Loading...After hiding in shame from her family history for years, Jeannette Walls now tells the truth about her homeless past. The best-selling author of “The Glass House,” was the Volunteer Ministry Center’s speaker at the organization’s May 8 "Carry the Torch" event. More than 1,000 people attended the event at the Knoxville Convention Center.
The VMC is a non-profit, interfaith agency whose mission is to facilitate permanent supportive housing for those who are homeless and to provide services to prevent homelessness.
“We hear so many statistics and numbers about the people on the streets, and the children of homeless. But by putting a human being up there who's been through it themselves, I think it adds a different dimension,” Walls said.
“I’ve come to learn that the hardships are the greatest blessing of my childhood,” she said, recalling memories of homelessness and parental neglect – some might even say abuse. The family existed as nomads, living in cars, sleeping in cardboard boxes or on the beach; her father telling the family all he had to do was “find gold” and everything would be ok. Eventually, they landed in a poor mining town in West Virginia, living in a house with no running water and no heat in the winter. Walls scrounged in the school trash for food. Her alcoholic father disappeared frequently, and her artistic mother relied on a “loopy optimism” as a coping mechanism. In West Virginia, Walls worked on a school newspaper, and eventually escaped her environment to become a professional journalist living in New York City.
She lived in fear that her secret would some day come to light, and one day she saw her homeless mother on the street from the window of a taxi cab. A couple days later she confronted her mother, asking what should she tell people about her? Her mother told her to “tell the truth.”
At the time, Walls said she had everything she had ever wanted, living in luxury in New York City, but she felt like a fraud. It wasn’t the life she wanted. She rose to her mother’s challenge. “Everything in life is both a blessing and a curse,” Walls said. “You need to shine the light and find the things you don’t like – those are your diamonds,” she said.
Walls shared a favorite memory. When she turned four years old, her father took her out to the desert in the evening, telling her she could choose a favorite star as her birthday present. She chose the brightest start she could see. Her father told her that wasn’t a star, it was a planet (Venus), but if she wanted a planet she could have it.
Walls told this story at her father’s funeral. Her sister said, “Isn’t that just like him, giving away something that didn’t belong to him.”
“The truth is a liquid, not a solid; it takes many shapes,” Walls said.
“When we confront our own stories, we can open our hearts to other’s stories. We shape ourselves by the stories we tell.” She said the hazard is defining ourselves by our hardships. “We might not have had food or heat, but we had dreams.”
Walls said there is no one ”type” of homeless person. Her parents were people who put independence and self-sufficiency ahead of asking for help, “but give them an opportunity to help and they’d be right there.” She described her father as brilliant, and her mother, who lives with Walls now, doesn’t admit she was homeless. “I see things differently than my mother does,” she said.
Walls said there is no shame in falling, and no shame in getting battered or scarred by the fall. “Don’t apologize for your scars,” she said. Walls said her father used to say “You’ve got texture.” She said she thinks we all have what it takes to get back up, but if we’re lucky, we have the opportunity to help someone else up.
VMC’s Chief Executive Officer Ginny Weatherstone told a success story of a homeless man who had recently moved into permanent supportive housing at Minvilla Manor, and who had drawn up a will, leaving his estate to VMC. “It isn’t much now,” he told Weatherstone, “but maybe by the time I die it will add up,” he said.
“The Volunteer Ministry Center is a grassroots effort of this community,” Chairman of the Board Don Sproles said. “Our programs work; 139 individual families were assisted into homes in 2011. We have a 92.4% retention rate of people still in housing.”
Knoxville churches St. James, St. John’s Cathedral, Good Samaritan, and St. Elizabeth sponsored tables for the event, along with the Diocese of East Tennessee. Several other churches and parishioners, including Church of the Ascension, also supported the event. Don Sproles, chairman of the board of the VMC, is a parishioner of Good Samaritan, Knoxville, and diocesan treasurer; the Rev. Peter Keese, rector of Christ Church, Rugby is a VMC board member and co-chair of this year’s event. The honorary chair of the event was Mayor Madeline Rogero; music was provided by the Suzuki Hart-Strings.
For more about the Volunteer Ministry Center, go to: //vmcinc.org/
