Vendor Spotlight

‘Shorty’ on family, the paper and the importance of giving

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

For James “Shorty” Redden, selling The Contributor is about connection.

“I like getting out there, intertwining with these people,” said Redden. “Nurses, doctors, I’m talkin’ about everyday people, they come by me every day. The way when you see them, they see you — they’re waving at you, you’re not just waving at them no more. They know who you are. You’re a fixture to them. You’re not going nowhere.”

Shorty is one of The Contributor’s most experienced vendors, having been with the paper for almost 13 years. He’s learned more than a few tricks about selling that he’s eager to share with newcomers — not just because they’re helpful, but because each new face is an addition to an ever-growing family.

“It’s a big old family here,” he explained. “This is a meeting place.”

“We all connect, we all meet, and this is the meeting place. Everybody goes and comes back — I ain’t went nowhere. [They come back] because it’s a family thing. I could leave and come back three years later and somebody in this building knows who I am.”

Photo by Linda Bailey

He sells frequently, but his mind is rarely on the paper. It’s on God, gratitude, and the family he’s come to know, he said.

“Thank the people. Thank God first, that’s the first thing you do. I pray that I get to my bus stop, I pray before I hit that corner. People need to back up some, ‘cause they say ‘it’s this, it’s this’ — no! It’s not all that, it’s what you make of it.”

Whether it’s a nurse dropping by his vending spot to offload some medical supplies and spare cash or a couple of strangers taking him and his girlfriend to dinner, Shorty has seen how you can get what you give when you’re working the streets.

He finds himself giving papers out to whoever will take one once he’s made his money back, confident he can make friendships more valuable than $2 in the moment.

“A man that interviewed me … he’d come to my apartment. I had a memory wall — I don’t have it no more — of everything I’d done with the paper and things. He started crying. You could hear it in his throat, he couldn’t talk. I said, ‘Hey, you ought to be happy! That pays my bills! That pays my phone bill, it helps me get something to eat.’”

Shorty said everything he knew about vending came back to that essential element of family, and it’s why he kept those memories so close.

He hopes to get settled into a Madison home one day, where he can enjoy a quieter life than most find in Nashville — but until then, he plans to put his best foot forward, knowing that positivity will return to him in time.

“Give your time. It will help you more than it hurts you.”