In Detroit's poorest neighborhoods, a food truck serves the forgotten

Maybe his crack-smoking brother would be there tonight, he thought. Maybe this would be his chance to save him.

Gregory Taylor was behind the wheel of the Salvation Army’s Bed and Bread truck, a mobile food pantry that drives though the poorest neighborhoods in Detroit to bring meals to people who are hungry.

It was near the end of a long day, the final stretch of his eight-hour route. The truck was pulling up to one of its last stops, a short street called Zender Place, which has a mix of crumbling houses and occupied homes fronted by a corner park that's favored by drug addicts and littered with empty liquor bottles and hypodermic needles.

“Welcome to Zender Pl. A great place!” says a hand-painted sign in the grass along the curb, a remnant from the neighborhood’s better days.

Taylor, 62, had already fed hundreds of people that day at several stops along the route, identified on a clipboard by the intersections where the truck parks — crossroads familiar to longtime Detroiters for their associations with crime and blight.

Mack and Bewick. Harper and Cadillac. French Road and Shoemaker.

Now, as the truck approached one of the day’s last destinations, Taylor wondered whether he’d run into his long-lost older brother, since this is the neighborhood where he hangs out, scores drugs, drifts without purpose.

His brother was once a wealthy man, a local minister who operated a church and three homeless shelters when his life was at its peak. He made the news 25 years ago when he got on a loudspeaker and calmed an angry mob protesting the beating death of Malice Green by Detroit police before the swelling crowd got violent.

By contrast, Taylor’s life was in the gutter back then. He was in and out of jail, wandering the streets, drunk and high on drugs, eating free meals from this very same Salvation Army truck, while his rich-and-famous preacher brother was cajoling him, trying to entice him into straightening his life out with the promise of a Mercedes.

“He would send me pictures when I was locked up saying, ‘This is the one you’re going to drive when you get out,’” Taylor said.

Just a few years later, in almost mythic irony, they’d switched places in life.

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Taylor got religion, got out of jail, got clean and got married, while his brother’s taste for the high life sent him down a spiral that left him a homeless drug addict, the very kind of person he once housed in his shelters.

Once in a while, among all those haggard people lining up at the truck to get thin sandwiches and warm soup, Taylor would see his grizzled brother — unshaven, dressed in rags, standing out in the cold, waiting in line with the others. Taylor always pulled him aside, gave him a few bucks, talked to him, tried convincing him to seek treatment to lift himself out of his hell, without much success.

Maybe he’d see him again tonight, he thought. Maybe this time it would work.

“I won’t lecture him when I’m on the truck,” he said. “But I’ll give him a lecture when I’ve got him by himself.”

The truck pulled up to the park. It was crowded with street people. Taylor opened the window, looked out into the shadows and waited.

Everybody's different

The day had begun as it always does, at the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light center on the city’s west side, the headquarters of the Bed and Bread program. It's also a temporary home for dozens of drug-addicted men who seek shelter, counseling and church services.

Every day before dawn, volunteers make lunch meat sandwiches while a chef prepares batches of warm soup, stew or chili to be served in little foam containers out of three trucks on three routes through the city — the east side, the west side and a route that straddles both near downtown.

The program began almost three decades ago when radio personality Dick Purtan wanted to celebrate his five-year anniversary at a local station by helping a charity. So he held a radiothon.

The first truck set out in January 1988 and fed a few people in an alley at Kercheval and St. Jean on the east side. Today, the program serves 4,000 meals every day of the year at more than 50 stops throughout the city and at its corps centers, where it also provides beds to 450 people every night. It’s still entirely funded by an annual radiothon, supplemented by private donations, with meals served out of specially designed, instantly recognizable, square-box trucks with large sliding windows and the red Salvation Army logo painted on their bright-white sides. Last year, the program's budget was $1.8 million.

Although there are now 124 Bed and Bread programs throughout the country, Detroit’s was the first. And it’s still the only place where the organization uses trucks to bring the food directly to the city’s poorest residents, right where they live.

The people they serve come from a variety of backgrounds, live in a wide range of conditions and suffer from a complex mix of problems.

“Some of them are struggling to get ahead,” Taylor said. “I’m sure if they keep trying, they will get ahead. Some of them are satisfied where they are. Some of them feel like there’s no hope. Some of them, drugs run their lives and they’re doing nothing. You know, there’s so many different cases and stories.”

Some are homeless; others pull up to the truck in a Cadillac. Some are dressed warmly in new clothes; others have plastic shopping bags tied around their shoes to keep water out of the holes. Some have fallen on hard times; others spend their days on drugs. But everyone who comes to the Bed and Bread truck is given a meal. There’s no criteria for people to be served, other than saying they’re hungry.

“The target audience is anyone who has basic human needs,” said Capt. Jamie Winkler, director of the Salvation Army Eastern Michigan Harbor Light System. “Anyone who is hungry, who needs food. That could be people that we would not even imagine who come to us because they need help. It could be our co-worker who’s going through an ugly divorce who’s now found themselves going through a crisis. You’d look at them and have no idea what’s going on in their life. They could be dressed in a nice suit and driving a nice car, but at home, they’re selling their furniture, and they’re living right on the edge.”

Many recipients already get food assistance from their Bridge Card or the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, both of which serve as the modern equivalent of food stamps. But that's only if they pass a number of strict income and work requirements, and even then, it’s not a lot — the current maximum benefit for a single adult per month is $194, or just over $6 a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For a family of four, it’s $649, or just over $5 per person for a whole day's meals. And a lot of people consume their allotment before the month is over.

“People run out of food,” Taylor said. “I had a guy yesterday in a wheelchair out of the senior citizens building. He said, ‘Can I have some extra sandwiches? ‘Cause I ain’t got no food, and I won’t get my stamps until such and such a date.’ So I filled him up a nice family bag, and he was so grateful — ‘Oh that’s for me? Oh man, thank you. I got something to eat now.’”

Taylor’s partner on the truck that day was Lannell Smith, 43, a longtime Bed and Bread truck employee. "I love serving people,” Smith said. “Just love the people in general. My hope is that people can better theirselves and don’t necessarily have to depend on us. But if we have to be out here, we have to be out here.”

Neither man preaches or lectures anyone. Both are kind and generous to everyone who approaches the truck. Interacting with desperately poor people every day, they say, cultivates humility. “It changes your life,” Winkler said.

This 52-mile round-trip route through Detroit’s east side takes them into some of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods, places few outside these neighborhoods ever see.

