GIVING A VOICE TO THE HOMELESS

DURHAM -- Sharyn Jordan was wearing a Band-Aid the first time Edie Cohn
drew her. It covered a spot on her forehead where she'd been hit with a
beer bottle.

It wasn't the first time she'd been hit. Drinking since she was 8, she'd
done speed, acid, heroin, cocaine -- and marijuana too, she said, almost as
an afterthought Saturday morning.

So in 1993 when Jordan found herself in the Durham homeless shelter and
heard about a woman paying people $10 to draw their pictures and tape
record their stories, she jumped at the chance.

"I said, 'I need that $10, I'm gonna get that $10,' " Jordan recalled.
"Immediately after that session I took that $10 and got high."

Jordan was one of three women who joined Cohn in a panel discussion at the
Durham County Library Saturday. The talk, the last in a series on
homelessness in Durham, focused on "No Call for Pity," a series of charcoal
portraits and interviews compiled by Durham artist Cohn, who started it 10
years ago.

The project, funded by the N.C. Humanities Council, has been published as a
small book. Several of the portraits are hanging in the library's
third-floor fiction room through the end of the year.

Cohn, who with big round glasses and a pixie haircut looks almost elfin,
didn't set out to chronicle homeless people's lives. She just knew she
wanted to use her art for something more than drawing portraits of people
the way they thought they should look, rather than how they really were.

At the Durham Community Shelter for HOPE, "nobody complained they didn't
have a big enough smile on their face," she said. Or because they had a
Band-Aid on their forehead.

Still, it took the shy Cohn some time to start asking her subjects about
their situations.

"I didn't ask them questions about their lives," she said. "I guess I felt
it wasn't any of my business."

Once she started, though, usually with a charcoal pencil in hand, Cohn
turned out to be a natural interviewer, Saturday's panel members said.

"She just had this face that was so kind," said Reneé Baker, whom Cohn
first drew in 1992. "I was like, 'Oh, I trust you!' "

Baker's story included drugs, alcohol and domestic violence. But she told
the crowd of about 35 people Saturday that she can't remember a lot of it.

"Some of that stuff is just not there anymore," she said. "It's not that I
don't want to remember."

Now 50 and a drug rehabilitation counselor, she says it took her those hard
times to get where she is now. Not that she doesn't have some regrets.

"Before my mom died, I could see the aging in her face," Baker told Cohn in
a follow-up interview this year.

"And I often said to myself, how much of that did I cause her to have to
come through? Just the pain in her face and how gray she had gotten. And it
seems like overnight to me, because during my time of being in the streets
and doing my thing, I never stopped once to really look at her! ... I never
looked 'til I got clean."

Cohn interviewed Tassie Johnson in 1994 at Genesis Home, where Johnson was
living with her three daughters after getting out a violent relationship.
Pregnant by the man who abused her, Johnson "prayed every night that God
would take my life, but every morning he blessed me with life."

Still, her daughters initially hated her for taking them to the shelter.
"The children did not want to consider ourselves homeless," she said.
"Being the adult in the family and knowing we didn't have a roof over our
heads, I knew it was homelessness."

Johnson's 1994 and 2001 portraits are hanging in the library. At Saturday's
discussion she held up a third portrait, a plastic-covered picture Cohn
drew of her and her three girls, who don't want anyone to know about their
past.

"I wish that this was the one in the exhibit," she said.

Cohn eventually drew more than 60 portraits. The pictures don't ask people
to feel sorry for Durham's homeless -- just to see them as individuals,
said Harlan Gradin, assistant director/director for programs for the
Humanities Council, who also attended the library talk. "This is an
extraordinary example of a project that gives voice to people who are
usually not paid attention to, or listened to or cared about," he said,
"who many of us will pass on the street pretending this person is not a
person."

And if there's a message, it's that people who want to change, can, the
women on the panel said.

Jordan, now married and Sharyn Jordan Holland, got help from the TROSA
(Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers) and DART (Drug and
Alcohol Rehabilitation Treatment) programs. She enrolled in the criminal
justice program at Durham Technical Community College and is an
administrative assistant for Durham County's teen court.

"I love my job," she said, then held her hand just a few inches in front of
her chest. "And I keep this [thought] close to me -- how quick I can
regress if I pick up a drug or take a drink."

Baker, who also treasures her cardboard copy of Cohn's portrait of her, is
also proud of her turnaround.

This last time Cohn drew her, "I don't think I even took the money," Baker
said. "It wasn't about the money this time."

For more information about artist Edie Cohn's "Homeless People Project"
please see www,homelessproject.org

A candlelight vigil in observance of National Homeless Persons' Memorial
Day will held at the Durham Public Library Plaza Dec. 20 from 6 to 7 p.m.
For more information, please call the library at 560-0123 or the Urban
Ministries of Durham at 688-2593.

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