“The American dream is getting rough,” said Terry, a disabled black man on his way to Minneapolis. The left side of his body was normal, the right side was deformed. I thought he had cerebral palsy, but he said that before he was born, the doctors didn’t know his mother was pregnant and gave her an X-ray. Half his body is nearly paralyzed. He limps, and his right hand is malformed.
“But I didn’t let it stop me. You got to have faith,“ he said.
He said the one thing he had to accomplish in life was to move from Gary, Indiana back to Minneapolis to take care of his mother.
“I’ve already accomplished the best thing. I’ve got my life and I’ve got God on my side,” he said.
His dream for the future is “that the world come together.”
“Good luck with that one,” said Victoria, his wife of just six months. They’ve known each other at church for twenty years. She has six children from a previous marriage, and he has three.
“That’s my dream, right here, my family,” he said gesturing to his wife and stepdaughter, a tiny girl, age 20, wearing on off-center ponytail and a black Tee with “sexy” written in spangles.
“I’m a content man, settled, happy. And I’m not going to let anybody take that away from me.”
He said he never asked for help, but I had seen him at a rest stop asking his wife to boost him from behind so he could go up the steep first step into the bus. “I don’t need help, I do it all on my own.“
“That’s why I stay out of the kitchen,” Victoria said dryly – Terry does all the cooking. He’s on disability and earns money as a caretaker for elderly people in order to stay occupied. He had an optimistic attitude in general.
“It’s just like I told you, we got to have faith,” Terry said.
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