Same Kind Of Different As Me

As Denver helps shovel dirt onto Deborah’s grave, he knows it’s only her earthly body, yet he’s still depressed and stays behind when everyone else leaves. He talks to God and Deborah and stays there all day, thanking her for seeing him as the person God meant for him to be as opposed to how he looked on the outside to everyone else. 

The next morning, there is a church service that Deborah demanded be a celebration. There are over a thousand people there. For several hours, people speak about Deborah, including Sister Bettie. After she speaks, it’s Denver’s turn. He speaks with more and more confidence as he describes how Deborah changed his life. When he’s finished, the entire congregation breaks into applause and a standing ovation. Ron realizes this is a miracle: the transformation in Denver from an angry, addled bum into a confident, clear-eyed loving man.  

Deborah had insisted Ron and the kids take a trip together after her funeral. As they are leaving, Don Shisler calls to say some major donors were so moved by Sister Bettie and Denver at the service they want to donate enough money to build a new chapel and name it after Deborah. During the week they spend in West Texas, tubing down the Rio Grande, he and the kids are conflicted by the request. On the one hand, they feel the chapel should be named after Sister Betty because Deborah wouldn’t have wanted undue attention on herself. On the other hand, the donors weren’t asking for the family’s permission as opposed to telling them what they planned to do, so maybe it is better for the family to honor their wishes. The decide to table a decision until they return.

While Ron and his children are on their trip to Big Bend, Denver learns he’ll have to wear his suit for the third time in one month as he’s been invited to a philanthropy banquet where Deborah will be honored. The banquet is in downtown Fort Worth at the Worthington Hotel, a place where Denver used to sleep outside of,on a grate,in the winter. Now, Denver’s name is on the program as an invited guest, and rich people come up to tell him how inspiring his story is. Ron informs Denver at dinner they’re against naming the new chapel after Deborah. Denver thinks this is a bad idea as naming the chapel isn’t about her; it’s about God’s plan. Ron doesn’t want to go against God. Denver says, “Then just get out of the way and let God do His thing!” (201). 

Denver receives a standing ovation at the banquet to accept a philanthropy award on Deborah’s behalf, and the next day, Ron meets with the mission board. Despite the family not wanting to name the new chapel after her, everyone heeds Denver’s thoughts on this, and it is named the Deborah Hall Memorial Chapel. Meanwhile, during Ron’s trip with his children, the New Beginnings mission fundraising campaign raised $350,000.

For weeks after this, Ron descends into a deep depression. He looks through photo albums and remembers the key moments in he and Deborah’slife together: the summer they became engaged, their honeymoon in Vail, Colorado, and building cowboy snowmen at Rocky Top. He reads her Bible because it has her notes about their life in the margins. His weight drops to 135 pounds, and he decides looking and feeling terrible is the only proper way to be. While he blames different healthcare professionals for Deborah’s death, God is the main target of his anger. Ron says, “I had trusted Him, and He had failed me. How do you forgive that?” (203).

At Thanksgiving, spent at the ranch with only his parents and Denver, Ron goes up to Deborah’s grave—protected solely by chicken wire and covered with now-withered white roses—and realizes he wants to turn it into a family cemetery. In December, he and Denver go to the ranch to begin working on it. The first night they build a big fire at the ranch house and reminisce about Denver’s sixty-third birthday party at the Red, Hot & Blue barbeque joint in Fort Worth. That was the first birthday party of Denver’s life—and therefore his favorite—even though he had trouble eating the food with his few remaining teeth. Subsequently, a friend of Ron’s made Denver a set of dentures which made him, according to Ron, look like John Wayne. Finally, Ron shows Denver to his bedroom upstairs. He worries Denver feels like a hanger-on now that Deborah is dead. However, nothing could be further from the truth, as far as Ron is concerned; after everything that has happened, Ron considers Denver to be his brother. 

