Shooting Back From the Heart

By the time I turned twenty, I had little hope. I didn’t consider myself very smart, especially since my dad judged me off my report cards and he would compare me to my older brother, who was academically brilliant. I don’t remember ever taking an IQ test, but I suspect I would have flat-lined the score./ Had there been a test to measure street smarts, however, I’d have tested off the charts.
My senior year in high school, I was assured my doom. Mr. Schumacher, the principal, said sternly, “You are a retard. You will be dead or in prison by the time you’re twenty.” Then came his final words to me before my expulsion from Detroit’s Cody High. Looking directly across his desk, his eyes peering over his glasses, he said, “You are our worst student in a school of 4,000 students, a hoodlum, and you are never to return. Goodbye, Jim.”
But my fate wasn’t sealed that day in the principal’s office, and decades later I was still among the living, not imprisoned and, in fact, had even seen a little success.
In 2010, I boarded a plane headed to Amman, Jordan, to launch a project with thirty Palestinian youth. Completing the project, I travelled to Hong Kong to consult with the Ho Family Foundation about youth projects they were planning.
After arriving at a hotel in China I collapsed onto a soft chair and looked out the floor to ceiling windows from the 25th floor of a hotel, onto a panoramic view of the Hong Kong harbor, thinking it a far cry from prison. “How did I get here?”
I reflected on how far I had come, from a tiny brick house in working-class Detroit to a city in China with a lifetime of adventures around the world in between.
Memories swirled in front of me. Contrasted to the condemnation of my high school principal, I thought of what Oprah had once said when she featured me on her show. Smiling, looking into the camera she said, “Shooting Back is one of the most interesting projects that caught my attention, and a very special effort in our nation’s capitol. Way to go, Jim Hubbard.” Without meaning to or even knowing how, I became a “media darling, a mini-celebrity, a man with a great idea.”
When I was a little boy, I knelt every evening at my bedside, my mother next to me, and we prayed for the “sick, needy and afflicted.” Then we prayed, “Now I lay me down to sleep, pray thee Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray thee Lord, my soul to take. Amen.” Now I have no doubt, and any idea denying God’s existence seems bereft of joy and imagination—the terror of a meaningless void. Happiness could only be achieved by being thankful to something higher than the self. “To whom or what do nonbelievers say thank for their being alive and being fed?
In this rare moment of solitude I could bring to the surface anything to which my mind had returned to again and again over the years, all the sore points of my life
A corpse in a casket in the dress she’d worn on Christmas day, and the blinding darkness that had followed.
I thought about personal pain and the pain of others. As a photojournalist, I had witnessed events that had made humans suffer through horror and darkness, as well as the heights of human glory and joy. I’d seen the richest and poorest equally good and evil, only ever human beings. Tragedy is not something I wanted to see either, but I did, and on a much grander scale than I ever imagined possible. Death and life are sewn together, akin.
When I was a little boy perusing Life Magazine and the Detroit News, studying the photographs that depicted war, famine and natural disasters, I was captivated. When I became a photojournalist such scenes became vivid for me. I saw bodies burned, cadavers laying in water for days. People butchered by knives, guns and bombs.
Is there a God, or is it all meaningless? How are we supposed to find any answers, especially after having taken photos of not only the victims but the monsters who had murdered or raped innocents, leaving haunting images as indelibly affixed in my mind as the layer of silver salts on the film in my cameras. These are permanent memories, not the kind I could repress.
What better place than the seminary, where I eventually landed, to ponder meaning and sift through the paradoxes of good and evil, to wonder why good existed in the same seeds of human nature as evil? But life absent meaning—and God—is an assumption without appeal.
When the consultations had concluded, I flew back to Los Angeles, but the memories weren’t nearly through—from my youth, my struggles with work and faith, the time spent abroad and at home with every kind of person—it all kept rushing together as one surprising story.
A writer for the Washington Post called one day and said he’d like to write a story about my work with the poor and homeless. “It’ll be a long story, seven to ten pages, including some of your photographs. I’d like to spend a few days with you, meet your family, accompany you when you’re on the streets taking pictures.”
“You want my whole story from childhood to now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a major story, seven to ten pages. Me?”
“I read some other stories about you and thought you’d led an interesting life. Besides, my editor thinks we should check you out. You’ve done something quite unusual, Jim.”
“What’s that?”
There was a pause. “You left one of the cushiest jobs in your field to attend a seminary and work with the homeless.”