The Flower Man
Cold winter air fills the overcrowded hallway as shivering people file into the St. Ben’s meal program. Talking softly, they queue up in the long line to the back of the hall where food in industrial size vats is waiting. I stand near the entrance, watching for my friend Samuel. I have brought him a good blanket, and he knows I’m coming.
Like all the guests coming for a meal at St. Ben’s, I extend my hand for a squirt of sanitizer the volunteer by the door offers. I don’t go there as a volunteer, per se. I’m there for a meal and some conversation. I keep going back because, just like it matters to me to be heard, it matters to them.
My attention shifts to a man with a red hand-made paper flower poking out of his pocket. A Green Bay Packers hat is pulled low over his ears, his thick coat seems a size too big.
“That’s beautiful,” I tell him, pointing to the flower. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Yeah, I make these.” He smiles, and a web of small wrinkles crisscross his dark skin. He holds a bulging black garbage bag. “What’s your favorite color?”
I know this is his schtick, that he’ll make me a flower and hit me up for money, and that I’ll most likely give him some, but I can see it’s more than that. I sense this is very real to him. His mission. I tell him my favorite color is teal, then join the food line and watch as he scopes out a spot and places his bag on a chair, asking the men seated there to watch it.
A tall fellow behind me says, “They call him The Flower Man.” He shakes his head, a smile showing so many teeth that he looks like a Zulu warrior. His thick accent fits the part. “Ev’body ‘round here know him.” He’s taking advantage of the cell phone reception, reading messages perhaps, screen glowing.
“Is that right?” I peer around the tall guy as Flower Man steps into the food line a few people back. I call out, “I hear you’re pretty famous around here.” The guys around me chuckle.
Flower Man promptly steps out of line and moves forward, politely asking each person one by one if he can skip them. They nod, gesture, tell him, “Go on.” And he stands beside me.
I chat as we move slowly toward the back of the hall. “I hear everybody knows you because you make those flowers. Are you famous?” I peer at the tall man who might be African. He gives me a tiny wink.
“Yeah, I’m real famous.” Turning to the tall fellow Flower Man says, “Hey brother, can you get on the internet and look up Best of Milwaukee 2017? I’m in there, in the City Life.” *
The tall fellow smiles, doesn’t speak, makes eye contact with me for the briefest second. I know that look. Give me an out. I do. “I don’t get very good reception in here myself,” I offer. The tall guy nods, and goes back to his own cell phone business.
I catch a motion across the room. Samuel waves to me and points at a chair across the table from him. His coat is draped across the back. He’s saving me a seat in the crowded hall. I give him a thumbs up.
Flower Man turns back to me. “You’re so nice. I can see that. I’ma make you one of my flowers.”
“Where’d you learn to make paper flowers?” I ask my new friend.
“In Joliet. I got locked up there for a long time. I was so down I knew I had to do somethin’.” He splays his hand over his heart. “I got changed in there. I found the love of God.” He pats my arm, the very image of sincerity. “I call my flowers HUGS – Humans United for Goodness Sake.”
I genuinely like this slogan. “That would be a great message on a tee shirt,” I remark. “Humans United for Goodness Sake. We could use some more of that in this world.”
He grasps my arm, his raspy voice filled with passion. “I wanted to do some good in my life. I was so down up in Joliet. All I wanted to do was get out of there and kiss my mother’s feet and thank her for all she did for me, for tryin’ to instill the love of God in me.” His smile disappears. “But, she died when I was locked up.”
“You never got to say goodbye to her?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” We inch along toward the serving station.
“And you know, my father got shot in 1962.”
“Was that during the riots?”
“Yeah – in Bronzeville- the black part of town. That’s the first time I got arrested, in the riots, when I was thirteen.” His face screws up into a puzzled expression. “Or was I eleven?”
My mind searches frantically for an appropriate comment. This has rendered me speechless.
“So now I’m out, you know what I do? I spread love. Because that’s what the Lord wants us to do. We got to be good to each other, to be kind.” He lowers his voice to a whisper, eyes bright. “I do this because of the eleventh commandment.”
