'She Took Real Good Care Of Me ...'

Toni walked into my life on Good Friday. On a promise to her mother, I had spent six months trying to find this young woman I had never met. Just as I was giving up my fruitless search, she came out of the rain to ask for help.

I first met her mother in prison. Terrified to think of having to make it on her own with six children, Yolanda had stayed for 13 years with a husband who beat her. When he began to abuse the children, she took them and fled. Enraged, her husband and some of his buddies gang-raped Toni, his oldest daughter, while she was walking to church one Sunday morning. Toni was 14 then.

Yolanda was on the scene when one of the buddies was shot and killed a few days later. Yolanda's public defender encouraged her to plead guilty to manslaughter—despite testimony to the contrary—which carried a lighter sentence than the first-degree murder charge she was likely to get stung with. She was convicted as the person with the strongest motivation for carrying out the crime.

Like most women in prison, Yolanda's major preoccupation was her children. She was most worried about her oldest, who had suffered such trauma, and her youngest, Lisa—"because she was so young." Lisa was 9 when her mother was taken away.

Toni had spent weeks alone in the hospital after the rape, fearing she had been rejected and abandoned by her mother. Hospital personnel were afraid that telling Toni her mother was in prison would only add trauma to trauma.

I will never forget that Good Friday, the rain pouring down outside as we shared my lunch and Toni said softly, "My mother said you could help me. I'm going to have a baby."

My goddaughter was born seven months later on Thanksgiving Day. That was three and a half years ago.

Two years later Toni wanted to make a new effort at regaining her life. I helped her arrange child care and get into a nurse's aide program specially designed for young people like her who were unable to finish high school.

Toni was a new young woman. She bought a uniform and talked proudly of her first accomplishments at learning to take a temperature and a pulse. I knew she would be a good and compassionate nurse's aide if she could just make it through her training. She asked if I would attend her graduation since I was her "second mother," and I was all prepared with a camera to be a proud parent on her big day.

But that day never came. We met for lunch one day, and she explained that it had all fallen apart. A fire in her house had destroyed all her clothes. Her latest welfare check had been stolen, and she had no money for food or bus fare. And there was trouble that needed attending to in the foster home of one of her sisters. As the oldest, Toni felt it her duty to be responsible for the others. School, she felt, had to be a lower priority.

Lisa moved in with her a few days later, in flight from a foster father who had sexually molested her. Lisa was 14 now. The pattern was beginning all over again. I shuddered in anger at the combination of bad luck and abuse that had set the course of their lives from early childhood, and I was despairing at my own failure to make a difference.

When Toni's house filled to overflowing with people, Lisa came to stay with me for a while. She stretched out on my floor in a sleeping bag the first night, and we talked until very late. Her understandings of men and her own young womanhood were marked by fear, ignorance, and confusion.

Before we drifted off to sleep, she said, "Once I wanted somebody to love me, so I tried to have a baby. It died. I didn't kill it. I never would have killed it." There was silence for a moment, and then she asked me, "Did you say your prayers?" There was another pause, and then she whispered, "Bless Toni and my mother and you and my baby."

I didn't sleep well that night, and I wasn't surprised when Lisa sat up in the middle of the night crying. "I can't sleep. I'm thinking about my baby. I think I killed it. The doctor said so. I was at a phone booth, and I had to run home to the bathroom. I think I ran too hard. I started to bleed."

It had taken an hour for the ambulance to come as Lisa lay frightened and bleeding, a scenario too typical of medical care for the poor. As Lisa finished telling me her story, she lay back down again and then smiled softly. "But Toni took real good care of me the whole time. She held my hand. And she just kept taking my temperature and my pulse to make sure I was going to be okay."

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.