I was outside a gas station in Russellville, Arkansas, just after dawn, when I met Charlie, a homeless African American man in his early 40s, who’d been living with drug addiction for decades and had arrived in town, looking for a fresh start. “I’m just trying to make a new life,” he told me. “I’ve been clean for 10 days now.”
For all of America’s dreamers and winners, Charlie seemed to be living on the dingy and dangerous fringes of society. He slept in a tent beside the freeway and had lost an arm due to drug abuse.
The odds were stacked against him. According to America’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, relapse rates range between 40 and 60 percent. He was, however, eager to work, to go to school, and become an artist. “I want to teach people how to draw,” he told me. “I love art, it’s my passion. I have a drawing; do you want to see it?” And with that he grabbed a sketchpad from his bag and flicked to a pencil drawing of a duck sitting on a rippling pond.
Charlie believed, evangelically, in the ‘American’ tenets of hope, freedom, and small-town pride—values I would encounter time and again across a complex nation that is so regularly misunderstood; in part down to shortening attention spans, shrinking newspaper columns, and social media algorithms promoting controversial opinions while relegating nuance.
