Lynchburg Living

Departments

By Jon Dupin

Stepping Up

One unremarkable day in November of 2009, Bianca Allison got in her Lincoln Navigator and drove away from her corporate job and her corporate pace for the last time. She finally did what her instincts told her to do for nearly a year: She quit. Resigning her position at that rung in her career–successful and still climbing–didn’t make sense on paper, but it was crystallized in her soul.

“I knew it was keeping from me something more,” she said.

And yet, Bianca wasn’t describing another career path.

Instead she explained, “Somehow, I felt God was calling me to step up.”

What exactly that “stepping up” meant was still blurry, but it began the day she walked away from her assumptions of the American Dream, and waited for direction. Then, just three weeks later, Bianca walked through Mary Thomas Gentry’s front door, a woman she had never met before, and everything became clear. She was supposed to be this woman’s friend and give her a house.

Lost and Alone

The American Dream, according to Mary, however, was much different than Bianca’s vantage point. Her view: Just survive and get your kids through another day without being devoured by the streets. To her, picket fences and home ownership were just crazy dreams for people living her kind of story.

A couple years before Bianca walked through her door, Mary was drowning in her own crisis. Her husband skipped out, wanted a divorce and went AWOL on child support; a sad situation, to be sure, but not a terribly unusual one. One of the things that makes Mary’s story unique is her health, or lack thereof. Namely, she has almost died four different times from heart failure, which kept her unemployable and chained to disability. Sure, Mary’s birth certificate says she is 37 years old, but her chronic illness makes her appear like she’s wearing an older woman’s skin.

Hope remained, though, when she awoke to see the ceiling above, because then she says that meant she had won another battle with her dying heart, and had another day to lead her children towards a better life. But that better life seemed ever more elusive.

“My world had crumbled,” Mary recalled of the day she got evicted from her home.

Her only option: Pile up enough of her possessions to sleep in the nearby homeless shelter. She was officially out on the streets.

Mary had no one to call. Both of her parents died when she was young, and the rest of her family couldn’t answer her pleas either. Most said the woman’s health was too messy and others said she supported too many children. Doors continued to slam, so Mary stayed slouched in a chair at the homeless shelter–an exile in her own city–waiting for the system to process her through the next set of hoops.

Inside the shelter, the walls and windows were drab and dry. Her five children, the oldest 18 years old and the youngest, 6, all huddled close by and waited for their mother’s cues. She inhaled and gave fumes to her struggling heart, and then finally exhaled to let herself weep as a little girl lost.

“When I went into that shelter, I thought, ‘This shouldn’t be me here.’ So I had a choice: either remain down or look up,” Mary said, moving her eyes to the ceiling. “And God brought me up. I knew He was going to provide for me.”

Nevertheless, each day she lived in the shelter, her stamina waned more and more. Her requests for Section 8 housing were continually denied, so she needed a major breakthrough in her ongoing refugee status–a place to call home, a table to gather her kids at and a door to welcome her community through. But, again, those were crazy dreams.

Still, some light broke through the clouds when Mary was offered a low rent apartment on Madison Street downtown. The space was cramped, especially with Mary’s full house, but even in the claustrophobia, that little apartment became the platform for Mary’s unique calling. There, among the urban poverty, she expanded an inner calling to help other children find the love and faith that kept her going. She transformed her shoe box residence into a castle for the forgotten youth of her city.

“Most of the kids that came over, their parents put them out, so they had no place to go but the streets; no place to eat,” Mary said. :So, I took them in. Just can’t see no kids out on the streets like that.”

As she is relaying this part of her journey, Mary’s nephew, a soft-spoken teenager, enters the room and wraps his arms around her. His story embodies the very mission she described; his mother gave him up to live the “street life.” She pauses to smile at his affection before continuing.

“I’ve always been the type of person to bring them in, love them, nurture them, feed them. Keep them in an environment of love and faith,” she explained.

Mary admits that the kids who find refuge in her home would be lost if she didn’t open her doors to them. The street life she describes is filled with crack houses and prostitution. Squad cars droned her street at all hours, playing cat-and-mouse with thugs and dealers. If you think these things don’t happen in Lynchburg, you need only to see certain parts of the Hill City through Mary’s eyes.

It is there that these elements, and even darker ones yet, still consume the urban young. Sometimes it’s middle school girls that walk Lynchburg’s city blocks selling their bodies for approval and survival. Or it’s the boys choosing drug gangs instead of sports leagues, and fighting each other instead of the poverty that caves in around them. Mary is reluctant to say that within their own families, many of these children are surrounded and bruised by physical and sexual abuse.

This is Mary’s quiet war against an entrenched foe. She fights it in her own way. Her tools are simple things, like making some wandering child a plate at her dinner table or laying a blanket on the floor at night. For any lost boy or girl that desires a different path–even if it’s a choice that he or she makes in the moment–Mary acts as a guardian of the wounded. At her front door, she stands and protects a few from the vultures that hover outside.

But Mary would not remain alone, and her reinforcements would appear from the most unlikely of places.

Woven Hearts

Christmas Week 2009–that’s when Bianca first walked into Mary’s confined rental space and moved into the “stepping up” that was now driving her life. At first, she did not expect anything memorable to happen; she was just there to deliver a food basket from The Harley Club, and get back home safely. Mary welcomed her in and looked for a place to put the basket. Soon, she set it down, and the two women hugged. Immediately, Bianca recalled, they were woven hearts, like separated sisters rediscovering each other.

