THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 TAG: 9611120029
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 325 lines
SHE IS AN old woman, part Cherokee, and she talks to plants.
Rather, plants talk to her, and it is only polite to answer.
Courtesy is not often found on Suffolk's Morgan Street, but weedy lots, drug dealers and collapsing buildings are. Georgie Calloway has lived there for five years, since her husband died on Cedar Street, just one block over but so far removed from the etiquette of the slum. Georgie says it's the attitude that makes the difference.
``Honey, it's rough,'' she says.
Georgie lives in an upstairs apartment, a cold-water flat if there ever was one, where every stranger might be the man come to turn off the gas, or the water, or the electricity, or the telephone.
Georgie can see the back of her old house on Cedar Street when she goes through her screen door. Fewer staples on the wire mesh and she won't even have to open the door frame to go out. It's a tough old door.
The plants that survive on Morgan Street are also rough-and-tumble - dandelions and plantein - nothing like the graceful roses and snowball bush that still grow on Cedar Street. Sometimes Georgie walks that way and, sometimes, the plants from her past speak:
``Take me home with you. Take me home with you.''
Georgie broke a stem off one that cried out those words in the spring and kept it in a vase until it, like the good life on Cedar Street, had withered away.
Her own yard grows nothing but weeds and brick piles where snakes hide. Ragweed grows by her front walk, but Georgie has a bouquet of carnations on her kitchen table. Unmown weeds in the vacant lot next door hide the remnants of a house.
Georgie knows all about remnants of the past. They have shaped her like water carves a canyon - invisible but invincible.
The past lives all around and in her, but Georgie lives for the future. Sometimes it's only a few minutes away: does anyone have a cigarette to share? But overhanging it all, like the branches of her favorite willows, is a vision of a green park for the kids on Morgan Street, such a park as Suffolk has never seen. It is Georgie's only reason for living.
Georgie has 50 kids in the general vicinity of Morgan Street, 52 if you count her birth children. But her son is dead and her daughter, she says, doesn't speak to her much. So 50.
``The children on the street took my heart because they are wasted and no one seems to care,'' she says. ``It's hard. For children, you know. Really, really hard.''
Her neighbors are pretty sure there are other reasons that God put Georgie on Morgan Street, and they come often to take advantage of them: a telephone, a washing machine, a freezer full of food, clothes and dishes and towels to be given away.
The people who pass through Georgie's door must do so carefully. It's 12 steps up with no landing, just another step through the worn white door with the deadbolt. If you stop to knock, you teeter back on your heels just a little bit. Most people knock and go right on in without pause and without teetering. Those people are sometimes adults. More often, it's the children, come to see Grandma Calloway.
Grandma always has something to eat, to read or to draw with. Grandma always has a hug, even for the bad kids, even when their parents don't.
Like a good grandma, Georgie can do anything. Grandma can hem pants and make curtains out of throwaways and quilts out of shoulder pads that fancy ladies have discarded. Grandma can fix a broken record player, but the sewing machine has her flummoxed. Some of these things Grandma earns by cleaning middle-class garages in exchange for the unwanted trash. It's not trash to her. She can spruce it up, or shorten it, or paint it - if the garage had any leftover paint. Like as not, she'll give it away after it's fixed.
Extras used to go to the Samaritan House homeless shelter or the Salvation Army. But not now. Now, Georgie is saving everything she doesn't use herself for a yard sale. Georgie needs $80 million. For her kids. And she doesn't have much time. She's 65, and if there's a part of her body that isn't giving her problems, it's probably her heart.
George wants a park for her kids, a park that will get them off Morgan Street. A park with trees and a playground and a basketball court and artificial animals of Virginia and a pond with ducks and geese and swans.
The birds around Morgan Street are all starlings or pigeons, scruffy and streetwise. But Georgie keeps looking for eagles, for the Good Book has told her that God's servants will mount up with such wings. She hasn't seen any yet.
The book has been consulted many times. The covers have been taped at least twice, once with Scotch tape, once with brown packing tape. Both have been overcome. The red edges of the pages have faded to pale pink and cream through handling.
Isaiah 40:31. Believe it. Believe it even if your life up to now has been more like reading Dante.
You have to believe because, honey, it's rough on Morgan Street.