Detroit has shown remarkable progress after declaring bankruptcy four years ago. Downtown and the neighborhoods that border it, such as Midtown and Corktown, are thriving, thanks to both public and private investment and the gentrification that followed. Several neighborhoods in the city, such as Indian Village and Palmer Woods, remained upscale enclaves through the city’s slow-motion collapse.

Some neighborhoods have seen considerable improvements in the past few years, including new streetlights, better trash pickup, renovated public parks, improved EMS response time and expanded bus service. Thousands of abandoned houses have been torn down or sold to developers.

But a number of neighborhoods are stagnant or in decline. Many residents complain that their neighborhoods have yet to see significant improvements from either public or private sources.

And there’s a small yet significant number of neighborhoods that are in a free fall, places where there are more grassy fields than houses. Where most of the houses left are abandoned or torched. Where nearly all of the businesses are long gone. Where crime is endemic.

These are the neighborhoods visited by the truck.

Many parts of the city need this kind of help more than they did only a few years ago. Detroit's overall poverty rate — defined as an income of less than $11,770 for a single adult, or less than $24,250 for a family of four — is now just under 36%, according to the latest census data, from 2016 — up from 33% in 2009, though down from nearly 40% in 2015. A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution said Detroit has the highest rate of concentrated poverty in the country, meaning the proportion of census tracts within the city where more than 40% of the residents live below the poverty level. That number has tripled in the past 15 years, going from 51 tracts to 184, out of 297 citywide. And in some tracts, the poverty rate is as high as 83%.

These areas got this way after being abandoned first by the white middle-class, then by the black middle-class, then by everyone else who could afford to get out or who bailed after their homes were foreclosed in the mortgage crisis. That left swaths of the city with high concentrations of those who couldn’t leave or had no place else to go — the elderly poor, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the indigent, the homebound.

These are the people served by the truck.

They are largely invisible, keeping mostly to themselves inside their neighborhoods, where they’re often stranded due to lack of money or transportation. Their problems, which have deep social, psychological, cultural and economic roots, are often beyond what any city government has the power or the will to change, let alone a city that only recently exited bankruptcy.

And these are the reasons for the Salvation Army's work. Although they may be unable to completely transform the lives of their clients, they still try to make those lives a little better, to alleviate their suffering and to offer some sense of hope. When it comes to the Bed and Bread program, they do so with something as basic and fundamental as a free meal that the people they serve can count on every day.

Each of the people they feed leaves the truck and goes home to their own unique problems. Each of them have their own story of how they got where they are — bad circumstances, bad choices or bad luck, and sometimes all three. But no matter how different they are as people or how unique their lives, each of them have two things in common — they’re poor, and they’re hungry.

A whole different world

All of Michael Terrell’s friends are prostitutes.

That’s because his neighborhood, near Detroit’s border with the northern suburbs, has become a shopping center for people’s vices. And hookers and dope dealers have flocked here in free-market response.

“There’s a lot of prostitution and a lot of drugs. You see white people coming from the other side of 8 Mile, especially up here,” he said of the customers, who he noted are easily spotted in his mostly black, sparsely populated neighborhood. “They’ll get off the bus and walk. They won’t take their car across 8 Mile, ‘cause if they get caught, the car gets taken. So they’ll actually drive to 8 Mile, get out and walk across. They’re sneaky.”

Terrell lives by himself, and out of loneliness, he lets the prostitutes shower in his apartment and watch TV there. Because of that, they’ve become his social circle.

Like Cheryl, who disappeared a few days ago. He assumes she was killed. And like Jody, who was walking with him that day before ditching him for a customer.

“Me and her was on our way to McDonald's,” Terrell explained. “She was going to buy me something to eat, right? And some car pulled up — beep beep — and she jumped in the car and took off, left me on the side of Chalmers. So she found a ‘date’ before we could get to McDonald's. So I didn’t get no McDonald's.”

He burst out laughing. “Sounds like a comedy movie, don’t it?”

That left him hungry, which brought him to the Bed and Bread truck’s first stop, in front of the Michigan Department of Human Services building near Gratiot and 7 Mile. It’s a logical stop on the route, a place where poor people already congregate for food stamps, cash assistance and help with their utility bills. By noon, a small crowd had formed by the front door, while other people were waiting in their cars. As Taylor pulled up to the curb, they all came over and formed an orderly line at the truck’s sliding service window.

The day’s menu featured franks and beans, cold-cut sandwiches and applesauce. For kids, there were Lunchables and Rice Krispies Treats. Hot chocolate for everyone.

Taylor and Smith put the meals and disposable utensils in plastic grocery bags and handed them through the window. Each time, they got a ‘thank you’ in response. Many of those in line were repeat customers, familiar faces to the men in the truck. Like Terrell.

“I’m here every day,” Terrell said, sipping his hot chocolate on the sidewalk. A prostitute tipped him off about the Bed and Bread truck when he moved to the neighborhood, and he has been getting lunch here ever since.

He lives in a well-kept, four-story apartment building in the Burbank neighborhood, near 7 Mile and Chalmers, an eerie landscape of rangy prairies interrupted here and there by clusters of crumbling houses. Motor City Mapping, a project that digitized Detroit’s residential property information, says nearly half the residents of the neighborhood fled in a single decade, from 2000 to 2010. It says a third of the residential lots are vacant. The U.S. Census Bureau says 65% of residents did not work at all in the last year.

Terrell says the neighborhood is mayhem.

“Where we’re at, it gets kind of crazy over there,” he said, as he began the 10-minute walk home. “There’s blocks with only one or two houses on the whole block. Everybody’s on drugs. There’s dope houses everywhere.”

It’s so lawless there, he said, that prostitutes openly roam Chalmers — the neighborhood’s main road — or take breaks in groups at one of the corner gas stations where, like many places in the inner city, the clerks sell cigarettes for 50 cents apiece to people who can’t afford a whole pack at once.

The going rate for a "date" with the girls is $10. But some can be talked down to just a few bucks, Terrell noted. It depends how desperate they are. Those girls are beaten mercilessly by the others, he said, for driving down the market rate.

And when police do patrol the area, he insisted, it makes little difference.

“I’ve seen a dope house over here raided. I’m walking down the street, and I see the cops come up, right? The people got out, walked down Chalmers, they walked all the way around the block, about seven or eight adults, and went right back to the same spot. It’s a joke.”

Terrell was born in Detroit, moved as a teenager with his family to Inkster, then moved back to Detroit and dropped out of high school because, he said, it was too violent. At some point, he tried crack, and his life unraveled.