“What is the eleventh commandment? In your opinion?” I want to know because I’ve heard some pretty interesting new commandments by now.
“It isn’t my opinion.” He steps in closer, points a finger toward the ceiling. “For the Lord said, I give unto you a new commandment. Love one another-”
“As I have loved you,” we finish together. Flower Man smiles and squeezes my arm.
“I knew you was here for a reason.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask. Plenty of homeless people have a deep belief in the mysterious workings of the universe.
“Where do you go to church?” I keep moving with the line, slowly.
Flower Man pats his heart. “Right here.”
I blurt, “You should come to my church.” If I keep inviting homeless people to church, we’ll need a social worker on staff, which we clearly can’t afford. “We believe in that, too. Spreading love and kindness.”
“Yeah?” He leans back and lowers his eyelids. “You for real?”
I imitate his body language. “Yeah. It’s the Big Red Church on 10th and Wisconsin. Calvary Presbyterian.”
“I know that place.” He gestures in the direction of south. “Across the street from the library.”
As we near the back of the hall, a young man wearing three necklaces and carrying a walkie-talkie leans against the wall. Jittery, he seems to be new to this security thing. He nods at my companion and says, “Flower Man?”
They bump fists. Flower Man reaches out to admire the necklaces. The young man holds up a palm, takes a step back. “You can’t touch that, man. You know. The energy gets messed up.”
Flower Man steps back respectfully. “That’s right.”
After spending three seasons at St. Ben’s, this makes sense to me. People with little under their control find power in small things, and it takes on tremendous importance. No matter what it is – paper flowers or special stones and charms on necklaces, it is respected. Even the fellow who believes his energy causes the signal on the television to pixelate is respected.
“You doin’ all right?” Flower Man asks the man. “I ain’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah,” the young man says. “I’m doin’ the best I can.”
“You keep on,” Flower Man says, checking himself as he almost touches the young man. “I’m gonna pray for you.”
“Thanks, bro.”
We arrive at the serving station. I turn down the first entrée, a beef and noodle concoction dripping with some brownish sauce, telling the server, “You can give him my portion.” I tilt my head toward Flower Man. She’s a new volunteer, not sure what to do. She directs a questioning look at the servers on either side, who are equally baffled. I smile and hold my ground.
“That’s good, ‘cause I’m hungry,” Flower Man says, and she spoons two servings onto his tray as I am given some salad and a different noodle dish with tomato sauce instead of gravy. When I am at St. Ben’s, I eat what the guests eat, grateful for the people who show up every week to prepare, serve and clean up after a couple hundred guests.
I take my seat at the table across from my friend Samuel, and we begin to chat. Samuel and I have known each other for five or six months now. We have a lot more in common than you might expect.
Flower Man sits beside me, one empty chair between us, sets his tray on the table, and takes a few bites as Samuel and I slide into our conversation. Soon we’re absorbed in sharing news - everything from his new apartment to books we’re reading. I’m currently reading a book Samuel recommended, The New Jim Crow. This sends us down a familiar path. Race, housing and incarceration are frequent topics at the dinner table at St. Ben’s. Politics, jobs, gentrification, too. Samuel is well read, and keeps up with the news.
Someone stops to chat with Samuel. Flower man leans over to me and says a friend of his is dying. He mentions the name, but I don’t know it. “Him and my brother and Al Jarreau was best friends. They used to play in the basement.”
Samuel is listening again. So are all the people around us at the table.
“Yeah, my brother was tight with Al,” Flower Man says.
The conversation around us pauses, takes this in, then resumes. I ask Samuel about his new apartment, and tell him after we eat, I’ll go get that blanket I promised out of my trunk.
After a while, I glance over at Flower Man. Most of the food on his tray is untouched, and he’s busy making a teal flower. A green paper cylinder and some hand-cut leaves lay ready to be assembled on the empty chair between us. I pat his arm. “You’d better eat.”
“I will.” But he’s concentrating on his creation.
