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32
Mernons op ppRsuesroN 5r5
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diuision of proofs, stating the thesis partly or fully, and summarizing
the evidence and arguments to be presented (paragraph 4: Rangel's thesis restated in paragraph 19; summary of evidence and proof omitted);
confirmation or proof, arguing the thesis (paragraphs 5-18);
refutation, answering opponents (paragraphs 20 *241;
conclusion, reinforcing and summarizing the main argument, and reinforcing the original appeal to the audience (paragraphs 24-26, restating the thesis and calling for study of the issue).
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These divisions may be combined or arranged in a different
order-
the narration or background perhaps combined with the confirming arguments, or the refutation coming before the confirmation. Often the division or outline of the arguments is omitted, and instead of coming early
in the argument, the thesis may be delayed until the conclusion f.or reasons discussed earlier (see
p. 14).
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ANNA
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In her column "About New York" and the later "Life in the 30's" inThe
New York Times, Anna Quindlen described daily life in New York City.
From 1990 to 7994 she wrote an op-ed column for the Times, "Public
and Private." ln 7992 she was awarded the Pulitzer Pize for Commentary. Her novels include Object Lessons (7997), One True Thing (1,994),
and Black and Blue (1,998). Her columns for the Times arc collected in
Thinking Out Loud (7993) and Liuing Out Loud (1988), in which the
following essay on her encounter with a homeless woman in New York
City appears.
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Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januarys 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
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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 p"p., uid brought out her
photographs.
. The.f were nor pi:tu{gr 9f family, or friends, or even a dog or cat,
its eyes brown-red in the flashbulb's light. They were pictures of"" hoor..
It was like a thousand houses in a hundred towns, nlt suburb, not city,
but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a .h"in-lirrk
fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch
of backyard. The house was yellow. I looked on the"baJk 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 ir was something I had often felt.
she was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although h"r 6"gs and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had made me Lelieve 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 iu.r".tiu" sense of
place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. so it is narural 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 mailiig address to which
the welfare people can send the check-although I k-now 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-riit.h .rrd
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 itr
or location.
"pp."rance
I- love dumb things about itr the hot-water heater,
the plastic rack you
drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasioially leaks. And
yet it is precisely those
things that make it what it is-a place of
_dumb
certainty stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for rny family. It
is where I live. rwhat 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 p"r.ntr and gr"nipar.nts.
There was a time when where you lived often was where"you iorked
and where you grew the food you ate and even where yor, *rr. buried.
516
ARcuupNrlNo PrRsuesroN
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, suddenlg where you lived was where you lived
for three years, until you could move on to something else and some-
thing else again.
And so we haye 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 sration,
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 af.raid 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 compassionare 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 cusromary 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.
Cneprpn
32
MErHots or
ptnsunsloN
Sr7
t?.
QuEsrroNs
1. 'v7hat appeal is euindren making to her readers? Is
she asking rhem
to take action to reduce homeressneis, or to change tr..i,
trrir-r.i"g
its causes,-or to change their attitude ioward ,t. io.'.t.rri'o,
at.,"bout
,rr.
have another purpose in writing?
2^'
Hqy is a "global view" of homelessness different from the view
Quindlen takes? How does she justify this view?
3. How is this view of the homeless different from the
view Hilary
Vries presents? Is her view a global one?
de
SuccnsrroNs FoR \il/Rrrwc
1. Describe an encounter with a stranger that aroused your
concern or
changed your thinking on a particular-issue. Like
d.etail, but select it carefully so that .".h
]1
l":rtnesls.
your
2'
a"i"hl.;,
d'.triii
be
,p..ifi.
p.riirr.n, ,o
Quindlen says that home.is "somerhing that we have been edging away
from.graduallv during mv lifetime
ihe lifetimes ;i;; p"?iri"
"nd then
grandparents." Explain what she means,
""a
discuss *t.,irJ or rror,r*
sratemenr applies to you and your famiry. Be specific
in you. a.tuil without turning your essay into a narrative or story.
