MACON — In the distance, June O’Neal spotted the flicker of a warming fire.
Soon, a northbound freight train would rumble past, a steel whoosh of cold air on a frigid night. But for a moment O’Neal stood her ground.
She had come to help the homeless. She heard there might be some huddled near a dirt path along the tracks that skirt the Ocmulgee River near where Interstate 16 juts off I-75.
So here she was to give a ride to those who might prefer spending the night indoors, in a shelter. She prayed some would.
The path where she stood in the dark was treacherous with loose gravel and soft dirt. O’Neal, 66 years old and in a fuchsia overcoat, hiked as near as she could to the fire. From maybe 50 yards away, she called out: “Hello!”
It was 31 degrees in Middle Georgia. Her voice was beaten back by gusts that made it feel like 20.
“Hello! It’s June O’Neal!” she yelled. “Will you come in with us?”
In the fire’s shadows, she could just make out a pair of figures — people — but there came no replies.
“Hello! Hello!” she kept on. “I can take you to shelter! ... I’ll take you in my car! I’ve got blankets and coats!”
Still no response.
For a full five minutes, the sole reply was the biting breeze.
Headed back to her small SUV, O’Neal spoke of the system for reaching and encouraging people to seek shelter.
“We’re doing everything we can do. We’ve told everybody we know to tell and put the word out at all the usual places,” she said. “It’s so frustrating to have resources and they won’t come.”
Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters were on the lookout for people without a place to stay, informing those they might happen upon of ways to get to the county’s five shelters. In the end, about 260 sought refuge in the 320 or so available beds, according to the Rev. Jake Hall, executive director of United to End Homelessness.
For the better part of two hours Tuesday night, O’Neal drove around downtown Macon. If someone she saw looked like they might be wandering, she stopped and rolled down her window.
She began her trek half an hour after sunset, on her way home from a Bibb County Commission meeting where the program she runs for at-risk students was saluted as the organization of the year by Macon’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commission.
In cold weather, O’Neal, a social worker by trade, scours the city, often alone, in search of those in need. Like many parts of Georgia, Macon is being buffeted by below-freezing temperatures this week.
Soon O’Neal spied two men hustling down Mulberry Street near the county courthouse. One of the men was coatless in the chill, hunched over, his head shrouded in a blanket.
“Will you let me take y’all somewhere?” O’Neal said. “I don’t want you to freeze to death.”
“Where we going?” one of the men replied.
O’Neal mentioned a couple of shelters.
The men didn’t want to go. They said they had a place. They didn’t say where.
“Well please don’t freeze to death tonight, I’m begging you,” O’Neal said.
“I promise, I won’t,” one of the men said.
O’Neal shook her head as she rolled away.
“They said they have somewhere to go,” she said. “I know different.”
Persuading people to come in from the cold can be challenging. O’Neal said some don’t like crowds, some are addicts, some suffer from mental illnesses. Some are afraid to leave their belongings on the street. “If that’s all you got,” O’Neal said. “Your stuff will get stolen.”
Near a hot wing joint off I-16, O’Neal noticed a man trudging up the sidewalk. In one hand, he gripped a Bible. In the other was a walking stick almost as tall as he was. The stick, wrapped thick with duct tape, was a homemade cross.
O’Neal said, “Hey, you want to come with me to the Salvation Army?”
The man did not seem to hear.
“Alrighty,” he said to himself, “alrighty now.”
O’Neal asked him again.
“I don’t want you freezing,” she said.
The man claimed to have a room at a motel about a quarter-mile away.
O’Neal rode on, but she was not so sure. She doubled back, cutting the wrong way through a Checker’s drive-thru. She followed the man at a distance until he made it to the motel.
“We might drive all night and not get one person,” she said. “That’ll break my heart.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Not far from the river, outside a Burger King, O’Neal encountered two men in a car. They were from a downtown shelter, out doing the same thing she was: Seeking the hidden.
Before long a homeless man angled across the lot on foot.
“Hey,” O’Neal said to him, “would you let me take you to a shelter?”
“Uh, I’m good on that one,” the man said. “The Salvation Army had bedbugs one year.”
O’Neal thought she recognized the guy from a Christmas party at a church nearby. The man said it wasn’t him.
“I didn’t do nothing on Christmas,” he said. “It was like just a normal day to me. It was peaceful.”
The man said his name was Richard, that he was 32 and that he preferred keeping to himself despite the cold.
“I just try not to be a bother,” he said. “Out here there’s lots of s— that’ll bother you, and I don’t want to take no chances for someone else to be bothered by it.”
He planned to hoof it around town, stay on the move, for as long as he could.
He asked what the temperature was.
It was 30 degrees.
“Negative 30?” he asked.
He had on two jackets.
O’Neal went to hand him a third.
He was reluctant to accept.
Before sliding his arms into the sleeves and tugging it on, he asked O’Neal a question: “Are you sure you don’t need it?”
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