Samuel and I continue talking. Every once in a while, I check out the evolution of the flower. Using Tacky Glue, Flower Man joins petals one by one, attaches the leaves to the stem and then deftly sets the blossom into the tube, finishing the creation. Or so I think. The next time I look over, he’s cutting out an intricate set of white stamens. Later, I wonder why he’s slathering everything with white glue. Next time I look, glitter abounds, and not just one color. The flower now sparkles in red, blue, green and gold.
I lean over the empty chair. “Please be sure to eat,” I urge. “I don’t want you to leave hungry.” But Flower Man is on a roll.
“Look at this,” I tell Samuel. “He’s really making something beautiful here.”
Samuel nods and Flower Man glances up. I size up my new friend. He could be one of the people who work temp jobs and live in a subsidized apartment, but he could be sleeping on the street. You never can tell.
“Where are you staying tonight?” I ask Flower Man.
“I’m homeless right now.” He says this the way a lot of people there say it – like you need to know that this is a temporary thing. That it’s just something you deal with. But, it’s a cold night, and this is not no big deal. Every night in Milwaukee, nine hundred people who seek shelter are turned away for lack of space, and warming rooms don’t open until the actual temperature hits ten degrees.
“I hope you eat your meal,” I say. It’s almost 6:00. I know that if a person needs shelter for the night, they have to be at the Rescue Mission before 6:30. He doesn’t answer. Instead, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he turns his back to hide what he’s doing. I watch his movements, but can’t see what’s up until he faces forward, eyes closed, whispering what I can only assume is a prayer into the flower. A ritual unfolds as he blows on it, and gives it a kiss. Judging by his expression, it seems the Rapture is upon him. Opening his eyes, he smiles at me and holds out the shiny blue flower. A gift. As I accept it, a sweet scent wafts over me. He grabs my free hand and presses it to his cheek.
“What did you put in it?” I find myself sniffing the stamens as if the thing were real. Because right there, in that moment, something real is happening.
“Love,” Flower Man tells me. “Love.”
* See Milwaukee Magazine, Best of Milwaukee 2017: City Life, Best Flower Maker: David “Fly Flower Man” Williams
Like all the guests coming for a meal at St. Ben’s, I extend my hand for a squirt of sanitizer the volunteer by the door offers. I don’t go there as a volunteer, per se. I’m there for a meal and some conversation. I keep going back because, just like it matters to me to be heard, it matters to them.
My attention shifts to a man with a red hand-made paper flower poking out of his pocket. A Green Bay Packers hat is pulled low over his ears, his thick coat seems a size too big.
“That’s beautiful,” I tell him, pointing to the flower. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Yeah, I make these.” He smiles, and a web of small wrinkles crisscross his dark skin. He holds a bulging black garbage bag. “What’s your favorite color?”
I know this is his schtick, that he’ll make me a flower and hit me up for money, and that I’ll most likely give him some, but I can see it’s more than that. I sense this is very real to him. His mission. I tell him my favorite color is teal, then join the food line and watch as he scopes out a spot and places his bag on a chair, asking the men seated there to watch it.
A tall fellow behind me says, “They call him The Flower Man.” He shakes his head, a smile showing so many teeth that he looks like a Zulu warrior. His thick accent fits the part. “Ev’body ‘round here know him.” He’s taking advantage of the cell phone reception, reading messages perhaps, screen glowing.
“Is that right?” I peer around the tall guy as Flower Man steps into the food line a few people back. I call out, “I hear you’re pretty famous around here.” The guys around me chuckle.
Flower Man promptly steps out of line and moves forward, politely asking each person one by one if he can skip them. They nod, gesture, tell him, “Go on.” And he stands beside me.
I chat as we move slowly toward the back of the hall. “I hear everybody knows you because you make those flowers. Are you famous?” I peer at the tall man who might be African. He gives me a tiny wink.
