What Difference Do It Make? by Ron Hall

voice a little lower. A little deeper. Right then, I knew what he was after.
    â€œYeah, I’m ready,” I said. “But I got to go to the toilet first.”
    I swung my feet down onto the floor, and brother-man stepped back to let me get out of bed.
    â€œYou go on and lay down,” I said. “Put the sheet over you. I’ll be right back.”
    I walked away from the bed into the pitch dark. I heard a whispering sound as his pants crumpled to the floor, then a creak-creak as he laid down on my bunk. The toilet was on the other side of the room. I walked over there and unzipped my britches, let him hear that I was doin what I said I was gon’ do.
    â€œYou want a cigarette?” I said. “For after?”
    â€œSure do,” he said, kinda cocky. I could hear him chucklin in the dark. So on my way back across the room, I stopped at the little shelf where I had stashed my cigarettes that he’d done bought me. It was also where I’d stashed my knife.
    Brother-man screamed when I stabbed him. Screamed like a woman ’cause I ’xpect I turned him into one, right through the sheet.
    I bent down close to his ear and growled real low. “You or any a’ your friends come ’round here again, I’m gon’ finish the job.”
    While he was howlin and cryin and, I ’xpect, holdin what was left of his manhood, I saw lights go on outside. Then I heard boots poundin and guards drawin down. But they stopped outside the door to size up the situation.
    â€œMoore! Who you got in there?”
    â€œThis fella’s done gone crazy!” brother-man screamed. ’Cept he didn’t call me “fella.” “Get in here and kill him ’fore he kills me !”
    They sent me to the hole for that. But didn’t nobody try to make me his woman no more.
    That’s why, though, when I think about Miss Debbie reachin out to me, my chest gets tight. I had told her straight up that I was a mean man, but she didn’t have no way a’ knowin how mean. I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.

DON
    The Art of Homelessness
    Most of the thirty or so men sitting in a circle at the Union Gospel Mission in Saint Paul, Minnesota, didn’t look like they’d been acquainted with a comb for a while. Their clothes were clean, Don Thomas told us, but they didn’t quite fit. Some of the men were addicts and ex-cons. Some were just down on their luck. Don wasn’t sure such a rough-looking batch of guys would be interested in what he had come to say.
    â€œI’m here to see if any of you would be interested in learning a little about art,” said Don, a designer for an architectural firm in Saint Paul. “Drawing, painting, that kind of thing.”
    Some of the men threw each other skeptical sideways glances. Others kept their eyes trained on the floor. But one man with a ruddy, wrinkled face and approximately four good teeth spoke right up. “We ain’t gonna weave any of them [expletive] baskets like we did in prison, are we?”
    â€œOh, no,” Don replied with a smile. ‘We’re going to draw naked women.”
    The whole circle burst out laughing, and a show of hands revealed that every man present was suddenly, miraculously, interested in what Don had to teach about art.
    I believe art can make a big difference in anyone’s life. After Deborah died and Denver moved in with me, I suggested he try his hand at painting. He thought that was a good idea, judging that he couldn’t do any worse than some of the multimillion-dollar pieces he’d seen by Jackson Pollack and Pablo Picasso when I took him to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. And once he started, Denver took to painting like a bull rider to a rodeo. Since Same Kind of