BSHS 465 Transformative Leadership Paper, Part II
lonrel1
politeness.docxPOLITENESS DOESN’T COST A CENT
Helen Jacques greeted Nick Costello as he finished the last of his
lunch. Returning from a brisk walk after her own lunch, she was
pleased to learn his visit to the agency was going well. “Gloria
Samuels is taking her walk after lunch. I asked her to take you
over to our drug program. It’s four blocks away. You can use the
hike to learn a little bit more about her contribution. I had to prod
her to tell you what she’s added to this agency. Gloria doesn’t like
to talk about it because she’s afraid it will embarrass me. I’ve told
her I’m not embarrassed—I’m thankful—but it still bothers her.
Gloria Samuels is a very proper lady.”
The receptionist was waiting by the front door. She had traded
her black flats for pink and white sneakers with socks to match.
After reminding Nick that the 3:00 meeting would be held back in
the small conference room outside her office, Helen left them and
headed back to work.
They started down the hill toward the subway station from
which Nick had debarked earlier that morning. When he asked
her about her contribution to the agency, Gloria looked away.
“Miss Jacques wants me to say, but I didn’t do anything special.
You know . . .”
She paused, searching for the right word in her slow, careful
manner. “It was right after that time she and Miss Jessup . . .
had . . . words . . . and I spoke to them. They were always nice
ladies, Mr. Costello. Always nice. . . . Anyway, she and Miss
Jessup went back into her office and stayed there awhile. Later she
came out to my desk and thanked me for what I said.”
She paused, a distant look crossing her face. “‘All I did,’ I said,
‘was tell you that you were nice. That the Good Book tells nice
people to love one another, like my father taught me.’
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“‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you taught Marjorie and me more than
that. You made us look at ourselves. We’re not enough like your
father. We don’t practice what we preach, like he did. You do.
You’re patient and polite to everybody. Because of you, we’re
going to try.’
“I was so surprised by what she said I don’t know what came
over me! I looked at her and replied, ‘Miss Jacques, it can be easy!
Just remember: With patience, politeness doesn’t cost a cent.’
“Well, she looked at me in such a strange way I thought I’d said
something wrong. I started to get so nervous, but she hugged me
close and just said, ‘Thank you! Thank you, Gloria!’”
A smile crept across the receptionist’s face. “At the next all-staff
meeting she told everybody what I said and how much it meant to
her. That it could help our agency. That was very nice of her.”
By now they were standing in front of a small office building
on the main avenue, its windows covered with pots of ivy. “She
told me to tell you that you could best understand what I gave the
agency by coming over here.”
The receptionist proudly opened the door for Nick and
motioned for him to enter. “This is our HIV/AIDS prevention
program for drug users.”
Drug users? With HIV and AIDS? Nick was taken aback. How
did politeness fit inside a program like this?
There to greet them was a thirtyish African American man of
medium build and height wearing a light blue, short-sleeved dress
shirt with a paisley tie. Two pens, one a Bic and the other a more
expensive-looking fountain pen, were clipped over his front shirt
pocket. His manner was as forceful as his handshake.
“Welcome, Ms. Samuels! You, too, sir!”
Gloria briefly slowed things down through her careful
introductions and her polite but insistent withdrawal. She had 20
more minutes of walking to do, she explained, if she were to be
as sharp as she wanted to be for her afternoon’s tasks.
The program director’s name was Alfred Cousins. “Call me
Cous’,” he warmly requested upon meeting the reporter. He
gave Nick a brief tour of the office: two counseling rooms, an
.
open-space area in the front for meetings and meals, a small
kitchen area, a staff space with three cubicles, and his own office.
As the counseling rooms were occupied and the young staff and
three other neighborhood people were busy preparing what
looked like a late lunch, the program director and Nick met in his
cramped office toward the back of the store.
“We eat a community lunch around 2:00 here. Junkies don’t get
up early, so we found it better to serve a meal a little later in the
day. The three people helping our staff pulled their early shift
today. Other folks will get here in about a half-hour.
“This program started about three-and-a-half years ago.
Having been in recovery for 5 years and from the neighborhood
awhile back, I was hired by Ms. Jacques to be assistant program
director.”
