir is skyrocketing in popularity and even the ever-scientific American Psychological Association has sanctioned the use of first-person narration in reports and articles. Speakers want to give voice to the experiences they’ve carried inside for years; right now, we are captivated by their stories.

The spatial positioning of the program and the movements of the participants during the Faces of Homelessness program construct a rare space in which homeless speakers occupy positions of respect and control that facilitate both interest and respectful dialogue. The speakers sit along a table in the front of the room, projecting the appearance of an expert panel, complete with clear plastic water pitcher and glasses. They do not, however, sit behind the table in a way that would remove them from the audience with a physical barrier; instead, they sit in chairs in front of the table only a few feet away from their audience. Luke stands directly to their right when he leads discussion, so that the speakers sit in the direct line of vision of the audience even when the focus of action momentarily shifts to Luke or to audience members. Speakers participate in overt dialogue with members of the audience during much of the program, but this arrangement enables the speakers to also take part in the audience-audience and audience-facilitator parts of the discussion. The speakers easily make their presence and opinions known through expressive (sometimes even visually exaggerated) reactions and interactions with members of the audience.

When Luke begins the presentation one evening by asking students in the audience to share their free-associative images of homelessness, August, a speaker who told me before the program that he wasn’t scheduled to speak but had the evening off from work and decided to stop by, becomes immediately involved by verbally attracting Luke’s attention and pointing out students who raise their hands. He, in effect, decides who in the audience will be heard. August and George, the speaker sitting beside him on the panel, begin covertly interacting with two students in the front row, whispering and gesturing to encourage the students to share their ideas, and laughing at a joke they share with these two students but not with the entire group. As the program continues to the slide show, Jonathan, a speaker, intuitively leaves his seat on the panel and takes control of the sound system in the front of the room as Luke begins the visual presentation in the back.

When the slide presentation ends and audience members share their impressions and questions, a student near the back of the room raises her hand and says, "I don’t understand how people can just become homeless. I mean, I just don’t understand how that could happen." Murmurs running through the crowd indicate that other (not necessarily more sensitive or respectful) students have been socialized to understand what questions they should not ask. Cheryl immediately jumps to her feet and walks forward into the audience, seizing control of a potentially volatile moment. "That is a very important question," she says. "There’s a lot of things that lead up to it. I’ll be happy to talk about that when I tell my story. I think George will, too. No, no, that’s a very important question. Thanks for asking that." The warmth of her voice conveys compassion for the plight of the suddenly alienated student while her stern vocal undertones serve to protect the student from the immediate criticism of her peers. Her steps into the crowd on the floor heighten the impact of her words tremendously. This sudden role-reversal in which the formerly homeless woman pities and protects the housed high school student demonstrates the ways in which the panel presentation creates an unusual space that fosters interaction and mutual respect.

As an advocate for the homeless in the Pacific Northwest in 1972, Michael was delivering speeches about homelessness to Kiwanis and Ruritans left and right when, he says, "I really got tired of listening to myself say the same speech again and again." He wanted to educate the public about homelessness, though, and he wanted the free meal that often came with a Ruritan meeting, so he kept speaking. Then one day, he asked his homeless friend Benjamin, "an older hobo-looking man," to join him at a Kiwanis meeting; he would still give the talk, but Benjamin could have the meal. (In the end, they both got meals.) Halfway through his speech, Michael says, "I stopped, without permission." His voice rises a little and his eyes grow slightly wider. "I invited Benjamin to stand and share his story." The audience, he smiles and tells me quietly, "was transfixed. I knew I was on to something."

Michael now serves as the Grassroots Organizer for the NCH. The Faces of Homelessness Speakers' Bureau officially came into existence as part of the National Coalition six years ago; last year alone, the group spoke to over 12,000 people and helped others set up similar panels in their own towns. The program has developed a standard format that remains through the hugely different stories and circumstances of telling that come with new locations. The standard program now includes a nationally-acclaimed audio visual presentation (either video or slide show, depending on the capabilities of the presentation space) consisting entirely of black-and-white photos of homeless Americans, interspersed with a select few printed words and accompanied by a four-song soundtrack. A facilitator from NCH shares background about the issue, leads discussion of the words and images, and introduces the speakers. Each speaker presents a story to the audience; depending on the number of speakers, each one may speak for anywhere from 3-20 minutes. After the speakers talk to the audience individually, they stand before the group together and answer questions.

Anything but a rigid constraint, this format serves as a rough guide to programs so interactive and situationally diverse that they can never resemble each other too closely. Besides, stories evolve and perspectives change with experience. The speakers and audience, of course, differ with every presentation; in a program shaped so significantly by speakers and audience members, this profoundly impacts the shape of each presentation. And while speakers, especially experienced speakers, may develop a general outline for their story ahead of time and adhere to it closely during each presentation, many stories change with each telling–lives change daily, and the stories must change to keep up with them. A speaker who focuses on setbacks one day may be eager to talk about positive faith and future goals the next day.

