By ARIANA E. CHA
The dewy mornings passed all too quickly that summer on Dacosta Street in Detroit.
Taleisha Murray, 12, and Mark McCloud, 15, would sit and talk, knee-to-knee on the ramshackle porch of her aunt's home.
About their favorite movie stars. A break-in at a neighbor's house. The sticky weather. Last night's "Cosby Show" episode. Sometimes, they'd wonder about their future.
"So Tee," Mark asked one day, "what do you want to do when you grow up?"
"Be a pilot!" she answered quickly. Taleisha loved the freedom of the skies and the idea of circling the earth in a day.
She also knew what she didn't want to be: her mother -- 30, single, with two children by different men and dependent on welfare checks. The closest her mother had come to flying was working for a while as a cocktail waitress in the officers club at Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
Taleisha and Mark met the summer before her seventhgrade year at Columbus Middle School and his 10th at Northwestern High School. Their cousins were neighbors on Dacosta. He was bulky at 5 feet 4 and 140 pounds, and mellow. Taleisha was just 4 feet 10 and 80 pounds, but spunky and talkative.
Although her family didn't have much money, Taleisha was able to scrounge up $4.50 most Saturdays to spend the day on wheels at Royal Skateland on Alter Road.
She would have preferred to skate outside, "with the wind," feeling free, like flying. But she couldn't afford her own skates.
At Skateland, Taleisha would practice spinning in circles until she was so dizzy and laughing so hard she couldn't stand up. It was only a few months later that the laughter stopped.
TALEISHA REMEMBERS the rust-colored leaves swirling around her feet as she
boarded the city bus at 7 Mile and Gratiot. She had never been on a bus
before. And she didn't know where this one was headed.
But as Taleisha sat hugging her jacket, she didn't care. She only wanted to forget what just happened.
She was folding clothes in her room after school when her mother's friend -- a tall, lanky man whom she had known for years -- snuck in behind her.
Before Taleisha could even say hello, he was kissing her. Taleisha was struggling with him when her mother walked in. From the blur of the next few moments, she remembers her mother accusing her of trying to have sex with the man. Taleisha had never even kissed a boy before.
With tears flowing down her cheeks, Taleisha grabbed a dog-eared student bus ticket Mark had given her "for a rainy day," and ran out the door. An hour and two more buses later, she was at Mark's back door. They snuck upstairs and he held her, protectively, on his bed.
Taleisha stayed with Mark five days.
When she finally went home, her mother acted like nothing had happened. Back at school, it suddenly seemed to Taleisha that everyone was talking about sex. "Nobody thought sex was a big thing," she remembered.
But Taleisha did. She and Mark were still virgins.
That fall, Taleisha and Mark periodically skipped school together. One afternoon, they were sitting on her bed listening to the radio when Mark started kissing her. Taleisha was confused when he started taking off her clothes. But she loved Mark, and knew he loved her, so she didn't resist.
Taleisha had sat through a sex education class in sixth grade but all the teacher talked about was why girls get their period. She had heard on television that people who had sex without using protection could get pregnant or catch diseases. But she didn't know of those things happening to anyone her age. She just hoped sex wouldn't hurt.
IT WAS the following March, on a Friday when the sun was burning snow into
puddles, that Taleisha's mother picked her up from school and took her to
a pediatrician for her annual checkup.
The doctor cleared his throat. "Taleisha," he said, "do you know you're pregnant?" Taleisha hadn't had a period in two months.
"Yes," she said.
"You're getting an abortion," her mother declared.
That night, Taleisha lay in her bed, hands resting on her stomach. She knew she didn't want an abortion. She didn't want to give up her baby for adoption, either. But she knew she wouldn't be able to take care of an infant.
The next Monday morning, Taleisha's mother took her to a tiny suburban abortion facility surrounded by a large parking lot. While her mother filled out some forms, the nurses showed her a videotape of the abortion procedure. It made Taleisha sick.
Then they told her that her mother couldn't force her to have an abortion -- that she had to sign the papers.
Taleisha refused.
Furious, her mother took her home. "Now what are you going to do, Taleisha?" her mother demanded. "I'm not going to take care of your baby. I'm not going to feed it. I'm not going to love it."
At 13, Taleisha had never felt so alone, so afraid in her life. She was flying solo and the plane was out of ontrol.
The trees near Taleisha Murray's home were shedding their blossoms, heralding another summer, as she began to notice the world changing around her. Taleisha was 13 years old and five months pregnant, nd her stomach was starting to show. Friends told er she couldn't visit anymore. Parents didn't want her to call. And teachers at school lectured her against having a baby at such a young age.
"People were discouraging me every day," Taleisha recalled. "They told me, 'You're not going to graduate,' 'You're going to be poor.' "I lost a lot of friends," Taleisha said. "But worst of all, I lost respect for myself."
In March, Taleisha's mother -- the woman Taleisha never wanted to be, an unmarried mother on welfare -- had given birth to her third child by a third man.
In September, less than three weeks after Taleisha's 14th birthday, the young girl who had not long ago dreamed of being a pilot and soaring free through the skies had a baby girl, Le-yandria Charaletta Murray.
