Same Kind Of Different As Me

Ron Hall’s story begins with an “inglorious” moment in 1952 when, as an elementary school student in Fort Worth, he is punished by his teacher for accidently giving her a urine sample meant for public health workers. He thinks of this episode in 1978 as a way of showing how far he’s come in life while boarding a private jet carrying artwork he’s selling in New York.

As a top art broker, Ron has gone from making $450 a month selling Campbell’s Soup to “the rarified atmosphere that oxygenates the lifestyles of the Forbes 400” (8), financing his first art sale by surreptitiously selling stock his wife received as a college graduation present. Deborah, though, is less enamored with this lifestyle, which includes yachting in the Caribbean and closets full of Armani suits. For example, when Ron trades a painting for a $160,000 Rolls-Royce convertible, she tells him he is no rock star and to leave it on the showroom floor.

As the private jet leaves Fort Worth, he looks down at a city about to be transformed by local billionaires from “a sleepy cow-town into an urban epicenter with a pulse” (7). Part of this transformation includes moving the city’s homeless population out of downtown, something he’s glad to see happen as he’s tired of their panhandling and periodic appearances at his art gallery. He characterizes them as “a ragtag army of ants bent on ruining decent people’s picnics” (10).

Denver describes growing up in Louisiana in the 1940s and how he lived with his grandparents Big Mama and PawPaw because his mother couldn’t take care of him, and his father BB was barely ever around. He also explains the sharecropping system, in which he and all his relatives worked. While slavery had officially ended after the Civil War, in the nineteenth century, the sharecropping system allowed white landowners to retain control over the land and the people who worked it. Black sharecroppers lived and worked on land belonging to white plantation owners while shopping at plantation-owned stores. The “share” of crops earned by sharecroppers after harvest was always calculated by (and to the benefit of) the plantation owners, which left sharecroppers perpetually in debt and with little to no chance to improve their lives. As Denver says, “An ought’s an ought, and a figger’s a figger, all for the white man, and none for the nigger” (12).

Denver then describes the first tragedy in his life, which occurs when he was five or six: the death of Big Mama, his grandmother and best friend. One night, Denver’s cat wakes him up because the house is on fire. After he and his brother make it outside, Denver realizes Big Mama is still inside and goes back to save her. However, he can’t wake her up and is forced to escape the house again. Once the roof caves in on her from the fire, Big Mama wakes up screaming, “Lord Jesus, save me!” (17) over and over while Denver and his brother watch and listen to her being burned alive.

Ron describes growing up in Haltom City, a lower-middle-class section of Fort Worth, with an alcoholic father he regularly had to bring home from the Tailless Monkey Lounge; a resourceful mother; and his brother, John. Most summers were spent at his grandparent’s cotton farm in Corsicana, seventy-five miles southeast of Fort Worth. While helping on the farm, he and his brother periodically find themselves in trouble for throwing rocks at cars and painting his grandfather’s chicken coop blue.

It’s here Ron is unknowingly introduced to the racial divisions of the time: “In the 1950s, the Southern social order was as plain to the eye as charcoal in a snowbank. But from the perspective of a small fair-skinned boy, it was about as much a topic for considered thought as breathing in and out” (22). White families live in neat rows of houses or on farms while black families are clustered near the Corsicana cotton gin and cattle pens in “Nigger Town” (22). Ron, like all whites, addresses black men by the same first name—“Nigger”—such as “Nigger Bill” and “Nigger Moses” (12). Still, working on his grandfather’s farm with black field hands, he grows to like them, and one night when he’s a teenager sneaks out to go to a juke joint with them, wherehe drinks his first beer. He’s mesmerized by what he sees there, but doesn’t drink the Pabst Blue Ribbon as its smell reminds him of having to bring his father home from Haltom City bars.

After Big Mama’s death, Denver and his brother go to live with their father, BB. He is a ladies’ man, and on Sundays drives the three of them to church but parks outside a window so they can listen to the sermon—which is always about sin—because it’s too awkward for BB to go inside. After a few weeks, though, BB is stabbed to death, most likely by a jealous husband, and the two brothers go to live with their Uncle James and Aunt Etha.

