Colby Magazine : Feature : Don't Call Me Homeless

For DeLong, it was depression exacerbated, she said, by stress related to her job and marriage and by hormonal treatments for infertility. She was plagued by depression followed by bouts of manic behavior triggered by medication.

"It was a major, major change from the Macy I knew, who was highly intelligent, incredibly energetic," said Barbara Waters '71, a friend and roommate at Colby who continued to talk to DeLong during her illness.

During one hospitalization, DeLong concluded she would get out only if she said she was okay. She lied and was released. As a result, she traded the hospital for the streets of Cambridge. On the streets, DeLong learned very quickly that for someone who is without a home, help can be a double-edged sword.

"I was talked into going into a shelter where they stole my shoes and my I.D.'s the first night," she said. "I was held up with a knife in the bathroom. They were convinced I was delusional when I told them I was a biologist at Harvard."

DeLong left the shelter and never went back.

Her days were spent wandering, she said. Food pantries, supermarkets and diners were stops on her rounds. An inveterate reader, she also was drawn to bookstores, where she would spend hours tucked in a chair. "As long as you didn't dog-ear the paperbacks, you could curl up and nobody cared," she said.

But it was winter and darkness fell early. In the city at night, just as in the woods, there were predators.

"If you're a woman on the streets, there's always an element of risk," DeLong said. "The way you protect yourself is [to be certain] no one ever knows where you are. In the beginning, no one knew where I was. No one knew where I slept."

She kept moving until nine or ten o'clock at night and then made her way to her spot in the Old Burying Ground. Some homeless people slept under trees along a fence, but she thought that too visible. So DeLong continued on to a bank of shrubs along the wall of a restaurant that backs up to the cemetery.

Near a stone marking the grave of Wendell Maynard Davis (died 1827), behind a clump of arbor vitae, DeLong would spend the night. "I was well equipped," she said, as though it were an outing club trip. "I had a sleeping bag and a tarp."

Eventually February cold drove DeLong to join a group of people sleeping on subway grates. Several men in the group got drunk one night and one attacked her, DeLong said. Another homeless man "beat the daylights out of him," she said.

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