Former Mayor Andy Damiani calls Morgan Street a war zone. Those are the same words Georgie uses when she talks about it. And she loves to talk. She has talked to me for nine months now.
This is how it works. I sit in the middle chair at the small table in the kitchen and Georgie sits in the corner seat. The third chair is under the wall-mounted telephone and it is left open for neighbors. The phone never stops ringing, and it's usually for one of them. Georgie doesn't know any strangers.
She drinks coffee in the kitchen, never in the front room. She calls it the front room, like it's one of those fine old homes with doily-filled parlors where only company sits. Georgie's bed is in the front room. So are piles of used clothing and the only heating unit in the whole apartment. It's a gas stove with a big aluminum vent running up the wall and out a hole. Its heat doesn't get back into the bathroom, so Georgie stuffs rags under the door in the wintertime and tries to hurry.
While we talk, Georgie pets a cat, any cat. She has 20 of them now, although she was down to five last winter. Sometimes a cat walks across the table and all my tape recorder picks up is the whiskery ``huff huff'' of its sniffing nose. I've missed something then, for Georgie certainly hasn't stopped talking. The only time I see her inhale is when a cigarette is in her mouth. That's not too often, for cigarettes are costly. Sometimes her friend, Jackie, comes by with a smoke and they share it.
Georgie's mother was Native American. She died when Georgie was young, and all the child had left was the knowledge that hers was the spirit of the pine tree, and that she could hear the plants speak. But the only thing tobacco plants could tell the 8-year-old picker was that she was earning 25 cents an hour.
Georgie and her sister moved in with their grandmother. They carried water to the house in buckets, and wore clothing made of feed sacks, washed and washed until the lettering was almost, but not quite, faded out.
Georgie keeps her nicest clothes for church, which is usually the Salvation Army chapel. At home, she wears dungarees. She's trying to teach the kids how to mend and alter second-hand clothes.
``People brings clothes to me they want to make sure someone gets them. I'll take anything. Shoes, anything you've got, you can bring it here and I'll see that it's in good condition and it gets to those who need it.''
Georgie coughed then, a deep chesty cough that has plagued her much of the year. A police siren wailed, not too far away. The police know Morgan Street. Sometimes the cruisers park there, two at a time, at the end. I have seen them there, on my way to visit Georgie, in the middle of the afternoon.
I am not afraid to park there, and walk down the cracked sidewalk. But Georgie says it's not safe after dark, and I believe her. You walk in the middle of the street then, she instructs, away from the shadows.
Georgie takes a drink of coffee. A policeman, she says, used to bring food to poor families when she was growing up.
``I said if I could help it, I'd never see another child go up and down the road begging for food,'' Georgie says. She inhales, and the cat on her shoulder purrs. ``They used to call 'em pigs, you know. If you don't respect 'em, how can you expect them to respect you? Let me tell you something, if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't even be able to get out on the street.''
All the neighborhood kids know Grandma Calloway and her kitchen. Grandma likes good country cookin': poke salad, sausage biscuits, black-eyed peas. Grandma never lets a child leave hungry, and there are many empty stomachs on Morgan Street.
``I'd go hungry to keep my cats fed,'' Georgie says. ``And children. . . people are crazy. They say I'm crazy. They're crazier than I am.
``It hurts me,'' she whispers then. ``Ain't nothin' I can do about it. I can't reach 'em all. Jesus fed 5,000 and he prayed, Lord, let me feed just one. But it breaks my heart to see such wasted lives.''
Georgie's freezer is really a refrigerator, but the controls are broken and it freezes everything. She keeps the outside covered with drawings that the neighborhood kids have made.
Georgie didn't draw much, growing up. She quit school in fifth grade to help her grandmother with the laundry they took in, scrubbing on a washboard the clothes that belonged to richer folks who could pay for such labor. At 14, Georgie lied about her age and got a job in a packing plant.
Her childhood dreams of being a doctor, a lawyer, a writer - they seemed like so much fantasy on the sausage-stuffing line. Then an older co-worker turned her in, and Georgie lost even that job. She married young, too young, and bore two children, a girl and a boy. Then she left the daddy and, because he had a job and a house, she left the children, too, where she knew they would have food and clothes and a bed.
She complained just once, to a preacher in a roomful of Sunday School children. ``He said, `You got children. Look around you,' '' Georgie says.