His aunt and uncle are sharecroppers, and Denver details more about this kind of life. No matter how little or how much cotton they produce each year, they are always still beholden to “the Man.” Uncle James does his best to raise the boys under the theory that “The heart of a child is fulla foolishness […] But the rod of correction will sure ‘nough drive it out” (33). It’s a hardscrabble existence comprised of farming, hunting, moonshining, home cures for any illness—“All good medicine tastes bad!” Aunt Etha says (34)—and a liberal dose of Christian religion. 

In 1963, Ron begins college at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas, but is unimpressed by the farm girls enrolled there. He and his friend Scoot Cheney are told the girls at Texas Christian University (TCU), ninety miles to the east, in Fort Worth, are rich and look like they just stepped out of a Sears catalog. They wrangle a blind date with two TCU sorority girls to attend a football game on campus. Ron knows, though, he needs to upgrade his clothes—his mom made them out of feed sacks—because the men at college wear khaki shorts and madras shirts.

On the way to their blind date, Ron picks up his new shorts and shirt, which his mother made out of plaid fabric. Upon seeing this outfit combined with knee-high black socks and lace-up brogan shoes, Scoot’s Tri-Delt date squeals in horror for everyone within fifty yards of the sorority house to hear. They walk to the football stadium for the game, but to this day, all Ron remembers is “feeling as if Bozo the clown had died and I’d inherited his clothes” (37).

One summer when Denver is seven or eight, he makes friends with Bobby, the plantation owner’s nephew who is around the same age as Denver. He and Denver play together, shoot BB guns, and go swimming. Bobby’s family even puts a wooden table in the backyard so the two of them can eat dinner together.

More than anything, Denver wants a “real” bicycle like Bobby’s as opposed to building ones out of junk. The plantation owner tells Denver he can pick scrap cotton until he earns enough for a bike. Bobby helps him and even steals already-picked cotton to contribute. Finally, after three years, the Man comes to Denver’s aunt and uncle’s house to tell Denver he’s finally earned his bike: a red and white Schwinn with a squeeze horn. Denver says, “That Schwinn was the first new thing I ever had. I was eleven years old” (41).

On November 22, 1963, Ron—now properly attired in a real madras shirt, khaki pants, and Weejuns—and three friends head to Fort Worth for a second date with the sorority girls. They drive through downtown Dallas on the way and become trapped in traffic due to President Kennedy’s motorcade. Shortly thereafter, and not realizing Kennedy has been shot, they follow his limousine up onto the highway. After hearing news of what happened on the radio, they follow the car to Parkland Hospital. They park next to the now-empty limo until a police officer tells them to move along. Ron realizes they are some the last people to see Kennedy alive. 

Every Sunday, a field hand drives a mule-driven wagon to pick up the black sharecroppers for church. Every plantation has its own church, and Denver’s family goes to the New Glory of Zion Baptist Church, a dilapidated building in the middle of a field. For months at a time, Brother Eustis Brown, a field hand, preaches the same sermon, usually about the dangers of lust.

When Denver is twelve, he is baptized at the same swimming hole he and Bobby use. When Brother Brown dunks Denver in the river, he loses his grip on him, and Denver floats downstream underwater for a while until finally coming up for air. This scares everyone so much he’s given two pieces of his aunt’s blackberry cobbler. 

When Denver is thirteen or fourteen years old, his uncle dies and his aunt moves away. His brother goes to stay with their father’s relatives while Denver moves to another plantation to live with his sister, Hershalee. He wishes he had a friend like Bobby at the new plantation, but the new Man only has a couple of daughters, which Denver knows are out of bounds for him.

Denver tells a story about an incident in South Carolina. White and black children had to cross a river at the same spot each day to get to their respective, segregated schools. One day, the white kids decide this isn’t right, and throw rocks and sticks at the black kids until they are forced to wade through the river and go to school drenched with water. Denver says he felt sorry for the kids because “I know what it’s like to get beat down for bein born with different-colored skin. And I know what it’s like to walk around with my eyes down low to keep it from happening again” (48).

