Homeless
Anna Quindlen
Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januaries ago. I was
doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just
passing through, although she’d been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me
that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a
sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.
They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eyes brown-red in the
flashbulb’s light. They were pictures of a house. It was like a thousand houses in a hundred
towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link
fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of back yard. The house
was yellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need
for discussion. I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She
was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing
its creases had made me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time had had
one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was
somebody.
I’ve never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and I’ve always
been a person with an overactive sense of place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. So it is
natural that the thing that seems most wrong with the world to me right now is that there are so
many people with no homes. I’m not simply talking about shelter from the elements or three
square meals a day or a mailing address to which the welfare people can send the check—
although I know that all these are important for survival. I’m talking about a home, about
precisely those kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on
samplers over the years.
Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like it. I love my home with a ferocity totally out of
proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about it: the hot-water heater, the
plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is
precisely those dumb things that make it what it is—a place of certainty, stability, predictability,
privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than
that? That is everything.
Yet it is something that we have been edging away from gradually during my lifetime and the
lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. There was a time when where you lived often was
where you worked and where you grew the food you ate and even where you were buried. When
that era passed, where you lived at least was where your parents had lived and where you would
live with your children when you became enfeebled. Then, suddenly, where you lived was where
you lived for three years, until you could move on to something else and something else again.
And so we have come to something else again, to children who do not understand what it means
to go to their rooms because they have never had a room, to men and women whose fantasy is a
wall they can paint a color of their own choosing, to old people reduced to sitting on molded-
plastic chairs, their skin blue-white in the lights of a bus station, who pull pictures of houses out
of their bags. Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate.
People find it curious that those without homes would rather sleep sitting up on benches or
huddled in doorways than go to shelters. Certainly some prefer to do so because they are
emotionally ill, because they have been locked in before and they are damned if they will be
locked in again. Others are afraid of the violence and trouble they may find there. But some seem
to want something that is not available in shelters, and they will not compromise, not for a cot, or
oatmeal, or a shower with special soap that kills the bugs. “One room,” a woman with a baby
who was sleeping on her sister’s floor once told me, “painted blue.” That was the crux of it: not
size or location, but pride of ownership. Painted blue.
This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But
in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk
or sitting in the bus terminal—the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain
and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human
beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the
man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.
Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated
on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang
it on. They are not the homeless. They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the
spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything.
This essay first appeared in Newsweek in 1987.