DonAlda is currently serving a fifteen-years-to-life sentence resulting from the death of her abusive boyfriend. Although it is difficult for her to be separated from her three children, she refuses to let incarceration get the best of her. She continues to paint and to write and was the first Black woman to complete a course of study at the Children’s Institute of Literature while incarcerated. DonAlda regards education as the key to reducing the number of Black women in prison.
DonAlda
I AM THIRTY-NINE years old; I was born in 1959. I have three children who are now ages fifteen, eighteen, and twenty-one. That’s my whole life, my children. Even incarcerated, they’re still my life. I live for them. That’s what keeps me motivated in prison. I think that’s what keeps me strong, it keeps me going, and keeps my hope alive that one day I’ll be back home being a mother to my children.
I come from a family that has no understanding of welfare, jail, or anything wrong or out of the ordinary. First of all, we’re Catholic. My mom works hard. She’s always been a sales clerk. My dad’s a career officer in the Navy. They divorced when I was around eight years old. My mom has my children. She’s raising my children, and my two grandchildren. I have a real supportive family, and that helps too, in prison, having a supportive family. It really does.
Being Black and Catholic was very hard. I grew up on the lower south side, which is predominantly Black, but I went to Catholic school in the suburbs. All my friends who were White were not the friends that I went home to. I’m an only child, so I looked good and I dressed nice because there was only one of me. I guess I mostly wanted to be accepted, somewhere. It was hard. I was incarcerated in 1987 due to domestic violence. It was my boyfriend. We had two children together. He was a career criminal who had been in and out of jails. I guess somewhere along the line in jail he learned to beat women.
Just the attention that I received from my boyfriend made me feel that there was a connection between the two of us. My dad was in the service and was always away. My mom was sickly. She was always in the hospital. I was usually with relatives, most of the time. All of my friends were the White kids who lived in the suburbs. I was mostly around grownups. What does a kid do around grownups? You have no one to talk to but the dog, or the cat or the fish. It was kind of hard, just missing out on having a friend.
I ended up suffering abuse for years. We had two children. We got together around 1977, my senior year in high school. We started hanging out and stuff. I didn’t know his other side. He was about two years younger than I was. He had been in detention homes. He grew up without his parents. His grandmother raised him. Basically, he did whatever he wanted to do. He wasn’t violent when I first knew him. Not at all. He just always was the type that made the promises. He always made promises, but never followed through with them. He would say, “We’ll live happily ever after,” and “You and me against the world. So what if we’re opposites,” and “We’ll be all right.”
I didn’t know that he was an intravenous drug user. He hid it well. I guess with the drugs and stealing or robbing people, or whatever, to get the drugs, I guess he was mad at me because maybe I was something that he wanted to be and couldn’t be, so he took it out on me. He seemed to resent my education, the fact that I didn’t use drugs, or that I had a level head. I worked. I went to work and I worked every day. When he was high it was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing.
The violence started after I had my first child with him, about 1980. I graduated from a Catholic high school, near Youngstown, a very good high school. I even went to college, Youngstown State University. I didn’t finish because of him. He didn’t like me going to college. He said things like, “If I don’t go, or we don’t have the same friends, then you don’t go.”
I studied graphic arts at Youngstown State University. I’m an artist, and a writer. I do my art every day. I paint every day. I use acrylics, because oils aren’t allowed in our rooms. We have to be supervised with the oils, because of the chemicals. You have to use turpentine to clean, and so we’re basically limited to watercolors and acrylics. Right now, my project is pillowcases. I sell pillowcases, usually for children. I love children, and in fact, I took a course of study from the Children’s Institute of Literature. I’d like to write children’s stories. I was the first Black woman, while incarcerated, to finish their course of study in the Children’s Institute of Literature. They said they had a lot of guys take that course, but I was the first incarcerated Black woman. I don’t let my incarceration stop me.
In 1980 the abuse started; it was after I had the first child. He became really jealous, really obsessively jealous. Shortly thereafter, I moved out, after I was beaten really severely. I moved out, moved back home with my mother, and, as always, you get the roses, and the apologies, and the “I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again.” Of course, I believed it, and went back. The next time I pressed charges, though. That violated his parole and sent him back to jail.
They sent him back to jail in 1984. They gave him six months in the county jail on a misdemeanor. That’s when he vowed that when he got out, he was going to kill me for sending him back to jail. They wouldn’t even charge him. I was beaten with the door molding, like the piece off the door with the nails in it and everything, from nine o’clock in the evening till four o’clock in the morning, all because he went to jail for stealing tape recorders out of parked cars on a busy street, and I wouldn’t go to jail and get him.
