HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
NO WAY OUT
walks west for three blocks, then
north up Hickory Valley Road, past
mostly empty spaces punctuated
by churches — the Hickory Valley Baptist Church, St. Michael’s
Charismatic Anglican Church,
Tyner Pent Church of God.
“I believe in God,” she says. “I
talk to him the whole way as I’m
walking. I just thank him that I
woke up today, and that I’m not
using drugs. I thank him for my
job. I look at this way: God has
something in store for me. I just
haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
She arrives at Amazon just before 6 p.m, tired and sweaty. She
uses baby wipes to clean herself
up. She spends the night scrubbing toilets, scraping gum off
floors, putting soap in the dispensers, and wiping the mirrors.
When her shift ends, just after 6 in the morning on Monday,
she walks a half-hour to a Shell
station and dials the CARTA dispatcher to ask for a Number 6.
Once, she waited in the pouring rain for more than two hours,
she says, but most days, the bus
comes within a half-hour. While
she waits, she sits on a block of
concrete and watches cars go by.
On a recent afternoon, Smith
taps her latest paycheck for a
$300 down payment on a used
Ford Windstar van.
“I can live in the car, sleep in
the car, find somewhere cool to
park and just lie down,” she says.
She can free herself from the
Chattanooga bus system, and proceed with her plans.
“I don’t care what the car looks
like, as long as it gets me from
point A to point B,” she says. “All
I’ve got to do is make it through
these three weeks.”
‘I WAS A PART OF THAT’
For Lebron Stinson, time seems
to be rolling backward, with each
week adding to the distance separating him from the working world.
Back when Stinson was a teenage "