Night At The Rescue Mission
Reporter Kuralt Checks In

The sign outside 419 S. Church St. says "Charlotte Rescue Mission, Jesus Saves." I stopped under it to light a cigarette.

I was wearing a battered suede jacket and an Army fatigue hat and carrying a paper sack under my arm. The afternoon sun slated toward me down the one-way street.

A red-faced man with the smell of liquor on his breath came up to me. "Haven't seen you around here before," he said.

"I'm just passing through."

"You'll get beans for supper," he said. "They won't let me in. They told me I'm just a bum, but I'm not drunk any more and I'm gonna try again."

He walked ahead of me to the door. A tall man in a yellow shirt grasped him by the shoulders, turned him back around and pointed him back out. I walked past him and went inside.

I was there to find out what it's like on the other side of the green-painted plate glass windows that face the street. I knew this much about the mission already: that it is supported by United Appeal; that it gives free meals and beds to hundreds of homeless men every year; that it operates, variously, as a relief society, an employment bureau and a church.

From looking over its September report, I had found that the rescue mission had served 7,224 meals last month; that it had given away 176 pieces of clothing, held religious services with a total attendance of 2,543; that it had conducted one funeral and found 29 jobs.

I entered a well-lit room. Six other men sat in chairs arranged on two side of the wall. They were watching a western film on a television set.

In the middle of the floor there was a table covered with magazines: "Life," "Look," Business Week," some religious pamphlets and four Gideon Bibles.

Jutting out from another wall and covering much of the floor space was a big wire cage. At a desk inside it, the man I took to be the manager was sitting. A shelf behind him held candy bars, combs and canned meat for sale.

The man who had let me in motioned me to a chair. "Sit down over there," he said.

I slumped into the chair and looked at the men around me. One had only one leg; he propped up the stump of the other leg in a crutch at his side. One, almost blind, stared motionless at the floor. The other men were all graying and looked tired; they watched the TV program. None glanced at me.

"You want a bed for the night?"

The manager was asking. I nodded to him.

"You'll eat after church," he said. "Church is at 7:30." The clock on the wall said 5:50. I nodded and settled down to wait.

A few more men drifted in. One little man carried a leatherette bag and held himself stiffly erect walked straight to the table, picked up a Bible and began to read. Everybody else watched the television set. Nobody spoke a word.

The mission seemed to operate like a well-run, small hotel. The was the "desk clerk," "lobby," the dining room." There was only difference. The desk clerk was clearly boss here.

A dinner bell rang. Most of the men got up and headed through a door to the rear. I got up, too, but the desk clerk stopped me.

"You eat after church," he repeated. I sat back down and noticed the little man hadn't even looked up from his Bible reading. The others were handed blue tickets, and they went to supper.

[Editor's Note: One paragraph of text was illegible.]

I figured they were being hauled away to be sold. I helped load them into the car's trunk and when I had finished, he said, "Tell that other man in there to give you a supper ticket."

I was being rewarded for working. I could eat supper before church, after all.

I handed my ticket to a man at the door and went back to the dining hall. The others were already halfway through their meals.

"Give this man a regular," [illegible] hollered to the [illegible]. I sat down at the long table with the other men to eat my "regular": tasteless white beans, fried potatoes and one wiener, split open and fried. A big pile of bread was in the center of the table and I got coffee with my meal. The "specials," given to regular boarders, included Pepsi-Colas.

I reached for a quart jar of sugar and shook some into my coffee. The big man next to me watched. He didn't so much as chuckle at the face I made when I tasted the coffee. It wasn't sugar; it was salt.

"That's too bad," he said. "I'd of told you, but I though you knew what you were doing. We don't get sugar except on Sunday. Sometimes, we don't even get it then."

I talked with the men at the table. I was going from Chicago to Miami, I said. I told them I had a job in Miami.

The talk turned to jobs they had held. One said he had been a butcher. One was now working on a construction job.

One, a very old man with a tanned, wrinkled face, said he once had his own business.

"You worked in a beer joint, didn't you?" the big man next to me was asked.

"Yep," he answered.

"All the beer you could drink?"