“It just wrecked everything, you know? By the time I realized, it was too late," he said. "I’ve been drug-free for a while, but it’s just, all the damage is done already, you know? I’m 48 years old. Nobody wants to hire me.”

He’s actually 58. He didn't even get his own age right.

He was placed in his apartment a year ago by a now-defunct local mental health agency. “I was homeless for three years. That’s why I took the first place that came along,” he said. “When I was, like, 12 or 13 years old, I seen a homeless guy pushing a basket, and I thought, 'Damn, what’s wrong with that guy? How did he end up like that?' And all of a sudden, that person’s me.”

His building is strictly managed, and signs in the lobby issue a number of warnings to residents. No roommates without approval from the manager. No bicycles allowed in the building. Mandatory pest extermination on the 10th of each month for each apartment. Lose your key, and you face eviction.

“There’s nothing good coming out of here," he said. "Almost everyone’s on disability. That’s where the money’s coming from. And you got people from other neighborhoods looking for the girls and looking for the drugs, they’re getting beat down, they’re getting shot. It’s crazy.”

Terrell usually has little to do but stay inside his apartment, where he lives a monotonous existence. Mornings are usually spent sweeping a liquor store’s parking lot for a few bucks. Days are passed watching TV and eating his Bed and Bread lunch. Nights are drowned in beer, in the company of the streetwalkers from the neighborhood. But he’s too broke to score with them, and they won’t give it up for free, so he’s stuck in the prostitute friend zone, the ultimate indignity.

He has no job, no car, no money, no phone, no prospects and no real employment history beyond part-time work. For someone like him, there are few options to make life better.

“I have a mental problem. But I’ve been off my medication for a while ‘cause I really can’t afford to go get it,” he said. “It’s hard, and then so the alcohol makes you lazy, you say, ‘Well, I’ll go tomorrow,’ and then tomorrow, you find some more beer money and then, ‘Well, I’ll go tomorrow.’ Tomorrow never really comes.”

Not long ago, he walked all the way downtown and back, 9 miles each way, looking for work. He found no place that wanted to hire a guy like him. But he did see the new sports stadium, the renovated skyscrapers and streets crowded with new residents and young workers for whom Detroit is an exciting island of trendy restaurants and bars in a few square miles centered on downtown. That’s a Detroit, though, that’s very different from the one most of the city’s residents live in. Like Terrell.

“You got a bunch of white people moving in down there by where the new hockey arena’s going and stuff like that,” he said. “They’re not from here, and all of a sudden, they think Detroit’s a hip, cool place to be, and they’re coming from their little rich neighborhoods, coming down here getting cheaper lofts and stuff like that. But they don’t know what goes on once you get outside your little safe zone down there. It’s a whole different world.”

Pride, fear and regrets

The truck pulled up to the Symurff and Symurffette Early Childhood Enhancement Center on East McNichols, a 24-hour day care with iron grates on the windows, familiar blue cartoon characters painted on its outside walls and a copyright-infringing motif no spelling tweak can hide.

The crowd at this stop grew quickly when the truck arrived, despite the low temperatures that afternoon.

“In Detroit, we have some really cold days, right? Where you don’t want to go out and get your mail, so on days like that, of course the number’s gonna drop,” Taylor said. “Then you got some people, they depend on this meal for the whole day, so they got to come. They’re gonna come anyway.”

Up came Shyfirska Emery, 31, one of two employees at the day care that day. She was holding a large plastic food container, which Taylor filled with franks and beans. There were 11 kids inside, mostly toddlers. “They’re my babies,” whispered Emery, smiling, as she went inside with the food. The lights were dimmed. Cartoons played quietly on the TV. It was nap time. The children were sleeping on mats. The food truck meal would be their wake-up snack, Emery said.

Up came a woman inquiring about volunteering. Not for her, though. For her son. “He has to do community service,” she said with a wink, as she munched on a corned beef egg roll from a nearby restaurant, a Detroit culinary peculiarity. She still took a couple lunches, though, to bring home to her daughter and her six kids, who all just moved in with her, suddenly bringing seven new mouths to feed.

Up came a tall man, bragging about having a job as he waited in line for his food bag. “I’m over here doin’ an apartment building behind the library,” he said proudly to a handful of women lined up ahead of him, who smiled at him as he spoke. Jobs in the neighborhood are scarce. They’re brag-worthy.

“We’ve got, like, a thousand sheets of drywall on five or six pallets; each pallet’s got 70 or 80 pieces on it. I’m going two flights up the stairs," he said. "That’s how I work out, you know what I’m saying?"

And up came Felicia Darnell, who grabbed two of the kids meals for her daughters — Geneva, 4 months, and Zoey, 2 years.

But she didn’t get food for herself. She had an impacted wisdom tooth, and though her Obamacare insurance would cover a visit to the dentist, she faced an $80 co-pay to have the tooth extracted, money she didn’t have. So for now, she relied on aspirin to dull the throb just enough to eat, and she was waiting for the pills to kick in before getting something for herself.

The 40-year-old lives in a three-story apartment building across the street from a century-old social services agency, down the street from where the food truck parks, next to an abandoned apartment building where squatters live and people go to get high.

This is the Osborn neighborhood. Thirty-eight percent poverty rate, according to the latest neighborhood census stats, from 2015. Fifty-six percent poverty rate for households with kids younger than 5. Thirty percent unemployment rate. Fifty percent of residents getting food assistance.

Last year, a study by a California company called ShotSpotter revealed that it recorded nearly 9,000 gunshots in 15 months in this neighborhood. This ZIP code — 48205 — was named one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the entire country a few years ago by online database NeighborhoodScout, based on FBI data. One in seven people will be the victim of a violent attack, according to the FBI. A gun is fired every four hours here, according to ShotSpotter.

It’s too dangerous to go outside, according to Darnell.

“I don’t hang around ‘cause I don’t want to get caught up in anything,” she said, sitting in her apartment. “I don’t have any friends. It’s always me and the kids and the TV.”

"Looney Tunes" reruns on TV played endlessly in the background, a maddening, all-day, cartoon-voice soundtrack to her life, in which a toddler and a baby competed for her constant attention inside a tiny apartment she rarely left, where every day’s sameness blended into the next.

This is not how it was supposed to turn out. She grew up on the west side, in a large home with beautiful Palmer Park’s lavish golf course as her backyard. Her mother was a high school principal, and her father worked for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. They sent their only daughter to Dominican High, one of the city’s longtime Catholic high schools, a beacon of hope for residents who believed the school and its strict standards would be an inoculation against the negative influences of the city’s declining neighborhoods. She understood their reasoning.

