Why on Earth, Darrell L. Jackson’s fellow clergy wanted to know, was a rising young minister getting himself and his Liberty Baptist church mixed up with AIDS? Black churches were stretched thin already. It was foolish to take on something cloaked in such stigma and sin.
The way Jackson read his Bible, the answer was as clear as gospel: There is a plague in our house. The people are perishing.
“You can’t just pray for folks,” he says. “What do you do when you get up off your knees?”
He did not have to pray on it for long before saying yes to the health and housing activists who asked him to put the prestige of his pulpit behind their vision and hard work to turn an abandoned building into a new apartment house for homeless families and individuals battling AIDS and the virus, HIV, that causes it.
Seven years ago, the first tenants of Vision House walked through the front door, past a sign quoting Proverbs–“Where there is no vision, the people perish”–and into their new homes. Since then, the rate of HIV infection has only climbed in the African-American community, and Vision House, like the people who live there, is struggling to survive.
Black churches have been slow to respond to the staggering rates of HIV and AIDS infection among African-Americans, and Jackson is in the vanguard of a movement to change that. He hopes Vision House will encourage other congregations to confront the problem.
“When I started this movement 15 years ago, nobody was talking about HIV in the black church,” says Pernessa C. Seele, founder of The Balm in Gilead, a New York City-based group that organizes AIDS ministries and other programs in churches around the country, including a week of prayer. The black church, she says, was not educated about AIDS, and it seemed to be someone else’s problem: that of white gay men. “We were just thankful it wasn’t us,” she says. n These days, she says, “you can’t find too many African-Americans who have not been impacted by HIV and AIDS in some way.” n There are more than 1,000 new HIV cases a year in Chicago, says Mark Ishaug, executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. HIV infection is an early stage of the disease, which is not considered to be AIDS until certain opportunistic diseases, such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii, appear. African Americans, who account for about 36 percent of the city’s population, represent 64 percent of the recently diagnosed HIV cases and 66 percent of the recently diagnosed AIDS cases. Nationwide, AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-Americans ages 25 to 44.
While the church has remained largely silent, uncomfortable addressing issues of sex and drug use, there have been exceptions. In Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, has had a nationally renowned AIDS ministry for more than a decade, visiting shut-ins, conducting support groups, educating its members about prevention and treatment. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Operation PUSH have been advocating HIV awareness and testing for some time. Rev. Doris Green has been on a one-woman crusade for years to bring HIV education into Illinois prisons and jails.
As the number of AIDs victims grows, more black churches are responding with similar programs, and Seele hopes this is the dawn of a new movement. “The church response,” she says, “must be as intense as it was to segregation.” In March, The Balm in Gilead and thousands of churches around the country will take part in the 15th annual Black Church Week of Prayer for the healing of AIDS.
“We aren’t where we want to be yet,” Seele says, “but thank God we aren’t where we used to be.”
At least one member of a family must be infected with the virus in order to get a lease and a key to an apartment in the four-story, 25-unit Vision House, which sits on a quiet, one-way South Side street, a few blocks from Liberty Baptist. There is always a long waiting list.
Among the 53 people–22 of them children–who live there are gays and straights, people who go to work every day, and a man who rarely leaves his apartment. There are married couples, single parents and a single woman turned single mother to her three younger sisters, orphaned by AIDS. There are jealousies and gossip, celebrations and farewells, newborns and love affairs.
Eric Evans, 51, wants to marry the woman upstairs. She’s HIV positive and so is he. He’s trying to get enough money together for a ring. He smiles and says maybe his adult daughter, who shares his Vision House apartment, will be the maid of honor and her new baby son the best man.
“This is the first place I’ve had of my own in a long time,” he says. “It’s like a foundation for the rest of my life. I don’t have to explain my HIV. We’re all going through the same thing.”
About half of the residents carry the virus in their bloodstream. The rest are uninfected children, siblings and spouses, who carry the virus in their broken hearts.
There is a white woman who just moved in and the sad memory of another who died not long ago. Everyone else is African-American, which says more about Chicago’s segregated past and present than it does about Vision House, which is open to anyone who is homeless and “HIV-impacted.”
Tenants pay 30 percent of whatever money they have, typically a disability check from the federal government. Some people eventually leave Vision House for bigger apartments or a house of their own–or a grave.
Besides a place to stay, Vision House also provides drug counseling, support groups and mental-health services on site. If someone tests positive on a random drug test–a result called a “dirty drop”–they are not cast out. They are sent for treatment and given a second and third chance.
About 40 percent of the original tenants still live there, including Vaughn Upchurch, a Vietnam War veteran turned AIDS activist, and Martha Brown, a grandmother and AIDS widow. Willie Jordan hasn’t lived there as long–about five years–but he never wants to leave. “It’s safe. It’s clean,” he says. “This is where I want to grow old.”