"I don’t talk as much now as I did when I started," explains Luke, the program facilitator who has been working with the Speakers' Bureau for about seven months. When I first began attending presentations early this semester, Luke adhered rather closely to a discernable series of ideas during his program introduction; in addition to giving a quick rundown of NCH’s fundamental goals, he spoke at length about the nation’s dramatic reduction in low-cost single occupancy rooms, the seriousness of the affordable housing crisis, the importance of living wage and fair market rent, and specific civil rights issues that NCH battles in court. Now he speaks less about the economics of homelessness and more about the faces, shoes, and philosophies of his homeless friends. "I soon realized that I could spout out all this economic information and these statistics about the affordable housing crisis," he says, "but what people desperately want–and need–to hear is the stories, the voice of the speaker."

Why are we so captivated by the voice of the speaker? In Essays on Performance Theory, Richard Schechner describes the importance of the person in the presentation of narrative. He argues that "even the most conventional actor affirms that something goes on inside him during a performance. . . there are rough and unexpected turbulences, troubled interruptions. These are not stylistic, but the genuine meeting between performer and problem" (18). This vitality and energy speak to an audience as powerfully as the words themselves. Mary Ellen Botter argues that contemporary society leaves individuals searching for this vitality of narrative. She writes that storytelling, "as old as human experience, had been all but dead, the victim of television, scattered families, shrinking time for one another and an onslaught of activities outside the home. . . . Storytelling is low-tech entertainment with high impact."

Perhaps the Faces of Homelessness program taps into a larger conversation (conducted largely over e-mail and fax machine) about the crucial importance of individual human interaction in this age of increasing technology-induced alienation from the face and voice of those we seek to communicate with. At this moment when statistics and intangible systems of the global economy can seem overwhelming, intimidating, and easy to ignore because they are hard to comprehend, the Speakers' Bureau offers a space where individuals, as Luke says, "change lives, one person at a time." To do anything "live in person!" one individual at a time–instead of sending an email to a mass list-serve or showing a bright advertisement in the theatre before a blockbuster film–makes a unique statement about the value of each human life. Speakers talk about the pain of being ignored by members of mainstream society and about how interacting with the group and seeing how they impact lives works to counteract the sense of painful invisibility that homelessness involves–but they are not the only ones who gain personal fulfillment from this arrangement. The tremendous popularity of the Speakers' Bureau and the response of audience members testifies to the program’s ability to fill a need in our society for face-to-face interaction that makes seemingly overwhelming monolithic forces into something tangible that we can understand. Botter explains that "actors pretend the audience isn’t there. Storytellers seek direct connection, providing words that create scenes in each listener’s mind rather than on the stage. For the audience, storytelling isn’t a spectator art, it’s full-contact." We aren’t always interested in studying statistics and social theory, but we are always eager to sit with someone who can tell us a good story.

Now, Joanne’s steady voice fills this long rectangular room in the basement of DC’s Church of the Pilgrims. She moves her hand every few minutes to finger-comb the hair in front of her ear into the short gray-streaked ponytail tied low at the nape of her neck. Her story begins with excellent grades in high school, her acceptance letter from Howard University, and the day she "was informed that my family could not pay for it." She shifts her weight a bit from foot to foot and looks at each suddenly spellbound student as she continues her story with her decision to take "the best honest work a black woman could get back in those days" cleaning government offices, her venture owning her own business in Connecticut during the inaugural year of the Small Business Administration, her return to DC, and gradual addiction to alcohol and cocaine. She talks about her days living in an abandoned building with other homeless people, the night it was "cold as a witch’s tit–you heard that expression? That’s what we say when it was cold–and that night it was so cold my toe froze to my boot and I just knew I had to get out of there," her frightening experiences in shelters and the years of recovery that have brought her, today, to sober life in her own apartment. The events of her story by themselves could capture the attention of a listener, but the truly powerful element of this narrative lies not in its chronology but in Joanne herself–her voice, her smile, her dark blue jeans and white sweatshirt, and her huge deep-set dark brown eyes that look directly into students’ faces when she asks them not to pre-judge her story because she used cocaine.

"I know lots of homeless people who never drank, never drugged," she quickly points out. "Not all homeless people are on crack. For me, it was loneliness, wanting to be part of something, even with my so-called friends. I was very easy persuaded back in the days." The form and concept of the Faces of Homelessness program connect closely at moments such as these when audience members sit quietly and nod their heads with recognition at Joanne’s description of loneliness and confusion. To present homelessness as a statistical issue with numbers or even with a written series of events on paper frames it as something far removed from personal daily life. "If asked to describe the characteristics of ‘the homeless,’ only a few of us will retrieve from memory tables of statistics" writes Gary Blasi. "Rather, most of us will retrieve from episodic memory an encounter with a particular homeless person or a prototype made of many real or imagined people" (566). The issue becomes a numerical equation not even distantly related to you or the people you know. The only best-case response to this form of impersonal representation involves a feeling of pity and spurs acts or feelings of charity. Pity and charity, while acts of kindness, do not always involve feelings of great respect or understanding; they may involve a sense that the object of charity receives a gift (a bonus, so to speak, not something she naturally deserves) and that the giver and recipient do not inhabit equal ground. As opposed to the less personal statistics-on-paper approach to public outreach, the Faces of Homelessness program involves a form that connects to a different function. This format of personal interaction and connection does not allow the type of detachment and objectification that turns another person into an object of charity and pity. Rather, it allows individuals to interact on an equal ground that encourages empathy and raises questions about justice.