“I think it’s partially environmental, I really do," she said. "I think it’s who you come in contact with every day. If you hang around influential and positive people, that’s what you can’t help but to be, or strive to be.”

But Darnell got into a fistfight right before graduation, got kicked out of school and took a couple years off, “to just do what I wanted,” she said. Then she attended college at Langston University in Oklahoma, where she dated a football coach, had two kids — twins who are now 13 — and lost them in a messy custody battle.

She came home to Detroit, enrolled in Everest Institute — “A better career, a better life,” its motto states — for medical assistant training, and twice dropped out. She tried crack, got hooked, spent a few years in a cocaine haze and then went to treatment. After declaring her clean, an agency placed her in HUD-subsidized housing in this apartment building in this rough neighborhood. She has had two children since, and though she gets food from her Bridge Card, she receives no cash assistance.

“They stopped giving me money because they wanted to know who the baby’s father is, and they wanted to know who to put on child support, and he doesn’t want to go on child support,” she explained of her current boyfriend. She never sees the father of her other child and therefore sees none of his money. He was abusive, she said, so she won’t let him see their daughter.

To get by, she does odd jobs and errands for the elderly women in her apartment building for a few bucks here and there, but that’s it for money.

Apart from walking the kids on sunny days to a newly created park nearby or going across the street to get lunch from the Bed and Bread truck, she rarely leaves the apartment. “I really don't. It’s too much messed up stuff going on, shootings and fights," she said.

She doesn’t fit in around there, anyway. She’s educated, well-spoken, drug-free — a standout in this neighborhood, she said. She did what she thought was right by sobering up, but the only reward so far is a clearheaded assessment of herself as middle-age, broke and living in poverty with no obvious way to climb out. It leaves her with lots of regrets and little hope.

“I’m upset with myself ‘cause I’m 40 years old, and I haven’t done anything except have four kids,” she said, tearing up. “My dad — that’s another reason my dad and I don’t get along, because he’s upset, ‘cause we had all the opportunities in the world. He and my mother gave me and my brother all the opportunities in the world, and we didn’t use them.”

There are a lot of Felicia Darnells along the food truck’s route, people who admit they made a mess of their early years, wish they hadn’t and now want to get their lives on track. But it’s not easy.

She has no job, no transportation to get to work if she finds a job, no family after her mom died — other than an elderly father and a brother who’s in jail for shooting someone during a carjacking, and thus nobody to watch the kids and no money for child care. She’s caught in a loop of inertia with no clear way out.

“I get frustrated, and yeah, I do wish that I could find something else to do, but this is the road that I’ve chosen, so there’s nothing else for me to do but deal with it," she said.

She looked around the spare apartment. There was a futon. A small TV with an antenna. A bed in her room. Some food in the cupboard. It was all she owned in life. Yet it was more than she had just a few years ago, more than a lot of people in the area have today. And she was thankful.

“I know there’s people, tons of people out here, that are worse off than me right now,” she said. Outside the window, dozens of them stood in line across the street at the social services center’s food pantry, waiting for a meal. “I’m very blessed and very humble and very grateful to have anything and everything that I have right now, because there were times when I didn’t have this.”

'You live and learn'

Tatiana Young’s kids climbed the playscape at Martz Playground, at the corner of St. Patrick and Gunston, as they waited for their lunch.

The Young family comes to the park every day by 1:45 p.m., where the kids play until the Bed and Bread Truck arrives. “Thank you!” came a chorus of toddler voices when they got their hot chocolate and Lunchables.

The family made their way back down to the end of the block where Young lives in a small bungalow with her four children. And her elderly mother. And her elderly aunt. And an older cousin.

She walked past well-kept homes and clean yards on her way. “The neighborhood is not that bad,” the 29-year-old said. “You know, every neighborhood has bad in it, but like I say on this block, this block is a real nice, quiet block. Maybe ‘cause it got more elderly people.”

But walk a block or two in either direction, and things get rough. She’s in the neighborhood just east of City Airport that both residents and police call "the Red Zone,” so named because it’s the territory of the Seven Mile Bloods gang, as named in a federal indictment last year for a slew of racketeering, murder and firearms charges. It's yet another reason the 48205 ZIP code, which she’s part of, is considered so dangerous.

That makes her extremely cautious whenever she leaves the house, which is almost always on foot, usually to the gas station three blocks away for food or smokes.

“I always carry some type of weapon just in case, because I don’t feel safe, even if it is a safe neighborhood. I don’t want to be caught slippin,’ ‘cause people will come out of nowhere. They come out the bushes, try to rape you, you never know," she said. "You on your way going to the store, tryin' to get you some chips or a cigarette or something, then something just random happens to you. I’ve seen it; I know about it. Like, literally, I have lost a friend like that. She was on her way going to the store, and she got shot in the alley.”

Young walks everywhere because she doesn’t have a car, because she doesn’t have a steady job, because there are none around here, because the neighborhood emptied out when the city said it was expanding the airport, which never happened, leaving a once-solid neighborhood a crime-infested wasteland. Young wishes she could leave, too.

“What’s keeping me here? I’m trying to get on my feet real quick, that’s what. It’s basically, it’s just a process, cause I ain’t about to be here forever," she said. "I want to explore. I want to really get out of Detroit. Once I get my stuff together all the way, me and my kids will be able to see the better things in life, and I ain’t talking about in Detroit. I’ve seen any and everything Detroit has to offer. I’m 29 years old, so I’ve experienced a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t have experienced. I done seen it all. I damn near done it all.”

For Young, life has been a series of disputes, disagreements and disappointments.

She grew up on the east side, in several locations, and quit Southeastern High School before graduation. “I was in a lot of trouble,” she said. “My mom was, she was upset with me, and I was like, ‘I really don’t even want to go to the school no more.’ She thought it was me. I never really got in trouble. It’s just, trouble came to me.”

So she enrolled in a job training program, but didn’t finish. “They was tryin’ to play me on credits,” she said. “They said that I needed 22 credits in order to graduate, and I only had 18 at the time, and they like, 'Well, instead of you graduatin’ in June, you’re going to have to graduate in December.' I wasn’t feeling it.”

So she enrolled in a Highland Park vocational program to become a medical assistant, but didn’t follow through. “I just want to go and pursue more, instead of just being a medical assistant, just drawing blood and urinalysis. I want to get where the big dogs are and stuff like that.”

So she got hired at Taco Bell, even got promoted to shift leader, but it didn’t last long. “Once we got our new store manager, I’m like, ‘I ain’t digging this store manager.’ I quit," she said.