Virginia Dumas moved in a year ago with her 10-year-old daughter, but she wants to move out as soon as she can, “so other people in my prior shoes can take up the space I had,” she says. “Vision House gives you a chance to start over. I just want to pass that chance on to the next person.”
There is a sense of heaviness in the hallways. Dignity in the face of death can weigh a ton. The staff urges the tenants to make “permanency plans,” outlining who will care for their children when they have gone to the hospital or gone from this world. A 42-year-old mother of five has taken the advice to heart. She keeps two white “home-going” dresses hanging in her closet, along with the shoes and the earrings. Her children won’t have to do anything, she says, “but say goodbye.”
In one six-month period last year, three tenants died–one neighbor lost every eight weeks. At such times of sorrow, dirty drops go up. Tempers get shorter. People get scarce, retreating into their apartments. Eventually, they gather in the conference room on the first floor. That’s where the memorials are held. One resident calls them “conference-room funerals.”
Wanda Hawes is the program director. Not long ago her sister lay dying of cancer. Hawes had always understood the tenants’ pain; now she felt it in her bones. The tenants reached out to comfort her. She was one of them. When her sister died, several tenants attended the funeral.
“I’ve grown working here,” says Hawes. “I’ve learned grace and humility. They make me a better person.”
Vision House, which is run day-to-day by a non-profit organization called Vision House Inc., was created through a partnership of the Interfaith Housing Development Corporation of Chicago, Provident Hospital, Cook County Hospital and Liberty Baptist. The building once was the living quarters for nurses at the old Provident Hospital. Then it was a methadone clinic. After that, the pigeons and ghosts took over, and it stood abandoned for years. Interfaith Housing purchased the building in the mid-1990s for $243,000, using federal grant money and spent $2.7 million renovating it.
Meanwhile, Interfaith began looking for a local partner. Someone who could get invited into the living rooms and kitchens of the neighborhood, someone to stand up in front of the block club meetings and convince the fearful that the vision for the old nurse’s nest was righteous. That partner was Darrell L. Jackson, the new pastor of Liberty Baptist Church.
Jackson, 51, is the third generation of his family to pastor the flock of Liberty Baptist over the last 80 years. His grandfather, D.Z. Jackson, was pastor from 1925 to 1950, a period when tens of thousands of Southern blacks migrated to Chicago looking for the Promised Land and instead found themselves adrift in a wilderness of segregation and racism.
His father, A.P. Jackson, was pastor for more than four decades. During the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from Liberty’s pulpit and made it his “home church” in Chicago. In 1968, nearly two dozen buses left from Liberty for the Poor People’s campaign in Washington, “We Shall Overcome” pouring out of the windows of the caravan.
“My father always used to say that the church had to justify its existence,” Jackson recalls.
Between 20 and 25 members of Liberty Baptist have died of AIDS-related illnesses in the past two decades, including, Jackson says, “a good friend who I grew up with. . . . I had to do his eulogy.”
So he was ready to take up the challenge of making Vision House acceptable to the neighborhood. “When you talk about a church stepping forward,” says Gladys Jordan, president of Interfaith and the co-chair of the Vision House board, “Pastor Jackson really did. Supportive housing is not easy; there was a lot of resistance. Nobody wants poor people living next door. This population had an even bigger stigma.”
Vision House’s leaders have plenty of faith but are chronically short of funds. Two years ago there were 16 to 20 people on staff, says Hawes, the program director. Now there are 13 and everyone has to wear several hats. There have been five executive directors in six years, and programs have suffered. “If Vision House doesn’t find some more money,” she says, “I’m fearful the doors will have to close in a year or two.”
To keep that from happening, Vision House’s current executive director, Tyrone Marshall, says the board will be more aggressive in seeking private donations. The nearly $1 million budget is a mixture of federal, state and local money. Almost none of it comes from the private sector. Liberty Baptist will begin taking a special offering for Vision House once a month during Sunday services. And sometime in the spring, the board plans to open a new building directly behind Vision House for a day-care center for 60 children with HIV. It will be called Children’s Place at Vision House.
Jackson, who has been chairman of the board from the beginning, says he has faith everything will work out. It has so far, with a lot of what he calls “magical juggling.”
“People come to Vision House with nothing,” he says. “They want to feel they’re worth something. Everybody does. Our facility builds that self-esteem back up.”
Everything inside his big body was shutting down. His kidneys. His liver. His will.
At age 52, Donald Bright was dying.
He knew it, and so did his wife, Martha Brown, 50. They were like one person: When he took a breath, she exhaled. When he slept, she dreamed. They had been together 28 years and the last few had been some of their best, despite the pills and the pain and the HIV they battled together and alone.
