For the nearly two decades that Charles lived on the streets of Washington, D.C., the nation’s elite hustled past him with their eyes mostly averted. They saw only a homeless crack addict, not a man carrying a weight that finally dragged him all the way down.
Today, inside his own clean, white-walled apartment in Southeast D.C.'s Woodland neighborhood, Charles, 51, pulls up a sleeve of his white polo shirt to show me his scars.
The looped extension cord he recalls his mother using to strike him as a child has left a distinctively curled mark. There are slashes, too, which may have come from the belt his father preferred, sometimes wielded by a brother left in charge of “discipline” when their parents were out.
For the adult Charles, who asked that his last name not be used in this article, the emotional scars will always be the deepest: he remembers sexual abuse by a cousin; he recalls watching his alcoholic father beat his mother; he'll never erase the memory of being forced to fight other children for the entertainment of his father's drinking buddies. More than 30 years later, Charles' voice still tightens as he describes the litany of abuse he remembers suffering at the hands of those he loved and trusted most.
[For more of this story, written by Christina Davidson, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...ginsand-ends/383596/]
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