CONGRATS TABITHA
Generous Support and a Fresh Start for a Struggling but Gifted Teen
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: June 28, 2004
hen she was still commuting from a homeless shelter in Queens to her high school honors program in the Bronx, Tabitha F.'s yearning to soar sometimes made the burdens of poverty even harder to bear. Reading "Great Expectations" in her shelter bunk bed, with her mother and four younger siblings sleeping nearby, she said she identified with Pip, the poor boy in the Charles Dickens novel, "when he runs away and starts to cry because he realizes his position in life."
Could she really make it into college? Would her family find a home? After pulling through hardship and sexual danger, would she be derailed by poverty despite all her promise?
Tabitha, whose perilous adolescence was chronicled in a March 8 article in The New York Times, is now living the kind of happy ending that Dickens often gave his readers, along with the real-life complications that endure between the lines.
On Friday, she graduated from a college-bound program at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. The day before, after 16 months in a Salvation Army shelter, her family moved into a spacious subsidized apartment in the Bronx. Next week, she is off to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., which has accepted her to a four-year liberal arts program on its most generous scholarship.
And she will travel there in style: on the private jet of a benefactor who has pledged to underwrite all additional college costs, so that Tabitha can graduate debt free.
The article about Tabitha was part of a series examining the reasons behind a nationwide decline in teenage pregnancy. The series also discussed experts' fears that the decline could be reversed, and Tabitha's case illustrated the way poverty stacks the odds. Her history includes a sexual assault that took place because she lacked money for a cab, the loss of her virginity to a young man who gave her a place to sleep after her family's eviction, and a decision to drop the birth control patch because it cost too much.
After the article was published, many readers responded, as one put it, "to her indomitable spirit" as much as to her vulnerability. She had started a literacy program in the homeless shelter, joined a theater youth troupe and impressed her teachers with her love of literature and political ideals. Along with gratitude for the gifts, letters and personal help that poured in from readers, Tabitha said she was now feeling a mix of conflicting emotions.
"I'm scared, happy, sad and depressed and excited, all in one melting pot," Tabitha, now 18, said after her first night in the apartment, for which she co-signed the lease. "My own room — finally! And I'm leaving. Sometimes I feel like I'm deserting my mother."
Tabitha's windfall of gifts and good will is being managed by Maryanne Mola, the assistant principal at DeWitt Clinton, who held a reception for "Friends of Tabitha" there last month. Ms. Mola's plan is to match the same donors with other handpicked seniors next year, in a venture she calls the Tabitha Project. Tabitha, who has already asked to donate, will serve on the board.
"People want to give to a human, not a charity, not a bureaucracy," Ms. Mola said last week, explaining why so many people called, wrote and sent e-mail messages from around the country offering to help Tabitha.
At the school's suggestion, at least 80 sent checks to a DeWitt Clinton scholarship fund in her name, for a total of $12,000 — not counting the pledge by Robert Touray, an investment manager from the Washington area, to pay all additional college costs.
"It's like a fairy tale," Ms. Mola said of his plan to fly Tabitha to college.
Others made more practical contributions — like a MetroCard and prescription eyeglasses for Tabitha, who had been squinting at blackboards in class because she could not afford to replace glasses broken in the shelter.
Some longed to give her the chance to splurge, but it was not easy to get the frugal teenager to spend, Ms. Mola said. When the principal gave her money to buy underwear, Tabitha came back with only two pairs.
"I told her, `Tabitha, buy three, get one free!' " Ms. Mola said with a laugh.
Mostly, the money will be doled out in a monthly allowance when Tabitha is at college, an arrangement that Tabitha said she preferred. But she was persuaded to buy a school ring and go to her high school prom after three members of the Westchester County alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a popular black sorority, made it a special project to help her shop for her prom dress.
But on graduation day, college seemed far away.
She looked around at her apartment, furnished only with beds, where her mother will be left trying to make ends meet for the younger children, aged 3 to 16. "The money could be depleted in, like, two days," said Tabitha, referring to the $12,000 in donations.
Rain poured down on the commencement ceremony, and the crowd that fled to the high school auditorium was too large to fit inside. Tabitha had arrived very late, and in the chaos entirely missed Mr. Touray, who had come with his wife and daughter for the event, and a counselor who was holding her cap and gown. (She had to borrow a friend's to go to the podium.) And she kept looking for her father, who had promised to come from Virginia. Later she learned that he had been there after all, locked out in the rain.
"But there's one thing I'll always remember," she said the next day. "When I went up and looked out, my mother was like, jumping up and down, `Yay, Tabitha! Yay, Tabitha!' "
And it made her think of the original ending of "Great Expectations," she said — not the too-perfect happy ending that Dickens added for his newspaper audience, where Pip and the rich Estella are a pair, but the original one, which underscores Pip's renewed relationship with the loyal relatives he had spurned in favor of wealthy friends.
"Don't get me wrong, it's a happy ending," she said. "He found out who the real Pip was."
__________________
I am a woman, I make mistakes. I make them often. God has given me a talent and that's it. ~ Jill Scott
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Brown's whereabouts by an anonymous caller soon after his mother pleaded for his return at a news conference. No ransom was paid, said a law enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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