HILARY DE YRlES
oe vnrps graduated
Tl1^t
i9B1 she received
from ohio rfesreyan University in 1976. rn
M.A. in crearive writing from gorr*-t;iu.rrity. tn
1983, she was named Magazine sfriter of the year
by the New England
an
women's Press Association. Her essay describing a visit
," grra" ,h.r_
ter for the homeless was published in The chritian
" Moriro,
s"i"nre
on
september 17, 1'987. Like Anna
euindlen, de vries giu."
to the
homeless and in this way urges the reader to r.j".t
"-f";
u"rt.r.otyp..
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AncuurNr nNo
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CrieprEn
THINK
PnRsuasioN
I 'S7trr Nor Foncpr
THIS"
MErnots
oE
PeRsuesroN 519
officer who stood a few feet away. A policeman was posted here24 hours.
I never learned her name. But she spotted me across the room-the common area of the shelter for the homeless which served as her living room.
If I wasn't exactly a guest in her house, then I was just another reporter
doing another story on the homeless. She was the one who lived here.
She was the one with a story to tell.
I arrived at the shelter in the early evening. Just before supper. Just
in time to catch the nightly intake of the hundreds of men and women
who, through alcoholism, or mental illness, or just plain hard times, had
nowhere to call home but this shelter. It was one of a dozen in dozens
of cities, tucked away in a commercial part of town where warehouses
and loading docks didn't form neighborhood coalitions against
32
the
housing of the horneless.
I was here to put a face on what I thought was an all-too-faceless
social problem. I had stepped around my share of breathing bodies lying
on the sidewalk in front of department stores. I had argued with myself
over whether to feel anger or pity or simply gratitude that it wasn't me
lying there gloveless and filthy. Mostly, I wondered how people could live
like that.
That's where the woman came in. The woman with neatly filed nails
and beautiful skin who didn't wait for me but simply walked across the
room and asked me if I was from a newspaper. Her breath smelled faintly
of mint and she wore a yellow sweater. I thought at first she was a staff
member, and told her I was touring the facility. Come back and talk to
me, she said. I'll tell you what itt like to live here.
I was taken first to the men's side of the shelter, to their front door
where I watched them being frisked, a man in a black baseball jacket
running his hands lightly down their sides as the men stood silently
in the first of many lines-a line for admittance, a line for supper, a line
for bed. Here, there are only two rules: no guns, no violence. The men
had only to get across the threshold to get a bed for the night. If they
came late, they joined the 200 others lying on benchcs or the floor of
the day room or the lobby. Every night it was the same. No one was
turned away.
One man was lying in the doorway with a pink electric blanket
wrapped around him, cradling a boom box. The man next to him
was snoring. His coat was greasy with dirt and served as a pillow for
both of them. Neither of them noticed me stepping over them, or the
in case. Overhead fluorescent lights blazed. They stay on all
night, I am told. All night someone will be awake-awake and walking,
awake and talking to someone or to themselves. All night the phone
Just
will ring.
Upstairs in the painted cement block rooms, I walk by rows of twin
beds with rounded edges-nothing sharp here-and plastic-covered mattresses. Three hundred men on secondhand designer sheets and under do-
nated blankets. Each bed is made up for the night. Outside in the hall,
someone's heels click by, and the low rumble from the men standing
downstairs, crowded and jostling, rises up the stairwell.
It must be easier to be a woman here, I think. It is less crowded for
them. They are neater. No torn bread crusts and spilled cups of soup in
the corners. No loud bursts of laughter.
\When I am taken'to their side of the shelter, a woman pushes open
the door wearing a rabbit fur coat and suede boots. For a minute I think
she works here, until I am told that the donations here are good ones,
that the bulging sacks under the stairwell belong to the bag ladies, that
the women do not steal from one another, that some of them do arts and
crafts here. There are homemade paintings hanging on the wall.
Now, it is dinner time for the women. They sit on benches alongside
a wall waiting for an empry chair. it is almost like a restaurant, I think,
but not quite.'Women from a local church are serving the meal, cafeteriastyle. The handwritten menu is posted at the head of the line: three kinds
of sandwiches, pea soup, and fruit. At the plastic-covered picnic tables,
the women eat neatly. They do not talk, only peel back the wax paper
from the sandwiches and take small bites. They do not look at one another or anyone else.
