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Cool to be Kind

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"That's exactly the kind of thing Carolyn would do," Lorraine says, though she doesn't specifically recall the willow branch. Her memory has been bad since she had a lump removed from her neck last year; so has her health. "Carolyn is one of my favorite people. But she does some things that other people might think are strange."

She pauses. "A lot of people call it Dumpster diving?" she ventures questioningly. "People at Karen House, they act real poor. I know some people could afford new shoes, but instead they put tape over the holes. They wear them in the sleet, rain, snow — everything."

The problem with Cohousing, Lorraine says, was that some former guests felt the Workers intervened inappropriately, telling them who they should bring home and how they should treat their children.

"It was complicated," she adds. "They usually had a better education, better lifestyle, better finances. But they don't know the struggles that go on behind closed doors."

At one point the group tried having the children at the meetings, but that didn't work out. "[The kids] said they didn't want white people in their lives telling them what to do," Lorraine says.

With the aid of a copper cane, she crosses to the door to let in her son Walter, a lanky nineteen-year-old who's home from his job in a school lunchroom. "That's the child I delivered at home," she says as he walks to the kitchen. "It was a hundred and six degrees that day, and I was taking care of three other children along with mine." Her eldest son, who was six at the time, helped her with the labor. Then he walked six blocks to the nearest pay phone to call 911. "When the paramedics got here, they were joking with me. They told me I was trying to take their job."

She ends the story with a laugh that's throaty and bit empty, then calls out to her son to check on the mousetrap in the kitchen while he's in there.

Just around the corner from where Lorraine lives is the sustainable house Tony Hilkin and Julie Jakimczyk are rebuilding. The structure is entirely "off the grid"; electricity will be generated by two solar panels and heat provided by a wood stove.

Most of the building materials were purchased secondhand or scavenged. The walls are made of straw and clay. There's no hot water. But there is a skylight, a big tub in the bathroom and a vase of roses in the window. In the bathroom Jakimczyk has carved a T and a J into the tile. After November's ice storm, when the neighborhood lost power, theirs was one of the only buildings that had heat.

"There's a lot of projects like this in rural communities, but this is the first one that we know of in a city," says Hilkin. A 2005 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story described the work-in-progress as possibly the "most environmentally conscious building in the St. Louis-St. Louis County area." They plan to move in this spring.

"It's not a Catholic Worker project. It's important to be clear about that," Hilkin notes. Catholic Worker projects, he explains, develop via consensus, and he and Jakimczyk wanted to make the decisions about the house themselves.

Propped against a chair in the kitchen is a poster board that displays photos of the house before the rehab. There are no steps leading to the front door. The back of the house is crumbling, and a vine has grown up through the inside, out a window and onto the roof. The floors are covered with garbage a foot deep.

"It used to be an old crack house," says Hilkin. "That's been confirmed by people at Karen House who used to use crack. They come over here and they can't believe what it looks like now. That's a real 360 there, for the house and the people."

With a trowel he smoothes a section of wall to which he has been applying a plaster-like substance made from mud. He and Jakimczyk plan to use the house to educate people about sustainable living. "Maybe we can just set a bar," he says. "I know we're more extreme than some people ever dream of being."

Both of them struggle with the idea that their work might not make a difference. "It's hard to live with the notion that this might have no impact," Hilkin says. "It's probably the biggest challenge."

"We fail all the time," Jakimczyk puts in. "In our relationships with the guests, we're not always as loving as we should be. We make mistakes, and we get selfish sometimes. I know that's not the way to change the world.

"I know it's unlikely there will be a change," she goes on. "But I know our society's lifestyle doesn't work. It's not sustainable, it's not loving, it's not kind. I think it's irresponsible not to look for something different."

Their quest has led them to construct a tidy, mud-and-straw building with a new blue roof amid an urban no-man's land. It is a cold day and the yard is covered in straw and snow. An unpainted wooden fence is punctuated by a gate with a shiny black latch. A few blocks to the north, the bell tower at St. Liborius juts skyward. Five birds fly over it, black flecks in a clear blue sky.

Contact the author
molly.langmuir@riverfronttimes.com

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