Taleisha's mother drove her to St. John Hospital in Detroit, but was gone when Taleisha woke up after the delivery. She stayed in the hospital for two days. Neither her mother nor Mark McCloud, the baby's 17-year-old father, came to visit. Her mother did come to take Taleisha home, but she arrived with her baby to learn that her mother was married to a man Taleisha hardly knew.
A few months later, on a snowy night, after Taleisha had gotten into an argument with her new stepfather, he and Taleisha's mother told her there was no longer room in the house for Taleisha and her baby.
Wrapping Le-yandria in a worn blanket, Taleisha felt very old as she got on a city bus and went to a friend's house to stay. Taleisha had been attending Charles Vincent Academy, a school for teen mothers. But she started skipping. That semester, she got all F's.
Within a few months, Taleisha and her baby had overstayed their welcome at the friend's home. She accepted an offer to live for free with a woman who was a friend of her mother. Soon, however, her new host began demanding $200 a month for rent.
Taleisha didn't have a penny. Now 15, she couldn't et a job. And her former boyfriend Mark didn't have a job so he couldn't give her a court-ordered $8 a week in child support.
Taleisha had been feeding Le-yandria table food since she was three months old, because she couldn't afford baby food. Some days, she mashed together eggs and potatoes for the infant. When the rent ultimatum came, Taleisha felt like she was on a disaster course and Le-yandria was a helpless passenger.
ONE MORNING, her mother's friend offered Taleisha money to return
something to a store. When she asked Taleisha to do this a second and
third time, Taleisha caught on.
The merchandise was stolen and Taleisha was cashing it in. Soon, Taleisha started stealing from stores, returning the hot items for cash to pay her rent or exchanging them for baby clothes.
She figures she took more than $5,000 worth of merchandise, including two air conditioners, a television, a microwave, clothes and expensive bedsheets.
"I did things I would never have even imagined ... to feed my daughter," Taleisha said.
Finally, she was caught by a video camera as she tried to swipe a pair of $200 lace tablecloths from Hudson's at Oakland Mall. Taleisha felt like she had crashed to earth when she was locked in the Wayne County Juvenile Detention facility, forced to leave her daughter with her mother.
Nights were the worst. Guards made all the girls shed their sole set of underwear and socks to be washed. The garments had to be tied together and left each night , along with shoes, outside their rooms. Then, the residents were locked in, like animals, Taleisha said.
"I was sad," she said. "Every night, I thought about my daughter. And I was angry -- angry at myself for putting myself in that situation."
After 20 days, a social worker told Taleisha she could be released on probation if she agreed to move back in with her mother.
It was an easy choice.
VOWING never to steal again, Taleisha, by now 16, went back to school, got
a job working nights as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes
on East Jefferson and applied for food stamps. Still on bad terms with her
mother, who refused to be interviewed for this story, Taleisha soon saved
enough money to rent her own place, a $200-a-month, second-floor flat on
Detroit's east side.
For more than a year, Taleisha struggled to go to school in the mornings after working more than 40 hours a week at night. She had little time for Le-yandria, but she was determined to make a better life for her daughter than her mother had made for her.
Taleisha graduated from high school in 1995 at the top of her class, earning a small scholarship to Wayne State University. She went there for one semester but ran out of money for tuition and a baby-sitter. Last month, Taleisha turned 19.
She quit her night-waitress job because of the hours. She is drawing about $370 a month in welfare while applying for day jobs and trying to sharpen her office and computer skills. She also is seeking financial aid to re-enroll at Wayne State.
Le-yandria is in kindergarten at Operation Get own's new Timbuktu Academy, an Afrocentric elementary school. Mark, who's since fathered another child, quit school and been busted for drug possession, has aid only $20 toward Le-yandria's care. But he rops by every week to see her and has gone back to school with an eye on a GED and college.
Taleisha has given up her dream of flying. She knows she could never afford the lessons. And she knows there are hard times and hard work ahead just to get by. But it's funny how things worked out, she said.
She has a boyfriend, Jason Hamlett, 19, who is a pilot. They met at an aviation fair a few years ago. Taleisha and Jason plan to get married when he graduates from Eastern Michigan University, where he's a freshman. Someday, they hope to run a small, private airport.
For Le-yandria's third Christmas, Taleisha bought her roller skates -- nothing fancy, just a pair of metal nap-ons. But it was an important present for Taleisha, who hopes to give Le-yandria all the opportunities she never had.
"People still tell me today that I'm just 'a baby with a baby,"' she said. "But I'm all too grown up. I missed out on ... a childhood and then a high school social life."
While she obviously loves her daughter, "if I could go back in time, I would have waited until I was older to have sex -- and I would have been careful," Taleisha said. Taleisha vows to make sure Le-yandria doesn't do what she and her mother did -- become a young, single mother.
Watching the fall leaves do their tailspins in front of her apartment, Taleisha smiled at Le-yandria, skating toward her, arms outstretched, as if she were flying.
Life is such a beautiful choice.
Source: Detroit Free Press, 01/98