Clement’s Poor People Bus

Posted by Mary Mancini on September 13, 2007 under Uncategorized |

Tireless local activist, role model, and nicest person in the world, Pam Kidd, emailed me today with her Nashville mayoral run-off election day experience. She called it a “post-card from the other side.” I call it an antidote to election season myopia.

The conversation, heard early on election day, went something like this:

“Thank goodness it’s raining.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you know? … the rain will keep Clement’s old people and poor people from getting out to vote.”
“Oh, please, the rain’s not gonna’ help,” the second lady replied to the first, “Clement probably already has his poor-people bus out there in the projects, hauling ‘those’ people to the polls.”

Well, the second lady was right. I know, because I was there that very morning helping load Clement’s so-called “poor people bus.”

Earlier my son had called…”Why are you doing this again, Mom, going out into those neighborhoods. It’s dangerous…”

“Don’t be silly, Brock,” is my only reply.

I want to say more to my son, but really, there’s no way to explain what waits for me or why I go:

What sort of words can recount the crinkled face of the old, old man who cracks open the door to see whose there…as an appealing food smell wafts out from his kitchen. He’s delighted to hear he’s got a ride to the polls but…”can we please wait for him to finish frying his potatoes?”

An artist could never paint the joy that spreads across the face of a black woman, as she struggles out the door with her walker, recounting the time Bob Clement helped her family secure an apartment. In her experience, this is the only thing an “important person” has ever done for her. In that fleeting moment, as I help her board “Clement’s poor people bus,” I have become a tiny extension of that life changing event. For a millisecond, I am her hero.

Could a poet relate the poignancy of a beautiful, clear-faced man in his sixties who sits on his tiny porch and tells me how much he’d love to vote…”but when I was a kid…I messed up with the law…and they took my right to vote away forever?”

Not even in the movies, could someone invent a script showing an unremarkable person like me…knocking on a door, meeting a young mother whose baby has died the day before, wrapping my arms around that weeping woman…delivering something I have yet to understand.

Is there a great novelist who could record the sweep of hope and hopelessness, beauty and ugliness, pain and joy…that I inhale as I move through this Nashville neighborhood, gathering bits and pieces of it’s epic story.

And selfishly, Is there a deeper joy that that of seeing my daughter Keri, hold the hand of her own four year old daughter, Abby, as they knock on doors and talk and laugh with “those” people, as they hand out stickers and invite them to vote?

…Or of sharing the day with people like Reverend Ray Bowman who after hearing a man make an anti-immigration statement, says, “You see, Pam, our work will never be done until there’s not one single bigot like that man, left in the state of Tennessee?”

…Or of watching my friend Beckie, knock on that first door and seeing the true humanity of the person who answers, reflected on her face.

Chances are good that I’ll meet one of those ladies (quoted in the first paragraph) at some social event or community gathering. In the grand scheme of things, I’m at least marginally “a person of privilege” and I’m sure our paths will cross. By first impression, they’ll never guess that I step over the line from time to time (though not nearly often enough) to that place where Clement’s poor people live. Unfortunately, those same ladies will never know that their conversation (as it was related to me) has illuminated a truth that I’ve never been able to name until now:

Why do those faces on the “poor people bus” keep calling me back to that place that feels like, for lack of a better word….home?

Ahh, the truth so simple, it takes my breath…”Whatever you do for the least of these … you do for Me.”

My son’s phone call floats through my mind,”Why are you doing this Mom?”

My answer becomes a question for us all:

“Is there a more important spot in all of Nashville, than a seat on the “poor people’s bus?”

Pam Kidd as “unremarkable?” I don’t think so.