Unlikely Friends and a Strange, True Tale…
by Marcia Z. Nelson, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2006
An international art dealer and a modern-day slave from Louisiana become friends after the art dealer is roped into volunteering at a homeless shelter by his saintly wife. Sounds like it's got to be fiction, but that's the true story told in Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (W Publishing, June). Co-author Hall, the art dealer of the pair, spoke to RBL from Miami, where he had just arrived after a week's vacation on his boat, saying, "Now that I have lived it for so long, it doesn't seem quite so out of the ordinary."
By contrast, Moore spent almost the first 30 years of his life on Louisiana cotton plantations, where he and his family grew and picked cotton and were never paid cash for their work, but given credit. The vicissitudes of his life, including a stint in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison, eventually brought him to a homeless shelter in Fort Worth, where Hall's wife Deborah, a volunteer, prompted by faith, love and persistence to become increasingly involved in the shelter, singles out Moore. She maneuvers the suspicious Moore and her Suburban-driving, Starbucks-drinking husband into a friendship that grows once "Mr. Tuesday"—the day the Halls volunteer at the shelter—realizes the man he has been calling Dallas is actually named Denver. With hesitations over social differences and revelations of human similarities, the story of intertwining lives knots decisively when Deborah develops colon cancer and dies.
 Ron Hall and Denver Moore |
The once homeless man now lives with his art dealer buddy, who owns residences in Dallas and New York and a ranch near Fort Worth. Moore has recovered from an aneurysm and stroke and is pursuing a new career as a painter. "He's doing some interesting self-portraits," the art dealer says. The authors' profits from the book will go to the Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth, which now includes the Deborah L. Hall Memorial Chapel.
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