On October 16, 1995, Charles' life changed. He went from being a somebody to a nobody.
On that fall evening, Charles was driving his four-door Mercury Topaz down a stretch of gray pavement in Laurel, Maryland. His wife sat next to him, while his daughter and his two-year old grandchild occupied the backseat. The family was returning from the Million Man March.
Forty-five minutes later, a drunk driver hit the Topaz.
Charles witnessed his wife slumped over her seat, her mouth was cracked open while blood ran down her face, and the violent ejection of his grandchild out of the back window. He heard bones crack as the baby hit a tree.
"All three died instantly, while I only suffered minor injuries," Charles says, as he sits on a ledge of a wall on Charles Street. "From that day, I have been at total bum. No pride, no self-esteem...Call me Nobody."
Nobody can be seen between Wyman Park and the News-Letter office on Art Museum Drive, three to four times a week. He wears a black sweater, khaki pants, gray socks and the "shiniest pair of brown shoes," as Mark Shaffer, a Johns Hopkins undergraduate likes to say.
Nobody holds a sign that reads, "Hungry," on the front and "Could use a bit of change," on the back.
The man panhandling for change outside Baltimore's premier art museum is part of an increasing number of homeless people in Baltimore and the United States. A 2000 study by The Urban Institutes, a non-profit organization, estimates that 3.5 million people experience some kind homelessness each year.
Yet Charles does not consider himself homeless.
He told a local woman who asked about his sign, "What does my sign say? It says that I'm hungry. It says that I could use a bit of change. It says nothing about me being homeless! I'm not homeless. I'm just hungry."
On some level he is right; he is not homeless. He stays in a semi-abandoned house with electricity and his own room. The room costs him seven dollars a day. If he does not collect enough money from begging, he sleeps in the littered areas of Wyman Park.
A couple of years earlier, Charles would have never guessed that he would end up sleeping in a park.
Charles says that he was born in Macon, Georgia. He remembers his father, a decorated hero in WWII, who was a sharpshooter for the U.S. Army, and his mother, who came from a family of railroad workers.
Charles says that he spent most of his childhood moving around the United States, eventually settling down in Maryland.
Charles says he joined the Army when he graduated high school. According to his story, he worked at a Baltimore City school as a student recruiter, after retiring from service.
"I was excellent at my job. All of my co-workers were black. I was the only white recruiter; I flooded the school with students. They had respect for me," Charles said.
"Respect," Charles says as he gets up from the ledge hands trembling. "I am nobody anymore," he says as he walks down Charles street.
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