By By Dane Roberts Wans On Bookreview
You see them all around you and you wonder if there is anything that can be done for them. They are the people who live on the street and ask for help. Now there is a story of one outreach to this group.
This story starts out with Denver saying “Until Miss Debbie, I’d never spoke to no white woman before. Just a few questions, maybe — it wasn’t really speaking. And to me, even that was mighty risky since the last time I was fool enough to open my mouth to a white woman, I wound up half-dead and nearly blind.”
Denver is a black man, a dangerous homeless drifter. Miss Debbie is a rich white woman with a stubborn dream whom he encounters in a food line at Union Gospel Mission in Texas. How she connects with him and helps him relate to others is a story that needs to be told.
It is told in two voices. The first voice is Ron Hall, the husband of Debbie Hall, and the second voice is Denver Moore, the homeless drifter. How they meet and become friends is an exciting one.
It started for Deborah Hall when she spotted “An item in the Star-Telegram about homelessness in the city. The piece mentioned a place called the Union Gospel Mission. At the time, an insistent voice in Deborah’s heart told her it was a place she might fit. Not long afterwards a letter arrived from Debbie Brown, an old friend, inviting us to join ‘Friends of the Union Gospel Mission,’ a circle of philanthropic donors.”
Ron tells us he always thought of homeless people as “someone who was probably uneducated or at least not very smart for having gotten themselves in such a fix in the first place.”
Denver tells us some things we need to know. “Let me tell you what homeless people think about folks that help homeless people: When you homeless, you wonder why certain volunteers do what they do. What do they want? Everyone want something.”
Ron befriends Denver. At first Denver is not sure. “There’s something I heard ‘bout white folks that bother’s me, and it has to do with fishing,” Denver says.
“I just can’t figure it out. Cause when colored folks go fishing, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that’ll look. Then we eat what we catch … in other words, we use it to sustain us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to all that trouble to catch a fish, then when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water.
“So, Ron, it occurred to me; if you is fishing for a friend you just going to catch and release, then I ain’t got no desire to be your friend.”
He concludes, “But if you is looking for a real friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.”
That is not the whole story told in this book. The second half concerns Deborah’s losing battle with cancer and how it strengthened the ministry to the homeless and developed leadership qualities in Denver. At her death bed he said, “I can understand how important it is to you that we keep on reaching out to the homeless. Now you done all you could do. And God has put it on my heart to tell you that if you lay down the torch, I’ll pick it up and keep your ministry to the homeless going.”
Good books like this are out there for us to read. Pick one up and read. A whole new world can open up to you. You can reach me at
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 12, 2008. Read the original PDF.