Class Questions

"I knew this was going to happen once we started the Shepherd Program," Beckley says with a laugh. "If you start raising these issues with students, you realize one of them is going to be bright enough to figure out W & L may be just as big an offender as anyone else."

One evening in April, Quiana and one of her good friends, Dane Boston, dressed up to go to Lee Chapel. They wanted to hear author Barbara Ehrenreich speak about her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. To write it, Ehrenreich had spent several months living off what she made working low-wage jobs ranging from waitress and maid to Wal-Mart employee.

Students are expected to dress for chapel: suits and ties for boys, dresses or slacks for girls. From the outside, Dane appeared to be every inch Quiana's opposite. White and blond, nattily dressed in a blue sports coat, yellow tie and khakis, he looked as if he'd just sailed in from the yacht club.

Ehrenreich spoke to a full house, then opened the floor to questions. Dane's hand shot up. Ehrenreich had criticized the way the government measured poverty, saying it missed too many struggling people. This reminded Dane of an argument he had read in class, one made by Harvard economist Amartya Sen, that what we think of as poverty should be measured in broader terms than just the financial.

He wanted to hear Ehrenreich's views on Sen's progressive theory. "The lack of money is not the only thing that makes people poor. There are questions of human capability," he said. "What are some things we should look at, like functional literacy, to measure poverty?"

"Stop thinking of it as something wrong with the person or there's something wrong with the choices they made," Ehrenreich snapped. "You have no idea how easily people can get derailed. I know that undermines the nice Protestant work ethic virtues if you can be blown off course so easily."

Dane sat down, crestfallen. Later, on his way out, he said quietly, "I don't think she understood what I was asking."

He comes from a small town in Florida. His father is a computer programmer. His mother is a teacher. Though Dane does like to dress up, he's hardly rich. He's attending W & L on an academic scholarship.

Dane spent last summer as a Shepherd intern, living and working at N Street Village in Northwest Washington. There, he cooked, cleaned, dispensed medication and organized activities for the women with mental issues who live at the shelter full time. The biggest surprise for him was also the most profound: discovering his shared humanity with the poor. "I was walking down the street in D.C. seeing the sights on one of my days off. I saw a homeless lady with a shopping cart. And it hit me: You know her name. She comes to the place you live," he says. "It's a link that most of America doesn't have."

In the journal he kept of his experience, Dane, with painstaking honesty, captured his hard-won transformation. "My patience with the ladies grows dangerously thin at times," he wrote on June 21, 2005. "I feel guilty for the judgmental attitude I have adopted, and yet whenever I am with them it is difficult to suppress."

At times, he wrote that he was frustrated by the women's childish behavior, their thanklessness or their inability to work toward their goals. Over the next month, however, he began to hang out in the craft room, where the women like to go to sew or knit or otherwise work with their hands. He listened to their life stories. He asked questions. When they requested a spelling bee, he made it a weekly event. "Slowly, I came to realize that the ladies do not deserve my service because they are elaborately grateful. They do not deserve it because they are unspeakably miserable. They do not deserve it at all. Rather I am bound to serve them because of the innate dignity of their humanity," he concluded in his journal.

He became especially close to Miss Tafeline Jones, a tart-tongued 75-year-old from Grenada who has lived at the shelter since brain surgery left her impaired years ago. On Sundays, before Dane went to church, Miss Tafeline always made him come out and model what he was wearing. She teased him one morning after he scrubbed the kitchen. "Oh Lord, I were afraid to go inside of it to cook. I could see myself," Miss Tafeline recalls. This past March, when one of his ladies died, he made the drive from Lexington for the funeral, sitting behind Miss Tafeline in the church and then walking her home. To this day, she calls him her "boyfriend."