Keeping his eyes down is what happens to Denver after helping the white woman change her tire as discussed in the first chapter. The three white boys on horses lasso him around the neck and drag him down the road until Bobby and his aunt happen to drive by and stop them. Denver spends a week at his aunt’s house recovering enough to be able to put on pants and a shirt. The effects of this go beyond his physical wounds. As Denver says, “Lookin back, I figure what them boys did done caused me to get a little throwed off in life. And for sure I wadn’t gon’ be offerin to help no white ladies no more” (50).  

Ron meets his future wife, Deborah, at TCU after he transfers there as a sophomore. She belongs to a sorority but is different from the girls he’s used to dating: bookish and independent, although still pretty. Deborah grew up in the West Texas town of Snyder and came to TCU on an academic scholarship. She and Ron date intermittently, mainly during those times when she’d broken up with her regular boyfriend, and they hadn’t yet gotten back together. However, Ron doesn’t hold this against her as they are more like good friends than a romantic couple.

During his senior year, Ron is drafted into the army. Instead of going to Vietnam, however, he is stationed at a nuclear weapons facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He and Deborah exchange letters for the two years he’s there, and after returning to Texas, he works as a Campbell’s Soup salesman while finishing his degree. They begin dating in earnest, marrying in October 1969, and go on to have a daughter, Regan, born in 1973, and a son, Carson, three years later. After earning his MBA, Ron works full time as an investment banker in Fort Worth and sells paintings on the side, although this latter endeavor interests him the most. 

By 1975 Ron is earning twice as much from selling paintings as from banking and wants to strike out on his own to do it full time. His chance comes when he has the opportunity to buy The Signal, a work by the noted Western painter Charles Russell. He has ninety days to pay for it which gives him a chance to quickly resell it for a profit. Time slips away with no buyers, so on a whim he flies to California to visit art galleries in Beverly Hills andlook for leads. He meets a local collector, Barney Goldberg (aka Snookums), who sells the painting for Ron just as it’s time for him to pay for the painting. With this one sale, Ron makes a profit equal to his salary for the year. He quickly sets up a new deal with Goldberg and within a few weeks has quit his job at the bank. 

As newlyweds, Ron and Deborah are “typical” Christians who attend their Methodist church on (most) Sundays as well as Easter and Christmas. In 1973, however, Patt and Dan McCoy invite them to join nineteen other couples at their house for a weekly Sunday night “discussion group” about life. The couples are divided into two groups: half have been “saved” (born again) and half have not. The Halls are in the latter group.

At the first meeting, Deborah is offended to be asked if she’s a Christian—“I was born a Christian,” she replies (60)—and as for being saved, says, “My daddy paved the parking lot at the Snyder Methodist Church, and that’s good enough for me!” (60). As the weeks go by, though, Ron decides to pray the sinner’s prayer and accept Jesus. Deborah is still not convinced. For her, it seems too easy. Eventually she is swayed by the arguments of Christian writers such as C.S. Lewis and Josh McDowell. After this experience, Ron tries to “save” many of their friends without much success. Later in life, he deletes the term “unsaved” from his vocabulary as he realizes he cannot see into anyone’s heart, and instead, he sticks to telling “the jagged tale” (61) of his own journey to a better life through Christ. 

By the mid-1960s, when he’s in his late twenties, Denver discovers that thanks to modern farming equipment, the sharecropping life he is used to is vanishing. Plantations which used to be worked by twenty black families eventually only need three or four. The Man lets Denver have a two-room shack and one hog a year in exchange for working three hundred acres. He is never paid other than—maybe half a dozen times—being slipped a few dollars here and there.

Living in rural Louisiana with no phone, radio, or TV, and without being able to read, Denver is completely cut off from the world. He doesn’t know about World War II or the Korean War or even Vietnam. He doesn’t know there are black schools where he could get an education or anything about the Civil Rights Movement. Denver does know the Man’s house has electricity while he is still using a coal-oil lamp. He becomes discouraged and feels like he is of no use to anybody. Finally, when he’s in his late twenties and learns his brother is making good money in California, he hops on a freight train to find a new life. 

During the 1970s and ’80s, Ron achieves great financial success as an art dealer. The Halls live in a million-dollar Dallas home painted to match the color of Ron’s Jaguar convertible parked in the driveway. He has a closetful of Armani suits and regularly visits New York, Europe, and Asia in the pursuit of more material success. Meanwhile, Deborah focuses on her spiritual development and being “plugged into God” (66). As a teenager, Regan wears clothes fromSalvation Army and wants to be a freedom fighter in South Africa. Carson’s heart is turned toward God and he is almost always a model child.