So now she’s home most of the time, taking care of her children with little help — her mom’s too old, her cousin’s not around enough and of her children’s three fathers, two are in prison. One for life. “They don’t have no evidence pointing him to anything, and I think that’s totally unfair,” she said. “I know he’s innocent.”

She does hair and nails on the side for some extra money, plus she makes and sells home-cooked meals from the house. She dreams of opening a hair salon or a soul food restaurant someday, but said she’ll take any work that comes along, at this point.

“My main concern right now is to get a job. It’s hard to get a job for me, and once if I do try to get a job, I don’t have no dependable baby-sitter,” she said. “Now if I can go and get somebody to go and give me some day care services, I can go out and get up off my you-know-who and do what I got to do, ‘cause right now I’m just a stay-at-home mom.”

Like Felicia Darnell, she lives in a neighborhood where there are no jobs, with no vehicle to get to where there are jobs, with no money for day care to watch the kids if there were a job to go to. And like Felicia Darnell, she admits that she wasted many of her younger years, wishes she hadn’t and now wants to get her life on track. But it’s not easy.

“I was procrastinating. When I actually had the opportunity at hand, I was procrastinating, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in the predicament I am in now,” she said. “I wouldn’t be on welfare. I would’ve had a career, you know?”

She and her children sat in their living room. The couches and chairs were covered in protective plastic. Her late father and two late uncles looked down on them with love from a painted portrait hung high on the wall, as her 5-year-old daughter drank the last of the hot chocolate from the truck.

“Everybody has mistakes or done mistakes, stupid stuff, you know? So yeah, you live and learn, man. You live and learn.”

'Good days … bad days'

The radio in the truck was tuned to an AM news station as it wove through Detroit’s east side. The stock market was up again that day, the reporter said. Ninth day in a row. It was news from another world as the truck drove past shuttered schools, fire-blackened houses, windowless liquor stores, stacks of old tires dumped along curbsides, and weed-tangled fences marking one empty lot from another. Smith stood in the back of the vehicle, packaging more meals for the next stop.

The truck pulled up in front of the Love Outreach Center, on Camden just off Conner, which houses about a dozen formerly homeless men as they struggle to remain drug-free. This is the Ravendale neighborhood. Forty-nine percent poverty rate. Thirty-one percent unemployment. Fifty-one percent of residents outside the labor force. Fifty-six percent on food assistance.

A lanky man ambled out and got a lunch from the truck. He has worked here 20 years. “It’s good days, and it’s bad days,” said Daniel Fields in a weary voice.

One of the residents came out, a middle-age man in recovery. He took a lunch, said "thank you" with a smile, walked across the street and ate as he stood by himself, bathed in the sun on the porch of a blown-out, windowless former school whose front door was bursting outward from the weight of the heaping trash illegally dumped inside. It was his moment of peaceful solitude in the day, a short break from a building full of unpredictable addicts, and he looked positively serene.

A mom with her two little children walking behind her approached the truck. “Ice cream! Ice cream!” the two kids said in sing-song unison, smiling. They thought the big square vehicle was the ice cream truck. They looked disappointed when they were told what it really was. Smith and Taylor looked even sadder about it than they did.

Two men swaggered up, beer bottles in hand, midday drunk, staring menacingly at the truck.

“Y’all want something to eat or what?” Taylor asked in a friendly voice. One of the drunk men walked up to the driver’s side window and said something incoherent to Taylor, who started to pull away. The man jumped back, and with fury in his bloodshot eyes, started shouting.

“You trying to run me over!” he said angrily.

“I thought you wanted something to eat, brother,” Taylor replied. “I ain’t got time.”

This infuriated the man. “Get your keys and come over here. I got some holla for you.”

Taylor just laughed and said, “Uh, have a nice day, sir.” He drove away.

This kind of reaction is rare, but it happens, Taylor said. For a while, there was another guy at another stop who kept cutting in line, threatening everyone, telling Taylor he’d shoot him in the head if he didn’t give him his meal before everyone else.

“We are in the public,” Taylor said. “That’s something we’re going to encounter sometimes. Like I said, most people are very nice. But the element of drugs causes all these changes. You just leave the situation.”

The truck headed down Harper and drove past a church where Forgotten Harvest, the local charity organization that collects unspoiled surplus food from stores and restaurants that would otherwise go in the trash, had pulled into its parking lot. Dozens of people stood in line, waiting to get food that once belonged to people who had so much of it, they could afford to throw some of it away.

What the area needs is...

Taylor pulled into a neighborhood once dense with houses, on a block now rich with empty land, and slid open the window. It was dead quiet outside, other than the sounds of the birds. There was nobody in sight. No traffic, either. But once the truck was parked, people came out from houses and across the fields, and cars pulled up along the grassy curb behind the truck. Within a few minutes, people who had been invisible materialized out of nowhere and became a crowd that formed a long line.

A man named Kevin Meeks took his meal bag. “Can I get more?” asked the short, thin 32-year-old. “I got 10 kids.”

“He ain’t lyin’” said a man in the crowd. Taylor gave him as many meals as he could carry.

“Next!” said Smith. A woman named Veronica Morgan got her meal, then headed back to a dilapidated old house on Garland, where she cares for a sick relative and takes classes from Colorado Technical University, a for-profit college that offers degrees online. “I started off in accounting, then I’m doing good, then I couldn’t make my classes, then academic probation from that going on, but they said we’ve got another perfect match for you — I.T.,” said the 56-year-old. “I’ve been kicking the ass out of I.T. now. They say I’ve been passing.”

Next. A group of kids came up to the window. “All my mom wants is water,” one said. They pointed to a woman waiting for them in a car idling behind the truck.

"We don’t have any water,” Smith said. There was only hot chocolate and some fruit juice. But he’d bought a bottle of water for himself, which he hadn’t yet opened, and he reached back and gave it to them, leaving him with nothing.“Thank you!” the kids said all together.

“All right, y’all have a good one. Bye!” Smith said cheerfully.

Next. A man named Alonzo Green, who’d waited at the back of the line, took his bag, said “thank you” politely and headed down Vernor toward Bewick a block west.

“This is where I grew up at,” said the 44-year-old, standing in front of an old blue bungalow with a stucco porch, a leaky roof and an unruly rosebush by the walkway. There’s an occupied house next door on one side, four occupied houses on the other side, four abandoned homes across the street — one of which had a body found in it not long ago — and a whole empty block beyond that.

