“…make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:7)
Life of Cass, an excerpt from Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom. A true story.
The story of my recent life. I like that phrase. It makes more sense than the story of my life, because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality – and, in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.
The Reb had achieved that.
And so had someone else.
Not Henry - although he certainly lived many lives.
But I refer here to his trusted elder, the man with one leg, who nudged and cajoled me until finally, on a cold night, in a plastic covered section of the church, he said, in a scratchy voice, “Mister Mitch, I got to share this with you…”
Anthony “Cass” Castelow, it turned out, did have an eye-popping tale: he’d been a star athlete in a big family, gone to the army, come home, become a local drug dealer.
“But okay, now. Here’s what I really need to tell you…”
And this is the story of his recent life.
***
“Eighteen years ago – back when I had both my legs – I was stabbed in the stomach in a place called Sweetheart’s Bar. I was selling drugs outa there. Two guys came in, and one guy grabbed me from behind and the other guy took the drugs and stabbed me. I nearly died in the hospital. I was gurgling blood. Doctors said I’d be lucky to live through the night. But when I got out, I went back to drugs again.
“Not long after that, the drugs got me sent to prison. Three years, I became a Muslim in there, because Muslims were clean, they took care of their bodies, and a guy named Usur showed me how to pray, you know, five times a day, on the prayer mats, do the salahs, say ‘Alahu Akbar’.
“But this guy, Usur, at the end of it all, he’d whisper, ‘In Jesus’ name, amen.’ I pulled him to the side one day and he says, ‘Listen man, I’m a Muslim in here, but my family out there, they’re Christian. I don’t know if its Allah or Jesus Christ after this life. I’m just trying to get in, you understand me? ‘Cause I ain’t never going home, Cass. Do you understand that I’m gonna die in here?’
“Well, I left prison and that kinda messed me up. I drifted away from anything with God and I got back into drugs – crack, pills, weed. Lost all my money. With no place to go, I went back to the Jeffries Projects, where I grew up, and which was abandoned now and being torn down. I kicked in the back door of a unit and slept in there.
“And that was the first night I called myself homeless.”
***
I nodded along as Cass spoke, still not sure where he was going with this. His hat was pulled over his ears and his glasses and graying beard gave him an almost artsy look, like an aged jazz musician, but his old brown jacket and his amputated leg told a truer tale. When he spoke, his few remaining teeth poked from his gums like tiny yellowed fence posts.
He was determined to get through this story, so I rubbed my hands to keep warm and said, “Go on, Cass,” Smoke came from my mouth, that’s how cold it was in the church.
“All right, Mister Mitch, now here’s the thing: I almost died a couple of times in the projects. Once, I came back at night and as soon as I walked in, someone whacked me over the head with a gun and cracked my skull open. I never did find out why. But they left me there for dead, bleeding, with my pants pulled down and my pockets turned out.”
Cass leaned over and pulled off his hat. There was a three-inch scar on his head.
“See that?”
He pulled his hat back on.
“Every night in that life, you would either be getting high or drunk or something to try and deal with the reality that you didn’t have no place to go. I’d make money all kinds of little ways. Take out garbage for a bar. Panhandle. And of course, I’d just steal. The hockey team and the baseball team, when they was playing, you could always sneak down there and steal one of them orange things and wave people’s cars in if you look decent enough, You say, ‘Park right here.’ Then you run with their money back to the projects and get high.”
I shook my head. With all the hockey and baseball games I’d gone to, I might have handed Cass a few bills myself.
“I was homeless pretty near five years,” he said. “Five years. Sleeping here or there in them abandoned projects. There was a winter night in the rain where I almost froze to death at a bus stop, my stupid behind out there with no place to go. And I was so hungry and so thin, my stomach was touching my back.
“I had two pairs of pants, and they was both on me. I had three shirts, and all three of ‘em was on me. I had one gray coat, and it was my pillow, my cover, everything. And I had a pair of Converse gym shoes that had so many holes in it, I loaded my feet with baking soda to keep them from stinking.”
Where did you get the baking soda?
“Well, come on – we was all out there smoking crack. That’s what you cook it with. Everyone got baking soda!”
I looked down, feeling stupid.
“And then I heard about this man from New York, Covington. He drove around in this old limo, coming through the neighbourhood. He was from a church, so we called him Rebbey Reb.”
Rebbey what? I said.
“Reb.”
***
Cass leaned forward, squinting, as if everything to this point had been a prelude.
