Fredrick Nickson searches long for the right words. When they finally come, his voice is low, and his right eye bulges out, making the emphasis he can’t muster vocally.
“I need help. I need help,” he says.
He speaks the truth.
But it’s equally true that no amount of help can cure his problems.
Nickson is only 50, but he moves, speaks and looks like a man whose already passed his allotted threescore and 10.
It’s not the worn, ragged appearance of a drunk or drug addict; it’s just the toll taken by myriad chronic health problems associated with poverty.
A Greenwood native, Nickson said he moved to Chicago in 1979 when he was a freshman at Greenwood High. He later served some time at the state Penitentiary at Parchman; he doesn’t offer many details other than to say he got saved while attending church behind bars.
Six months ago, he said he collapsed and had a pacemaker inserted. Since then he has gone to speech therapy twice a week to try to reconnect the gap between his brain and his tongue. He has to take a lot of pills, 12 bottles worth, he says.
I met Nickson last week when he walked from his home on Avenue F to the Commonwealth’s office and asked for a reporter.
Such unannounced visits are not infrequent, and you can usually spot the visitors as soon as they walk in the door.
The task of talking with them usually falls to Staff Writer Bob Darden or myself. I confess to often hunkering down behind the computer screen, avoiding eye contact, in hopes that the assignment will fall elsewhere.
Typically, the person is outraged about a perceived injustice: Their beloved child was mistreated at school by a cruel principal. An unfair employer terminated their hard-earned job. Unscrupulous scammers targeted them with fraudulent mailings.
You listen to what they have to say, and maybe write a story, depending on the validity and seriousness of their allegations. But the reality of the job is you don’t really get too concerned about the person’s plight.
For some reason, talking with Nickson got to me.
He didn’t really have a newsworthy element to his story, and he wasn’t complaining of any mistreatment.
In fact, Nickson’s case highlights some of the good benevolent organizations and our health care system do for people in this town.
For example, he said Greenwood surgeon John Lucas III installed his pacemaker, and Lucas surely didn’t do that work expecting to ever get paid.
Nickson has received care at the Leflore County Health Center, a nonprofit clinic on U.S. 82 for uninsured patients.
Greenwood churches, at least three that I know of, have paid his prescription bills or provided him with food.
Employees of U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker have written letters on his behalf in his so-far-unsuccessful quest to get Social Security disability benefits.
But despite all the help he’s received, you get the sense when talking with Nickson that nothing you can do will really change his life. He’ll still be just as sick and just as poor after you get done helping him as when you started.
What should my response be to such situations?
That’s the question I thought was bothering me after I met with Nickson.
There’s no absolute answer to it, but I believe it’s reasonable both to help people you meet like Nickson and to cut them off at some point.
But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that wasn’t really what was upsetting me.
The disturbing part is whether people in such dire circumstances can ever really change.
For that, consolation is harder to find.
I sought it from Ezekiel.
Upon being placed in a valley full of dry bones, Ezekiel is asked by God, “Can these bones live?”
The prophet seems to hedge his bets with his elusive answer, “Oh Lord God, you know.”
On one hand, it shows his disbelief that something so seemingly impossible could happen, but at the same time it expresses a hesitancy to accept that things can’t change.
Ezekiel, it seems, is not willing to answer either way — He’s going to leave it to God.
Of course, the account ends with God telling Ezekiel to tell the bones to hear the word of the Lord, and they rise up, first connecting bone to bone and then being covered with muscle and skin until they become a great army.
God tells Ezekiel that it means He’s going to raise up the destroyed nation of Israel.
So, can Fredrick Nickson and the countless others like him really be helped? Will their lives ever really change?
Oh Lord God, you know.
• Contact Charlie Smith at 581-7235 or csmith@gwcommonwealth.com.
