Meet June
June Interview with Bobbi Rathert:
JUNE HART was eager to share her story “to help others understand homelessness” and about her life situation. She is originally from Tunica, Mississippi, just over the border from Memphis and West Memphis. She spent much of her youth in southeastern Iowa. June was proud to list the states she has lived in: Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and Texas. Most of these, she stated, were before she was eighteen.
At age thirteen, Her mother told her to pick a new place for them to live. June closed her eyes and pointed to a map. After her finger touched the Coulee Region area, they came to La Crosse, and June has proclaimed it home ever since. A friend calls it her “Ground Zero.”
June explains what it was like when she first arrived. “I was extremely awkward socially, shy,” she said, “and I did not know how to make friends. I did not speak above a whisper and wouldn’t look anybody in the eye.” June continued to describe how she ultimately made a few friends who wouldn’t give up on her.
Eventually, June attended school for criminal justice when she left home to “escape her mother,” she said. It wasn’t until she was in her thirties that she deliberately pulled away from her mother and brother. “My brother could do no wrong, and I could do no right in my mom’s eyes,” June says. “When I was fourteen, the neighbors called the cops because my brother pushed me against the wall with his hands around my throat. When my mom got called home from work, she looked at me and told me I shouldn’t have antagonized him!” June says matter-of-factly.
June talked about her drug experience in the trap houses, the first time she had used and become addicted at age forty-one. She said she is now forty-five and says she has been nearly clean for three or four years.
You can find June’s full story in “Where’s Home: People Experiencing Homelessness in La Crosse County Share Their Stories.”
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