I have found Gerard’s writing to be difficult to get through. It’s hard to find the “why” or “what for” in her essays and I wondered the same things in “The Mayor of Williams Park.” We meet G.W. Rolle, a man who has been in and out of jail, on and off the streets, and who has also earned a degree in philosphy at Syracuse and published a book with the intent to finish another. But I don’t get the sense that I know what G.W. looks like or that I can imagine the sound of his voice. I know a lot of things about him, that he’s religious, that he’s served thousands of homeless people in the basement of a Lutheran church, but I don’t know him like I could know a character in a fictional novel. There is space between the reader and G.W. and I don’t think we’re being asked to relate to him. I feel the same way about Gerard in this essay. There’s nothing internal, no comment on something insensitive a police officer might have said or something inspirational that might have come from G.W. She is reporting the daily lives of the homeless as well as relaying statistics and facts about the homeless culture in Florida and its minimal change and even worsening condition over the years. We began with a highly personal, highly introspective essay and are moving further and further away from any closeness with Gerard.

The structure of this essay reads like a documentary film. Gerard sets the scene for us, but in a very mundane, very quotidian way. Each time she is at the church she describe the morning’s breakfast, the “trays of eggs, grits, home fries, sausage…” etc. and later the same basics of the “pot of coffee” and “large bowl of cut fruit.” But I want to know about the people she is meeting. At the heart of this essay, I want to say, is the urge to push us to sympathize with the homeless and to acknowledge that they are quite literally treated like animals and they are continually neglected by the government. G.W. even mentions that he encourages the others to feed eachother “because when you ‘feed people’ they sound like animals in a zoo” (191). But she doesn’t say any of this.

I’m also interested in the biblical passage before the essay. Prayers and blessings are repeated, the last with G.W. reciting “And thank you, God, that we’re not where we used to be. Lord, help us.” This seems to be a theme in G.W.’s life, continuing to fall and get back up, trying to better himself, but I’m not sure what it says about the essay. The ending feels anticlimactic. G.W. wants to take up yoga, the Missio Dei church is without a home, but only temporarily. “This has happened before” (224). It’ll happen again.