When they came to Vision House from a cramped apartment they shared with another family, Bright and Brown finally had a place of their own, a place where their grandchildren could come and play on the wall-to-wall carpet or raid the new refrigerator humming in the kitchen. They could store their medicine and still find it in the morning and have neighbors over for coffee. Or they could stay inside all winter, just the two of them, until the howling wind had slipped into a warming whisper.
“A place like this,” Brown says, “gives people hope.”
Their Vision House apartment was a small two-bedroom, safe and clean, the kind of place most Americans would take for granted. To Martha Brown it felt like “a baby mansion.”
But last spring, when the end was near, she asked her husband to leave their home and drive himself to the hospital. It was the hardest thing she had ever asked him to do. “I wanted Donald’s spirit in my home,” she says. “Not his death.”
Bright found out about Vision House through the Veterans Administration Hospital where he attended a men’s support group for other old warriors fighting the enemy of HIV and AIDS. He had served eight years in the Air Force. His wife called him Sarge.
Folks in the street call HIV and AIDS “the package.” Brown found out she had it in 1986 when she had open-heart surgery. Bright was tested, and he too was positive. “We don’t know who gave it to who,” Brown says. “We never cared. We just got it, and we had to live with it.”
After Brown’s diagnosis, her mother had a plate and a glass set aside just for her daughter’s visits at Sunday dinner. Everything Brown touched, everywhere she sat, her mother would wipe off with a rag or wash away with bleach. Brown felt dirty and dangerous. Some of the youngsters in the neighborhood taunted her daughter, Lynetta: “Your mama got the package.”
“After a while, I found out lots of people have it,” says Lynetta, who is now 33 and works for H & R Block. “It was nothing to be ashamed of.”
Brown says she was in denial for years about her infection. She kept on running the streets, living her life on the edge. She and Bright used heroin and shared needles. Eventually, they kicked drugs. But all that time shooting dope had caught up to them.
Brown goes into her bedroom and comes out with a white canvas bag, the kind you’d take to the beach filled with sandwiches and pop. Bright kept his medicine in it: 17 bottles of pills for diabetes, cancer and pain, pain, pain. “His pillbox used to be running over,” she says. “He used to have to get a tall glass of water to take all his pills.”
Heaven, Brown’s 8-year-old granddaughter, came into the living room. “Go on,” Brown told her. “You don’t want to hear this.” Heaven looked at the bottles and quickly retreated.
“Usually, she puts her fingers in her ears when she hears us talking about her grandfather,” Brown says. “The kids miss him so much.”
Sarge died last year on May 5. The death certificate says he succumbed to respiratory failure and liver cirrhosis. He was buried in a plot in the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Joliet. The sound of taps floated across the headstones, as Brown was presented with the American flag that had draped her husband’s casket. She keeps it in a black plastic trash bag. “When I get the courage,” she says, “I’m going to go to the VA and ask them where I can get a nice case for Don’s flag.”
On a cold January Sunday, Vision House celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday with the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, which has adopted Vision House and made HIV and AIDS prevention and awareness one of their national campaigns.
Brown didn’t feel like going downstairs to the celebration. But in the last few weeks, she had slowly started to rejoin the Vision House community, started to put away her grief as best she could. She was the newly elected tenant president and felt it was her duty to show the Deltas her appreciation.
She sat surrounded by her four grandchildren with the most recent, 9-month-old Jimmy, on her lap. She laughed and applauded as the Deltas and the residents played a black history game. The names of Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes and Harold Washington filled the room.
As the evening came to an end, she stood with everyone else. She put Jimmy on her hip, held Heaven’s hand, lifted her voice and sang with her neighbors with all her heart, “We Shall Overcome.”
Willie Jordan lives in a studio apartment just down the hall from the laundry room on the first floor. He has been there for five years but has never gone upstairs. Curiosity is not going to kill this cat. Ignorance, however, might be the death of him.
Jordan is a 46-year-old gay man who knew almost nothing about HIV before he was diagnosed in 1996. By then the epidemic was at least 15 years old. He and his friends and lovers rarely discussed HIV. “It was hush-hush,” he says.
Few people he knew practiced safe sex. He lived and loved as though there was no such thing as AIDS. It’s not going to happen to me, is what everyone said. Until it did. He doesn’t sound bitter or sad, just matter of fact, fatalistic. “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” he says. “I just have to accept it and live my life.”
Still, he insists he has been “blessed.” Jordan says he has never taken any medication for HIV and has never had a symptom, not even a sniffle, related to the virus. His infection is nearly undetectable. Other residents at Vision House can rattle off their CD4 counts almost fast as they can their date of birth: 280, 354, 33. A healthy count of CD4–the immune-system cell that is destroyed by HIV–is between 500 and 1,500. Anything below 200 is serious trouble, an opportunistic infection or two just waiting to pounce. Jordan isn’t even sure what his count is these days. Last year it was 1,200. “This virus doesn’t bother me,” he says.