Nodding her head once, Joanne thanks the students for listening so closely and calmly returns to her seat. Silence. Luke bounds immediately to the front of the room. "I want to point out," he says, "that when you think about it, the place where Joanne’s story diverges from most of ours is when she found out she couldn’t afford to go to college." Silence. This single idea about a moment in one woman’s life impacts the audience more powerfully than any number of billboards and pie graphs about America’s homeless ever could–because this moment in her life is close enough to their reality to have meaning, and because this woman is now someone they know.

When the presentation ends, students crowd around Joanne and shake her hand with its shiny clear nail polish and one nail brightly decorated with a small neon green and orange design. The bright nail stands out from her otherwise natural appearance as she clasps the small hand of a student who insists that she would not have called her mom and asked for help either if she were living in an abandoned building. I have to get back to school, so Joanne pats my arm good-bye and continues listening to the student’s thoughts about family relationships and personal dignity. I climb the concrete stairs out of the church basement and push open the heavy door to the grassy hill outside. My eyelids slam shut as soon as I open it–bright sunlight splatters over my jacket as rain had done only 90 minutes earlier. The street is suddenly over-run with joggers and bikers who whiz past me smiling as I walk back to my car a few blocks away. I look at each one and wonder, what is her story?

Building Self by Telling Stories

When I ask Joanne if she plans or practices her story before she speaks to big groups, she smiles and shakes her head. "I just go up there and tell the truth," she says. "You know, when you tell the truth, it always turns out right. I don’t have to be nervous about that." George also tells me that he makes it a point to "tell them what it’s really like," but he has prepared a written testimony (similar to his spoken story, but with fewer specific details and elaborations) that he distributes to interested audience members after his presentation. Every speaker approaches presentations in a different way and has a unique method of pulling together a life story. David tells me that he thinks about ways to make each program unique and to take this opportunity to express different aspects of his life experience "because I do not want to just say the same thing every time."

The diverse act of constructing a story, the act of imposing narrative on a series of life events and transforming experience into tale, is what Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps call a "characteristically human" thing to do. "Through narrative," they write, "we come to know what it means to be a human being" (9). In his book Homo Narrans, John Niles suggests that the need to construct and speak narrative stories is the characteristic that fundamentally distinguishes humans from other animals. Stories, then, do more than entertain or inform us–they help define who we are. George Rosenwald and Richard Ochberg write that "personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life; they are the means by which identity may be fashioned. It is this formative power of life stories that makes them important" (1). Through the act of creating life stories, individuals may develop not only an understanding of what they have done, but also an understanding of who they are and who they want to become. Stories give shape to experience and help define the boundaries selfhood. Ochs and Caps write that "personal narrative simultaneously is born out of experience and gives shape to experience. In this sense, narrative and self are inseparable . . . We come to know ourselves as we use narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others" (2).

To create a story that they feel comfortable telling and an audience feels comfortable hearing, speakers must (consciously or unconsciously) choose certain life moments and thread them together with coherent themes and motifs. In doing so, they decide what events matter and what ideas hold their identity together. "Coherence," write Rosenwald and Ochberg, "is imposed by the work of the story makers. The logic with which one event leads into another is not simply ‘out there,’ waiting to be recognized by any disinterested observer. Instead, coherence derives from the tacit assumptions of plausibility that shape the way each story maker weaves the fragmentary episodes of experience into a history" (5). By choosing which life events to include in their stories and deciding how these events relate to one another, speakers work through an understanding of their own challenging and often confusing experiences. Ochs and Capps write that "in forging story elements into a plot, narrators build a theory of events. Narrators attempt to identify life problems, how and why they emerge, and their impact on the future. As such, narrative allows narrators to work through deviations from the expected within a conventional structure." (7).

Though stories have traditionally been viewed as representations of real life, recent theorists have begun to argue that the telling of a story is itself a "real" event, that speaking or hearing narrative creates (rather than re-creates) an experience as "actual" as any other. The power of creation (especially self-creation) in the hands of storytellers, then, is tremendous. Schechner explains that narrative art does not merely depict an event but "breaks off and becomes itself." The act of telling creates a dynamic event that involves both speaker and audience in a shared experience of reality. Some even argue that a narrative telling is the most "real" kind of lived event because "the chaotic and disorderly sensory world is organized and made manageable by the symbols [words] that are devised to dominate it. . . language is a force through which the essence of a substance or an idea becomes known or ‘real’ to us because it halts the constant flux of the contents of consciousness by fixing a substance with a linguistic symbol" (Foss, 122).