“Reb come around every day with food on top of that car – on the hood, in the trunk. Vegetables. Milk, Juice. Meats. Anybody who was hungry could have some. Once he stopped that car, there’d be like forty or fifty people in a line.
“He didn’t ask for nothing. Most he’d do was, at the end he’d say, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you.’ When you homeless, you don’t wanna hear much of that, ‘cause it's like, when you get through talking about Jesus, I gotta go back to living in this empty building, you know?
“After awhile, Pastor got deliveries from these food bank organizations and he’d serve them out the side of his house in an empty field. A few of us made this grill next to his place and we’d heat the food up. People would come from blocks away, they’d bring a bowl, maybe a spoon if they got one – I seen people with plastic bags scooping up food and eating with their hands.
“And Pastor would have a little service right there against his house. Say thanks to God.”
Wait. Outside? Against his house?
“That’s what I’m saying. So pretty soon, we’re liking this guy. We see him coming, we say ‘Here come Rebbey Reb. Hide the dope! Hide the liquor!’ And he’d give us a little money to help him unload the food trucks – turkeys, bread, juice. Me and a guy had our own unloading system: one for the church, two for us. We’d throw ours out in the bushes, then come back later and pick it up.
“Eventually, Pastor come to me and say, ‘You got enough to eat, Cass? Take what you need.’ He knew what I was doing.
“I felt ashamed.”
***
“One night in the projects, I had just gotten high and I hear Pastor call my name. I’m embarrassed to come out. My eyes are big as saucers. He asks if I can do some landscaping around his grass the next day. And I said, sure, yeah. And he gives me ten dollars and says meet me tomorrow. When he left, all I wanted to do was to run upstairs and buy more dope and get high again. But I didn’t want to spend this man’s money that way. So I ran across the street and bought lunch meat, crackers – anything so I don’t spend it on drugs.
“That night, this guy whose staying where I’m staying, while I’m sleeping, he steals the pipes from under the sink – steals ‘em for the copper, so he can sell ‘em. And he takes off, and all the water starts running in. I wake up on the floor and the place is flooded. I’m washing away.
“My only clothes is all ruined now, and I go to Pastor’s house and I say, ‘Sorry, I ain’t gonna be able to work for you. I’m all soaked."’ And I’m telling him how mad I am at this guy, and he says, ‘Cass, don’t worry. Sometimes people got it worse than you do.’
“And he sends me over to the church, and he says, ‘Go upstairs, we got some bags of clothes, just pick out what you want.’ And I get some clothes – Mitch, it’s the first time I got clean underwear in I don’t know how long. Clean socks. A shirt. I go back to his place and he says, ‘Where are you gonna stay now, Cass?’
“And I say, ‘Don’t know. My place is all flooded.’ And he goes in, talks with his wife, and he comes out and says, ‘Why don’t you stay here with us?’
“Now I’m shocked. I mean, I did a little work for this man. I stole food from him. And now he’s opening his home?
“He said, ‘You wanna think about it?’ And I’m like, ‘What’s there to think about? I’m homeless.’”
***
Henry never told me any of this, I said.
“That’s why I’m telling you,” Cass said. “I moved in with his family that night. I stayed there almost a year. A year. He let me sleep on the couch in his main room. His family is upstairs, they got little kids, and I’m sayin’ to myself, this man don’t know me, he don’t know what I’m capable of. But he trusts me.”
He shook his head and looked away.
“That kindness saved my life.”
We sat there for a second, quiet and cold. I now knew more than I’d ever figured to know about an elder of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry.
What I still didn’t know was why.
***
And then Cass told me: “I see the way you watch the Pastor. You here a lot. And maybe he ain’t the way you think a pastor should be.
“But I truly believe the Lord has given me a second chance on account of this man. When I die, Jesus will stand in the gap for me and I will be heard and the Lord will say, ‘I know you.’ And I believe it’s the same for Pastor Covington.”
But Henry’s done some bad things in his life, I said.
“I know it,” Cass said. “I done ‘em too. But its not me against the other guy. Its God measuring you against you.
“Maybe all you get are chances to do good, and what little bad you do ain’t much bad at all. But because God has put you in the position where you can always do good, when you do something bad – it’s like you let God down.
“And maybe people who only get chances to do bad, always around bad things, like us, when we finally make something good out of it, God’s happy.”
He smiled and those stray teeth poked into his lips. And I finally realised why he had so wanted to tell me his story.
It wasn’t about him at all.
You really called Henry “Reb?” I asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
Nothing, I said.
***
“…let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16)