Denver is happy to go to the ranch with Ron, but he worries Ron was only ever friends with him because Deborah made him be, and that now he’s going to cut Denver loose. The first night, Denver sleeps upstairs, determined to stay in the bed he’s always found so uncomfortable. After a few hours, he hears footsteps in the room, and someone tucks the bedcovers around his neck. Then he hears a voice say, “Denver, you are welcome in our home” (207). Denver opens his eyes to see Deborah, beautiful and healthy again. Abruptly, she disappears. Denver knows this was no dream; rather, it was a visitation. He’s happy she said “our home” as that means her and Ron’s home is open to him. Suddenly the bed feels more comfortable, and he goes to sleep.

Ron and Denver spend a week at the ranch gathering rocks for Deborah’s burial site, Brazos del Dios (The Arms of God). After a few days, Ron notices Denver’s spirits are better, and he asks why. Denver explains it’s because Deborah came to him in a visitation the first night they were there. Ron asks if Denver means a dream, but he is adamant: he was awake when she showed up to tell him he was welcome in their home. At one point in his life, Ron would have found this hard to believe, but everything about Denver he learned during Deborah’s illness turned out to be true. Ron tells Denver he promised never to catch-and-release him and that he is always welcome there as he’s part of their family now. Denver says, “Forever,” (210) and goes back to work. 

In May 2001, there is a dedication ceremony for Brazos del Dios. Although he hadn’t planned to speak, Denver knows he has something he must share with the group of fifty people there.

Denver describes how he tried to make a deal with God to take his life instead of hers, but that hadn’t worked. However, since then he figured out: “I know when somebody you love is gone, that’s the last time you feel like thanking God. But sometimes we has to be thankful for the things that hurt us […] ‘cause sometimes God does things that hurts us but they help someone else” (211). And, as he goes on to explain, when something ends, something else begins, such as when leaving the physical world, we enter the spiritual world. He looks at Ron and knows they are both thinking about Denver’s spiritual visitation from Deborah.  

Ron and Denver decide they might want to turn their shared story into a book. But, Ron knows he needs to learn more about Denver’s past in Louisiana as most of what he knows about the Deep South comes via the movie Gone with the Wind.

In early September 2001, they leave in a new Suburban for Louisiana to visit where Denver grew up. After they cross the border from Texas, there are miles upon miles of cotton fields. Denver becomes excited and describes how with all the humidity in the air it’s a good day to pick cotton. Ron is struck by how Denver likely could have stayed working on the plantation if the system hadn’t been so inherently unjust. Finally, Denver tells Ron to pull over at the very cotton field he used to work. In the distance, they hear a train whistle blow. It’s the same train that took Denver to Fort Worth. 

Denver is both anxious and excited about returning to Louisiana: “There was somethin in the air […] memories, spirits. I don’t know. Ain’t every spirit good, but they ain’t all bad neither” (216).

Denver tells Ron to turn down a dirt road, and after passing the Man’s house, they go by the “Boss Nigger’s house” (216) before coming to the two-room shack where Denver used to live. As they poke around inside, Ron keeps shaking his head and says, “I can hardly believe you lived here all those years. […] It’s awful. Worse than I thought” (217). Denver remembers being proud to have his own place, working for the Man, and yet never having anything of his own. Ron takes a picture of Denver in front of the shack, and Denver smiles, but only on the outside. 

Ron can hardly believe the house Denver used to live in, especially in comparison to the Man’s big white country house they passed on the way there. He ponders a series of paradoxes: The Man’s sharecropping system kept black people down but provided Denver with a new bike, allowed Denver’s sister Hershalee to stay in her house after she couldn’t farm anymore, and gave Denver a way to live when he could have been replaced by machinery. He considers the slavery-era doctrine of “paternalism,” that black people couldn’t take care of themselves and so needed white people to do that for them.