The tales speakers tell can be described by three loosely defined categories. Their work changes and crosses boundaries quickly, but understanding the general form and purpose of the stories helps explain the ways in which the tales work with or against other narratives in our society. I do not intend for these categories to be limiting, but rather, descriptive or explanatory. One type of story prevalent within our society in general and present but less prevalent with the Speakers' Bureau is the cautionary tale used warn listeners against the trouble of certain ideas and behaviors. Cautionary tales are present throughout our society as a way to help young people learn from the experience of others. Such stories are characterized by an overt warning to the audience, often near the end of the tale, that they should be careful to avoid some of the situations described in the story. The cautionary tale derives from an idea that the speaker has lived through difficult experiences and shares them in hopes of preventing others from experiencing the same difficulties. Joanne’s story, for example, may sometimes be called a cautionary tale. She tells some audiences that they must avoid experimenting with drugs because even an experiment "is enough to get you hooked."

When she chooses not to add this warning, however, Joanne’s story is better described by another category, the inspirational tale. Inspirational stories also serve to change the life of the listener, but they do so by modeling positive actions, often in response to exceptionally difficult circumstances. Joanne’s description of how she extricated herself from homelessness and addiction will be heard by many listeners as extremely motivational and inspiring rather than cautionary. Other speakers tell tremendously motivational stories as well, when they describe the difficult choices they made in overcoming obstacles and the challenging plans they make for the future. Jonathan, for example, speaks with enthusiasm about his future educational goals and his plan to become the first Hispanic mayor of DC. Audience members inevitably smile and cheer when they hear his articulation of overcoming struggle and reaching to achieve even higher goals. Such stories fit especially well, perhaps, in this city. We sit and listen, after all, in the nation’s capital, the seat of American democracy and the fabled land of opportunity where everyone can, the story goes, overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. Speaker and audience are united, especially here in the shadow of the capital, by our belief in the power of the individual to make dreams come true.

Equally appropriate in the nation’s capital is the third type of tale, the experience/empathy story whose main purpose is to help listeners understand the experience of homelessness. They can be compared to both adventure stories and political tales because they regale the audience with vivid details and also contain an edge of advocacy for those whose lives are defined by these details that most audience members will only experience through story. The purposes connect closely; when an audience begins to understand the experience of homelessness, members will be more likely to advocate for those in need. Everyone in this city, it sometimes seems, advocates for something; these stories take part in a larger conversation about human rights, individual liberty, and the meaning of justice.

Points of Connection: Building Community

One of them

All slim limbs and big dark eyes

Grasps my hand

As she would never do in the street

And speaks to me

And discovers

We speak the same language

College students from Indiana sit transfixed on the edge of their seats in the basement of a church; 4-H club officers from around the country elbow each other as they rush out of the speaking room so that they may be the first to hug and talk to the speakers after their presentation; Jewish high school students at youth leadership camp, their counselors, even Luke and other speakers, listen intently to each panelist, riveted by her every word. "Going into the program I was a rich snob," writes one audience member. "After hearing the people speak, I went out and gave away clothing and food to all the people I could. I tried to help every person in my own little way." Another audience member writes that "the speakers left an indelible impact on the audience. I believe those watching will never see homelessness in the same way." Many linger after presentations for a chance to speak personally with presenters–they approach tentatively or rush forward enthusiastically to express thanks and often to share parts of their own stories. I have seen audience members hug, pray, and exchange email addresses with speakers they met only an hour ago.

Cheryl, a formerly homeless political activist who has been speaking for nine years, laughs proudly when she tells me about the strong responses to her talk. "We were talking to some young leaders over at the Reagan National Center, and this big jock-looking guy, he comes up to me, this guy, and he says," her voice shifts into a squeaky upset-sounding tone, "‘I got something to say to you and I don’t know how to say it–oh, I just really appreciate you coming here today to talk with us!’ and he starts crying so I just hug him. Then all his big jock friends come over crying so I say ‘come on,’ and we’re all hugging." I have no trouble believing this; I’ve seen Cheryl literally rushed after presentations by students who want to hug her. She embraces them quickly, smiling in her sweatsuit and bright orange Nike baseball cap. After another program, she tells me, she met a student who felt helpless as she watched her own mother endure an abusive relationship. "I told her, ‘you call me when you need to talk,’" Cheryl says. "I said, ‘I don’t care where you are, you pick up that phone and call me.’ And we, we wrote for years after that."

How does a middle aged woman who spent years living on the street and now devotes herself to advocacy for the homeless connect in less than an hour with "this big jock-looking guy" enough to elicit tears, and with other students enough to forge lasting relationships? How does David manage to connect with his audience so profoundly that roomfuls are moved to tears by his story or, as one student explained in a letter she sent him, so impacted by the story that they leave quickly to avoid making an emotional scene? How do storytellers in any culture find ways to convey their experiences in ways that we as listeners will understand?

