It takes a village idiot

Yesterday I attended a funeral for a 27-year-old woman. Her name was Donna. I met Donna when she was 14 while volunteering for a neighborhood tutoring program in the ghetto where we both lived. Uptown wasn’t the hardcore ghetto, like Cabrini Green, but an ungentrified neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood was full of gangbangers and urban pioneers like me. I lived there because the rent was cheap and my apartment was a block from the lake front. Now, I could barely afford to move back there.

Every time I stepped out of my apartment I was treated to a free show. Someone was always going crazy in the street. I didn’t need cable television because all I had to do was look out my window to watch people having sex on the school playground behind my building, or getting shot. One summer afternoon I saw an old black man wearing nothing but leopard-print bikini underwear and an Indian headdress walking down Sheridan Road.

I moved to Uptown during the first Bush Administration in 1991. The neighborhood literally straddled the two Americas and I was caught somewhere in the middle. On my way to one of the four jobs I held during the five years that I lived there, I’d drive past lines of people waiting for the Uptown Lutheran Church food pantry to open, then settle down at work where I’d listen to people bitch about how much noise the recycling collectors made clanging the bottles and cans together. I wanted to shout at my suburbanite co-workers to get fucked. For every basket case in the neighborhood, there were ten people living below the poverty line trying to make an honorable go of it. The neighborhood was one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States, at least according to the 1990 U.S. Census. For the most part, everyone got along.

I started volunteering as a tutor and youth mentor for elementary school-aged children at the height of the Hillary Clinton-It Takes A Village To Raise A Child craze. I wasn’t exactly the best role model for children in 1992. I pretty much lived like a child myself and was a veracious pot head. I had a lot of crazy ideas about the government and life in general. I was more like the village idiot. When children visited my house I didn’t care what they did, as long as they didn’t play with matches. That was my only rule. But I like kids and thought I could give one evening a week to helping neighborhood children with their homework, instead of flopping down in front of the television every night like I usually did.

The tutoring program was sponsored by a Methodist Church that was founded to help children at Goudy Elementary School. President Reagan’s education czar, William Bennett, had visited Goudy in 1985, when he declared Chicago as having the worst public school system in the country. When I arrived at the church to volunteer that first evening, the kids were having a huge fight with one of the neighbors. Apparently on the way to tutoring, the kids rang the man’s doorbell and ran away before he answered it. The program director, an urban Methodist missionary named Beth, was standing between the man and the kids, trying to keep them both separated. I thought the guy was a real dick and overreacting. I remember him getting pissed off at me when I started smirking, thinking it was kind of funny that kids still engaged in the classic game of “Ding Dong & Ditch.”

Eventually things quieted down, and I was assigned to help a seventh grader, Donna, with fractions. She was a tall, lanky girl with short hair and a dirty jacket, the sleeves hitting somewhere along her elbows. I didn’t have to know anything about Donna’s life story to see that my dog led a better life than she did. This was a kid who had suffered trauma, violence, neglect and abuse. Donna hung on my every word as I tried to muddle through the fractions, thinking I was the most fascinating person in the word.

Eventually I learned that Donna, her brother and two baby sisters lived with their aunt, who was paid by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to be their foster parent. Donna’s birth mother was a heroin addict who used to pimp her little brother to pedophiles to get money to buy smack. Beth told me that Donna just showed up one day at the tutoring program, and a few days later, brought her younger siblings to the program as well.

Every day Donna got her little sibs up and dressed for school. She took them to the tutoring program because there was obviously something there that she felt both she and they needed. The kids were just chattel to her aunt. Her aunt pocketed all the money she received from the state to take care of them and spent it on her own children. It was specifically because of Donna and her siblings that new laws were passed in Illinois reforming the foster care system requiring more oversight and accountability of relatives entrusted to care for wards of the state. Once I gave Donna a winter coat and soon saw one of her cousins wearing it. Another time I gave Donna a tape recorder to record her classes because she was dyslexic and her aunt immediately confiscated it for herself. I soon learned to stop giving things to Donna.

During the school year, Donna would eat the free breakfast and lunch provided to her at school. Her aunt never bothered to feed Donna and her siblings’ supper, so she would go 18 hours between her last and first meals of the day. On the nights that I tutored, I’d take Donna and her brother, Kurt, to McDonalds for a treat, since I couldn’t give them anything without their aunt swiping it. I had no idea then that the Happy Meals I bought for them were a bonus meal.

Although she was horribly neglected and abused, Donna loved school, loved to laugh and have fun. She was in eighth grade but barely read at a third grade level. She was a hard worker and never gave up on herself. She had every reason to hate the world, to go on a shooting rampage, to spit at well-meaning white people like myself, or become a terrorist. But she chose to be a forgiving and loving person.

I had a lot of funny conversations with Donna who was always full of beans. I was only in my mid-thirties then, but to Donna I was practically a senior citizen. Whenever I drove the kids in my car, I made a deal that they could listen to WGCI, an urban contemporary station, as a compromise so I wouldn’t have to listen to any god awful rap stations. Donna liked to crank up the bass. I’m sure people could hear my car coming a block away. We used to argue about it, and one day Donna turned to the rest of the kids in my car and said, “Rainy doesn’t know anything about bass.” I looked at her and said, “Kid, my generation invented bass.”