Bianca remembers taking in Mary’s surroundings, including a tiny, sullen tree in the corner, with no Christmas presents underneath it; an image that would go on to haunt her. Driving home later that night, she could not get Mary’s barren Christmas tree out of her mind. The thought of all those kids opening nothing on Christmas morning toiled with her conscience. So, Bianca took another step. On Christmas Eve, she piled her family and loads of wrapped presents into her vehicle and delivered the gifts to all the children who called Mary’s place “home.”

Over the next few weeks, Bianca and Mary’s bond grew. She earned Mary’s trust and began to realize the mighty impact this woman was having in her community. Her story inspired and challenged Bianca, so she decided she wanted to do something to lift Mary up and bless the life she was struggling through.

Another step was coming.

One night, Bianca lay in bed and wondered why God put her and Mary together. Then a “Field of Dreams” moment rushed into her mind: “Give Mary a house.” Of course, Bianca thought, we can fix up our old rental property downtown, and give it to Mary and her family.

“So I just started praying about it,” she said. “And talking to a lot of people. Then it just kinda went from A to B to C.”

Before she knew it, Bianca was in an all-out home makeover. No, ABC didn’t send their host, cameras and major sponsors. This project was nothing if not grassroots, but Bianca was confident that people would hear Mary’s story and want to join in.

“I didn’t know how we were going to do it financially on our own,” she admitted. “So I reached out to my friend, Tom Gerdy. He does a lot of Habitat houses. All I really wanted was some guidance, but he really got involved.”

Enrolling other people was a necessary start, and yet, Bianca would ask so much more of herself and her family.

Building A New House

Before long, Bianca and her husband, Kenny, took more than a step. In fact, they took a colossal leap into their new calling. They moved some funds around in their savings account, rethought a vacation and discovered other donors willing to make similar sacrifices. Finally, Mary was presented with the reality of the gift and the project, and she cried grateful tears. A dream she never thought possible for her family was now a light in her darkened tunnel.

“I believe when we have been blessed by God,” Bianca said, “there is an expectation that we should bless others. So, I wanted a person like Mary, this woman who led her own children so well and brought in these others from the streets, to live in a home that we’d live in. And, that she could live there with pride and dignity.”

Momentum to remake Bianca’s old Monroe Street house for Mary ramped up, and work was underway by late winter. The Allison family, shifts of Mary’s children and a hodgepodge of volunteers and professionals put their vigor and sweat into getting it done. An agreement was made between Bianca and Mary that Mary would not see the house until the day she moved in. So, Mary waited and found new ways to express her gratitude for what was a miracle in her world–a house to call her own.

The project took nearly six months of back-breaking work, including a lot of late nights after work and weekends. During that span, Bianca, Kenny and their two children, became honorary family members in Mary’s greater household. Birthday parties, sleepovers with the kids at Bianca’s place and project days out at the makeover home with Kenny were ordinary connections that now joined the two families.

A natural bond soon developed between Kenny and Mary’s oldest son, Dominique. The boy rarely sees his own father and, being at the threshold of manhood, he welcomed Kenny’s paternal wisdom and example into this life. At first, though, Dominique was slow to trust. But after a while, he waited at the front door, like a quarterback at game time, for Kenny to pick him up and take him over to the work site or out to eat with friends.

“Here’s a kid who has chosen not to enter the gang life,” Kenny said, describing Dominique. “He sacrificed a year of his education to take care of his mother when she was sick, so I wanted to give him hope that he could finish school and even go to college.”

Kenny went on to retrace another conversation they had together while painting walls and ripping up carpet.

“I wanted to always let him know that God is watching out for him. Dominique would say he wanted to play football and go to college, so I’d tell him if you follow this path, keep your grades up, go to football practice, you’re going to do great things,” Kenny said.

These words stirred up a desire in Dominique to accomplish his dreams and goals.

To brand their growing camaraderie, Kenny gave Dominique a right-of-passage offering. He took the boy’s old E.C. Glass football jersey and towel and displayed it in a shadow box. The end result looked like a hall-of-fame display. When it was eventually presented to Dominique, he opened the box shyly, then held the jersey up next to his face and smiled.

Move That Toolbox

On Saturday, June 5, 2010, a riled up sun cut out a relentless heat, and Kenny Allison dropped his toolbox on the front porch of the house he just gave away to Mary. He was depleted and barely standing. The thud from his toolbox was overshadowed by the fanfare going on throughout the house. His daughter, Monica, was inside giving Mary and other well-wishers the grand tour of the transformed space.

For months, Kenny had put everything his injured back could give into the renovation. He scraped and painted, nailed and hung, gutted and plastered up to the very last second. But, when he heard that thud and felt the reverberation from the toolbox, he knew it was done.

Inside, Mary followed Monica into one room after another. She cried and her tears reached a crescendo with each new room she entered.

“To see their faces was wonderful,” Bianca said about that moment. She paused and seemed to be recapping the entire journey in her imagination. “All the emotions from the last several months came to a head. And, I really found peace that day with what we had done.”

Bianca admits her family didn’t intend to grow so close to Mary and her children. This was supposed to be about fixing up an old house, doing the right thing and following God’s lead. Building a house, though, led to building a friendship, and that etched slowly into the trust and laughter, the love and struggle of true family.

And so, such a story began with two different women, living vastly different lives, but both searching for a better American Dream. Neither of them would have guessed they’d discover much more through each other–two women from two completely different worlds–and the faith and friendship that built a new house for them both.