"All the beer I could drink."

Everybody laughed.

After supper, we watched television some more. The Esso Reporter came on and went off with the cheerful advice: "Happy motoring starts at the Esso sign."

A thin man in a starched white shirt took up the phrase: "Happy motoring," he said to everybody listening. "Happy Motoring!"

The room was crowded now, and some had to stand. Others walked out on to the street, into the darkness, and I went with them. We stood there and talked about jobs some more, and about towns. And money. One man said the most money he had ever found was a dime. One man had found a quarter and another had found several pennies at once.

Most of the men in the little group I talked to were now working. They were looking forward to pay day on their jobs. One man said he was hoping to get an overcoat from the mission, because winter was coming on and he would never be able to buy one.

The "Happy Motoring" man asked me for a cigarette and seemed surprised when I gave him one.

"Don't let on you're generous," he advised me. "These guys will be after you and you won't have a cigarette left."

He said his name was Sam. When I looked for him a little late, he was talking to a late-comer, a well-dressed man in a blue suit with a new felt hat. Nobody else talked to the man. "Either an AA guy or a cop," one of our number suggested. I never found out which.

We all filed into the chapel at 7:30. Like the other rooms in the building, it was clean and freshly painted, and he pews appeared almost new. It was a long narrow room with a pulpit and a piano at one end.

By this time there were 50 men or more, almost all elderly. They filled the aisle seats from the back. The preacher, a guest minister from a Mecklenburg church, walked down the aisle, briskly shaking each man's hand.

And then, the door opened from the street and a group of women walked in. I suddenly realized the Rescue Mission's work is not confined to men. The women were young and middle-aged. One was pregnant. They walked down from the front with a young matron behind them and took their seats.

The service began with a hymn. The congregation surprised me with the loudness of their singing, most of the men disdaining hymnals and fairly lifting the roof off with the strength of their voices.

Then the preacher and his two assistants sang two gospel songs, the audience joined in another hymn with a young woman playing the piano, and the sermon began. The preacher told the story of Jonah and the whale, making the point that Jonah found himself in difficult circumstances because he disobeyed the will of God - and that he was saved from the sea by that same will.

At the height of his sermon, a one-armed man left his seat and walked to the pulpit. He knelt down before the preacher, who invited others to do the same. During the closing hymn, one more did, and afterwards, the two made brief testimonials.

"I am saved," one man said quietly, "and I will sin no more."

We shook the preacher's hand and the hand of the man who was pointed out to me as Supt. J.K. Booker, on the way out.

A handful of transients were handed meal tickets and went into the dining room to eat. I walked through the lobby with Sam and downstairs to a bathroom.

One man, the youngest I had seen, was shaving at a yellow sink. The one toilet had its seat torn off. Clouds of steam came from an adjoining room and I saw the outline of a crutch through the water. The man with one leg was taking a shower.

When I got back to the lobby, the attendant motioned to me.

"You want a bed? he asked.

I said I did. He asked my name and address, my nearest relative's name, my Social Security number. He took down a physical description of me. Then he gave me a slip of paper with a number on it. I walked over to stand in line with a group of others. We went upstairs to a large room full of doubledecker bunks with a cotton mattress on each one.

"There only two things I ask," the man who had led us upstairs said, "that you take off your clothes to sleep and that if you smoke, you do it in the bathroom. There's 70 men staying here and we don't want nobody burning up."

The beds were fairly clean. The little man who had concentrated on the Bible stretched out immediately and went to sleep.

After a while, I walked downstairs. A few stragglers were watching the fights on television.

"Hey you," I was told, "you can't just walk up and down the stairs."

I looked over at Sam, who had suggested that I watch the fights. He looked away.

"Well, I guess I better get going anyway," I told the desk clerk.

"All right then," he said. "I guess you better."

I picked up my paper bag and moved to the door. Nobody watched me as I opened it and walked out.

Church St. was almost deserted. Lights from the Duke Power Building across the street cast long shadows on the pavement.

Charles Kuralt's People (Kenilworth Media, copyright 2002)
ISBN 0-9679096-1-9 | Hard cover | 384 pages with photos | $25.95

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