North Carolina: They're Home for Christmas

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Brandon and Nicole Harden drew a poster together at school that captures the rough journey they have taken together this year. On one side is a picture of a skull with knives stabbing through it. "This is bad," they wrote, "so never have a bad holiday or a bad birthday or other bad days." On the flip side is a heart, a promise of better days.

A lot of good hearts have helped give the Harden children a real Christmas this year. But six months ago, when their mother Tamey left them in Poplar Bluff, Mo., to search for work elsewhere, the children wondered if the holidays would ever come again. When they joined her in Charlotte, N.C., Tamey had still not found a home. At first the clan lived in cramped motel rooms, then in a homeless shelter for families. But now Tamey, her boyfriend Bobby Warren and the children, 7 and 10, have an apartment, a tree ringed with presents, and a vision of their lives that hard work and good luck delivered just in time for Christmas.

When Tamey and Bobby set out last spring for the prosperous Sunbelt city, they hoped they could make a new life for their family. Though Bobby found a job at a local cafeteria, they lost their place to live and soon were out on the street. For a while they slept in a parking lot in their 1978 Buick LeSabre, until the police shooed them away. Then they spent some nights in Park Road Park, sneaking in about midnight after the park ranger left and departing by dawn before he returned. They hid blankets and pillows in the bushes and slept on a picnic table under a streetlight, where the mosquitoes weren't so bad. They took showers with a five-gallon water jug and washed up in the bathrooms, one standing guard for the other. Bobby shaved using the car's broken rearview mirror, and they washed clothes in the sink. "There's no reason you can't be clean if you can find a bathroom," notes Tamey. But they could improvise for only so long, and on the Fourth of July they finally hit bottom. For two days they had not eaten: after the picnickers left, they scavenged through the garbage cans for food, angry that one large group had taken their trash with them.

"You can get down," says Bobby, "but you don't have to stay there." The next day Tamey found a job running a cash register at Hardee's. Soon they had enough money to move into some cheap motels on a seedy avenue of used-car dealerships, pawn-shops and nightclubs. Within weeks they sent for the kids, who showed up the day before Nicole's 10th birthday. As she stepped out of the car at 5 a.m., Nicole took one look at the decrepit motel and asked, "Where are we going to live, Mom?" Tamey's response: "Here." Her daughter shrugged her shoulders, thinking they would move to a house the next day. "But we didn't," Nicole recalls, "because we didn't have one."

Motel life might have soured their souls. The children watched television all day, and slept on the floor or shared a single bed. They ate lunch meat from a cooler, or cooked fried chicken on some electric skillets and a hot plate they bought from a street person. Brandon once tripped over a shoe and burned his hand on hot oil in the skillet. He sobbed for an hour, but Tamey did not think the burn was bad enough to justify calling an ambulance. She was worried about the cost.