Unlike many people he knows, Jordan says his family never shunned him when he told them of his diagnosis. His relatives visit him often and his apartment is dotted with pictures of his nephews and nieces.
He has also been blessed, he says, just to live in Vision House. “It’s a godsend,” he says. “There’s an empty lot across the street. They need to build another one. Today.”
Before he began receiving disability payments last summer, Jordan worked in catering. “I miss work,” he says. Most days, he gets up at 6:30 a.m., surfs the Internet or watches television. He says his troubles don’t seem so bad after a few minutes of Jerry Springer.
Above his bed, there is a copy of the Ten Commandments. On the windowsill he keeps a framed certificate from Vision House. It’s the “Special Spirit Award” for “such a positive attitude.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Vaughn Upchurch says in his hospital room on the eighth floor of Stroger Hospital. “But I don’t want to suffer. I’ve seen the ravages of this disease.”
He’s lying in bed with pneumonia, an oxygen tube attached to his nose and an IV in his arm. Before entering his room, everyone has to don a mask. If you touch anything, a nurse warns: make sure you wash your hands.
“We’re scared of pneumonia,” he says, referring to those with HIV. “It’s a killer.”
Just about any germ or infection right now could kill the 53-year-old Vietnam War veteran. His immune system is shot.
He thought he would have been dead long ago. He was diagnosed HIV positive in 1988, but he has been luckier than a lot of buddies with the virus. He says this is the first time he has battled an opportunistic infection, and he’s badly shaken.
Until now, he was the one who helped people living with HIV. He visited the shut-ins and fed them, one spoonful at a time. He worked at the Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center, the county’s HIV prevention and treatment complex on the West Side. He was the crusader, the activist, who testified before government committees, the peer counselor who told his dying brothers and sisters that they were not alone, not as long as God and Vaughn Upchurch are around.
A few minutes ago, a chaplain from the CORE Center walked into his room, pulled up a chair next to his bed and reminded Upchurch that he was not alone, either.
The doctors sent him home after eight days. He vowed to slow down, to take better care of himself–in other words, to practice what he preaches to others.
“I’ll chew bark off a tree if it will save my life,” he says. “I want to be here for when they find a cure. That’s what keeps me going.”
The other night at Bible study, a woman who just moved into Vision House asked Virginia Dumas how she contracted HIV.
Did a cheating husband bring it home? Was it a dirty needle? The woman said that’s probably how she got it. Out of 15 friends who used to shoot up together in the suburbs, she’s the only one left. The virus took everyone else.
“I’m not sure how I got it,” Dumas said. “I can’t give it back wherever I got it from, so I don’t worry about that.”
Domonic Gangley, a student minister at Liberty dispatched by the pastor to conduct Bible study, cleared his throat. “People will say HIV is a curse from God,” he told the women. “But it’s not. One thing you have to remember is, God loves you regardless.
“Amen,” Dumas said. “Amen.”
Dumas moved into her fourth-floor apartment a year ago. “When we moved in we didn’t have nothing,” she says. “They gave us sheets, blankets, pillows.”
But she did have something of her own: the will to work. She takes a train and a bus every morning to get to her job at a sandwich shop. “Now, I can save some money,” she says. “I’m not planning to be here no 4 or 5 years.”
On Tuesday and Saturday evenings, she bowls in three different leagues. On Thursdays, it’s Bible study.
Yet, at the end of her busy days she has trouble sleeping. She swears she can sometimes feel the virus moving through her. Her hands tingle. Her left leg hurts. In the middle of the night, she often gets up to check on her 10-year-old daughter, Denise, sleeping soundly in the next room. The little girl and God keep her going, she says. That’s about the only thing she’s sure of these days, and that she’s thankful she and her daughter have a place of their own. Not that long ago they were living in a shelter.
She stands in the darkened doorway of the bedroom, listening to her child’s breathing. She returns to her chair in the living room to wait for the dawn.
Dumas is 43 years old. She learned she was HIV positive in 1993, shortly after Denise was born. Dumas was a substance abuser for much of her life, but was clean for more than a year by the time she gave birth. Denise is not infected with the virus.
In November 2001, Dumas was diagnosed with AIDS. She thought about suicide. Then she listened to Denise’s sweet sleeping sounds and put those thoughts away. “You might as well wipe your eyes and put your boxing gloves on,” she told herself, “because this is a fight for life.”
Right now, Dumas isn’t thinking about anything but those pins that have been mocking her all night. She’s with her friends at a Southwest Side bowling alley, and she’s not happy with her performance. Too many pins left standing.
She has her 16-pound purple ball on her hip, and she’s talking to herself, trying to get fired up. “Will the real Virginia Dumas please come out?” she asks, addressing the ball.
She sends her ball spinning down the lane. It’s a perfect strike.
