Vanetta Evans
Vanetta Evans broke my heart.
I briefly mentioned her in my last microblog. I was using her
to prove a point, so I couldn’t get too deep into her life story, but she
really deserves a full-length telling of her tale.
Vanetta Evans is 20 years old and, when we first meet her, is
staying in the Lodge, a homeless shelter, with Crystal Mayberry. She is a
mother of three young children. The oldest is Kendal Jr. He is four years old,
but he’s very mature for his age. He has to be for his mother. She had him when
she was sixteen. A year later she had Tembi, her daughter, and another year
later she had Bo-Bo, a son. When a daycare worker dropped Bo-Bo on his head, he
began having seizures. Every time he has one, Vanetta rushes him to the
hospital. Her boyfriend at the time was abusive and provided nothing. Well, he
did once.
Vanetta’s hours at Old Country Buffet were cut from five days a week to one. She couldn’t afford to pay her electricity bill and was about to get her lights shut off. She had no way to pay to keep her electricity and the rent. With the threat of losing her apartment and her children to Child Protective Services looming over her shoulder, she felt helpless. To “help”, her friends suggested that they rob two women they saw walking by. Her boyfriend gave her friend a gun and Vanetta took the purses. The cops caught them, Vanetta was fired and evicted, and she took her kids to the Lodge.
Vanetta’s hours at Old Country Buffet were cut from five days a week to one. She couldn’t afford to pay her electricity bill and was about to get her lights shut off. She had no way to pay to keep her electricity and the rent. With the threat of losing her apartment and her children to Child Protective Services looming over her shoulder, she felt helpless. To “help”, her friends suggested that they rob two women they saw walking by. Her boyfriend gave her friend a gun and Vanetta took the purses. The cops caught them, Vanetta was fired and evicted, and she took her kids to the Lodge.
The main reason I wanted to talk about Vanetta was that of her sentencing hearing. The judge says
there’s nothing stopping her from committing a crime like that again, so they
can’t take any chances. I didn’t care too much about what the judge was
literally saying. What Desmond writes next, however, was heartbreaking to me.
He writes: “What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you
were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had
been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling
soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right
now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was
de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe
schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment
he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes
to become a nurse, like you always
wanted. And who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then
you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the
one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city
with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you
were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by
lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn’t break down your
door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with
a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up
front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the
grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that
day on your groom would introduce you as “my wife.” But that’s not what happened. What happened was your hours were
cut, and your electricity was about to be
shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home,
and you snatched someone’s purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And
if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again?
Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying
cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity,
no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots,
then at least we can cut it low at the stem” (Desmond 267). Vanetta knew what
she could have been worth. Could things have come in the way of this dream? Absolutely.
Even if she had kept her hours, several things could have happened to change
the course of her life. Yet this life was a possibility. The only thing in the
way of it was her boss. By cutting her hours, they cut away her stability, her
self-confidence, and her chance at a steady future. She lost a life for
herself, her children, and her grandchildren after that. It wasn’t the crime
that took this away from her. However, the crime did take something. She is
sentenced to 81 months in the prison
system for emptying those two purses. 15 months in the prison, 66 months under
supervision. Kendal, expressionless, watches her leave in handcuffs. He stays
strong for his mother for the last time for over a year to come.
Vanetta committed a crime. That much I can say. I can’t say
that she wasn’t a victim. With three children crammed into a tiny, filthy
apartment, electricity about to be cut, and the threat of eviction, she was
desperate. Desperation leads to dangerous things. She made a bad choice, but it
wasn’t a “rich kid getting drunk and running people over” bad choice. And,
unlike that rich kid, she got prison time for her decision. Vanetta lost
everything. She certainly lost more than the women she robbed. She’s out of
prison by now, seeing as this book was published in 2016, but she still has to
get another job, find a house, take GED classes, and take care of her children.
She’s not confined, but she’s trapped.
Anyone who says that America provides her with limitless
options is lying.
Anyone who says she is free is lying.
And anyone who says she is lucky to live where she lives is
lying.
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