Symbolic convergence theory offers the explanation that speakers bring their listeners into a plane of shared reality by putting forth symbols that both the teller and listener can understand and relate to in the same way. In this sense, speakers do not necessarily construct elaborate literary metaphors that push their listeners down a narrow path of meaning; instead, they talk about images and symbols from their lives. Listeners hear and understand theses images in the same way speakers understand them; this brings speaker and listener onto a path of meaning that they may explore together. Sonja Foss explains that (122):

Describing the experience of homelessness presents a particular challenge because, as speakers say almost every night, it is something you can’t really understand until you experience it. The word itself, however, already conjures images that may lead to shared reality for speaker and listener. Gary Blasi writes that "images and issues relating to ‘the homeless’ seemed to have had a power that issues of ‘poverty’ or ‘housing the poor’ did not. . . the ways in which the public reacts to these issues has much to do with the differences in the images and schemata they evoke" (565). We respond strongly to the issue of "homelessness," then, in part because the phrase itself calls forth feelings and experiences from our own lives. Blasi explains that "perhaps, as a matter of cognition and imagination, it is simply easier for people to identify with the harsh reality of homelessness than with that of mere poverty. Many people have had an array of experiences that can supply details to imagination: being lost, being very far from home, and being between homes, for example" (567). By presenting homelessness in terms of ideas and experiences that housed audience members can understand, speakers forge connections that bridge the differences in their lives and create a space where speaker and listener co-exist.

My alarm beeped at two minutes after seven on Tuesday morning, so I stumbled half-asleep across my room to turn it off before it woke my roommate at this horrendously early hour. I tugged on the metal chain hanging from my window to open the blinds and, I hoped, let the bright sunshine jump into our room and yank me out of grogginess. No such luck. Fat drops of rain crawled over my window and the only beam of light I saw through the gray fog was the headlight of a car. Ok, only a few more minutes of rest. I opened my eyes at 7:25 and figured that they day was not going to get any brighter unless I got out of bed and made some coffee. I would never make it to the NCH headquarters downtown in time to meet with Cheryl and David this morning unless I got out of bed now. I actually laughed half-heartedly at my reflection in the mirror when I finally made my way to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I look like hell–this is way earlier than I am used to waking. As I pull a soft terry beach towel from its rack and start to dry my face, my mind wanders to the cold drizzle outside, then to all the commuters out there who wake up before dawn and rush to the metro in overcoats and hats. Then I remember something Joanne told me last night after a presentation as we bundled ourselves in warm scarves and heavy coats to shield out some of the freezing wind. She said that the hypothermia watch would be in effect tonight, but a lot of homeless people would stay on the streets because they would rather freeze than go to a shelter. She didn’t mean they would rather "be cold." She meant that they would rather freeze. Six homeless people died of hypothermia on the streets of DC this winter. Why?

"Sometimes it’s just safer," said Joanne. She was attacked and raped the first time she went to a shelter to escape the freezing cold. "And they make you leave at seven in the morning no matter what," she continued, shaking her head. "then you have to be back at four in the afternoon if you want a bed. And you have to take all your stuff with you." I look in the mirror at my red eyes and frizzy hair and wonder where on earth I would have walked if I had to be outside in the cold rain thirty minutes ago carrying everything I own. How would it feel to wake up that early with nowhere to go after barely sleeping all night in an arguably dangerous place with a hundred people you don’t know?

"Why do you think you see homeless people sleeping on benches all the time?" a speaker asked me once. "Because I’m tired, that’s why! You’d be tired too if you had to carry all that stuff around every day!" I never thought about that. I drape my beach towel back over the towel rack and glance at the red Mickey Mouse clock I bought in Disney World something like ten years ago. It is already 7:31.

When I try to write about the Speakers' Bureau and describe the voices and stories that have spoken to me this winter and spring, I realize again and again that I am struggling with an issue of translation. When I listen to speakers tell their stories, I "hear" certain elements of the story more clearly than others, no matter how objectively and thoroughly I try to observe. Certain parts of a story and certain off-hand comments resonate more powerfully than others with me because they somehow touch on an element of life that I particularly value. Ochs and Capps explain this phenomenon when they say that "each telling of a narrative situated in time and space engages only facets of a narrator’s or listener’s selfhood in that it evokes only certain memories, concerns, and expectations" (3).

Joanne’s comment about waking early with no place to go, for example, struck a chord with me because I really prefer to stay awake late at night and sleep later in the mornings; during times in my life when I preferred to wake early every day, this comment may not have resonated so deeply with me. I obviously do not believe that having to wake up early is the worst part of homelessness–but it is a part of the experience that I am capable of vividly understanding. Certainly we all do this when we talk to new people, tune in to the radio, watch television and especially when we listen to speeches by educators, religious leaders, elected officials, or political activists. We "hear" the parts of the story that come close to our own experiences. Part of our culture of public speaking and presentation involves an effort to include elements of shared imagery or value that connect listeners to the presenter. I know that members of the Speakers' Bureau do this highly effectively because I see audience members react to small elements of shared imagery every time I attend a program. I also know, however, that those elements, those things that spark recognition and empathy, differ greatly from listener to listener. What strikes me as meaningful may be different from the idea that emotionally impacts the "big jock-looking guy" who cries with Cheryl. When I tried to describe a presentation to my roommate one night, I found myself easily "translating" the program for her without consciously thinking about what I was doing. I say that I did this "easily" because I know her well enough to know what few elements of the long program were likely to speak to her. In writing about the Speakers' Bureau, I attempt the same task of representing it through a few images and ideas that I believe to be powerful; but instead of "translating" a program to a friend I know, I try to translate it for people whose interests, quirks, and daily values are undoubtedly different from mine and from each other’s. I know which select images impacted me, but I do not know what readers will "hear." I write about my experiences and represent the words I hear, then, with the hope that others will understand their arbitrary nature and will think about the "vital details" of their own lives.