We decided to start a high school study group to continue helping kids that aged out of the elementary tutoring program. It was hard to get kids to come to the new group, but Donna eventually dragged the neighborhood’s ninth graders to our Wednesday night sessions. She was the glue that held the group together, since I spent a better part of that first year screaming at kids. They squabbled like puppies. One kid was always smacking another, or grabbing someone’s notebook or pen. But by the end of the year, the kids were actually studying and doing okay in school.

When Donna turned 16 she decided to throw herself a Sweet 16 party. She was going to hold the party in the church gym. The pastor was freaking out, and eventually, I was coerced into being the evening’s chaperone. (I had to throw out a big gangbanger. Don't ask me how I did it.) Donna overlooked no small detail in her party planning. I remember driving Donna and her friend to Aldi’s to buy pop, chips and other snacks. The girls bought baloney and bread and made up a price list. They were going to make the boys buy the food and drinks that would be served at the party. I tried to explain to her about being a gracious hostess, but Donna was determined to get some of her money back, and damned if the boys didn’t pay for the baloney sandwiches. I found the party wonderfully life affirming, that here was Donna with probably the worst life of anyone I knew, celebrating being alive with her friends.

A few months after the party, Beth called me frantic at work. A neighbor had called Beth to tell her that she saw Donna’s aunt loading the kids into a taxi with their clothes in plastic garbage bags. The aunt was always threatening to turn the kids back over to DCFS. After work, I went to the DCFS facility which was a block from where I lived. Somehow, I managed to find out that Donna and her sibs had been dumped off on the door step the day before. I told the social worker that I wasn’t going to leave until I saw the children. As I was waiting, one of the other mothers whose kids were in the tutoring program joined me, in addition to Beth. The DCFS workers were amazed to see three people from the community show up independently of each other to check up on the kids.

Donna and her brother were off on a field trip, but they did bring the little sisters in to see us. Within 24 hours, the little girls’ hair had been freshly braided with colorful bows, and they were wearing adorable, laundered dresses, cared for by a grandmotherly aide. Donna and Kurt eventually arrived, and we told Donna to hang in there, that we were going to figure out a way to keep her in the neighborhood. A wonderful woman from the church named Paula, volunteered to take Donna in. Paula had three little girls of her own. She and her husband were the live-in caretakers at the Cultural Institute on Lawrence and Sheridan, where a lot of Methodist missionaries lived. They were Christians, but not in the sense of the Christianity that’s been hijacked by the fundamentalist religious right. These were Christians who had actually read all of the New Testament and practiced “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Donna blossomed under Paula’s tender loving care. She had her own room down the hall from Paula’s family’s apartment that she decorated with knickknacks from the dollar store and pinups of rap stars. The first thing I did when Donna moved in with Paula’s family was give her a bomber jacket that didn’t fit me anymore. Donna had found a new mommy, and I used to tell Beth that it was if Donna was cramming in 16 years of a lost childhood.

Eventually Donna graduated from high school at age 19, after transferring to an alternative high school specifically designed to help students with learning disabilities. After graduating, Donna developed a drinking problem, but eventually sought treatment at a facility in Arizona, where she met her future husband. She got married and had a little boy. Paula threw Donna a wedding last year.

Donna became a stay-at-home mom and took care of her little boy up until she had a brain aneurism on Jan. 19. Around that time I started having dreams that Donna had died. I dreamt that Beth called and left a message on my voice mail telling me Donna passed away. Donna was in my thoughts a lot, and last week, when Beth called and began leaving me a message, I knew what she was going to say as soon as she mentioned Donna’s name. It was as if Donna’s soul had been communicating with me.

At her memorial service yesterday, three people, including Donna’s adoptive mother Paula, got up and paid tribute to Donna in words far more eloquent than these. Most of my friends are atheists, and I’ve since lost that line of what I thought was communication with God. But seeing the church packed with people like me from the community, her natural siblings and her adoptive sisters, I came to the conclusion that Donna was a spiritual being having a human experience. At the end of the service, we all got up and danced to James Brown.

Afterward, her family distributed the photo collage of Donna that was displayed in the church. It was good to see Donna living in a nice house in Arizona, with a family, a dog, and riding a horse. At the time of her death, Donna had taken in a family left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. She never forgot the pain of being a homeless, neglected and abused child, and was reaching out to others the way a neighborhood had once reached out to her. Eight of Donna’s organs were also donated to five people as she lay brain dead from the aneurism.

I don’t know how you tell a 19-month-old baby that his mommy is never coming back. I’m glad Donna didn’t work but stayed home to have 19 wonderful months of being a mother to her child, especially since she didn’t have the best parenting herself up until she moved in with Paula. I can’t say I was the most significant person in her life, but she taught this village idiot quite a lot about courage, overcoming adversity, and how a kind word can follow a child through her lifetime.

Donna would have turned 28 on Feb. 13.

P.S. Donna’s brother and sisters are doing okay, too.