Knocked Up. Knocked Down by Jeannie Alexander, as Published in The Contributor

The Contributor

The Contributor is Nashville's Homeless Newspaper. Despite editorial differences I have with people at the paper, I admit that every once in a while they run a good article. This is by far the best the paper has published.
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The first time I met a homeless woman who was pregnant I was living in Atlanta working on my Masters in Religious Studies. We’ll call her “Kiki,” she was 17 years old, HIV positive, 4 months pregnant, and living under a bridge on Edgewood Ave. Kiki was always hungry for both love and food in equal amounts. I sent Kiki home to Tennessee on a bus once only to find her again a month later under the same bridge in late Autumn were more tolerable than her life at home.

bar"Where is the clean safe loving place that I can send homeless women to who are expecting? And even more importantly, where is the clean safe home that these women can then take their children to once they are born?”
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I lost track of Kiki when she was seven months pregnant and I never saw her again. I remember sitting with her and holding her hand while she talked about the boys she liked; the men who had raped her twice under the bridge; and wishing she could go to church. I encouraged her to report the rapes, she refused but did go to Grady Memorial Hospital, the hopelessly under funded last refuge of the broken and damned of Atlanta’s streets and alleyways.

As for church I told her that she could go anytime and that I would go with her. Kiki was “brought up right” however, and as a consequence believed that she was too smelly, too dirty, and too full of sin to step foot in a church. None of my well honed theological arguments could change her mind and so we had church under the bridge on more than one occasion. Kiki among countless others whom I have grown to know and love, have taught me that no one understands the Gospel like the poor; the poor who are crucified daily in our streets.

quote“The issue of homelessness at its heart is not an issue of economics, it is a matter of morals. We can choose to be a just and ethical society, but to do so we must choose to enter into community with ‘the other.’”quote


A month ago I met “Lucy.” Lucy came to my office at the Nashville Homeless Power Project because she was hungry and wanted a bus ticket. She wore a reasonably clean polyester suit, but her hands were dirty and her nails broken. She began speaking in a rapid voice with quick smiles and said that the people downstairs in the Arcade had sent her up to us. I asked her what I could do for her and her face crumpled and she began to cry. She said that she was “just so hungry.” Our lease prohibits us from providing “services” to those in need and so I leave the Arcade when my conscience dictates that I act in a manner not in accord with the lease; after all it will not do for the Homeless Power Project to be homeless itself. As a consequence, I buy a heck of a lot of 1/2 pound cheeseburger combos from Cheeseburger Charlie’s. Lucy ate hungrily in a city where supposedly no one has to go hungry. It is true that in Nashville churches feed seven days a week, (speaking of which, it is a fact that the desperately poor in this land of plenty would starve were it not for the 10000’s of churches that feed people) however, accessing that food requires an individual to either walk for miles or obtain public transportation. Walking is the form of transportation utilized most often by the homeless, but often walking any real distance is not an option due to the fact that the feet of the homeless are often in deplorable condition, especially the feet of homeless women. There is also the issue of how well informed, or uninformed as is often the case, the homeless are concerning the services available in Nashville. Finally in the quest for food is the very real issue of physical and mental illness which often prevents an individual from traveling across the city; people are often too ill to move any real distance, or too incoherent to seek sustenance.


As Lucy ate we talked and it became clear very quickly that she suffered from mental illness. She told me about people who had been following her and about being raped multiple times. She claimed that a man had purchased food for her earlier but that it had been inedible because he had put semen in the food. Lucy also claimed to be pregnant, a condition that was not readily observable to my eyes, and seeking an abortion. I do not know how much of what she told me was true, but the events she related seemed true enough to her. I asked Lucy if she would consider an alternative to abortion if I could find care for her and her baby. She agreed to consider alternatives and said she had to go but that she would come back to see me. I have not seen Lucy since that day.


As a person who embraces a consistent pro-life ethic, the seamless garment from womb to tomb, I nonetheless find it difficult to council a woman not to abort a child when she is living on the streets. For too many religious folk pro-life actually means pro-fetus and the burden of caring for the child rests squarely on the already burdened shoulders of the mother once the child is born. Where is the clean safe loving place that I can send homeless women to who are expecting? And even more importantly, where is the clean safe home that these women can then take their children to once they are born? In the past two months I have come into contact with a handful of mothers whose children are sleeping with them on the street, or have slept with them out-of-doors recently. I search frantically for someplace safe for these women to go, and too often I come up empty handed. If you know of someplace please let me know and I will send you women in need by the dozens.


