A man of the streets, separated by color

When we met, he was living on the streets of Tidewater cities, getting a day job here or there and depending on area soup kitchens for food and, if he was lucky, shelter.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

We were born on the same day. In the same year. He in eastern North Carolina, just across the Virginia border. I in southside Virginia, 12 miles from that same North Carolina state line.

Our paths crossed 55 years later when we were members of a church community in downtown Newport News. As we shared our stories, it was as if we were from different planets. He was “Black” … I was “white.”

Carl’s family had been day laborers in the tobacco and peanut fields of sandhills North Carolina. “Pickup workers,” he told me with a wry smile. “We lived mostly in an old Ford pickup going wherever field hands were needed.” He had dropped out of school in the third or fourth grade (he couldn’t remember) to make more hands. “The more of us working, the better we ate.”

Because he had little formal education, life was hard as he grew up. Fieldwork gave way to what he called “grunt jobs.” Temporary. Minimum wages. No benefits. An intact family of his own was not in the cards. By the time he was 40, his health was so severely compromised that heavy-labor jobs were no longer possible. “I just couldn’t pull and haul anymore,” he told me.

When we met, he was living on the streets of Tidewater cities, getting a day job here or there and depending on area soup kitchens for food and, if he was lucky, shelter. Sometimes, he had “three hots and a cot” in local jails, arrested for loitering or drinking in public.

My story had been light years different. I had the best opportunities for an uninterrupted education. Though Massive Resistance broke the public schools in nearby Prince Edward County, my home county avoided the worst instincts of Harry Byrd’s political madness.

My parents advanced slowly into the postwar middle class, my father with but a seventh-grade education. With the help of FHA home loans (in the South not easily available to racial minorities), he and my mother became solid citizens in a town with clearly defined borders between the white and black communities. Curbs and gutters in one, ditches in the other. Separate and unequal.

For me, the best health care available. A stay-at-home mother. College at a major Southern university. Then, two post-graduate degrees. My father at age 65 retired from a utility company, with benefits. Carl’s father and mother? He didn’t know where they were or if they were still alive.

The institutional church of my youth was seldom a prophetic voice for justice. Men who were recognized church leaders were founding members of White Citizens’ Councils: Segregation today, tomorrow, forever. Going unnoticed were fire hoses turned on Black teenagers wanting access to a public library in a closely neighboring city.

In May 1964, 10 years after Brown vs. Board of

Education, only one congregation in my tobacco and cotton mill town would welcome the local hospital’s nursing class for their baccalaureate service … because two graduates were African-American.

Now it’s 2020, a year of social unrest as well as social distancing. It’s been nine years since I’ve seen Carl. Is he still on the streets? How is he managing a four-month-long pandemic in the midst of a 400-year-old plague? The distance between us remains vast.

But, thanks be to God, in some communities, the Church that St. Paul describes in his letter to the Galatians is taking, not without risk, some longdelayed action (not just book studies!) to address the wrongs, the deadly effects for everyone of a misguided belief that some people are better, more deserving, than others.

“Faith in Christ Jesus is what makes each of you equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or woman.” (Galatians 3:28, Contemporary English Version.)

Isabel F. Steilberg is a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. She can be reached by email at isabel.steilberg@gmail.com