Bones seem to crumble
Under mountains of wet wool
Hands Chapped, hard
Nothing makes you warm
Not even mamas arms
We looked at each other
Slits of eyes – tryin to lift up the eyelid ice
The vinyl seats slippery sharp
You ache from the inside
Mountains of fabric and plastic lock u up
Everything is old and wet…
—excerpt from homelesscold
I remember the first time I was homeless cold. I was in the back seat of one of me and mamas hoopties. We had just been evicted and had nowhere to go. The battery died, and slowly the air crept into ice.
I felt this same terrifying cold when I heard the story of the two babies who died last week in Detroit from hypothermia while sleeping in a parking lot with their family.
Homeless cold isn’t I-need-a-jacket-or-a-scarf cold, but more like freezing your blood as it travels through your veins cold. Cold that seeps into your brain from your hands. Indescribable cold. Terrifying cold.
I’m not sure how I made it out alive from that night. But I did and it was only the first of many nights. After that, it became normalized. Sometimes we had to sleep in doorways filled with layers of old pee. Sometimes huddling up in a bus shelter. Eventually that homeless cold became the trigger for a serious trauma response that I have to this day anytime the temperature drops.
“Every time I called they said they don’t have a bed, they don’t have family beds,” said Tateona Williams, single mama of her 2- and 9-year-old precious babies who died last Sunday of hypothermia. Tateona was talking about her desperate pleas for help from Detroit’s homeless solutions agency, who told her they couldn’t help.
These babies’ lives were stolen by the baked in disinterest, disdain, and hate for our lives if we are poor/houseless as well as this sick system that only ensures we have a home if we have enough money for the lie of rent. It doesn’t matter if we are babies or elders. We are already reduced to trash in society’s eyes.
When this grief hit I was already deeply grieving the story of Cornelius Taylor run over while sleeping in his tent in Atlanta in January, in one of these violent sweeps that continue to rage across occupied Turtle Island, made worse since the Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling that claimed we as houseless humans are officially not protected under the 14th Amendment, effectively saying we no longer are even seen as humans and therefore our lives, our cold, our heat, our sleep, our hunger, doesn’t matter.
Which of course is why the settler town known as “Fremont,” aka more occupied Ohlone land, has just passed yet another anti-poor people measure making it illegal to “camp,” which is just code for “be houseless,” in their town and added an extra hate measure making it illegal for people to support houseless people with life-giving/life-saving food, supplies or medicine like sleeping bags, blankets, Narcan, hygiene kits and hot meals.
In other words, starving or freezing us to death if we make the deadly mistake of being houseless in Fremont.
“They conduct sweeps in the snow, rain, sleet or hail, if a sweep is scheduled, they proceed and don’t care if they leave us out in the elements with nothing,” said Marcus, one of the RoofLESS radio workshop participants on a recent UnTour we houseless folks at POOR Magazine made to the Pacific Northwest to help the fellow houseless warriors of so-called Olympia, Tacoma, Bellingham and Seattle build their own HomefulnessPNW.
“Every day is a struggle when we live outside, many times we have almost poisoned ourselves by lighting a fire in our tent, just to stay warm,” said Kienard Ganes, a RoofLESS Radio reporter and single father in so-called Tacoma who has been struggling with homelessness for three years in the freezing weather of that territory. He spoke while the snow flurries raced through the freezing air.
This violent disinterest, hate and anti-poor people violence of sweeps, eviction, cold, heat,fires, rain and snow exposure, lack of safe and warm beds, hate and police terror when we are outside is not new.
Before Cornelius there was Shannon Marie Bigley, run over by a CalTrans vehicle in Fresno. Luis Temaj, burned alive for sleeping outside. Green Eyes, Mike Flo and Jessca “Queen” Mendez in Tovaangar (LA). Papa Bear, Tyrell Wilson, Steven Taylor, Mario Gonzales, Luis Gongora, killed by anti-poor-people police terror in the Bay Area.
This hate, like we see now in Encampment bans, sweeps and anti-helping legislation both societal and personal, system wide and implicit in so many people who “vote against us outside” must be fought, must be organized against like so many movements are doing now.
But it is also why us poor and houseless mamas and children and families and elders at POOR Magazine, Wood Street Commons, Aetna Street Solidarity, Reclaiming Our Homes, Share/Wheel and Homeless in Fresno work so hard to lift up our own self-determined solutions like Homefulness, Nickelsville, Wood Street Community and Tent City 3 &4 in Seattle.
We know that as evictions rise and more and more of us end up like Tateona’s and my family, we will lose more relatives to this hate and we cannot wait for people who have never experienced the violence of homelessness to save us.
Support the GoFundMe of mama SisStar Tateona at this link so she can get housing for her and her other babies.
Support the building of Homefulness in Oakland, San Francisco, LA and the Pacific Northwest by donating to www.poormagazine.org/donate (make a note on your donation if you have a preference of which region’s Homefulness you want the resources to go to).