This is the Foch neighborhood. Forty-two percent poverty rate. Fifty-two percent outside the labor force. Forty-two percent of residents getting food stamps.

Down the street, neatly planted rows of little trees covered the block’s empty lots and stood leafless in the spring sunshine. This neighborhood is so empty that a few years ago, an organization proposed turning parts of the area back into a planned forest. It’s another in a long line of ideas proposed for a city with rural quantities of empty land.

“Picture oaks, maples and other high-value trees planted in straight, evenly spaced rows” implores the website for Hantz Woodlands, which has so far covered 140 acres of the east side in such a way. The project has been called an innovative solution by its proponents, a land grab by suspicious residents and a head-scratcher by others, including Green, who doesn’t think deliberately reverting a neighborhood back to nature is a sign of progress.

“I don’t even see why they put trees over there,” he said. “Why not try to put houses there for low-income people instead of planting trees? I don’t see why. It’s everywhere, too. It’s down there on Vernor — they’re planting trees, for what? Instead of building houses, instead of trying to build Detroit back up.”

Green grew up in this bungalow, which was his grandmother’s, then his mother’s, and now his. “That’s why we’re trying to keep this house. And I want to keep it ‘cause I grew up, was born and raised in this house.”

He remembers the old days with the same idealized memories shared by many older Detroiters. “The houses was beautiful; the grass kept up, clean. We as kids, when we were here, we shoveled the snow, and the grass was pretty; the houses wasn’t run down," he said. "And if anybody needed stuff, we came as a family, as a neighborhood.”

But he also remembers the crack epidemic that terrorized the neighborhood, the Devil’s Night arson sprees that burned much of it down, and the waves of fleeing neighbors that abandoned it.

He, too, left for a time, moving for 10 years to North Carolina, where he got married, had two kids and worked as a housekeeping manager for a hospital. A divorce led him back to Detroit. So did the death of his father in January.

His elderly mother developed dementia and was placed in a nursing home. Green moved back into her empty house, which he renovates in his off-hours from the job that a temp agency got him at a tire shop in Warren.

“After my dad passed, I came back to rekindle with my brothers and be close to my mom, in case whenever she does pass, I didn’t want to be too far,” he said. “And I missed home. This is really my home.”

His house, like the neighborhood it’s in, needs work. The pipes in the kitchen ceiling leak, so he has a bucket on the floor to collect the water, which means he can’t leave for long or else the bucket will overflow. The hot water heater is broken. The roof leaks, and black mold has formed on the upstairs ceiling where water has been coming in. A big section of the plaster ceiling in the living room came crashing down one night while the house was empty, exposing the wood beneath. And the fridge and stove are broken, which is why he relies on the Bed and Bread truck for food whenever he’s here.

His house, like the city it’s in, is emptier than it used to be. “It was empty probably a year, and my brother let everybody get what they wanted out of here,” he said. What’s left is a time capsule of 1960s residential life, like a couch that his mother had reupholstered in baroque green fabric. A lamp with a garish red shade. Thick gold curtains. A shag rug. An old record player inside a long wood cabinet.

And his house, he thinks, is like a microcosm of Detroit, which he's convinced can be brought back to what it once was. It just needs more people to return home like he did, and make it a place worth living in again.

“It can come back,” he said. “It’s not too far gone. It can come back if people come back, help out.”

'Thank you. For real. I mean it'

A stray cat on someone’s lawn saw the truck pull up to the curb, ran to the sidewalk and looked up in expectation at Taylor, waiting for food. Taylor put out a little container of franks and beans. And the cat sat down on the grass and ate it as people walked around it to get their food.

Amazingly, animals have come to know the schedules of the food trucks, and they wait patiently at several of the Bed and Bread stops just like anyone else. There’s a wild pheasant on 15th Street that approaches the truck, anticipating crumbs. A flock of birds lines up on a wire every day in Highland Park, settling in a field just as the truck arrives, waiting for pieces of bread. And several dogs emerge from behind different houses on different routes and sit shyly behind everyone else until the crowds of people get fed first. Then they approach, and Taylor always brings something to give them.

“They’re living, breathing beings like we are,” he said. “It’s not just people who are hungry. They see the vehicle, and they associate it with food. Animals are smart.”

There are several stops on the route on side streets in front of battered homes that may or may not be abandoned, judging by the broken windows, the bedsheets used as curtains and the gaping holes in the roof covered loosely by plastic tarps. There’s a stop like that on French Road. Two on Ashland. One on Newport. Usually a sole, weary person, often a shut-in, emerges from each to get fed before returning to his or her hiding place.

By contrast, the busiest stops of the day are on Mack, two of which are in front of bustling liquor stores. One is a windowless brick box on the corner where there’s a large crowd day and night. The parking lot outside serves as its own market.

“You can buy anything you want there,” Taylor said. He knows firsthand from his time on the streets in this part of town. “Buy license plate stickers, drugs, girls. If the store is closed, probably something to drink, jewelry. Anything in that parking lot.”

The lot quickly emptied as everyone ambled across the street toward the food truck, and cars lined up behind it, and people emerged from the side streets, and the biggest crowd of the day formed. It was also the most forlorn.

A few people didn’t wait to get home to eat, and instead stood on the sidewalk and shoved the food into their mouths in blind hunger, as if they’d been waiting all day to eat. Some were high on hard drugs and talked incoherently. A couple were drunk and behaved aggressively. Several were sober but meek, as if beaten down by it all, and they waited at the back of the crowd until nearly everyone else was gone before they walked up to softly ask for their food.

Some in the crowd had canes, a couple of them were in wheelchairs and several walked with limps or hunches, because oftentimes, poor people don’t live near doctors, or don’t have a ride to the doctor, or didn’t sign up for insurance, and thus won’t seek medical care until it’s an emergency, and so their minor, temporary issues become crippling, lifelong ones. Some of them had few teeth left in their mouth, for the same reasons. Most of the people were older and feeble. Most had weary, weathered faces hardened by too much time outside, too many ailments, too few good times.

But all of them expressed profuse gratitude for the food.

“Thank you,” a woman said sadly to Smith and Taylor. “God bless all of you.”

“I appreciate y’all,” said one man.

“Thank you,” said another, with true sincerity in his eyes. “For real. I mean it.”

“You’re doing a wonderful job!" shouted another as he walked away. “Don’t know if you hear that much.”

Taylor was humble in response, almost taken aback. “You’re welcome,” he said, slightly embarrassed. He deflected the credit. “God gets the glory, as far as I’m concerned.”