"Blender, Coffeepot." Those were the words that made me understand homelessness. I was sitting at my desk in the transitional shelter for homeless families where I worked last summer, entering information into an Excel database. I had typed, printed, copied, cut, distributed, and collected forms asking residents about what gifts they would like for the "Christmas in July" party I was planning. Kids neatly printed the names of action figures and dolls. Marianna had written "blender, coffeepot." I stopped typing and stared at the words she had penciled into the blank line on her form. Then it hit me: she did not have a blender. She did not have a coffeepot. Those are the only two kitchen appliances I have ever owned or needed. I needed to blend a fruit smoothie and brew a cup of rainforest-safe coffee every morning. If I did not have that fruit-vitamin boost and steamy caffeine infusion, how could I get the energy it took to come here every morning and breathe in the harsh disinfectant that hung in the air while I waited under a hidden camera in the front foyer for someone to recognize my face on the screen and buzz me through the heavy security doors? She lives here and she wants a blender and she wants a coffeepot and she absolutely cannot spend the $25 it takes to purchase either one of them? A screensaver engulfed the Excel spreadsheet as I continued to stare at her words. So that is homelessness. I never understood.

I had worked in the shelter for about a month at this point, chatting with women and babysitting their kids when I wasn’t busy. But until I saw these words, I had not encountered the thing that allowed me to glimpse for a moment how one aspect of my daily life would be different if I were homeless. That thing is different for every person, and it is a significant part of what the Speakers' Bureau provides. They put forth these shared images to help people connect to their experience. My brain has trouble fully comprehending what it is like to be sick in the cold and not have health care or even a bed, but I have no trouble relating when two speakers work together (in what could be described as both tragic description and stand-up comedy) to tell the audience about how it feels to wear the same pair of socks every day. One of the goals of the program is to "build bridges" between homeless and housed Americans. Perhaps these bridges are made of socks, coffeepots, and shared imagery. As speakers construct their stories and present them to the audience, they invariably include small elements of their life before, during, and after homelessness that people in the audience will recognize and relate to.

These devices reflect the small talk that forges easy bonds in mainstream society, the kind of talk that George explains as almost impossible for homeless people to take part in. "You know what it is about mainstream society?" he incredulously asks students crowded into a small basement room–lined with ornamental dinner plates commemorating each of the 50 states–on the manicured grounds of the National 4-H headquarters in Chevy Chase. "It changes every six months! Imagine that! Every six months it changes! Sports, politics, movies, cars, they all change. If you’re homeless, you don’t know what they’re talking about! You can’t participate in conversations at work; you can’t be part of it because it is always changing. Homelessness, homeless never changes." His words run through my mind when I see August, a formerly homeless veteran who hopes to soon make a down payment on his own house, pace a three-foot area in the basement conference room of a hotel just a few blocks from DuPont circle and ask his crowd of nearly 100 where they are from. "Los Angeles! Ooooooh! Any Lakers fans in the house?! Ooooooooh!" The students burst into laughter and stadium shouts–like many public speakers warming up their crowd, August has found something that both he and his audience can joke about. A week later, he begins his "warm-up" moment with words that subtly underscore the idea that he is no longer homeless. "Before I get started, I want to ask you something," he says. "Anybody know of a good weed killer? ‘Cause that’s what I’ve been doing all day, trying to kill weeds in my yard."

"It’s called an ice-breaker," Cheryl says. "They just love that. Those college kids, those big groups, they just love it when you get up there and say ‘Where y’all frooommmmm?’ They’re all like ‘ooooooh,’ going crazy and stuff. It’s an icebreaker. I find out from their counselors beforehand, you know, what they’re going through. Like those Jewish kids, I heard they just had some fighting in Israel, shooting, so I wanted them to know I was there with ‘em. I feel their pain too. We all have pain, we all have to feel for each other. It’s not just about me up there telling them about pain, I understand what they’re going through too."

I remember arriving a few minutes early to a presentation before I met Cheryl and hearing her voice reach out to this audience as the early program of this evening’s double-header ended. I could only see her baseball cap and the short black curls around its edges from my vantage point in the hallway where I was wedged between an older man in a prayer cap, two film students, and a camp counselor as Cheryl emphatically told Jewish students that she feels the pain of their people, that she prays for them and thanks them for feeling her pain because we are all human together. With younger audiences, she talks about things like grocery carts. Little kids, she says, want to know what homeless people push around in those carts. "I was real surprised," she says with a smile. "Some of those little dudes, they were hearing me. You’d be surprised but, you know, they understood."

