Habitat for Humanity -- Ike Photo

The photograph at the bottom of this page was taken in February of 2001 by Stephen Billings, who at the time was a full-time staff member of the Kansas City, Missouri, affiliate of Habitat for Humanity.

The subject is Isaiah Washington, who at the time was also a full-time staff member, a construction supervisor.

I include this picture on my Web site because it is such a well-captured character study of Ike. I have shot perhaps a thousand photos in my life, and not one has ever been this good.

This is exactly what Ike looks like. You can't tell that he's five feet five and maybe 120 pounds, but he's a heavyweight in every other category. And he didn't know this photo was being taken. Nor that it would end up being used in Habitat promotional literature.

Ike is a skilled carpenter, electrician, plumber, HVAC installer, and all-round handy guy. In the too-few months I was privileged to hang around Ike I've come to the conclusion that he can fix anything. Ike is so proficient that when he gets near broken stuff it just gives up and fixes itself. He can walk into a half-framed Habitat house he's never seen before and diagnose ten problems in the time it takes most people to figure out which room is the kitchen.

Yet if you didn't get a chance to watch him in action over time you'd never know it. Ike keeps his light under a bushel. It's a bright light, but it's a big bushel. I imagine there's a lot more about Ike I wish I knew.

Ike and I have talked a bit, and I've never heard him utter nonsense. He is not just always soft-spoken, he actually mumbles a lot. Yet most everything he says is worth listening to.

As far as I can tell, he has a short list of philosophical ideals: Love and teach your kids. Don't hurt anyone. Take responsibility for yourself.

Here are two Ike stories.

1. One afternoon in the summer of 2000 Ike and I were talking on the front porch of a house I'd been working on for two months straight for Habitat. The sun caught his right eye just right and I swear it looked like a cat's eye, with a pupil that contracts and enlarges not in a circle but rather a vertically oriented oval. I swear.

Cats do see better in the dark, needing about six times less light than us humans for the same level of acuity, which is why they're always so surprised, and probably a little bit irritated, when we trip over them in the dark at the top of the stairs. The reason is an extra membrane in the feline eye called the tapetum lucidem ("carpet of light"). The tapetum lucidem is located behind the retina, and it reflects light back onto it from the rear. There's a drawback, though, to having an extra light-collector in your eye, which is that sometimes the light is too bright.

And that's why feline pupils contract from the sides in and not roundly as most mammalian eyes do. By contracting the pupil into a vertical slit and the eyelids into a horizontal slit, the feline can reduce the amount of light entering its eye by roughly twice as much as we humans can. Except Ike, I swear.

2. About a month before the photo below was taken, Ike and I were driving back from lunch in a Habitat truck when he happened to see something out of the corner of his right eye. He said in his laconic way, "I just saw two guys hit a guy, and we should go back. He's not moving."

I exclaimed, "What!? What did you say?!"

"Johnny, turn around and go back right now."

When we got back to the scene I hopped out of the truck. The victim was lying on the ground in a heap at the top of a small hill. His face was bloodied in several places, and so were his hands. I could see he was dazed and also frankly under the influence of at least one recreational drug. I said to Ike, "He needs help."

Ike got into the driver's seat and said, "I'll go to the police station."

As I kept asking the victim how he was doing he kept trying to get up, but the mild slope of the hill had him stymied. He'd put out a leg and roll a few feet down the hill, then catch himself. I'd catch up with him and try to get him to hold still till the police or someone got there, but he kept trying to right himself. Then he'd roll down the hill some more. At one point early on I became pretty damned insistent that he hold still, because I was so concerned that he not injure himself further or disturb the crime scene, and he growled and actually swiped at me. At a later point in his decline down the hill he held out his hand to me to help him, but I refused because neither of us was wearing HIV-proof gloves.

By the time he'd worked himself to the bottom of the hill about five minutes had gone by. He was starting to come around more, and seeing as how the police station was only half a block away I couldn't figure out why they were taking so long. He was going to get away!

And that's just what he did. Even though I told him several times that help was on the way and that he should lie still till then, he insisted on trying to escape. Eventually he gained his feet and began staggering south down the street. I tried to keep myself between him and the scene of the incident, so that when the cops and Ike did arrive there they would be able to see where I was so I could show them where the victim was.

As I watched him wobble down the street, for no reason I can figure out he removed the big, blue parka he was wearing (it was maybe 30 degrees out at the time) and flang it into the yard he was passing at the time. (As it happens, by the sheerest coincidence that yard was across the street from Ike's mother-in-law's house.)

I kept trailing the victim and looking behind me, expecting to see a cop car any second. Another minute passed, and no cop car. The victim got another half a block away, and still no cop car. What was Ike doing?!

Well, he finally did show up in the truck, but with no cops, no ambulance, no fire truck.

"Ike," I said, "where are the cops?"

He told me that he had gone to the police station and told them what we had seen, and that they decided not to respond because it was "too much trouble," they couldn't "confirm his story," it was "probably over."

As it turns out, all the cops had to do was literally look out their window down the street, but Ike said they wouldn't do even that, and he acted surprised when I acted surprised at that.

I don't know about your neighborhood, but as far as this particular neighborhood is concerned I should explain that this type of incident isn't exactly uncommon. In my experience there since August of 1997 I've seen and heard of a lot that just isn't normal where I live now. As one example, in July of 2000 a group of neighborhood gang-bangers-in-training threatened my life several times in person as I was ordering them off the property for hassling the teenage female volunteers. I learned from that experience (Hi, Billy Duncan) that the best way to get the cops motivated is to use the phrase "Man with gun." As another example, in 2004 or so a site supervisor once came under fire while rolling up a job site during a shootout. Apparently at least one of the bad guys thought the supervisor (Hi, Apollo) was an enemy combatant. As a third example, in 2009 a drive-by shooting (seven shots, five cop cars) took place half a block from a site I was volunteering on. One of the bonuses to the neighborhoods served by the Kansas City, Missouri, affiliate of Habitat is eventually replacing bad neighbors with good ones.