NEWS FEATURE: One woman’s calling: feeding the homeless

c. 1999 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Sometimes, Glendoria Smoot says, before she goes to bed Saturday nights she asks God to let her sleep at least until dawn. But no, sometimes he wakes her 63-year-old bones at 1 a.m., as he did recently, and sends her padding into the little kitchen of her […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Sometimes, Glendoria Smoot says, before she goes to bed Saturday nights she asks God to let her sleep at least until dawn.

But no, sometimes he wakes her 63-year-old bones at 1 a.m., as he did recently, and sends her padding into the little kitchen of her home in the suburban subdivision of Avondale, thinking already about the 100 or 120 homeless people she feels bound to feed that afternoon.


She tries to be quiet with the pots so as not to wake her sister, Stella, or her niece or nephew or her elderly father, still asleep elsewhere in the house. But there is little room in the neat kitchen with its pink counter tops, lace curtain and white cabinets. And to cook more than 100 meals takes serious gear: big 40- and 60-quart pots sitting atop her four-burner gas stove, not to mention the big commercial roasting pans she tries not to bang going in and out of the oven.

So much food to prepare every Sunday, week after week, year after year. Yet such a welcome task, a sweet burden.”My calling, I know it,”she said recently.

Indeed, those who would seek to help do so on Glendoria Smoot’s terms, which first of all means no corner-cutting, no concessions to the scale of the job. This is retail, not wholesale. When she talks about the men and women who later will line up for her free food at the New Orleans Mission, a tenderness comes into her voice and sometimes her eyes moisten. She loves them, she says,even in their busted-up, eccentric, grimy anonymity.

But then a touch of the she-bear: At bottom, this is her calling.”I don’t trust my own daughters to cook for the homeless,”she says.

But in fact she does, a little. Nieces, daughters, grandchildren, anybody in the house on Saturday nights might throw in some help, twisting paper napkins and plastic tableware into 120 individual packets. Or peeling 30 pounds of raw potatoes for potato salad. Or browning 110 pounds of chicken Smoot has scored on sale somewhere for 29 cents a pound. Someone can fill six or seven empty milk jugs with powdered fruit drink.

But the heavy pre-dawn cooking is Smoot’s. And, by mid-morning Sunday, it’s packed and ready for loading onto the blanket-covered floor of her plum-colored Ford Aerostar van, in the space where the middle seat used to be: 20 pounds of red beans in two big pots; 30 pounds of cooked rice glistening in translucent plastic tubs; 100 pounds of stewed chicken swimming in gravy; slabs of bread pudding and sweet potato bread, each an inch and a half thick and half as big as a man’s hand, mounded under foil on a metal tray; 30 pounds of thick-textured potato salad; six bags of day-old rolls from a bakery; and six gallon-jugs of cherry, grape, lemon and orange fruit drink.

Altogether, it’s about $200 worth of food, purchased each week largely out of her own pocket.


It is her regular Sunday routine, and has been for the better part of three years, since Smoot and her friends who help her serve began her Mission of Mercy Outreach Ministry, began coming to the mission on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.

On months when there is a fifth Sunday, Smoot takes off and spends the morning with her congregation at Macedonia Church of God in Christ. And on certain holiday weekends the New Orleans Mission has a standing arrangement to let other church groups do the feeding.

But all the other Sundays of the year are hers, filled with such dependability that the nonprofit mission long ago ceded the day to Smoot, confident she would show up with her food and her band of helpers: her daughter, Cassandra, a nurse, and Chauna Modica, a young securities trader who leaves her own Sunday worship service early and takes the bus to the mission.

Sister Smoot, or more often Sister Smooth, is what they call her there.”She’s the real deal,”said Mac Thornton, the mission’s executive director.”She and her helpers show up every Sunday, which is a real help for us. Lets us give most of the kitchen staff a break. I think she does it from a genuine sense of Christian sharing. I don’t have any doubt about that.” And then a small laugh. There have been a few minor skirmishes with Sister Smooth, Thornton said. Nothing serious, just a minor difference or two over the best way to organize the food serving, given the slightly volatile nature of the clientele.”She likes things done her way,”he said.

Ultimately they are all on the same mission, a joint commitment that has solved all the little problems, he said. Bottom line: He’s grateful.

Sunday dinner at the mission, not surprisingly, comes after the preaching. Most Sundays, Smoot takes over a chapel service begun by Brother Don Harrison.


While the staff carries her food back to the kitchen, Smoot unlimbers her tooled leather Bible and, when Harrison gives way, opens it to the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John: the story of the woman taken in adultery. Much of it is her story.”I used to be a drunk. An outcast alcoholic,”she said recently.”Didn’t care about anybody but myself. Used to drink anything. If you think Listerine won’t make you drunk, try it.” For 30 years, off and on, she has pressed clothing at the same family-owned cleaners in Carrollton, where a Christian co-worker, Joshua Hill, by the steady example of his life, led her from alcoholism to a deep personal conversion to Christianity, she says.

Luke Gennaro, who took over the cleaners from his father and who has known Smoot since he was a teen-ager, confirms the story _ confirms the raggedy old Smoot, the influence of Hill and the authenticity of the new Smoot _ as well as the fact that, so far as he can tell, Smoot bears nearly all the expense of the weekly feedings. Sometimes, she says, he throws in $50 or so to help her buy food. Smoot can hardly afford $800 worth of food a month on her weekly salary of $175.

But the secret, she says, is her kitchen, which one day a week turns out covered plates of red beans with fish or chicken, stuffed crabs or bowls of thick gumbo that she drives over to nearby Avondale Shipyard and sells to the yard’s welders and pipe fitters from her van.

The income, she says, supports her weekend cooking and her regular trips to Sam’s Club, where she buys rice in 50-pound bags, powdered juice drink by the bucket and salad dressing by the gallon.”The Lord has blessed me that way, to let me keep this up,”she says.

If it is a grind, those around her say she seems to thrive on it.”There is love,”she says,”and there is being `in love,’ and there’s a difference, you know?”I am `in love.’ This love God put in me not so I could sit around and say,I’m saved, I’m sanctified. He told me I had to help somebody else, just as somebody helped me. And I know that God loves those guys. But he wants me to demonstrate that love, to show it, you understand?”That’s why this is such a joy. Such a joy I can’t describe it.” So, for the foreseeable future, she will continue her weekly feeding, helped by Cassandra, Modica and Ernest Lewis, another convert in her group who sees in the poor the same things Smoot sees.”When I hand a man a plate of food, I don’t see his hand. I see my savior’s hand. I see my king, that’s who I see myself feeding,”Smoot says.”That’s hard for some to understand, but that’s the way it is, because God’s word tells me insofar that you do this to the least of my brethren, you do it for me.” DEA END NOLAN

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