By 1988, however, Ron and Deborah have spent several years growing apart. Then, because Ron didn’t follow a cardinal rule of the evangelist Billy Graham—“Never allow yourself to be alone with a woman who is not your wife” (67)—Ron has a brief affair with a Beverly Hills painter who wants him to help her career. After some prodding from his friends, Ron confesses the affair to his wife, telling Deborah it was her disinterest in him that drove him to another woman. Despite this remark—and Deborah subsequently hurling a variety of objects at him—they decide to work on their marriage after meeting with their pastor. Deborah calls the woman Ron had the affair with to say as long as she is the best wife Ron could ever want, she should not be hearing from Ron again. Deborah then tells Ron, “You and I are now going to rewrite the future history of our marriage” (69).

After leaving Louisiana, Denver moves around from place to place: Dallas, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and then back to Fort Worth. Fort Worth is known as a “hobo heaven” because there are many different groups who feed the homeless and provide them with a place to sleep.

To make money, Denver would do the “hamburger drop”: buy a hamburger, take a few bites, put it in a trashcan, and then pull it out and start eating when someone walked by. Most people would be so horrified they’d give him money. At the end of the day, he could usually afford a real meal and a pint of Jim Beam bourbon, “anti-freeze for the homeless” (71). To stay clean, Denver and a partner would pretend to be tourists at the Fort Worth Water Gardens. They’d push each other in the water like they were joking around and then quickly bathe. Denver says, “We’d laugh and laugh while we was in that water, but it wadn’t no fun. We was like animals livin in the woods, just tryin to survive” (72).

Over the years, Denver periodically makes money as a day laborer. However, no matter how steady the work is, the most he earns is twenty dollars a day, never enough to get ahead. “What you gon’ do with $20 ’cept buy yourself somethin to eat and maybe a six-pack a’ somthin to help you forget you gon’ sleep in a cardboard box again that night?” (73). Not everyone, he says, becomes homeless because of alcohol or drugs, but most people do abuse them when they are homeless to numb the reality of their situation. 

One key to Ron and Deborah rebuilding their marriage is buying a 350-acre ranch, Rocky Top, overlooking the Brazos River west of Fort Worth. On weekends and holidays, this allows them to leave behind the pressures of city life and be a family with their children. Ron also begins to travel less and focus more on spiritual matters. In addition, to escape the social demands of Dallas, the Halls move back to Fort Worth.

Upon returning to Fort Worth, Deborah begins volunteering at the Union Gospel Mission, located in a rough part of town, to help the homeless. Ron agrees to go with her but secretly hopes once she sees the kinds of people there she’ll decide to stick to donating old clothes or making generous monetary donations. However, this turns out not to be the case.  

There is a code of conduct among hobos: you share what you with everyone else, be it food, drugs, or alcohol. For Denver, this extends to a friend who, despite living on the streets, has a car he can periodically sleep in. Over time, however, life on the streets makes him both more violent—he buys a gun—and isolated: “You get a spirit in you, a spirit makes you feel like nobody in the world cares nothin about you. Don’t matter if you live or die. People with that spirit get mean, dangerous. They play by the rules of the jungle” (77).

One night in 1968, some black youths from the nearby projects try to rob Denver, but he scares them away by acting crazy. As they flee back home, he chases them down in his friend’s car. He drives it over a pile of dirt, jumping into the middle of the projects, and continues screaming and yelling. Even though he eventually drives away, he knows he needs to leave Fort Worth until things calm down.

Denver goes to Shreveport, Louisiana, where a failed attempt to rob a city bus lands him in Angola prison for ten years. At this time, it was one of the worst prisons in the United States, and Denver works crops in the field during the day and sleeps with a knife under his pillow at night. After being released, he’s too embarrassed to live with Hershalee andgoes back to Fort Worth. He spends years sleeping in the doorway of the United Way until downtown revitalization forces him to the east side of town and the Union Gospel Mission. It takes a while for him to accept a bed inside to sleep on because after twenty years of sleeping outside, that’s what he’s used to.