“Yeah, I’m real famous.” Turning to the tall fellow Flower Man says, “Hey brother, can you get on the internet and look up Best of Milwaukee 2017? I’m in there, in the City Life.” *
The tall fellow smiles, doesn’t speak, makes eye contact with me for the briefest second. I know that look. Give me an out. I do. “I don’t get very good reception in here myself,” I offer. The tall guy nods, and goes back to his own cell phone business.
I catch a motion across the room. Samuel waves to me and points at a chair across the table from him. His coat is draped across the back. He’s saving me a seat in the crowded hall. I give him a thumbs up.
Flower Man turns back to me. “You’re so nice. I can see that. I’ma make you one of my flowers.”
“Where’d you learn to make paper flowers?” I ask my new friend.
“In Joliet. I got locked up there for a long time. I was so down I knew I had to do somethin’.” He splays his hand over his heart. “I got changed in there. I found the love of God.” He pats my arm, the very image of sincerity. “I call my flowers HUGS – Humans United for Goodness Sake.”
I genuinely like this slogan. “That would be a great message on a tee shirt,” I remark. “Humans United for Goodness Sake. We could use some more of that in this world.”
He grasps my arm, his raspy voice filled with passion. “I wanted to do some good in my life. I was so down up in Joliet. All I wanted to do was get out of there and kiss my mother’s feet and thank her for all she did for me, for tryin’ to instill the love of God in me.” His smile disappears. “But, she died when I was locked up.”
“You never got to say goodbye to her?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” We inch along toward the serving station.
“And you know, my father got shot in 1962.”
“Was that during the riots?”
“Yeah – in Bronzeville- the black part of town. That’s the first time I got arrested, in the riots, when I was thirteen.” His face screws up into a puzzled expression. “Or was I eleven?”
My mind searches frantically for an appropriate comment. This has rendered me speechless.
“So now I’m out, you know what I do? I spread love. Because that’s what the Lord wants us to do. We got to be good to each other, to be kind.” He lowers his voice to a whisper, eyes bright. “I do this because of the eleventh commandment.”
“What is the eleventh commandment? In your opinion?” I want to know because I’ve heard some pretty interesting new commandments by now.
“It isn’t my opinion.” He steps in closer, points a finger toward the ceiling. “For the Lord said, I give unto you a new commandment. Love one another-”
“As I have loved you,” we finish together. Flower Man smiles and squeezes my arm.
“I knew you was here for a reason.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask. Plenty of homeless people have a deep belief in the mysterious workings of the universe.
“Where do you go to church?” I keep moving with the line, slowly.
Flower Man pats his heart. “Right here.”
I blurt, “You should come to my church.” If I keep inviting homeless people to church, we’ll need a social worker on staff, which we clearly can’t afford. “We believe in that, too. Spreading love and kindness.”
“Yeah?” He leans back and lowers his eyelids. “You for real?”
I imitate his body language. “Yeah. It’s the Big Red Church on 10th and Wisconsin. Calvary Presbyterian.”
“I know that place.” He gestures in the direction of south. “Across the street from the library.”
As we near the back of the hall, a young man wearing three necklaces and carrying a walkie-talkie leans against the wall. Jittery, he seems to be new to this security thing. He nods at my companion and says, “Flower Man?”
They bump fists. Flower Man reaches out to admire the necklaces. The young man holds up a palm, takes a step back. “You can’t touch that, man. You know. The energy gets messed up.”
Flower Man steps back respectfully. “That’s right.”
After spending three seasons at St. Ben’s, this makes sense to me. People with little under their control find power in small things, and it takes on tremendous importance. No matter what it is – paper flowers or special stones and charms on necklaces, it is respected. Even the fellow who believes his energy causes the signal on the television to pixelate is respected.
“You doin’ all right?” Flower Man asks the man. “I ain’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah,” the young man says. “I’m doin’ the best I can.”
“You keep on,” Flower Man says, checking himself as he almost touches the young man. “I’m gonna pray for you.”
“Thanks, bro.”
