Cotton is not a hard woman to find, if you know where to look.
Park your car in the gravel lot, walk down a crumbling slip of asphalt that passes over the tracks and follow a thin trail tramped down into the knee-high grass. As you approach the treeline start calling her name. She’ll hear you, but she may not answer.
Bring some tobacco — she prefers hand-rolled cigarettes — and a bottle of Mountain Dew, a big one. Maybe some aspirin. She needs more than this, of course, but she’ll appreciate the creature comforts. And this woman has done without the things she really needs for so long that an ounce or two of tobacco and a couple cut-rate painkillers seem like manna from heaven.
She’ll thank God for His blessed tobacco and expertly roll a smoke with her knotted but capable fingers.
“The tobacco has kept me from killing a couple a people,” she says, “including myself.”
She is not joking. Then maybe she’ll crunch a couple aspirin to ease the aches in her gnarled back, wash them down with a swig of the Dew. She’ll pull down the smoke, carefully tapping the cinders into a glass apothecary lid she uses for an ashtray, pinch out the butt and drop it into an old can that once held cherry pie filling.
She’ll set the can on an upturned white cardboard box that is in pretty good shape — it serves as her nightstand, dinner table, craft bench…. Perhaps come winter it will become fast-burning fuel in her quest to keep out the bitter cold that even here in the upper South blows through fast and hard.
Cotton doesn’t have much; she lost her food stamps two months ago, she says, and she has trouble getting medication for what she calls “my ADD.”
She has the clothes on her back: a Goodwill sweater in two cheery shades of green and the pair of Levi’s she says she’s been wearing since the advent of spring. She has her home, a domicile made of blue plastic tarp she got from a church and a few sheets and blankets salvaged from a Dumpster downtown, all elaborately tied together among the thin trees in this little thicket beside the railroad tracks. She has a few jugs of water lined up neatly by the entrance to her hut, and a collection of empty Mountain Dew bottles, some fastened to a neighboring tree in a decorative fashion and others hanging from low branches, panels cut into their sides so they turn in the wind. She’s got a knapsack full of keepsakes — a few extra pieces of clothing, a stack of business cards, a knife in a plastic baggie that may have been used in a stabbing a couple weeks ago out here by the tracks, a green plastic watch running 10 minutes slow. She has some smokes… for now. And she has a dog-eared copy of A Separate Peace by John Knowles. “Reading is my drug of choice,” she’ll tell you.
And she has the wheelchair, a narrow ironsides with thin wheels and a sloping seat parked next to her tent.
If she likes you she’ll let you sit in it while she tells you about her life, of her childhood in Chicago, working construction in Texas and training horses out in California. She’ll tell of running a couple small businesses, working stints in bars, restaurants and strip clubs, a couple years of college in Illinois, her two marriages, both doomed for failure, four years in a Texas jail. She won’t talk about the one child she birthed — “My life might be a fishbowl but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else,” she says. But she’s candid about the last 16 years, all of it spent on the street, nine of it in the wheelchair.
“Sixteen years,” she says. “People think I’m joking. It ain’t no joke. People come out here and say, ‘Glad to see you’re doing alright.’ Do I look like I’m doing alright?”
Above: Cotton’s place in the woods is not much, but it’s home. Below: The writer interviews Cotton and Don at the Freeman Mill Campground in downtown Greensboro.
Cotton prefers hand-rolled cigarettes. “The tobacco has kept me fom killing a couple of people,” she says, “including myself.”
Residents call this place the Freeman Mill Campground, a privately owned piece of wilderness along the tracks of the Norfolk Southern Line. It’s in downtown Greensboro, a couple hundred yards from city hall, our revitalized downtown, all those glass and steel monuments to order and prosperity.
There are maybe a dozen folks living hard out here by the tracks, Cotton herself won’t disclose exactly how many — “I don’t like to talk about my neighbors,” she says — and they are but a fraction of the thousand or so homeless living within the city limits.
But “homeless” doesn’t quite describe the situation in which the residents of this campground find themselves.