He looked closely at Nick to judge his reaction. The reporter
nodded, seeking more explanation. Cousins was happy to oblige.
“Marge Jessup’s assistant director was in charge then,
Shondelle Williams. Both Ms. Jacques and Ms. Jessup sat us
down and went over how they wanted the program to work. I’d
been in drug programs one way or another for years, but this one,
they said, had to run differently. There were a few parts to this
program since it was supposed to be about prevention. First,
there was an outreach and counseling program. That’s where the
Centers for Disease Control funding came from. People would
get $20 to come in for an interview.
“We were set up to interview people on how healthy they were or
not. Some of it related to sexual practices, too—you know, safe sex.
That was the point of the funding, to study what was going on in
poor communities. That interview included the usual postinterview
services, like information and referral, if people wanted that.
Counseling was available, too, if people were open to it.”
“Sounds like standard stuff so far.”
Nick was waiting for Gloria’s etiquette lesson to show up
somewhere.
“Tell you the truth, on the face of things, it was so much the
usual drug outreach program that I thought it would be duller than
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dirt. If I hadn’t needed a job, I would’ve been out of there in
2 months, I thought.
“But those two ladies had different ideas, man, let me tell you.
They told us the program’s got four rules: no drugs, no drinking,
no judgment. Talked about how ‘politeness doesn’t cost a cent’
was a key to winning people to this program. We put that saying
up on the wall first.
“Then there was one final rule. Everybody who showed up was
invited to pitch in and help out with lunch.
“Lunch? I thought they were crazy. Those two ladies were
crazy like a fox. Asked me to think for a minute. ‘What would
preparing, serving, and cleaning up after lunch look like between
staff and a bunch of addicts?’
“I thought for a while and started to get it. The first two rules
gotta be there.You don’t live in la-la land with addicts. Limits are
limits, or they walk all over you. Trust me; I’ve been there. But
after his craving and trying to score, what’s an addict deal with the
most, inside himself? Shame. Let’s face it: People think addicts
are the lowest of the low, the scum of the Earth. Addicts do, too.
“Wherever they show up, people are watching them like hawks.
Mistrust every move they make. Look at ’em more like a bunch
of ferrets than human beings. Addicts get so used to feeling like
scum they beat you to the punch and play the fool before you have
a chance to tell ’em so.”
He scratched his bearded chin for a second before continuing.
“Helen understood that. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘in a lot of ways an
addict is just an extreme version of every client we’ve got when
they first walk through our doors—more needy, more demanding,
trying to “get over” more. If we’re really supposed to meet clients
where they’re at, we’ve got to make this office a space where
everybody can show up together and treat each other with respect,
no matter how people present themselves.
“‘Those first two rules stay. We’re not stupid. But maybe if we
politely break bread together, we’ll start to deliver a message
that’ll get folks to come back here, even when money’s not part of
the picture.’
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“I got it. ‘So,’ I said, ‘we’re polite with people who aren’t
expecting it. This way we’ll let them know we’re not judging
them.’
“‘Hey, what’s politeness?’ she replied. ‘A code of behavior that
lets us know that we’re all the same, at least some of the time. It
may not be equality before the law, but politeness sure makes us
equal at the dinner table.’ The lady blew me away.”
“Easier said than done, don’t you think?”
Nick was curious to see how such a lofty idea could work in
practice. This storefront wasn’t the late Reverend Samuels’s
Episcopal church, and its participants weren’t from his choir.
“Are you kidding? First couple of months nobody’d do more
than give an interview, score their $20, and split. I admit my
patience for this project was starting to run thin. Finally, a couple
of guys stuck around for some roast beef sandwiches. Pretty soon,
we had about six more. Guys couldn’t believe it. ‘We just gotta
help out? No prob!’ was the attitude.”
The site director pointed to the walls. Nick saw a list of neatly
lettered rules on poster board. “Got them to draft their own rules
for the place. Pretty much followed the ones we had already, plus
a few more. Interesting, don’t you think? Say grace at every
meal. Everyone pitches in. Call people by their names. No
‘dissing’ . . . you know, no disrespect inside these walls. If kids
are here, no swearing. Guys started to bring their kids in, once in
a while, for a meal, too.