Soon it will be time for bed. Lights here go out at 9 p.m. No exceptions. The women will go upstairs, stand in line, put their clothes in a bin,
put a rubberized band around their wrist. The band has a metal tab with
a number on it. It is the number for their bed. In the middle of the night,
if someone should call, the woman can be located by number. Next, a
woman staff member takes their clothes, hands them a nightgown and a
towel. Both are clean and folded. There is some lace on one of the nightgowns. The women's own clothes are put into the "oven," where they
bake all night. This is
to dry them and to kill lice. Then they take
a
shower. No exceptions. The women's showers are stalls fitted with curtains, not like the men's, a bare room with a guard posted. "No more
10
t1
52o
ARcuuenr e,Np PtRsuesroN
than 5 minuteq in the shower," says a sign taped to the wall. It is almost
like being back in gym class, I think. But ir isn't. Ir isn'r a school. Ir isn,r
even a home. And I still wonder how people can live like this.
I make my way down the stairs, under the cold fluorescent lights and
with the smell of antiseptic all around me. Now rhe woman in the yellow sweater finds me again, corners me here in the common room. She
doesn't wait for my questions, but starts to tell me that all the women
here are unique, that it is not easy or right to categorize them. That is
her word, categorize. She tells me that the women are divorced or displaced or just couldn't deal with the life they were dealt. She tells me that
it is hard to get stabilized when you do not have a job. She has lived here
3j weeks; this is her address. She tells me she is going back to school,
that she is working on her secretarial skills. She tells me she is from
Cleveland, has a job here now but not the $600 a monrh for an apartment. "You know they give foot soaks here every night," she says. "Some
of the women really need them."
Outside it has begun to snow. I would like to go home. Or sit down,
just for a minute. But the woman hasn't finished. She hands me a scrap
of paper she took from the bulletin board that morning. "This says it for
a lot of us," she says, looking right at me. She is not smiling. Someone
yells for her to come pick up her things from the floor. I look down at
the paper. The handwriting is in faint blue ink: "These rimes remind me
of a situation I never want to realize again."
I look up at the woman. She is not smiling. Remember, she says,
everyone here is different, everyone here is an individual. I think i will
not forget this, when I am out walking and see a woman pulling bottles
from a trash can with dirtg ungloved hands and I start to wonder how
can people live like this.
I think I will remember this when I am tired and want to go home
or sit down, just for a minute. I will remember the woman with no home,
the woman with the neatly filed nails pracicing her typing skills. I think
I will remember that persistence does not have any particular address or
wear any specific outfit; that courage can be found in a gnarled hand
gripping the lip of a garbage can.
But mostly I think I will remember that compassion is not limited to
those who can write checks or their representative or articles for newspapers, that empathy might be most easily found among those with their
heads bowed over bowls of donated soup, and that concern for onet
CHnprEn
32
Mmnots
oF
PERSUASToN Szr
fellow human beings, as in the case of this one woman, does not even
have to come with a name.
*
QuasrroNs
1. de Vries says of the woman who showed her the shelter: ,,I never
learned her name." Why does she srress this fact at the beginning of the
essay and return to it at the end?
2. 'Vfhat details does
she give us about the woman? 'What point is she
making through these details? Is she arguing a thesis?
3. How
does the visit to the shelter change her image of homeless people
or of how they live? How does the visit change her attitude and fielings
toward them?
IJ
4. Is
de Vries contrasting the men's shelter with the women's or merely
giving'us a picture of both? lfhat does she gain by focusing on a singll
shelter and homeless person?
5. A writer may appeal to our reason, our feelings, and our respect for
qualities of the writer's character evident in the essay (ethical appeal).
'lfhat appeals does de
Vries make in her essay? How successful do you
find the appeal that de Vries makes to you?
SuccsstroN FoR lTnrrtNc
1J
Report an experience that changed your thinking and feelings about
a group of people or a current social problem. Build your discussion to a
judgment or a comment, as de Vries does in her essay.
GEORGE F. \X/ILL
GaoncE F. WItL's essay on the Supreme Court decision in Reno v.
ACLII
in this book. His colurnns on a wide range of political
and social issues have been collected in a number of books, including
appears earlier