Tina Edwards has slept in parks, in open fields, behind shopping centers on Route 1 and in prison cells. But she once had a place to call home and a family who cared about her.
“I loved growing up in Lewes, it was a nice place to grow up. Everybody knew each other and took care of each other,” she said in an interview on a bright and sunny day this summer.
Edwards grew up in a home across from the Zwaanendael Museum. Her family moved from Pennsylvania to Lewes when she was about 4-years-old after her father, Granville, was seriously injured on his job at a chemical plant.
She said her mother, Margaret, was “just a mom,” not unlike many mothers of the 1950s – caretakers of children and home.
“Lewes was just a good, clean, nice place to grow up,” Edwards said.
She got her first job when she was 13, at a Lewes Beach restaurant where she cooked hamburgers and served fountain sodas.
“In those days you didn’t need to have working papers,” she said.
Edwards said she worked numerous places in Lewes throughout the 1960s. She later married, moved back to Pennsylvania for a while, had children and for a time, lived a relatively stable life.
In 1985, Edwards purchased a trailer home in the Donovan-Smith Trailer Park, just outside Lewes city limits.
A then-prominent Lewes businessman cosigned a loan, making the purchase possible.
She was evicted from the trailer after mounting a voluntary effort to push drug dealers out of the park.
Edwards said she videotaped drug deals and passed the tapes to police.
But things didn’t work out as she had expected.
“In the end I lost everything, and no matter which way I turned I couldn’t get any kind of legal help or anything. That forced me to sleep on benches, in fields, bathrooms, everyplace you could think of – after living here for 56 years,” she said.
Her marriage ended in separation and divorce.
She was arrested for criminal trespassing when she reentered the trailer and, as a result, was incarcerated in Baylor, Delaware’s women’s prison.
She spent 40 days behind bars – she said no one would pay her bail.
Edwards said since then said she’s been arrested by Lewes Police who deemed her “mentally unbalanced.”
“They took me up to Beebe hospital, and I’ve been in Meadow Wood and I’ve been in Rockford, where they would keep me for about a week or so and then release me,” she said.
Now officially homeless, she has bounced from shelters to the streets, to the occasional seat in a restaurant to an empty church at night.
Her divorce pending, she met her estranged husband in Philadelphia, telling him she wanted to relocate to New Orleans.
“He gave me $900 and put me on the bus,” she said.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse.
“When I got down there I got caught in Katrina. I should have stayed down there but of course I came back again thinking I was home,” she said.
Back in Lewes she would sometimes sleep in a church “when they don’t lock me out.”
She spent three months in jail on a violation of parole charge. While on work release she helped make repairs at the Cape Henlopen State Park fishing pier.
“Here I am, a lady that had never been in jail or anything else. But when it first started out, don’t ask me how I did it, but because I thought they were doing this to help me out – lord, did I ever know that they were going to take my trailer, that was bought and paid for, and take my whole life away from me. But this is what I went along with,” she said, holding back tears.
While she was in jail her brother died, but no one told her. When she was released she went to live with an aunt, now deceased, on Kings Highway.
“My aunt told me that Tony, my brother had passed away. My aunt died about six months later,” Edwards said. She lived in her aunt’s home with her cousin, who kicked her out of the home.
“Last year I asked people up town who’ve known me since I was this big,” she said, holding her hand about a yard above the floor, “offered to wash windows – anything so I could keep myself going.
“I applied for jobs, just can’t seem to get work after living here all my life, raising my children here and my grandchildren,” she said. Her son is in his late 20s, her daughter, in her early 40s.
She said her children told her what they were doing for her – having her live in the streets – was “for her own good.”
“It just gets worse and worse every day. It just goes and goes,” Edwards said.
She’s spent one night sleeping beneath a fish-cleaning table along the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal, which, hours earlier had been a bustling scene of anglers disembarking from head boats with their day’s catch.
Sleeping under the table resulted in her arrest.
She’s had many other offers of assistance but none that have resulted in a home.
She said once, while in custody at Delaware State Police Troop 7 before being transported to jail a man claiming to be FBI-connected, held a knife inches from her neck as she sat handcuffed to a chair.
“He said ‘You had enough, can’t take anymore? Here, let me help you,’” she said. She said the threat made her feel like vomiting.
She said city of Lewes workers who clean the city’s public restrooms in which she would sleep, never harassed her.
“I’ve known some of them since they were little. Everybody knows what’s going on, but not a one of them have said, ‘we’ve got together with friends and we’re going to have a fundraiser or whatever it takes for you,” she said.
Where’s Tina?
“Everybody knows where I’m at. Everybody knows what I’m doing,” she said. But in the past several weeks many people who knew the spots Tina frequented in and around Lewes say they haven’t seen her.
Some said she’d been trying to get money together to buy a bus ticket to head south again – maybe to Savannah, Georgia and a warmer winter clime.
But homeless is homeless – whether its Savannah Road or Savannah, Georgia.
