Phase 2: An Update on Boston’s Unhoused
Out on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where I work with MANNA, a ministry for the unhoused community of downtown Boston, I talk with M— about the changes we see. The trees have exploded into full, leafy bloom. D— and J— are back, chalking the sidewalks around Park Street. A manhole cover is now a giant sunflower; there’s a new labyrinth every week. This week, in lettering like an illuminated manuscript, J— chalks beside the labyrinth, “No Justice, No Peace.” There’s a lot of traffic now, cars and feet. There’s a surge of energy in the street.
But a few weeks ago, when we noticed that there were many people missing, M— pointed out a cluster of recently-installed police surveillance cameras on the corner. “They’re doing a sweep,” he tells me, “a lot of people got picked up.” A lot of people who had been, for months, almost totally neglected. Left to their own devices, with nowhere to be, nowhere to pee, nowhere to eat, now “swept up” and hidden in jails, and understaffed and dangerous emergency shelters in anticipation of “the public” — the resourced public — returning.
At the bottom of the steps I ask S— how it is out there, with all these people returning. He tells me that almost none of them are wearing masks and it makes him mad. “We’ve survived, we’re alive, but for how long with all these people breathing on us?”
Inside, the silence of a few months ago has broken. We’re having the same conversations that many of you are having, or trying to have, on your social media feeds, with your friends and families. During morning meeting D— asks, “What does it mean, defund the police?” He worries that defunding would result in more violence, more brutality and abuse, from angered police officers. After the protests in Boston on May 31st, several of our people came in with injuries from pepper spray and tear gas for refusing to leave their safe spaces and their friends behind.
We hear stories from the black men in our community about their experiences of racism and being targeted by the police. One man remembers the beginnings of desegregation, and describes being accosted by white people on his way into school. Another man demonstrates the way a police officer violently shoved his arm over his head while detaining him for something he didn’t do. Being not only homeless but also black, in America, he says, is horrible.
In response to the murder of George Floyd, one man writes: “George Floyd wasn’t the first or the last wrongly murdered by officials of law enforcement, and this violence that is happening is not coincidental, it is strategical and has been going on since the beginning of our nation’s history. Our ancestors were taken by force to a foreign land on a journey we weren’t meant to survive. Tortured along the way, raped and terrorized. While our oppressors systematically plotted and executed to rob us of our ancestry, language, spirituality, and culture, all in an effort to break us like an animal so they could oppress us and use us to build a nation that they never intended to allow us to be equal in.” Another reflects in his homily, “It’s crazy out there, the police need to stop killing people. There should be no more police in America.”
In a one-on-one conversation, a white member of our community tells me that while he doesn’t disagree with the protests, and is hopeful for change, but he wonders if “people” should “act right” when encountering police. I offer that people who are afraid for their lives may not be able to “act right” in the eyes of someone who already thinks they are guilty or a threat. I suggest that some people, people of color, are not given that option. That because of racism, even just the existence of people of color is seen as a threat, and that this puts them in serious, often life-threatening danger before an “encounter” with police even takes place. He thinks about it. He says, “So the police see what they’re looking for, what they want to see?”
Another white community member, who usually says he’s not interested in “politics,” calls me to say he’s been out at the protests where he lives now, across the country. “That’s not right what they did to that man,” that man, George Floyd. He’s housed now, painting bandanas with mountain landscapes and selling them to people he sees without masks. “This second wave is going to kill 100,000 people,” he tells me, “and that’s sad.”
As people all over the world, still ravaged by Covid, begin to talk about how to do anti-racist work in their communities, we wondered how some of the advice we’d seen about having these conversations would apply to our own community, a community of people of all races and cultures, beliefs, and experiences, who have all had harmful encounters with police, who are all carrying their own deeply complex and diverse traumas. What emerged was a realization that the structure for these talks was already in place, that our core values, co-created with the community, would hold us together in love. Because they have been established over many years, these values belong, truly, to the community. They are simple, but make the long work of making room for empathy possible.
At the core of these values is a long practice of listening, of upholding the dignity of all people, of not talking while others are speaking, of not using language that is harmful to others, of giving space to every voice that wishes to speak. Every week we have two of these open discussions which are held, by the community and staff alike, in alignment with these values and practices. So, as we move together through this pandemic, which makes every one of us vulnerable and fearful for our lives, we at MANNA are fortunate enough to already have the structure in place to share and receive more stories of vulnerability with real listening, with real love.
During Pentecost, we decorated the space with red, yellow, and orange streamers as a reminder of the Holy Spirit descending like a “rushing mighty wind” and appearing, like fire, on the tongues of the people, allowing them to be understood by one another. As the weeks go by, the streamers remain, as the Spirit does, in our conversations, in our speaking and our listening. I think about this when I walk through the room, the love that burns through it, visible and invisible, known and unknown, still yet to come, like a rushing wind, like fire.
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Note: Names have been redacted to protect the privacy of MANNA community members.
Christie Towers is a poet and educator at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she is currently earning her MFA. She is on the pastoral care team for MANNA, a ministry for the unhoused community of downtown Boston at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. She has published poems in various journals, online and in print, most recently in Meridian, LETTERS Journal, and Cathexis Northwest. Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s project, American Life in Poetry. She is currently working on a collection of poems about the visions of Hildegard von Bingen.