We arrive at the serving station. I turn down the first entrée, a beef and noodle concoction dripping with some brownish sauce, telling the server, “You can give him my portion.” I tilt my head toward Flower Man. She’s a new volunteer, not sure what to do. She directs a questioning look at the servers on either side, who are equally baffled. I smile and hold my ground.
“That’s good, ‘cause I’m hungry,” Flower Man says, and she spoons two servings onto his tray as I am given some salad and a different noodle dish with tomato sauce instead of gravy. When I am at St. Ben’s, I eat what the guests eat, grateful for the people who show up every week to prepare, serve and clean up after a couple hundred guests.
I take my seat at the table across from my friend Samuel, and we begin to chat. Samuel and I have known each other for five or six months now. We have a lot more in common than you might expect.
Flower Man sits beside me, one empty chair between us, sets his tray on the table, and takes a few bites as Samuel and I slide into our conversation. Soon we’re absorbed in sharing news - everything from his new apartment to books we’re reading. I’m currently reading a book Samuel recommended, The New Jim Crow. This sends us down a familiar path. Race, housing and incarceration are frequent topics at the dinner table at St. Ben’s. Politics, jobs, gentrification, too. Samuel is well read, and keeps up with the news.
Someone stops to chat with Samuel. Flower man leans over to me and says a friend of his is dying. He mentions the name, but I don’t know it. “Him and my brother and Al Jarreau was best friends. They used to play in the basement.”
Samuel is listening again. So are all the people around us at the table.
“Yeah, my brother was tight with Al,” Flower Man says.
The conversation around us pauses, takes this in, then resumes. I ask Samuel about his new apartment, and tell him after we eat, I’ll go get that blanket I promised out of my trunk.
After a while, I glance over at Flower Man. Most of the food on his tray is untouched, and he’s busy making a teal flower. A green paper cylinder and some hand-cut leaves lay ready to be assembled on the empty chair between us. I pat his arm. “You’d better eat.”
“I will.” But he’s concentrating on his creation.
Samuel and I continue talking. Every once in a while, I check out the evolution of the flower. Using Tacky Glue, Flower Man joins petals one by one, attaches the leaves to the stem and then deftly sets the blossom into the tube, finishing the creation. Or so I think. The next time I look over, he’s cutting out an intricate set of white stamens. Later, I wonder why he’s slathering everything with white glue. Next time I look, glitter abounds, and not just one color. The flower now sparkles in red, blue, green and gold.
I lean over the empty chair. “Please be sure to eat,” I urge. “I don’t want you to leave hungry.” But Flower Man is on a roll.
“Look at this,” I tell Samuel. “He’s really making something beautiful here.”
Samuel nods and Flower Man glances up. I size up my new friend. He could be one of the people who work temp jobs and live in a subsidized apartment, but he could be sleeping on the street. You never can tell.
“Where are you staying tonight?” I ask Flower Man.
“I’m homeless right now.” He says this the way a lot of people there say it – like you need to know that this is a temporary thing. That it’s just something you deal with. But, it’s a cold night, and this is not no big deal. Every night in Milwaukee, nine hundred people who seek shelter are turned away for lack of space, and warming rooms don’t open until the actual temperature hits ten degrees.
“I hope you eat your meal,” I say. It’s almost 6:00. I know that if a person needs shelter for the night, they have to be at the Rescue Mission before 6:30. He doesn’t answer. Instead, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he turns his back to hide what he’s doing. I watch his movements, but can’t see what’s up until he faces forward, eyes closed, whispering what I can only assume is a prayer into the flower. A ritual unfolds as he blows on it, and gives it a kiss. Judging by his expression, it seems the Rapture is upon him. Opening his eyes, he smiles at me and holds out the shiny blue flower. A gift. As I accept it, a sweet scent wafts over me. He grabs my free hand and presses it to his cheek.
“What did you put in it?” I find myself sniffing the stamens as if the thing were real. Because right there, in that moment, something real is happening.
“Love,” Flower Man tells me. “Love.”
* See Milwaukee Magazine, Best of Milwaukee 2017: City Life, Best Flower Maker: David “Fly Flower Man” Williams