At the last meeting of Real Change vendors, Deatri Williamson stood up, her voice filled the room, and a current went through the air as indescribable as lightning striking. At women's shelters around the city, said Williamson, women are being turned away, handed a bus ticket and told to ride to the end of the line. Stay warm and good luck.
"It's up to you men to take care of the women out here at night," she called, her voice syncopated, strong, and forceful.
People nodded; a few amens rang in the room.
Some people just have it: when they talk, you've got to listen.
Deatri has it, and come to find out it runs in the family. Born in Indianola, Miss. to a white father and black mother, Williamson spent a childhood steeped in the Civil Rights movement. Her parents, who walked to Washington D.C. with Martin Luther King, raised a biracial family in the shadow of the Dixie flag.
After a time in Milwaukee, Williamson joined her husband in his native Las Vegas.
Things do tend to fall apart, though, and her husband got sick. He was of that gone generation who distrusted the IRS, insurance companies, and doctors in equal measure. When he passed, the business and house went with him -- he'd never even registered it with the government.
"Yeah, I'm homeless," she says. "I'm homeless because the bank locked the door to the house the day [my husband] died."
But hope and despair often go hand-in-hand, and shortly after the death of her husband Deatri met fellow vendor George Williamson. The two left the bleaching dust and blinding lights of Vegas and came here together. You see them in the office -- sometimes tired and sometimes angry and sometimes sad. But always together. And that's something.
Says Williamson: "Stop. Care. Just listen."