HOMELESS
Ann S. Brown c 2025
Was he homeless or was every barn he slept in his home? Nobody knew who he was or where he came from. He didn’t talk, but seemed to understand what was said. Was he lost? Had he been injured or displaced during the Civil War? He walked the dirt roads in Northwestern Ashe County, NC and parts of Grayson County, VA. He carried all of his belongings in a sack and slept in barns along the way.
Farm owners gave the homeless man food, work and a place to sleep. He did small chores for his keep. He cleaned out stalls in the barn. He also chopped wood for the cook stove and carried it into the kitchen. But if the work got too hard, he went on his way. There was plenty of food on the farm and big meals were cooked every morning and evening. He ate on the back porch if the weather was nice and in the kitchen if the weather was too cold. Some folks gave the homeless man clothes they no longer needed. He would wash up a little bit and shave at the water table on the back porch before putting on his “new” clothes. The water table was a small wooden table that held a bucket of water and a dipper for drinking. It also held a wash pan and soap for washing your hands and face. A towel and a mirror hung on the wall. In the winter time the water table was moved into the kitchen.
A group of teenage boys that hung around the general store began picking at the homeless man. They named him Billy and made goat noises at him. Then the boys laughed and laughed and Billy laughed, too. He seemed to be a good natured man. Another time those boys gave Billy pieces of paper and told him that those papers were important and that he should keep them. Billy was very proud of them. He could not read and just had to take their word for it. As you can see in the photograph above he kept them all in his pockets. It seemed to me that the joke may have been on those boys. They should have kept some of those papers for themselves. Billy had a ready made supply of toilet paper as he traveled the dirt roads from farm to farm. Toilet paper, as we know it, was not available in the country stores back then. Most farms had an outhouse with a Sears & Roebuck catalog at hand. In the wintertime it would get so cold in there you could not enjoy looking at the pictures.
Imagine Billy, the homeless man, as he settled down in the soft hay of a barn loft to spend the night. He could have heard the gentle sounds of the horses and cattle in their stalls below. He could have heard the hoot owls calling each other on the ridges. Cooing from the pigeons nesting under the eaves was almost like a sweet lullaby. “Sweet Dreams, Billy, Sweet Peace to You.”
It is not known what happened to the homeless man. I hope some kindhearted folks took him in and cared for him when Billy was no longer able to walk the dirt roads from farm to farm and do small chores to pay for his keep. His story is only remembered through this photograph and the oral history of our area. Please be kind to people who are homeless or different. We do not know the roads they have traveled or the trouble they have seen.