4
I arrived at the Detroit women's homeless shelter “after-hours,” but they still accepted me. The main lobby had a large, round check-in desk, with some chairs nearby. The inner door leading to the rest of the building was locked. A security guard stood nearby, keeping an eye on me for the initial check-in process, and then after I sat down to fill out some paperwork, he chatted casually with the lady at the desk.
As I sat in the lobby that first night, waiting for a bed, I couldn't help but overhear a conversation from two black women who sat in the chairs across from me. One was trying to comfort the other, who was speaking about how some of her high school daughter's classmates made fun of the way her daughter spoke. Was it a foreign accent? Nope. The “crime” was that her daughter didn't speak with a “black accent.” Instead, her daughter “spoke white,” as the mother explained, and her daughter's black peers hated her for this, as if it was a sign that she was better than them. They even went so far as to make fun of her for making plans to go to college, as if she should purposelyfully keep herself down and not pursue an education, because it “wouldn't be black” or something. For me, growing up in a somewhat-rural, white neighborhood with a high school that only had about 5-6 black students out of a few hundred, this was a shocking conversation—I had no idea this kind of ridicule happened.
Despite the ridicule, the mother was proud that her daughter was currently enrolled in college-level courses. The accent (or lack of accent?), however, wasn't the reason for being homeless. The mother was going through a relationship break-up and didn't have anywhere else to go. Although her daughter had to stay at a different shelter since this one was 18+ only, and therefore the mother was in the process of arranging a situation where they could both live together in a different shelter.
I didn't say much; I mainly just sat and listened, nodding my head and trying to also be sympathetic and comforting. Both women were nice towards me. Just this one conversation alone was mind-opening. I'd never known a homeless person, and suddenly not only was I talking to two, but now I was one of them, as well.
The other young woman had an arm gently around the mother, to comfort her. She spoke gently and softly to the mother and had happy cheeks like a cherub angel. She introduced herself as Deshaunra and she would later tell me that she was half black and half Native American. Later, I joined the others in calling her Dee, for short, and she didn't seem to mind the nickname at all. She was the type who was somehow often smiling, despite circumstances.
The shelter crew set me up with a thin mattress in the basement for that first night. Lights were mostly turned off, but I could make out a large, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, as well as a few small windows placed higher up on the walls towards the ceiling.
Other mattresses of various depths and sizes were sprawled out on the floor, sticking out from the walls like fingers, with a narrow walkway through which we could navigate. Most residents slept with their heads towards the wall, but some had their heads towards the walkway, and I had to be careful to not step on hair or hands that had fallen outside of the confines of their cushiony rectangles.
It was pretty packed, down there in the basement. Someone was even sleeping on the sofa in front of the TV. I was led to an empty mattress—quite possibly the last one left. I was not given a pillow, so I used my arm, curling up on my side.
Even though it was a foreign place, I was so exhausted by the events of the past few days that I slept quite well—and no mosquitoes!
That first night, it seemed like a miracle that shelters existed, and it was a wonder I hadn't heard more positive things about shelters, before. Society's “safety net” worked!