When Earnest speaks to the Jewish students later that evening, he jokes about his years stationed in Egypt with the military. "Of all the countries I lived in, that was my favorite," he says. "It’s just beautiful over there. And I’ve got to say, yo, Israel may be small but y’all can kick some butt!" Earnest grins at the students and starts laughing along with them. The fact that he makes an effort to speak specifically to the identity of this group and attempt to connect with them seems to mean something; the students perk up and listen closely to what he has to say next, even though it is after 11:00 pm and they have been attending lectures about American democracy since early in the morning. Earnest tells the group about the moment when he knew he had to get out of homelessness. "I was thirsty," he says, "and I couldn’t get a drink of water. I mean, water! Water is everywhere and I couldn’t even get a drink of water. I knew that, man, I really had to get out of this." As he speaks, my fingers twist the cap of the Aquafina bottle I carry around in hopes of actually consuming my recommended 6-8 glasses of water each day. Certainly I’ve refilled it 3 or 4 times today with water from my kitchen sink and water fountains outside my classrooms and office. I remember how bad I felt yesterday when I forgot my water bottle at home and had to sit through my afternoon classes absently wondering how long you have to be thirsty before dehydration sets in. I empathize with this shared imagery before I can even think about it. Luke glances over and smiles proudly. "Wow, I thought Earnest was great, don’t you think?" he asks proudly, genuinely impressed. This is Earnest’s first speaking gig.

Jonathan pulls on a denim jacket as he takes a few steps from his panel seat to the impromptu center stage area in the middle of the room’s front. The baggy wrinkle-free jacket matches his stovepipe jeans exactly; black and white threads are woven together to create the dizzying almost shiny shade of charcoal that Versace designers call "dirty denim." Before the program started, I did not know if he was a speaker or a high school student in the audience. Before we go home tonight, we will all sing in honor of his 18^th birthday tomorrow. Jonathan lowers his head, then looks up with wide-open brown eyes. "You’ll have to excuse me," he grins. "I’m a Pisces so I’m kind of shy."

"He’s cute!" the curly-haired high school student beside me whispers to her friend. I smile without realizing it and immediately think of my friend’s obsession with analyzing a date’s behavior based on his zodiac sign. How can we not connect? George tried to explain to me once how difficult these small details of connection can be for homeless speakers to recognize and use. "When you’re homeless," he says, "you’re in survival mode. You don’t think about all these things! I mean, what’s the difference between Coco Puffs and Count Chocula anyway? Imagine that, they have two! And when you’re homeless, it doesn’t matter." I lean forward at the same moment as the girl beside me with curly hair does. We’re ready to hear a story.

"I once was just like you, I had a dream I couldn’t make come true. Just a bank account away from America. . ." the words on the slide show soundtrack drift through my head as a middle-aged man in a blue dress shirt and khakis steps through the audience members sitting cross-legged on the floor and reaches into shell-shaped lamps to screw the light bulbs back into their socket and gradually fill he room with light. Someone has cleared the tables and chairs out of this restaurant to make room for a bigger audience, but still nobody can tell Luke or the speakers how to turn off those shell-shaped lamps without unscrewing the bulbs. My eyes rest on a thin girl with her knees pulled to her chest a few rows in front of me wearing only a black tank top. She had taken off her pullover before the slide show, complaining loudly about the stuffy heat of this over-crowded room. Now, visibly chilled, she pulls on her overshirt and shivers. My arms prickle with chill bumps, too, though the room’s temperature has not changed.

Though an absolute hush falls over the room without fail every time the slide show ends, the series of black-and-white images actually catalyzes discussion. Form meets function in that the universality of the images that flash before audience members’ eyes seem to spark recognition. "I’ve seen that show, oh, about 87 times now," Luke tells the audience. "And every time I see something new that really strikes me. Tonight it was that woman leaning against the phone booth with all of her stuff piled up there. She just has this look on her face and I really wonder what someone could have said to her to make her look like that. Were there any images that really stood out to you guys?"

Hands shoot into the air, but a voice from the middle of the room calls out before Luke or August can call on anyone. "All the kids! They look so, so happy but you see their mom there and you know that things are so bad for them and they didn’t do anything wrong!"

"Yeah, yeah, that’s true," Luke says. "When you look at those kids, sometimes you see a look of sadness in one eye and in the other eye you see a look of hope."

"He looks just like my brother!" someone calls out. "I mean, just like him! And that other kid, that’s what I looked like when I was little!"

"Man, I was really surprised when that one said there are more animal shelters than homeless shelters in this country. I mean, animals and nice and all, but that’s messed up."

A voice from the front of the room sounds angry. "That guy who was a veteran and he was sleeping there with all these bags right against the ‘do not enter’ sign and you can see the Capitol building in the background. I mean, this is America and he served our country and we’re supposed to take care of people like that!"

