The white, four-door sedan rolls down Wade Hampton Boulevard, the driver’s camouflaged sleeve propped on the open windowsill, eyeglasses perched on top of his head, a white Clemson visor on his close-cropped grey hair. The car is riding a little low — the back seat stuffed with boxes of lace-up boots and pop-up tents.
Eventually, the sedan pulls into Greenville County Square, backs into a spot, and out comes the driver, Redd Martin.
That’s Redd with two D’s because, he says, “Mom said I was different.” He laughs.
Though it’s a Sunday afternoon, a group of vehicles soon surround Martin’s sedan in the vast County Square lot. And while iron workers clang away at the new, billion-dollar facility nearby, out from the various makes and models pour people as various as their vehicles: Families, friends, servants all.
This gathering is known as Sunday Dinner with a Twist, a 501(c)(3) that today has come to life in the form of the 13 people whose 26 hands are there to help Martin, 55, and his wife, Cassandra, 48, serve Greenville’s homeless.
In the next couple of hours, this group (anyone is welcome to volunteer) won’t wait for Greenville’s homeless to come to them. They’ll fan out and deliver about 150 homemade spaghetti meals to them along with the boots and tents in Martin’s back seat, bottled water, and snack kits.
It’s a calling for Martin, who says he spent 20 years battling drug addiction, alcoholism and homelessness. It’s Cassandra Martin’s calling too. Though she was never homeless, she did spend time in some of Greenville’s shelters. Redd’s situation, though, was more pronounced.
“I was homeless in Greenville, Columbia, Sumter, Atlanta, Charlotte,” he says. “I’m a runner.”
“I felt like God didn’t want anything to do with me,” he says. “I knew God would work in your life, but not in mine.”
One day, a man Redd knew told him to sit down and calculate all the times he’d been in jail, the times he’d been in rehab, the times he’d been in the psychiatric unit, the times he’d attempted suicide and the number of friends of family members who’d died of addiction.
“Thirty-two treatments, six jails, eight psychiatric hospitals, five times I tried to commit suicide and eight people,” Redd says.
In that moment, he found faith.
“I saw God in those numbers,” he says. “I realized he’d been with me all the time — all those treatments, all those hospitals, all those suicide attempts. I should have been No. 9 a long time ago.”
Martin credits two forces for pulling him out of addiction and homelessness: “My wife, and building a relationship with God.”
No stipulations
After the group has divvied up the meals and supplies and identified where they’ll take them, they gather in a circle; Redd makes a few announcements, gives updates. And then they pray.
A homeless man approaches. Redd immediately hands over a spaghetti meal and bottle of water. One thing is clear: He understands this man, feels his need. When the man mentions money, Redd’s right hand goes into his right pocket, and out comes a $10 bill. No questions asked. No stipulations.
Ryan Swartzel, a contractor during the week, is out most Sundays with the Martins.
“My faith leads me to help and love folks,” he says. “Marginalized people. Folks that people say aren’t worth anything. Folks that need to be loved on and helped.”
Specifically, Swartzel is a Christian.
“You look at how Jesus did things; he went to where people needed help,” he says. “He didn’t ask people to show up at the temple, clean, asking for help. He went there were they needed him.”
“Redd and Cassandra are doing something a lot of people are not doing,” says Augie Henry, whose wife, Heidi, owns Harvest Kitchen, the Greer restaurant where today’s meals were cooked and prepped. “It’s a need. They’re meeting a need.”
Heidi Henry says helping the Martins by offering the use of their kitchen is a no-brainer.
“Harvest Kitchen is mission based,” she says. “One hundred percent of our profits goes to missions. We’ve been a part of a lot of ministries, but the Martins’ is just so grassroots. We were sold on it right away.”
Sunday Dinner with a Twist is so named because of what Cassandra’s grandmother used to do, Redd Martin says. “No matter what she was going through in her household, you always had a Sunday dinner at grandma’s house.”
In the beginning, the Martins would take a poet or a comedian with them as they delivered meals to a men’s addiction-recovery facility in Greenville.
“The poet or comedian was the twist,” he says. “Now, the twist is just feeding the homeless.”
These days, they’re delivering between 125 and 150 meals a week; in five years, they’ve put about 43,000 hot meals in homeless hands, Cassandra says.
Showing up every Sunday
They keep coming back, because so few do, Cassandra says.
“When you’re homeless, nothing’s worse than someone saying they’ll be there for you and then, they never show up,” she says.
“They’re waiting on us. They know we’re going to show up every Sunday with food,” Redd says.
The team behind Sunday Dinner with a Twist has plans to expand their reach, he says, but most are somewhere out in the future. For now, they’ll continue delivering meals every Sunday.
The food and items come through donations and support, particularly from listeners of WCCP 105.5 FM, The Roar.
“The Roar family plays a big part,” he says.
Either way, things always seem to work out.
“I used to worry, and Cassandra would get onto me,” Redd says. “She always says, ‘God’s got it.’ I’ll think maybe we won’t have enough green beans or something and it’ll turn out that we had too many.”
So when the group of 13 fans out to deliver meals into the wooded areas of the city where the homeless tend to gather, Martin smiles and says it’s not just about the food, or the boots, or the water or the tents.
“Mostly, the homeless need people to show them love and compassion,” he says. “I don’t worry anymore where it’s all going to come from. I’m the richest man I know.”