Most of the men live on the far side of the path, over a chain-link fence a few feet into the woods. They’ve pitched tents in the clearings under the trees, built residences from found lumber and salvaged construction surplus. One, made from castoff roofing materials, looks like it could withstand gale-force winds. Clothes hang from tree boughs, drying in the fresh air. Jugs of water — for cooking, for washing, yes, for drinking — sit in the shade. At the base of one tree, many, many Budweiser King Cans make a small, haphazard pyramid.Cotton’s place is across the way, tucked in among a few other sites. One tent over here exists in a small alcove created by the greenery, with a front yard of neatly raked gravel and an inviting sofa under the leaves. The woman who lives here lost her home to a fire a few months ago and was unable to collect on the insurance. Cotton’s friend Don lives a ways around the bend in an orange and yellow tent he got from Wal-Mart.
They find themselves out here for myriad reasons: mental illness, addiction, bad luck, bad timing, bad circumstances, bad attitudes. Some are unemployable, others just socially insecure. And some are like Cotton, who has been out on
the streets so long she barely remembers what it’s like not to be.
“Sixteen years is a long time, and there’s no end in sight,” she says. “I been laying out here dropping dead. I don’t want a whole hell of a lot, but I need a little bit of something.”
Don is a veteran, a former Navy fireman who saw action when helicopters crashed or torpedoes activated unexpectedly in the years between 1979 and 1985. He made castings for Chris Craft boats in Michigan and worked for a time in Alaska.
Now he collects cans and turns them in for cash. He hefts a 15-pound bag of them, crushed down for the weight.
“I can get maybe three dollars for it,” he says. “It turns out to about a penny a can.”
He spends many of his days volunteering at local homeless facilities, cooking soup, fixing things, offering counsel. Don likes to keep busy.
There’s firewood neatly stacked between two thin trees at his site, a rebuilt bicycle leaning against another trunk, clothes drying in the trees like low-hanging fruit.
“Life was probably harder up in Alaska,” he says. “You go out hiking, the land is unforgivable. You go out searching for someone, it could be whiteout, 20 below.”
He’s wearing a thin T-shirt and a pair of police-issue navy-blue cargo pants. Shadows play across his gaunt face and a freighter rumbles along the Norfolk- Southern Line. He says it comes by so frequently he’s gotten used to it.
Don moved to Greensboro from Detroit because of the economy.
“I researched it,” he says. “I do an awful lot of woodworking, furniture and all that. I figured I’d have a better chance of employment.”
Four hours after he arrived in town, after setting up lodging at the Greensboro Inn downtown, he was robbed of pretty much everything he owned.
“They took my ID and all that,” he says.
With no ID and no fixed address, steady work is hard to come by.
In three days Don turns 49. He’s been out here about a year.
“So far, so good,” he says. Now he picks burrs off his pants and flicks them to the ground in front of Cotton’s place. “Don’t throw those in the yard,” she admonishes. He bashfully picks them up.
They’re friends. Don brings her food when he can — Cotton says she hasn’t left the campground but three times since April, and since her food stamps ran out she’s been eating whatever she can get her hands on, including, she admits, some of the food people leave out for the dogs who sometimes run through these woods. He’s helped her tie off the tarps for her shelter, makes sure she has some of the bare staples she needs to get by. And he’s handy to have around when things get tough.
Just a few weeks ago, Cotton says, a kid named Romero “got cut to pieces.” She believes she found the knife used in the stabbing, has it in her pack in a baggie.
“I talked to the cops about it,” she says. “They were supposed to come get it.
I’d like to get rid of it.”
Cotton herself been attacked out here several times, the last resulting in kicked-in teeth and bite marks on her torso. She’s tough, but it’s hard.
“The predator factor is awful,” she says. “I been out here 16 years; most people wouldn’t survive it. I’m here fighting grown men off with shovels.”
This week Don made her a candle, a cylinder of purple wax in a Natural Light beer can; come winter it will bring the temperature up inside her tent a good 10 or 15 degrees.
Now she throws a packet of tobacco to him, tells him it’s his. He tries to give it back.