Lost and now found

Taylor was born in Tennessee, brought to Detroit by his mother and grew up on the west side. He got his first job right out of high school at Chrysler, worked for Detroit’s Forestry Department for years, and then got introduced to cocaine one night by a woman and her friend. “She said, ‘We got something we want you to try.’ That was the beginning of the end,” he remembered.

He lost his job, lost his wife, lost his home, lost his way.

The truck’s east-side route is like a tour of his dark past. He drove by a shelter where he spent many nights, the jail where he spent months, a store where he spent days panhandling for change, a house where he spent money on drugs.

These sights triggered his memories, and he began to tell his story, beginning five years ago.

“I found myself committing little petty crimes, in and out of county jail, and the last time I went, the judge called me a habitual offender and he said, ‘I could give you life right now.’ When I went into that jail cell, I remember it like it was yesterday. The county jail is so full, the same hour someone leaves, that same cell is filled by the end of the day.

“I went in there. Whoever was in there had left a note on the desk. And he said, ‘My name is such and such. I was in this cell for so many months, I got saved.’ Telling what God had did for him made his time in there easier, and gave me some Scriptures to read. When I went into the cell, I was already depressed and I was seeking God’s help anyway, and it was almost like that was waiting for me. And it changed my life right there and then, in the county jail.

“I didn’t wait till I got out. I wrote down the things I intended to do when I got out. I think I did three months. And I did every one of them — go back to church, go to the Salvation Army, get a job, stop drinking and drugging, get a place. I had a girlfriend who was using drugs at the time. I said if she wasn’t willing to change, I would leave her, find me a wife, which I did. I got married since 2014. She’s a soldier, as well, in the Salvation Army.

“Man, I’m so grateful. I’ve been out there. I’ve been out there on drugs, on alcohol, all of that. I have so much to be thankful for. I got a nice car, a nice place, money in my pocket now. It’s the biggest reward just to have this job, serving people. The Salvation Army, there are two s’s on that uniform that mean ‘Saved to Serve.’”

He stopped talking as he rounded the corner to Mt. Elliot, and pulled up in front of the park where his brother sometimes hangs out. He parked the truck, slid open the window, looked outside and waited.

This is the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. Thirty-nine percent poverty rate. Twenty-one percent unemployment. Forty-eight percent outside the labor force. Thirty-three percent on food stamps.

A woman walked up, looking sickly. Taylor recognized her from his days on the streets. “She’s 25, 30 pounds lighter,” he whispered as she slowly approached. “Terrible. I’m not gonna say nothing, see if she recognizes me.”

He asked how she was doing, how the weather was treating her, what kind of food she wanted. She didn’t seem to notice anything special about him. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in.

“You look familiar,” he said. “Do I?”

She said no. But she hadn’t actually looked at him. She was staring at her feet, as if in shame.

Then a man walked up. Taylor recognized him, too, and he asked him the same thing. The man didn’t recognize him, either. Becoming clean and sober was transformative for Taylor, inside and out.

“I used to stay around here,” Taylor finally admitted to them. The words indicated not just geography, but also a lifestyle. The man and woman understood, and they looked at him in disbelief.

“I sure did,” Taylor said.

Times like this are when he shines without trying, when his true value for the program really shows. He not only feeds the hungry, but his mere presence shows something to those he serves, to people like those in the park, to people like the Michael Terrells and Felicia Darnells and Tatiana Youngs and Veronica Morgans of the city — that no matter how down they are, how far they’ve fallen or how hopeless things seem, a better life is possible. He’s the living proof that there’s a way out. It's not easy. But it can be done.

“A lot of people I see, especially a couple of stops on the east side, they know me real well. I know what they do, and they know what I used to do. I let them know if I could do it, they can do it,” he said.

If only his brother could see it, too.

Taylor waited a few more minutes, but there was one more stop to make, maybe the most important of the night, and he didn’t want to be late.

'Something to look forward to'

There would be no junkies waiting for the truck here. No gaunt faces with downcast expressions. There would be only a sudden rush of little children visibly excited to get their daily visit from the food truck. And there would be one young man who’d made himself an example for all of them.

“You ought to see the look on their faces when they get those bags,” Taylor said of the kids. “It’s like Christmas. That makes my day, the looks on those faces.”

The truck was pulling into the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, established in 1942 by the federal government as housing for blacks in a city where they had few options. The neighborhood, nearly all-white at the time, erupted into protests that required the presence of hundreds of police officers, led to dozens of injuries and ended with hundreds of arrests. It eventually took 1,110 police officers and 1,600 National Guardsmen on duty to allow the first six black families to finally move in.

There’s no white neighborhood surrounding it now. The census says it’s 95% black. This is the Krainz Woods neighborhood. Forty-two percent poverty rate. Thirty-five percent unemployment rate. Forty-five percent outside the labor force. Forty-five percent of residents on food stamps.

It was the last stop of the route, one that’s both uplifting and heartbreaking for the men in the truck. For whatever reason, the only people who come to the truck are dozens of children. It could just be custom for parents to send the kids, Taylor speculated, or it could be the parents aren’t home yet. But day after day, they rarely see an adult come up for food.

And Lunchables are like gold out here.

This is Taylor’s favorite stop. After a day of helping troubled adults, the children are a welcome delight. Despite their situations and their surroundings, they’re still innocent, still joyful, still trusting. A lot of little kids don’t yet know they’re poor, because everyone else around them is, too. The stigma of poverty hasn’t yet dampened their natural spirit.

“Can I have two Lunchables?” a little boy asked excitedly.

Taylor became fake stern. He loves to play around with the kids. “For who, man? Why you need two?”

“‘Cause I want two?” replied the boy, who was maybe about 8. Taylor burst into a smile. “Oh, you want two for yourself, one for later? My man! Since you’re an honest man, here you go," he said. "You know who Abraham Lincoln was? He was honest, too.”

Taylor gave the boy two Lunchables: “That’s for you and Honest Abe.”

“Can I get two for my cousin?” asked a little girl, who was maybe 9 or so. Taylor pretended to test her. “What’s your cousin’s name?”

“Her name Mikayla,” replied the girl.

“You got a driver’s license, birth certificate and proof of insurance?” he asked. She chuckled. He gave her two. Before they left, 59 kids would get food from the truck.

Plus one more person.

Towering above the sea of giggling children was a tall teenager wearing a crisp, green military uniform and a serious expression on his face. “Two, please,” he said politely.