They go further down the road, to Hershalee’s old, abandoned house. They wade through the tall grass in the front yard and go inside to find mail for Denver from 1995 that had been forwarded there and the bathtub he bought for his sister with the money from the trip to Colorado. They hear something stomping around in the house, too big to be an animal, and run outside. Just like a horror movie, they go back to take another look. Without seeing anything, the hair suddenly raises all over their bodies, and they rush back to the Suburban, which won’t start. Finally, the Suburban fires up and they drive away. Denver tells Ron he has quite the story to tell, and, more seriously, “Nothin keeps you honest like a witness” (222). 

At first Denver feels silly for running away from the abandoned house. Given how the Suburban didn’t want to start, however, he feels there must have been something supernatural going on. After all, as he tells Ron, this wouldn’t be the first time. Big Mama’s sister, his great-aunt, was a spiritual healer who worked with a variety of roots, herbs, and potions. One day, when Denver was little, he was at her house without there being a cloud in the sky. She spread a powder on the floor, swept it around while humming a tune, and suddenly it began to rain exactly above her house and nowhere else. Denver has never told this story before because “most people gon’ say that’s just superstition. They’d rather pretend things like that don’t happen” (225).  

Ron and Denver continue on Highway 1 and turn down yet another dirt road looking for Aunt Pearlie May’s house. Finally, they come upon six shotgun shacks “squatted in a clearing in the woods, lined up like prisoners held hostage from another era” (226). One house has a sofa in the front yard; in front of another, small children are burning a pile of trash. Chickens run loose everywhere.

Aunt Pearlie May lives in the last house there with half a dozen lawn chairs out front, next to piles of Natural Light beer cans and empty Garrett snuff jars. She proudly talks about her new indoor toilet—although she still uses the outhouse because the plumbing doesn’t work right just yet—and shows them her pigs, in case they know anybody who might like to buy some.

Ron is horrified by the experience. He thinks, while they drive away, “the images of poverty and squalor burned themselves into my brain like hated tattoos” (228). Denver points out, however, these people are living better than he ever did when in Louisiana. And that’s why, he says, living on the streets in Fort Worth looked like a step up in life. 

Ron is still trying to make sense of Deborah’s death as the time comes to break ground for the New Beginning’s mission and its Deborah L. Hall Memorial Chapel in Fort Worth, only two days after the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City. Mary Ellen tells him that Deborah was like the kernel of wheat from the Gospel of John: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains by itself, alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit” (229).

The Sunday following the groundbreaking, Ron and Denver go to the New Calvary Baptist Church for Denver to preach a sermon. At first, few people are there, and Denver becomes impatient during the lengthy introduction about his life: “It ain’t nobody’s business how I got here. […] Just tell em I’m a nobody that’s tryin to tell everbody ‘bout Somebody that can save anybody” (231). By the end of his sermon, the church is full of people, and Denver is invited to return to preach a revival. Ron remembers Deborah’s dream: “There was found in the city a certain poor man who was wise and by his wisdom he saved the city” (232).

Denver moves into the Murchison Estate, the former home of a Texas oil family, in Dallas, Texas, while Ron sells the art within it. Denver finds some paint in the garage and decides he can make pictures as good as the “silly looking pictures by fellas like Picasso” (233) in the house. He gives his first painting of an angel to Sister Bettie. Ron sets up a studio for Denver next to the Murchison garage.

Denver also devotes himself to Deborah’s cause of helping others: assisting Sister Bettie and Miss Mary Ellen, preaching once a month at the Riteway Baptist Church, taking clothes to the homeless, and periodically giving money to his friends still living on the street.

Denver and Ron go to Washington, D.C. in January of 2005, for President George W. Bush’s second inauguration. Denver is amazed to be sitting in the front row with astronauts and war heroes, given where he started in life. The next day, he goes to see the Lincoln Memorial and thinks back to when he was a child and Big Mama telling him how Lincoln freed the slaves and was shot for it.

Denver concludes the book by saying he used to worry that he was too different from other people to ever have any kind of future with them. Instead, as he realizes now, this world is no one’s final destination, and “we is all homeless—just workin our way toward home” (235).