Yes it is true that there is the Women’s Mission that takes in homeless women and women with children, but the Mission can hardly accommodate the thousands of women and children in need in the Davidson County area. Moreover, during the past two months I have interviewed over 30 women who are currently staying, or have recently stayed at the Women’s Mission, and all but two gave a consistent and troubling picture of the Mission. The laundry list of complaints were as follows: unsanitary conditions, constantly changing rules, forced attendance at a religious service where the women have been called whores and drug addicts, inadequate food for the children, a prohibition on the sharing of child care so that women can take turns looking for a job, a failure to provide in house child care so that the women can look for a job, poor quality of food, refusal to allow women to pick out their own clothes, forcing women who are mentally ill to sleep in the chapel and also forcing women to sleep in the chapel as punishment, the list goes on and on. And this is why I ask where is the clean safe loving place that I can send women in need?

Finally I’ll tell you about Tanya. Tanya was beautiful, funny, black, proud, an addict, and dying from AIDS while trying to survive for one day longer out on the streets. My home church in Atlanta, Mercy Community Church, where I served/serve as co-pastor struggled to get Tanya into stable permanent housing, or into a long term care facility, we failed at both.

Every time Tanya was admitted to a medical facility they pumped her full of drugs, rehydrated her, and turned her back out into the streets. The residential care facilities that she was admitted to all had staffing and funding problems. The care was marginal and the atmosphere extremely depressing, but apparently it was the best our system had to offer Tanya. As I said, Tanya was proud (and did I mention stubborn?) and she soon left the care facility. Tanya would wedge herself between two fences during the day to sleep. One fence was a privacy fence surrounding The Open Door Community, a Catholic Worker house that fed, clothed, and cared for Tanya on many occasions, and the other fence surrounded a tennis court at an upscale overpriced trendy apartment building. Occupying a space between two worlds; one offering a promise of God’s Kingdom yet unfulfilled, and the other completely rejecting her, she existed in a state of limbo. Apparently it put the tennis players off their game to see a dying woman lying against the fence and so they made calls to have her removed. The hospital came one last time to take Tanya away and the decision was made to admit her to hospice care.


I was stunned when I went to the hospice care facility to visit Tanya. The facility was beautiful, safe, welcoming, and staffed by compassionate competent people. In death Tanya was able to obtain what she could not in life, a safe place to live. She survived for a couple of weeks longer. I sat with another woman, a friend and Catholic Worker, at Tanya’s bedside the day she died. We read to her from the Bible, prayed, and played Miles Davis for her. But Tanya was no longer responsive. My hand rested on top of the bed’s comforter and I could feel her bony leg through the blanket. I held her leg and Heather held her arm as her body struggled with seizures to let loose the battered life within it. My co-pastor, Chad Hyatt, along with a couple of members of Mercy took our place at Tanya’s bedside and I left to teach the Wednesday night bible study and serve the Wednesday night meal. Chad called during the meal to tell us Tanya had passed. One of our parishioners who had been with Chad when Tanya died was Tanya’s friend “Lisa.” Lisa was tough as nails, homeless and ravaged by the same unforgiving disease as Tanya. Upon entering the Wednesday night space she collapsed to the ground shrieking and waling in terror. I will never forget her high pitched tortured screams of “that’s me, that’s going to be me!” I wanted to comfort her, to say “no honey that’s not going to be you,” but that would be a lie, and not even a helpful comforting lie. We held each other and wept.


There are women like Tanya, “Lucy,” “Kiki,” and “Lisa” in every city. In Nashville there are over 2200 woman, many with children, who are in desperate need, who are dying on the streets every week, every day. But it does not have to be like this, the world does not have to look like this. The issue of homelessness at its heart is not an issue of economics, it is a matter of morals. We can choose to be a just and ethical society, but to do so we must choose to enter into community with “the other.” We must see people as individual human beings with inherent dignity and moral worth, not problems to be “fixed.” We are all creations of the same Creator. None of us are children of a lesser god, and if we dare to simply close the gaps between us a new world will not only be possible, it will exist.


Tanya’s family would not claim her body. I don’t know if her children were even told that she died. We, her community in Christ, fought a mindless bureaucracy in trying to claim Tanya’s body. The Presbyterian Church that gives our little church space offered to let us use their main sanctuary for her funeral. But there was to be no proper funeral, one last insult heaped upon the injured broken body of a woman failed by a system that crucifies the poor. So after fighting for our sister’s body for weeks we were given a time and location to follow the hearse to an undisclosed burial plot where paupers are buried in unnamed graves by county employees who dig sewage ditches and sanitation lines when they are not burying the poor.