So perhaps that played into her split-second decision to do something completely uncharacteristic — offering a ride to a stranger whose car was stuck in a ditch on I-75.
She is, after all, a reasonable, respectable person, an associate professor of English at Sinclair Community College. And she was driving her daughter to her African dance class and already running late.
The Centerville mother wrestled with her conscience: Was it safe to stop, with her daughter in the car? Would her car get hit? “Someone else will take care of it,” she told herself.
But she listened to the voice of her good angel and pulled over. “Are you OK? Do you need to call someone?” she cried out to the stranded motorist. “Do you need a ride?”
“I’m OK,” he said. And no, he didn’t need a ride.
Henry-Jones hopped back into her car, relieved. But a minute later the stranger started walking toward her. He confessed a bit sheepishly that he might just need that ride after all; he hadn’t been able to reach anyone.
“All right, God, this better be the right thing to do,” she prayed.
To the stranger she said, “Where do you need a ride to?”
“Centerville,” the man said.
“That’s where I live!” she replied.
But first they would have to take a little detour to West Dayton, so that her daughter could make it to her dance practice.
In that two-hour detour the new friends learned more about each other than many people do in a lifetime.
His name was Dan. Henry-Jones is black; Dan is white; but the two quickly learned how much they have in common. “Turns out we go to the same church,” she said. “We lived in the same apartment complex. He’s practically my next-door neighbor.”
They spent a couple of hours at Hardee’s while her daughter rehearsed, eating French fries and watching the Bengals-Broncos game. “I learned a lot about this man, his life and his family,” she said.
She learned that they both volunteered for the same ministry that feeds the hungry.
They talked about “both of us being believers but not being tied to a physical building or other people’s ideas about God.”
They asked themselves, “How can we be the hands and feet of Jesus?”
Her daughter was mystified on the drive home, Henry-Jones said: “Here was this strange man in the car and my mom’s laughing and joking with him. I had to do some damage control with her. I told her that she should never pick up strangers, but I had a deep feeling this was the right thing to do. I told her that when she gets older and has broader experiences in the world, she will have a better understanding of what her intuition is telling her to do.”
Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing she had ever done, but in her heart she knew it was the right thing.
How many moments in life are we called upon to reach out to another human being — a loved one or a stranger – knowing that we’ll never have another chance to say “Yes”? How often have we regretted not acting on the side of kindness and compassion?
As a civic-minded woman, Henry-Jones has reflected a great deal about the Black Lives Matter movement. Needless tragedies have occurred, she believes, when people “act out of fear and not out of what is right, what is conscious.”
And she’s not just talking about police officers. She’s examining her own conscience, her own culpability: “Sometimes I don’t speak out because I don’t want to hurt a white person’s feelings, or because it might get me in trouble. When I do that I am perpetuating a culture I don’t want to support.”
And what about the messages she’s giving her 19-year-old son? “I constantly talk to him about not doing certain things because, as a black man in Centerville, he might be perceived in a negative way,” she said. “I don’t want to teach my child from a place of fear.”
She has a lot of people in her life, after all, who take chances to help people. “When I met Dan, it confirmed that I shouldn’t always act out of fear, that I am capable of helping someone,” she said.
When she dropped him off at his apartment, Dan wanted to give her gas money. “No way!” she said.
Instead, he gave her an extraordinary gift: his uncle’s etching of a mouse on a scrimshawed whale bone. “He wanted me to understand how much the help meant to him, so he gave me something that was irreplaceable,” she said.
Dan wanted her family to pass the precious heirloom down through the generations.
And she will. The small mouse on the whale bone will always remind her “there’s nothing too big and nothing too small for us to share in this lifetime.”
Tell us your story. Did you take a chance on a stranger that led to a meaningful or even life-changing encounter? Email your experience to this columnist at maryjomccarty@gmail.com.
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