Myles Green is 15, a resident of the housing project and a member of the JROTC, a high-school officer training program for the U.S. Armed Forces. Its goal is to instill discipline, pride, self-reliance, citizenship and leadership skills. In both appearance and attitude, Green is out of place here, among the cars screeching in and out of the lot, and the two women screaming obscenities at each other nearby, and the big man banging loudly on a door that some occupant wouldn’t open for him.

“Yeah, I do get some of the comments like, ‘What’s with the suit?’” he said. “I don’t let that kind of stuff get to me because this uniform actually gets me lots of compliments and recognition. I’m not really looking for that, but as far as the negative comments, I don’t really care. I honestly don’t.”

He comes to the truck for food sometimes because his mom works late, and he’s not much of a cook. He took one meal for himself and one for his little sister, and headed back to his apartment at the edge of the projects, followed by a small group of admiring little kids, drawn to the sharpness of his uniform, the formality of his walk, the maturity of his demeanor.

By any measure, he’s a good kid. He attends Cass Technical High School, long one of the best in the city. He stays out of trouble in the neighborhood. He cleans up the grounds of the housing project without being asked.

“I don’t like to boast or brag, but I do try to make a difference in the community,” he said, sitting on a sofa in his living room. “So in the summer, I’ll have my little friends, we go around the community and clean up. And my mom and I and my sister have a store that we run out of the house — sell candy, chips and juice and whatnot. Just give the community something to look forward to.”

His mom walked in the door, home from her job. Quelyn Calhoun, 34, works full-time as a medical assistant at a hospital in the suburbs. All the while, she has never had childcare, nor baby-sitters, and so by 7 years old, Myles had a cell phone and a key to the house to get inside on his own after he got out of school and his mom was still at work.

She beams with pride at her son. “He’s everything a mother could ever pray for, honest to God,” she said. “He’s never given me issues, from birth.”

When he went to his orientation at Cass Tech, he wore a suit. The teachers and administrators swarmed him to offer praise for his initiative in dressing so formally. They didn’t know he had to buy the outfit used.

“They cost an arm and a leg,” his mom said. “We tried to buy them brand-new, so he said, ‘Mom, I need some new blazers,' and we went to the Goodwill.”

But being different carries a price. “I’ve witnessed it,” she said. “He’s had issues in school ‘cause he’s always been this guy. He’s been bullied, and he was being bullied for a while, and I didn’t even know. The teacher hadn’t told me, and it was like he had … gotten to his wit’s end, and I could see it coming out of him emotionally. Those challenges come, but you know there’s a sacrifice in everything you do, and that’s just his sacrifice.”

He hasn’t let it affect him. He wants to be an architect and hopes to be successful enough to move his family somewhere better than the projects, maybe even out of Detroit, if necessary. But he’d be back.

“I like the city,” he said. “If I do move out of the city, I’m still gonna come back and help to make improvements to the city. I’m not just going to just up and leave and forget about Detroit. That’s not what I’m going to do, ‘cause I was born and raised here, and there’s a certain commitment that I have to my city.”

His mom shares that loyalty.

“It would be convenient for me to find me a nice, quiet home across 8 Mile, somewhere where I ain’t gotta worry about the hoodlums, you know? I’m not. I’m a warrior. If I gotta fight through it and for it, I’ll do that.”

Their home was immaculate. A set of reference books, including a dictionary, thesaurus, grammar guide and famous quotations, stood in a case on the TV stand. A dry-erase board on the wall noted upcoming events like a parent-teacher conference, a doctor's appointment and Bible class. Another said, “God is doing great things!” in blue marker. Another one in the kitchen noted: “If you use it, you wash it. Simple! If you spill it, you clean it or wipe it up!” Everything signaled the family’s determination to rise above their surroundings, like flowers in a weed patch. But it’s not easy.

“There are challenges,” Calhoun said. “You can survive in a place like this, but you’re gonna have to fight for it to be different. You’re gonna have to fight for it to keep just your peace.”

Life in the shadows

Eight hours after they’d begun, the long day was over. They headed back to the Harbor Light center, where Smith and Taylor cleaned the inside of the truck for the next day’s shift. Their clipboard said they’d served 340 people that day, but that was probably far short of the true total.

When he was finished, Taylor got in his car and headed to his home on Detroit’s west side. He planned to take a shower. He would make himself some dinner, after a long day of feeding others while he ate little more than snacks. He’d put the news on TV, and maybe play solitaire on his new tablet while he waited for his wife to come home from Bible study. Then he’d go to sleep early and wake up before the sun did, with a clear head and a clear purpose. It was something he savored every single morning, something he was grateful for every single day.

“It feels great,” he said. “It feels great to have a new life, to have a job, to help people, to do positive things. It’s a blessing to have the job, and I believe God called me to this position to help others. I actually know where they’re coming from. I understand them. I try to give them a word of encouragement. Most of them know I’ve been there. I think it gives them hope.”

A few nights later, Smith was working the east-side route alone. Taylor was on another truck, on another route. Toward the end of the day, Smith pulled up to Zender Place right on time, as usual. About a dozen street people made their way to the truck window for their food. One was a glassy-eyed woman apparently so high on drugs she could barely speak. She made futile gestures with her hands and paced manically as she tried to express her agitation. Everyone made their way around her as they went up for their meals.

A grizzled man emerged from the shadows. He came down the sidewalk, took the woman gently by the arm and whispered soothingly in her ear. It calmed her down, and she stood with him.

The man was Darnell Taylor, the long-lost brother of Gregory Taylor, the driver of the Salvation Army truck. And Greg wasn’t there to see him.

“I know everybody around here,” said the 63-year-old, explaining his ability to comfort her. “I’m their friend.” His cloudy eyes were bloodshot. His voice was dry and raspy. But he had a presence among the others.

“They know what I used to do. I was a minister. I made the front page when Malice Green got killed, when I kept peace in the city," he said, still clinging to his triumphant past.

He admitted his success back then led to partying, but tragedy brought him down. “My wife got breast cancer and died, my two children were murdered, and I got out here on the streets," he said. "I couldn’t deal with it.”

He took a meal from Smith, handed it to the woman at his side, and then took one for himself.

“I gotta get my life back together,” he acknowledged. “First step is to get myself into treatment, make up my mind to do the right thing.”

The crowd had been fed and began to scatter. Darnell Taylor stood on the cold sidewalk for a moment, a preacher without a parish among his flock of fallen souls. Then he turned and walked off into the shadows of the twilight until, like the others around him, he became invisible again.

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

For more information on the Salvation Army's Bed and Bread program, go to salmich.org/emi/bedandbread or call 313-361-6136.