``I learned to love. Because, you see, you don't have to have your own. Other people can give you life.''
Life. And something to live for. A past full of loss means Georgie needs kids now, and her kids need a park, she says. All 50 of them.
``I wanted eight kids,'' she says. ``I only had but two. But the Lord has blessed me in my old age with all these kids.''
CHRISTMAS IS coming soon, but the park is still on a wish list. That's OK. Georgie knows what it's like to want.
``I don't know what it was like to have doll babies at Christmas or toys or anything like that, because I never got 'em,'' Georgie says. As she speaks, her teddy bear sits in a chair in the front room, waiting for the kids to come in after school.
One child on Morgan Street, she says, didn't have a Christmas tree last year, and another was told she had outgrown dolls at age 9.
``I got a Christmas tree and I'm not too old for it,'' Georgie says. ``I guess I never grew up.''
Georgie's own grandmother was strict. Dresses were always below the knee, don't mind that the other kids laughed and pointed. Georgie had one pair of shoes that she shared with her sister. An insurance salesman bought them, sorry for the little barefoot girls who walked past his door every school day.
``I'd wear 'em one day and my sister would wear 'em the next,'' Georgie says. ``I can remember how happy I was going to school that first day and then the next day having to pull 'em off and give 'em to her, me going barefoot and her wearin' the shoes.''
Georgie spends a lot of time gathering clothes for the kids on Morgan Street. She's teaching the kids to sew, too. They won't always live at home, she says, and Lord knows Grandma won't always be around to fix it for them.
Same thing goes for cooking. Georgie can't figure out how many burned stews, bad chilis or tasteless meat loaves she's eaten, meals that her kids have practiced on. No matter how bad it is, she never throws it out.
``It was when I burnt the toast for the missionaries from Africa I learned a lesson on that,'' she says. ``I started to throw the toast out. She said, `Do you know how many hungry children there are in Africa? Do not throw it away.' And they sat there and ate burnt toast. So I learned a lesson right there. Eat whatever you got, no matter what it is, even from bad cookin'.''
Lessons are so important to Georgie. She tells her kids that they can be president if they stay in school and work hard. If their dreams are less lofty - say, a hairdresser or a store clerk - Georgie is no less demanding that they stay in school.
``I don't judge you for what you've done in the past or what you've been in the past,'' she says. ``It's what you're gonna do in the future. And they say I expect too much out of 'em. I don't expect too much out of 'em. If somebody don't expect something out of 'em, they're gonna be just like it always is. Your mind is the only thing that's never full. Don't waste it.''
Georgie writes stories for her kids, even though she says she still doesn't know when to start a new paragraph. ``Sunshine the Mountain Lion'' is a favorite. Sunshine lives where the eagles fly, and Georgie keeps a poetic eye on both.
Georgie is getting old and tired, sometimes, but she won't take no for an answer. When a little child protested that she couldn't read the book Georgie gave her, Grandma Calloway pointed at a picture. ``I said, `Yes, you can. Look at the picture and tell me what you see'. I said, `You have a whole story just from a picture in the book.' ''
Georgie wants to send a little story in to the Reader's Digest. Philip thinks she can get it published. Philip has a truck, and he's usually coming around to give Georgie a ride. Philip also has a secret.
He wanted to be a policeman. But he stuttered, and he stopped dreaming, and now he runs over in his truck to tell Georgie about submarines or ships or something he's seen on TV or read about but never will drive. Georgie believes in him, and Philip doesn't stutter when he talks to her.
``I like to see people achieve what they want to be,'' Georgie says. ``It's a waste of humanity when I see the kids growing up now. They have nothing to look forward to. I try to instill in them the importance that learning can be fun if you make it fun.''
Georgie has learned lots of different job skills in 63 years and if you think that picking crops, mopping floors and working in the kitchen are career builders, then you won't understand why Georgie went back to the classroom she had left in fifth grade and earned a General Equivalency Diploma at age 50.
Georgie wants to take bookkeeping lessons now, so she can keep the figures straight when money for the park starts rolling in. She doesn't want the city or the state or the feds to pay for the park, but when the time comes, she wants their permission to build it. 'Til then, every penny counts.
