First in a series of occasional articles chronicling the people, and the world, of Bus 19.
Iris Soares is an uneasy person when her cart is empty, and it is empty now. But it is just after 6 in the morning. The cart is always empty at this hour.
She had risen before light, as she does most mornings, to get to Fields Corner Station. She wants a seat on an early Bus 19, and she’ll push to get on first. If she can just get to the church in time to claim a good place in line, she will calm down.
She sits upright and fidgets nervously with the wire cart, like an athlete between plays, as the bus heaves out of the station and along Geneva Avenue toward Grove Hall. The people who board this time of day, mostly sleepy high school students bound for Latin Academy or the Burke, don’t pay her any mind as they squeeze past. To them, she is just the big woman with the anxious face and red Raggedy Ann hair whose cart is blocking the aisle. On the 19, people like her are an everyday sight.
The route of the 19 tells a story of this city. For much of the route, nearly a third of all residents live in poverty. Then the bus travels on to world-class hospitals and museums. For those struggling neighborhoods of Dorchester and Roxbury, the 19 is a lifeline. People rely on it to get to second and third jobs, to get to those hospitals, to get to a check-cashing place, or rehab.
Soares is headed for a door that is a half-hour ride across Dorchester and Roxbury, past weedy lots, well-kept shops, storefront churches. When at last the bus turns onto Warren Street and heads toward Dudley Square, her movements gain purpose. She reaches up and hits the yellow call strip.
She is already on her feet, hands gripped firmly to the cart handle, when the bus snorts and hisses to a stop at the stone facade of the Twelfth Baptist Church. As soon as the door snaps open, she is out with a clatter of her wire cart, huffing as fast as she can across the church parking lot toward a lone squat building and the door.
That door leads to the church’s food pantry, one stop on a circuit of pantries Soares visits each week to find enough to feed herself, one of her grown sons, and a grandson. It doesn’t open until 10, and food won’t be distributed until noon. But crowds at food pantries have gotten larger in the last year, and more unruly. The church has tried to assure the two hundred or so who show up each week that they do not need to come so early, to wait so long. But they do not listen. For Soares, it is a chance she cannot take. This is not just a food pantry. It is an everyday emergency.
This morning, she sees just one man waiting.
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