52 Books: Book 13

When traveling home from Arkansas, I read Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Even if I hadn't been in a car for so long, I think I would have read this book in one setting.

It is a memoir of Denver, a modern-day plantation slave from Louisiana, and Ron, an international art dealer from Texas. The paths of these two men eventually cross at a homeless shelter in Texas where they form an unlikely friendship at the nudging of Ron's wife, Debbie. Coming from vastly different worlds, these two men find a connection through a shared faith in God.

Excerpts from the book:

Sometimes it's drinkin or druggin that lands a man on the streets. And if he ain't drinkin or druggin already, most fellas like me start in once we get there. It ain't to have fun. It's to have less misery. To try and forget that no matter how many "partners in crime" we might hook up with on the street, we is still alone.

I didn't scare everybody, though. I slept on the doorway of that United Way over on Commerce Street for a whole lotta years. And every mornin for all that time, a lady who worked there brought me a sandwich. I never knowed her name and she never knowed mine. I wish I could thank her. Funny, though. That United Way buildin was right next to a church, and for all them years, nobody at that church ever looked my way.

With the museums, the restaurants, and the malls, I was showing Denver a different way to live, a side of life in which people took time to appreciate fine things, where they talked about ideas... But he remained unconvinced that his way of life was no worse than mine, only different, pointing out in the process certain inconsistencies: Why, he wondered, did rich people call it sushi while poor people called it bait?

"Ever man should have the courage to stand up and face the enemy... 'cause ever person that looks like a enemy on the outside ain't necessarily on the inside."

I used to spend a lotta time worryin that I was different from other people, even from other homeless folks. Then, after I met Miss Debbie and Mr. Ron, I worried that I was so different from them that we wadn't ever gon' have no kind of future. But I found out everybody's different - the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walkin dow the road God done set in front of us.