Quarters would be better. That's the coin with an eagle on it. An American bald eagle, like the one in the magazine picture Georgie has framed on her wall. She figures God's servants must look something like that. Georgie needs 320 million quarters for her park. She doesn't intend to give up. But this is Morgan Street, and pennies are easier to come by than quarters.
``The same God that owns the penny owns the $80 million,'' Georgie says. ``All I got to do is have the faith and step out and work for it.''
Georgie has darn close to nothing, but she hasn't given up. Too many people need too many things. She's trying to find an apartment for a homeless friend, an apartment that's affordable, but the security deposits. How can anyone come up with that much rent, and a security deposit on top of it?
Georgie has a new kitchen table now, a little round one. She gave the square one away, because someone needed it more than she did. The little round one is still big enough to set a coffee cup on, and a kitten and my tape recorder.
The kids brought the kitten. It was sick and wet, made no more miserable by the good bath Georgie gave it in the sink. Now it crouched on the open door of the oven, and the warm air coming out fluffed its fur again. It started to purr.
The floor of Georgie's apartment is painted milk chocolate brown, but that's deceiving. Georgie scavenged near-empty paint cans from garages last fall, and poured it all into the cracks between the floorboards to keep the cold air from blowing in. She had enough of one color to cover the whole lot. Underneath that Morgan Street brown, a rainbow shines.
Georgie picked up a pair of green pants once, real cheap. After she had cataract surgery, she discovered the pants were purple. Now she can see better, and she knows she's wearing pink to church this Sunday. It will match the worn edges on her Bible. She had two really nice Bibles, but she gave them away.
``I'm more familiar with my old one,'' Georgie says. ``It's got all my goodies in it.'' Clippings, obituaries, pictures. And a scripture verse, something about eagles.
The plants have told Georgie that winter will be hard this year, and she worries for the kids on Morgan Street. Not about herself, though. The Lord has told her she would never go hungry, and she says she hasn't. The Lord has also told her the park will come, and she believes.
It's a long walk to the site Georgie and the kids have picked out for the park, but she doesn't mind too much. It's on Carolina Highway, and the folks who are watching their own children swing on the rusted sets at the little playground across the street are skeptical when Georgie tells them what she has in mind. Not that they don't think it's a nice idea. But they don't believe.
Georgie leaves them with her grand idea and crosses the highway, walking fast to get across between the trailer trucks and the cars. I scamper, too, although I don't see much worth crossing the road for, either.
Georgie has picked an industrial site for her park. There's a chain-link fence here, a big pile of dirt, some parked trailers. The assessed value runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on which lot you're interested in. A man tying his shoes says she'll never raise enough cash.
``You won't ever get that land. It's too valuable,'' the man says.
``Everybody tells me I won't, but God says in Luke 1:27 `Nothing is impossible','' Georgie says. She really believes.
``If I cry, forgive me,'' she says, and she does and I do. ``If they could see with my eyes what those children do in the street. If they could hear the language that the children use and nobody cares. You see, because they've got nothin' to look for, to work for. If they don't have nothin', what's the use of trying?''
You try because you can't soar without effort. Look at the eagles.
``They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.''
Even when the walking is from Morgan Street to a nondescript industrial site. ``Honey, it's rough,'' she says, but there's one thing I have learned in nine months. Georgie is not faint. ILLUSTRATION: VICKI CRONIS
The Virginian-Pilot
[Color Photos]
Georgie Calloway hugs Harry Lee, an old neighbor, on the street in
Suffolk. Morgan Street, where Georgie lives, is in a tough part of
town.
Georgie offers Dominique Savage, 4, some candy during a recent visit
by him and his mother. Her kitchen is the neighborhood gathering
place, where coffee, cigarettes and conversation are shared among
friends.
ABOVE: Georgie holds a kitten after feeding it milk by hand. The cat
that had the litter was unable to feed it.
LEFT: Georgie visits her neighbor, Lottie Mae, once a week to help
her with housework and errands. They've known each other since they
rang bells for the Salvation Army 11 years ago.
VICKI CRONIS
The Virginian-Pilot
Georgie Calloway's kitchen is a meeting place for neighbors and
friends, including Jackie Savage, left, and her son Dominique, who
is peering down at one of Calloway's 20 cats.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE INTERVIEW by CNB