This is the season for giving and, as Brunell Donald has come to understand, one especially invaluable gift is the gift of forgiveness.
Donald is a 30-year-old Cook County public defender. When she was a toddler, her father was carted off to the penitentiary for selling drugs. At 10, she watched helplessly as her mother was brutally murdered.
By the time Donald went to college, she’d been a ward of the state for 8 years, living in foster and group homes.
If you follow child welfare statistics, you’d see the unmistakable pattern that suggests wards don’t often fair too well. But, as you’ll see, Donald is a woman of uncompromising faith and determination. She isn’t one to cower in the face of great odds.
I started talking to Donald a couple of months ago. When I finally sat down to write, my words didn’t seem to do justice to her remarkable journey. So, I decided to step out of the way and allow her to tell her own story. This is the first of two parts, in Donald’s own voice–with minor editing from me.
My mother was a drug addict. My father was involved in the sale of narcotics. He went to college but dropped out and decided to pick up a street trade.
My mother was from a small town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and my father was from Chicago. They met when she was in her late teens; he was in his late 20s. My parents never married but they lived together.
I can remember being a little girl and everything seeming normal for a while.
But when I was 3 or 4 years old, the feds raided our apartment on the West Side. My father was later convicted for selling drugs and sentenced to 10 years in the penitentiary. My mother and I would visit him there, and I remember eating vending machine hamburgers and playing cards with my dad. That was my joy.
Then, one day, my mother stopped taking me to visit him. She never told me why.
After my father left, we lost our provider and my mother had to fend for herself. She started prostituting and using drugs. I remember her being on welfare. Two years after my father went away, my mother had my sister. I remember all of us standing in the church line for cheese and canned goods.
By then, we were living on the North Side. It was so weird what went on in that house. I didn’t realize how dysfunctional it was until I was an adult. I remember the prostitutes coming over. They would stop by to change their wigs, wash the makeup off their faces and wash their bodies, all in the bathroom sink.
They would also eat my Frankenberry cereal. I never could keep enough. They were prostituting all night and by morning they’d be so hungry.
My mom would press their hair and cook meals for them. My mother was a caretaker of people.
But bad things sometimes happen to good people. My father was violent and when he lived with us. She would call the police when he hit her. They would come but my mother never pressed charges. When he left, the beatings stopped, but the pain didn’t.
The last year my mother was alive was 1985. In July, I threw her a birthday party. I was only 9 years old. I invited all of her friends and family. We had cake, spaghetti and chicken.
I turned 10 years old Aug. 5. By November she was dead.
A drug dealer wanted $250 dollars that she owed him. She couldn’t pay him so my mother, sister and I went on the run to relatives’ houses for a couple of weeks.
We came back on Nov. 4, 1985. The next day, the dealer knocked on our apartment door. I opened it.
He came in and said, “Hey, Vonne.”
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My mother sent me to my room. From the hall, I could hear him saying, “Where’s my money?” In my room, I turned on the television to watch a cartoon. Then I heard her scream.
I ran out to the living room to see him stabbing her over and over.
I started to scream and he said if I didn’t shut up, he’d kill me too. By the time it was over, he’d stabbed her 39 times.
When I was 5 years old, I told my mother that I was going to be a lawyer. I was watching an old “Perry Mason” rerun. My mother said, “Your momma ain’t a lawyer; your daddy wasn’t a lawyer, so how you gone be a lawyer?”
Over the next few years, all of my interactions with the police and court system during my childhood were pretty rough, but they prepared me for who I am today.
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On Tuesday, more from Brunell Donald and the gift of forgiveness.