"Yeah, that picture," Luke nods. "And you know, 40% of homeless men are veterans." We could go on like this forever–time constraints always cut this conversation short. The words from the soundtrack continue to run through my head. "I don’t live across the water, I live right here on the corner. . ." I once jumped during a slide show (after I had seen it at least five times) because I thought I saw my older cousin in a photo. Was that him? I looked closely the next time I saw the program. Maybe not. The point, perhaps, is that it could be.

"It seems so pointless just sitting here talking about this all the time!" a frustrated college student comments one afternoon when Joanne sits down and the discussion turns to causes of homelessness. "I mean, we learn about all these things and talk about it, but what difference is that making?"

Luke responds quickly with more authority in his voice than I have ever heard him use. "Being here and talking about this is enough right now," he declares. He talks about some other things individuals can do to combat homelessness, things like volunteering at a soup kitchen. Then he adds the caveat. "You have to be careful," he says, "not to stay on one side of the counter giving the food."

"I guess we all start on the other side of the counter," he tells me later. "At first you can’t avoid it. It takes a number of times. It’s very important for people to come back again and talk to the people involved. Then it’s obvious. It’s not about charity, it’s about justice. You start understanding that the experience of homelessness is about a lack of compassion and dignity more than just not having a lunch. ‘Here’s a blanket’–you can start with that, it helps, but. You have to take people for where they are now, but also help them look down the road a little." Listening is valuable, then, but Faces of Homelessness strives to promote interaction rather than the charity of hearing. I remember the assertion that "stories give direction to lives" (Rosenwad and Ochberg, 6). They give direction and meaning to the lives of the speaker and to the lives of those who listen. I have never left any presentation with the impression that the audience or the speakers looked down on each other in any way; in fact, I have always left with a sense that they respect and in some ways admire each other.

"I met a twelve-year-old poet today," David writes after one presentation:

Speakers invariably talk about feelings of isolation, invisibility, and lack of dignity as some of the most difficult parts of homelessness. Giving and receiving acknowledgement with the audience enables listeners to learn and speakers to work against the pain of being ignored by other humans. "I was afraid they would not like me," David says slowly, pronouncing each word precisely. "I was afraid I would freeze up. I was up there speaking and I was thinking ‘please let this be over’ but when I was finished, I got a lot of positive response. Everyone was crying and thanking me and telling me how great I had done." Surprise, awe, and pride mingle in his voice. "And it felt, it felt very nice." David pauses. "I don’t believe I have ever felt like that before."

"When you give something to a homeless person, you gave from your heart," Joanne likes to say. "And what that person does with the money is between him and his God!" The discussion during programs almost invariably includes a conversation about panhandling. "You don’t have to give money if you don’t want to," someone will say, "but just don’t ignore the person! Say hey or something—it’s dehumanizing to have people just look at you like you’re not even there." You choose to give or not to give, the recipient chooses what to do next. Both parties in this interaction make active valid choices, and both parties recognize each other as people.

"The kids who come up to us all cryin’ and stuff, I don’t see that as a one-time connection" Cheryl tells me. "We’ve all got to stand up for each other because we’re all family. They have to have a positive attitude towards it. A positive attitude. They can’t go in here all like ‘ooooh, we’re going to help the poor people.’ They gotta be positive about it."

Speakers tell remarkably different stories in panel discussions, but one narrative choice permeates the construction and presentation of each tale: speakers do not narrate the story of a victim. Rosenwald and Ochberg write that "how individuals recount their histories–what they emphasize and omit, their stance as protagonists or victims, the relationship the story establishes between teller and audience–all shape what individuals can claim of their own lives" (1). A victim has no agency, no decision-making capability or responsibility for her life. These presenters tell stories about choices as well as about circumstances. "People don’t make mistakes," one speaker likes to say. "They just make tough choices in difficult situations." Her emphasis on the word "tough" illustrates the reality that life makes it easy for us to tell stories where we play the victim of unfortunate circumstance; her emphasis on the word "choices" illustrates the reality that we all have the power to tell stories in which we play the part of an active subject who fights against injustice. Clearly speaking both words takes the dynamic of storytelling away from a power hierarchy of confession and acknowledgement and into a dynamic of equal interaction and community connection. We need to hear both words because, after all, there is more to every story than we will ever know.

Works Cited

Blasi, Gary. "And We Are Not Seen: Ideological and Political Barriers to Understanding

Homelessness." American Behavioral Scientist 37.4 (1994): 563+.

Botter, Mary Ellen. "Do Tell." Richmond Times-Dispatch 15 April 2001: J1+.

Capps, Lisa, and Elinor Ochs. "Narrating the Self." Annual Reviews: Anthropology. 25.1

(1996): 1-14.

Foss, Sonja K. Rhetorical Criticism. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1996.

Niles, John D. Homo Narrans: the Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Ochberg, Richard, and George C. Rosenwald. Storied Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1992.

Schechner, Richard. Essays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977.

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