A Knight Of The Word

The Wiz shook his head immediately. “You know better than to ask me about that, Andrew. I never talk about myself except in the context of my work. My personal life isn’t relevant to anything.”


Wren laughed. “Of course it is. You can’t sit there and tell me how you grew up doesn’t have anything to do with how you came to be who you one. Everything connects in life, Simon. You just said so yourself Homelessness is tied to domestic violence, teen pregnancy, and so forth. Same with the events of your life. They’re all tied together. You can’t pretend your childhood is separate from the rest of your life. So tell me something. Come on. You’ve disappointed me so fair, but here’s a chance to redeem yourself.”

Simon Lawrence seemed to think about it a moment, staring across the table at the journalist. There was a dark, troubled look in his eyes as he shook his head. “I’ve got a friend,” he said slowly, reflecting on his choice of words. “He’s the CEO of a big company, an important company, that does some good work with the disadvantaged. He travels the same fund-raising circuits I do, talks to some of the same people. They ask him constantly to tell them about his background. They want to know all about him, want to take something personal away with them, same piece of who he is. He won’t give it to them. All they can have, he tells me, is the part that deals directly with his work-with the present, the here and now, the cause to which he is committed. I asked him about it once. I didn’t expect him to tell me anything more than he told anyone else, but he surprised me. He told me everything.”

The Wiz reached for his empty glass, studied it a moment, and set it down. A server drifted over” but he waved her away. He grew up in a very poor neighbourhood in St. Louis. He had a brother and a sister, both younger. His parents were poor and not well educated, but they had a home. His father had a day job at a factory, and his mother was a housewife. They had food on the table and clothes an their backs and a sense of belonging somewhere.

“Then, when he was maybe seven or eight, the economy went south. His father lost his job and couldn’t get rehired. They scraped by as long as they could, then sold their home and moved to Chicago to find work there. Within months, everything fell apart. There was no work to be found. They used up their savings. The father began to drink and would sometimes disappear for days. They drifted from place to place, often living in shelters. They started taking welfare, scraping by on that and the little hit of income the father earned from doing odd jobs. They got some help now and then from the churches.

“One day, the father disappeared and didn’t come back. The mother and children never knew what happened to him — The police searched for him, but he never turned up. The younger brother died in a fall shortly afterward. My friend and his little sister stayed with their mother in a state-subsidised housing project. These wasn’t enough food. They ate leftovers scavenged from garbage cans. They slept on old mattresses on the floor. There were gangs and drugs and guns in the projects. People died every day in the rooms and hallways and sidewalks around them.”

He paused. “The mother began to go out into the streets at night. My friend and his sister knew what she did, even though she never told them. Finally, one night, she didn’t come home. Like the father. After a time, the state came looking for the children to put them in foster homes. My friend and has sister didn’t want that. They preferred to stay on the streets, thinking they could stay together that way.”

“So that was how they lived, homeless and alone. My friend won’t talk about the specifics except to say it was so terrible that he still cries when he remembers it. He lost his sister out there. She drifted away with same other homeless kids, and he never saw her again. When he was old enough to get work, he did so. Eventually, he got himself off the streets and into the schools. He got himself a life. But it took him a lot of hard years.”

Simon Lawrence shrugged. “He had never told this to anyone. He told it to me to make a point. What difference did any of this make, he asked me, to what he did now? If he told this story to the people from whom he sought money--or if He told the press, what difference would it make? Would they give him more money because he’d had a hard life? Would they give him more money because they felt sorry for him? Maybe so. But he didn’t want that. That was the wrong reason for them to want to help. It was the cause he represented that mattered. He wanted them to help because of that, not because of who he was and where he came from. He did not want to come between the donors and the cause. Because if that happened, then he risked the possibility he would become more important than the cause he represented. And that, Andrew, would be a sin.”

He stood up abruptly, distracted anew. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to run. You’re staying over for the dedication tomorrow night, aren’t you?”