Hearing Voices

To be an ally to a homeless person is very simple: Approach him with an open mind and listen to his story. Don't listen with the idea that's he's a typical Terry the Tramp - listen to him as a person. And don't go to a bureaucrat for answers, ask a homeless person what he needs, and what he can do with your help. - Doug Castle

Doug Castle, a homeless man in Seattle, gets at the heart of Steven VanderStaay's Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans. VanderStaay, in the tradition of Studs Terkel, Margaret Randall, and others, reminds us that it is the listener as well as the teller who causes the "story" to exist. His active listening and dialogue with a large and diverse cross-section of homeless Americans has allowed him (as listener/interviewer) and the homeless people (as tellers/interviewees) to mutually rewrite history.

A young homeless man in Washington, D.C., Trae Casey, echoes this need for careful listeners: "I've come a long way since I've been here. I've climbed back up. I've pulled myself back up. That's what I'm doing. But it's still hard, man. I need somebody to listen to my problems...Somebody just to take five minutes."

Nearly five years in the writing, this book is the product of VanderStaay listening not just for minutes but for hundreds of hours. And unlike the voiceless "research" on the homeless that masquerades as "objective" analysis (and certainly objectifies the homeless themselves), the voices on these pages empower the homeless to be subjects of their own history. They speak. In so doing they remind us that they have stories worth telling and listening to, that they exist.

Perhaps this seems self-evident. It is not.

Joe, a homeless man from Philadelphia, reflects on this struggle to be heard, to be recognized as a person: "You see, you a human being, but you not treated like one. You go in the train station and the cops chase you out. It's rainin', it's cold, you gotta go someplace. You can't stay in the street. 'Cause the streets are survival, total survival.

"People don't know this. The mayors, the governors, people in power, most of the time they come from middle-class and wealthy families. They can't relate to a person who never had no money."

VanderStaay can. He has taken painstaking care to accurately and compassionately transpose these voices from tape to ink. As writer/editor he is not a filter but a funnel, encouraging the untold stories of a hidden subculture to pour through him, and perhaps into mainstream American readership.

He, however, does anticipate the potential conflict - the hypocrisy of a middle-class white person using a bunch of mostly non-white homeless persons for his professional purposes, to write a book. He does not attempt to deny his own secondary framing voice, but he also plainly states that readers who find his voice (in the preface, afterward, and chapter introductions) distracting should "simply skip to the testimonies."

The voices of the homeless are primary, and VanderStaay's presence in the text enhances rather than distracts from their primacy. The chapter introductions in particular provide necessary contextual information which helps readers understand how homeless voices have and haven't been heard in the wider socioeconomic and political fabric of American society.

AS I LISTENED TO THESE voices - to Lana, Johnson, Trae, "T," Batman, Stacy, Joe Dee, and others - I found myself wondering about the homeless in my own neighborhood...about James, a homeless man about my age who walks by my apartment complex every few mornings. I can sometimes hear his loud voice through open windows: "Damn it. Where was I gonna go? Tell me that, Mr. Policeman, Mr. Know Everything, Mr. I-gotta-warm-car-to-sit-in." And more recent, "She told me she'd come back if I'd fix it. I couldn't though. Who the hell's gonna fix it?"

I wonder where James will go. I wonder who is going to fix "it." I wonder how many stories he will tell to the sidewalks and stop signs as he roams the neighborhood. I wonder if anyone will listen to him, and in so doing hear his stories into existence.

The voices that VanderStaay has so carefully collected and shared provide readers with answers, albeit difficult ones. They remind us that we must hear the voices of James and other homeless people, and that if we listen closely enough we will hear our own story in theirs. When we really listen we will discover "they" and "we" long for and fear many of the same things, that we have much in common.

Nell Morton referred to the idea of "hearing the voiceless into speech," of listening so compassionately and completely that you encourage the voice to speak and therefore the story to exist. VanderStaay and the homeless people who speak here are challenging us to do this and more. They challenge us to consider our response ability--to move from listening to acting, from print to person, from the book to the streets. They encourage us to move beyond fear and peripheral identification and toward solidarity - to hear the homeless, and thus ourselves, into a more meaningful and abundant life.

Tom Montgomery-Fate was assistant professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and taught English in the Philippines with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ when this review appeared.

Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans. By Steven VanderStaay. New Society Publishers, 1992. $39.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).