“The kids helped us with their parents. The addicts didn’t want
their children to become like them. So after lunch, we’d read
stories from the anti-drug comic books we got from the federal
program. Had the parents read one cartoon panel apiece so nobody
got embarrassed about how well they read.
“Might have been the first time the guys shared something other
than a needle in a long, long time. And you know what? Giving
their kids that anti-drug message—guess who else heard it?”
His laugh was like a happy bark. “They did!”
By now Nick thought he knew how to listen for the leadership
principles embedded in South Bronx Multi-Services practices, but
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so far he wasn’t hearing them. “So, how’s this good work tie in to
the special way things operate up here? Sounds like a great
program for clients, but what’s that got to do with how the staff
work together?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Shondelle and I and our staff were putting a lot
of energy into getting our clients on board. Working with addicts
is like climbing the same hill a lot of times. . . . You know that
Buddhist saying, ‘fall down seven times, get up eight’? He musta
used that first while working with junkies. All that resistance and
denial can wear you out.
“Plus, we’re trying Ms. Jacques’s new way of involving
people, which made us anxious. Who knew if the program
would catch on? Wanting to mix ‘rights and responsibilities’
with a hot lunch sounds good in a grant, but could it really
happen? We sure didn’t know. Let’s face it: By now patience
was at a premium.
“So one day, Shondelle and I are in this office, discussing how
things are going. She’s a very detailed lady; me—I’m the more
spontaneous type. When things were going good, we were great
together. But when we weren’t? That was a horse of another color,
and it wasn’t pretty!
“That particular afternoon was one of those not-so-good-days.
I was in a hurry; Shondelle was slowing me down. Of course, she
was thinking I was sloppy while she was getting things in order.
Like I said, we were going at it.
“All of a sudden, there’s a knock on the door. It’s Richie, one of
the roast beef guys. Hands us a piece of paper and leaves right
away. I mean, he runs out of there!”
“What was on it?” Nick asked.
“The ground rules from the wall. Guess what Richie had
added?”
For once Nick knew. “Politeness doesn’t cost a cent.”
Cousins was impressed. “Exactly. You see, we staff were using
up our good energy on politeness for everybody but us. After all
that hard work being empathic and respectful, we didn’t have
much left to communicate the same respect to each other. It
reminded me of the family I grew up in. My folks were sweet as
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sugar to the neighbors. Inside our walls, forget it! World War III,
minus the nukes.
“Like my parents, Shondelle and I had spent our last dime of
respect on the outside world, not ourselves. But who were we
kidding? As Richie said later, ‘Hey, hearing you guys bark at each
other once or twice a week made me feel that all that politeness
was just a new version of getting over. I liked being here, but I
figured that “respect and reciprocity” crap was just another con.
Until you changed.’”
“How’d you change?”
“Hey, Mr. Costello, you’ve already heard the other stories.
There’s no magic to having that full glass. No magic to ‘politeness
doesn’t cost a cent’ either. If you want it, it’s yours for free. But
you gotta be willing to work on yourself, developing that patience,
to make it happen.
“Shondelle and I started taking those after-lunch walks
together. Before that we thought it was kinda cute. Me and my
background—I saw it as worse than cute, to tell you the truth.
Ms. Jacques said we had to stick with it for at least 2 months for
it to matter, so we did.”
He barked his laugh again. “We both started losing weight about
the time we gained a new perspective.”
“And what was that?”
“In every part of my life, politeness didn’t have to cost a cent. I
just had to care about myself enough every day by taking that
walk, working on who I wanted to be to keep my own glass full,
for me to be free enough to keep it that way.”
For the first time, Cousins looked completely serious, his voice
almost somber. “It’s no joke, Mr. Costello, really. If I can’t love
myself for free, if I can’t be patient and polite to me, how can
politeness be free?”
He put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder for emphasis.
“Politeness doesn’t cost a cent, Nick, only if we know our own
worth is gold.”
He walked Nick to the door. “Treasure’s everywhere, all around
us, even in a program full of addicts. It’s the prospecting,
especially on ourselves, that’s so hard.”
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