WASHINGTON D.C. — Let’s say I told you that Darona Williams, 22, is a thoughtful Georgetown University senior who came to the prestigious institution by way of Massachusetts’ wealthy Concord Academy prep school.
Would that tell you what’s important about her?
What if I mentioned that Williams is the unmarried mother of a toddler? And that her drug-dealer fiancé was recently shot dead? Would that give you a fix on her?
I’ve spent hours with Williams, whom I met while visiting her journalism class. I’ve listened to her cadences hip-hop between ‘hood and hoity-toity, watched her arrange herself from classroom upright to meltdown mode in her aunt’s Southeast Washington home.
And I can’t begin to say who she is. Watching Williams reminds me of how often we all switch gears and get-ups to present different, equally valid, selves to the world.
Nobody really knows us, either.
The afternoon I met her, Williams seemed like everyone in that fluorescent-lit classroom — female and male, black, white and every other shade. Like she belonged.
Then I overheard this baby-faced girl tell a classmate she had a daughter. And I heard her say, "I’m having all my kids before 30" — an atypical attitude for a career-minded coed. I wondered, "What’s this girl’s story?"
In fact, there are girls — and boys — like Williams at every college, survivors of iffy parenting, "bad" environments, tough breaks. This one was smart from Day One.
Her mother — an electronics repair person before falling into drugs — bought her books and listened as she read them. An aunt — who raised Darona with a paternal grandmother — coaxed her to write essays on everything she learned. Teachers pushed her academically; an adviser drove her to private school interviews, paying "out of her own pocket."
Concord offered her the biggest scholarship. The school’s smallness soothed her. Its academics challenged her. And its wealthy students introduced this street-smart child to drugs.
"(Students’) parents would be gone for insane amounts of time — their kids partied the whole time," Williams recalls. She tried ecstasy, marijuana — but never cocaine.
"I know too many crackheads," Williams shrugs.
Post-graduation, she headed to Georgetown after briefly studying at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
She was determined to become a writer. Her boyfriend had other plans.
After two years together, Williams says, "he started talking about having a kid." Her response: "Wait until I’m out of school." Foolishly, she admits now, they were relying on the withdrawal method of birth control. And one night he didn’t. "I was so mad."
But nearly two years after giving birth to daughter Lashae, "I can’t even imagine my life without her."
A curious child whose beauty mimics her mom’s, Lashae is cared for by Williams’ aunt, Joy Jennings. The toddler so adores her babysitter that Jennings’ own daughter often reminds Lashae, "This is my mommy."
Jennings is proud of her college-girl niece, who "had a baby and went right back. … Darona always wanted to do stuff in life."
That means spending school nights at the dorm and hopping onto public transportation to her aunt’s home for breathless meetings with Lashae. Some nights, Williams brings her daughter to the dorm and explains, "This is Mommy’s room. This is Mommy’s bed.
"I’m doing this for both of us."
She’s doing something else for both of them: examining her choice of men. A veteran of several relationships with drug-dealers — "addiction is a choice, I don’t blame the sellers" — Williams nevertheless begged her fiancé to stop dealing before his unsolved slaying.
In a searingly honest memoir for a class, Williams wrote: "If I had reached the murder scene 20 minutes earlier — as I was supposed to — my fate and my daughter’s would have paralleled his."
Suddenly, she understood the problem with men "with sizable but inexplicable incomes (who’ll) buy you the world but who just can’t put it in their names." They die, or end up in jail.
Williams hopes to see her own name attached to honest stories about the ‘hood she still loves, about the little boys who "see videos of drug dealers, and who at age 9 start running errands for the ‘big boys.’ Who, once they’re in that life, learn it won’t leave them alone."
If life is a hothouse, the often-harsh environment that cultivated Williams has helped her bloom at Georgetown, where her classmates’ saddest stories, she marvels, "are about their grandparents’ passing."
Says Williams: "I don’t mind where I’m from — I think I have the best of both worlds. Coming from where I did will give maturity to my writing, help me put the inner city out there, in plain view.
"I’m blessed enough to have broken out of that cycle. But I’m not the only one who can. There are lots of intelligent children" in the inner city.
And she wants everyone to know them.
Donna Britt can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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