THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHARITY AND JUSTICE

Carmen Deedy is indeed a gifted storyteller. She has been a featured teller at two events we’ve attended, one in Tennessee and the other, more recently, in Texas. Carmen’s featured stories are about her growing up years in Georgia. She is a child of Cuban refugees
It would be difficult to sleep through a Carmen Deedy story, even if you were very tired. Her stories are structured on dialogue. She alternates between the narrator voice—her naturally soft southern drawl, and the family voices delivered in a high-pitched super-speed ultra-emotional patter of Hispanic English. Following her stories is a little bit like taking a wild ride on the midway. You climb a little, you speed up, you slow down, you almost stop, and then you are catapulted around again. And even if you could sleep, you wouldn’t dare, because her stories end very abruptly and you have to be listening, or you’ll be lost in the applause, trying to reconstruct the finale.
I wouldn’t dream of trying to tell a Carmen Deedy story. Her stories are hers and hers alone. But there is this one story—summarized here, not told--about her father, who was starving, eking out his last few pesos for the smallest portions of food that money could buy. Each time he did this he was given extra food. Starving as he was, he was also ashamed to take the food and so, at some point, he insisted on taking only that for which he had paid. Then the one who was dishing up the extra food for him said that he needed to learn the difference between charity and justice.
The difference between charity and justice! I wrote that line down when we got back to our hotel and didn’t find it again until this week, when I began to sort through the treasures brought home from the Texas storytelling Festival. I wrote it down because it grabbed my attention. I knew that, when I got home, I’d have time to think how proud we are, in this bountiful country, of our volunteers, our philanthropists, our generous purchases at silent auctions. And to these I am bound. In a flurry of good-cause activity I am both giver and receiver. Still, I can’t help but wonder something: How would our society structure itself differently if we spent more time contemplating the difference between charity and justice, then acted upon the conclusions we reached?