In the unremitting heat of this neverending summer, I’ve often thought about Austin’s street people and wondered how they are faring.  I haven’t seen as many along the downtown streets, so I hope they’ve been staying cool at shelters or the City of Austin’s cooling stations.

Pondering the situation of the homeless, I realized that – with the exception of Leslie – we recognize very few of the denizens of our streets, making reference to them in the collective categories of “homeless” and “street people.”  The individual members remain largely faceless and certainly nameless. 

In earlier days, particularly in the 60s and 70s, most Austinites recognized Bicycle Annie, also called the Indian Princess, wearing braided hair and pieces of native American clothing.  Her trademark, the basketed bicycle she rode along the streets, was the reason for her other sobriquet, Bicycle Annie.

As the years passed, we saw the Indian Princess, who started out as a bicyle rider,  limping along the Drag on a crutch or just pushing along her bicycle.  We knew her to eschew interaction with others (if not outright resent it), a tendency that seemed to grow more pronounced as she got older.  Accordingly, as far as I could tell, she was pretty much left alone with the mental issues we assumed upon her, to do whatever it was that she did. 

But while she became an Austin icon, the simple truth was that this woman, with a face and at least two names, was very much an unknown to most of us.  Indeed, it was a welcome revelation when I was contacted by one of her relatives who became aware that I had written about the mysterious Bicycle Annie in several of my blog entries (jeffeepalmer.com). 

According to Diane, the granddaughter of Bicycle Annie’s niece, her real name was Zelma O’Riley who came from Durant, Oklahoma where her father, John O’Riley was a professor.  John and wife, Mary Catherine Harkins, a full-blooded Choctaw Indian, had five other children including, Lester, Arlee, Zula, Lula, Ora, and Lela.  The family was said to be very wealthy, and raised their children quite traditionally.  Purportedly very intelligent, Zelma moved to Fort Worth for a few years, and then finally to Austin to go to college at UT.   Here, she started the publication "Up and Down the Drag" in 1941.

Frankly, I didn’t know Zelma and I so much in common.  It was delightful to hear that she had written – in a November 1947 edition of Up and Down – "It will take a woman to save America.”  And she was not shy about her leadership skills.  She apparently saw herself as a potential savior of the country, and explained that her principal campaign plank was:  preparedness.  The advertisement read "Vote for Zelma O'Riley for First Woman President of the United States –  she is Irish, she is Indian and she will care for you.”   

A pioneer of activism, Zelma pursued other causes of importance to her.  As the true daughter of a strong Indian woman, she advocated for Native American rights.  Additionally, there are rumors that at some point in her life she attended the UT Law School to better understand the judicial system, and thereby, better "fight the power."

To finance her publication, Zelma sold subscriptions and advertising along the Drag.  Her family believes that after she stopped publishing Up and Down the Drag, however, she continued to sell advertising once in a while to fund herself.  Stores along Guadalupe probably bought these “ads” just to get her out of the store.  Zelma passed away April 30, 1991, and is buried in Durant in a Choctaw burial ground.

While these are the barest outlines of a life, I’d like to think that knowing about Zelma and her history gives us some insight regarding the others who roam our streets.   It was with great interest, therefore, that I read the article in September’s Texas Observer about the new book, "Hard Ground," a collection of photographs of individuals among Austin’s homeless.  This is the work of photographer Michael O’Brien, who at an unsettled crossroads in his own professional life, started going to the Mission: Possible! Community Center in East Austin every Tuesday to photograph and document the stories of the Austin homeless over a period of three years. 

What struck me the most is his idea that when a photo is “taken” the subject, as common parlance suggests, gets nothing in return.  Accordingly, he used a poloroid film that permitted him to give his subjects a print, while he maintained the negative.  I wonder whether he was honoring the old Native American suspicion that a person’s soul was stolen in the photographic process, and his gift of the picture returned whatever soul might be lost to its true owner. 

O’Brien, on the other hand, aptly describes the print as a testament to a life.  This reminded me of how we take documentation of our own lives completely for granted.   While we can find our faces in countless photographs from phones, digital cameras, and social media sites, it must be a rarity for any of the wandering homeless to have visual evidence that testifies to their presence on this earth.

Pairing these photographs with poetry by musician Tom Waits, O’Brien has produced a very special book of diminished lives that he has accorded the respect and dignity that all of us, as human beings, deserve.  For O’Brien, personally, his achievement is equally meaningful.  He tells the story of how he had been floundering, often unemployed due to changes that had rocked the photojournalism industry, but over the three years he photographed the homeless, he regained his balance and place, finding that this project gave him back his anchor.   Thumbing though the pages of this book, you become aware that O’Brien – in dignifying the life of the pictured individuals – has also dignified his own.