When he finally did get out he let me have it pretty good so I had to escape from the house. He held me in the house, but I escaped and ran about twelve blocks to my mom’s house, where I called the police. I had to leave my children in the house, and, when the police arrived he wasn’t there. I pressed charges, they gave him six months, and he went back, and that’s when he said he was going to kill me for sending him back to jail.
He got out in 1986. I hadn’t seen him, but he had been looking for me. He’d been to my mom’s house, saying he wanted to see the kids and different things. This one particular night, I took a friend to the grocery store, because her child was sick and needed cough syrup. We went to a 24-hour grocery store. While she was going to run into the store, I got a hamburger and a shake at the nearby drive-through and I was sitting in the car at the supermarket. Who do I see but him? He was with a group of people, and he sent one of the guys to the car to ask if he could talk to me. Before I could even answer the guy, he was walking toward the car. I had bought a gun after being assaulted so much. It was a sense of security for me. I never thought I would have to use it. I was about twenty-one years old when I bought that gun. I always took it out when I went out at night, and I had it under the seat of the car.
When he walked up to the car, he had a grocery bag in his arm, and he shifted the bag. Then I saw the butt of the gun in there. So, I reached under my seat, and got the gun and shot out the window, and shot at him. By now, my friend was coming out of the store, she was getting in the car, I was shooting out the window, just scared. I took off from there and went home and found out later he was dead. I didn’t even know that I shot him. I knew I grabbed the gun. I knew I fired that gun. I didn’t think I hit him. I hit him several times, I found out. Three times, as a matter of fact. He didn’t die instantly, but, from my understanding, either he died upon arrival at the hospital, or on the way to the hospital. I didn’t intend to kill him.
I was charged with Murder One. I had a trial. I had a private attorney. I felt really good about the relationship with my attorney because I knew him. I had retained him several times before to get my boyfriend out of jail. He was the only attorney I knew, only to find out that there was a conflict of interest. I didn’t know that then. I know it now, but I didn’t know it then. The attorney never explained that to me. He took my money, and then got court-appointed to me, so he got paid twice for my trial.
I never did a day in jail till I went to prison. I was out on bond a year waiting for the trial. Having no knowledge of the law, I didn’t know that I could go before a panel of judges, that I didn’t have to go through a jury trial. I thought that’s how it goes, you commit a crime, you go through a trial. I had an all-White jury. This was not a jury of my peers. It was mostly males. There was one woman who was questioned, one Black woman, but because she had someone who was incarcerated in her family, she did not want to be a juror. She asked to be removed.
Nothing went through my head during the trial. I was on Zanex and Tranzene. I was numb sitting through the trial. My doctor gave me that. Behind the abuse, I started taking nerve medication. They said I suffered from high anxiety and anorexia. I weighed maybe 110 pounds, at the height I am now, five feet, eight inches. I used to pull my hair out; I would sit and twiddle my hair till I pulled it out. I was just a basket case during the abuse. When I would go to the doctor and say, “My boyfriend beat me up,” instead of talking about it, or saying “Maybe I could refer you to someone to help you,” he would just up my medication and add another pill to it. I was on a tranquilizer and a nerve medication. During the trial, of course, I abused them. I felt, “Oh, my God, my nerves are bad, I’ll take, well, I’m taking three a day, I’ll take six a day, or six an hour.” I was taking them like Tic-Tacs, just shaking them out and taking them. I was aware but I wasn’t aware. I was there, but I really wasn’t functioning like I should have been. I just felt a grave injustice had been done to me.
I feel that, under the law, I should be punished. But, fifteen-to-life is a lot, that’s a lot of punishment for someone who was abused, and for defending myself. I had the battered woman’s claim, but at that time, it was not really known. The only thing that was out on the battered woman was the movie The Burning Bed at that time. Even though my lawyer questioned the jury on the battered woman syndrome, he really did not submit a lot of evidence on my behalf as far as the years of abuse and the different circumstances that led to that. He also had me take the stand in my own defense to testify about my relationship and the abuse I suffered. My attorney was trying to get me involuntary manslaughter, or manslaughter. Never once have I ever said that I didn’t do it, or I’m not guilty of something. I’m guilty. I did it. I hadn’t even seen him. That was the first time I had seen him since he got out of jail. The verdict that they came back with was for murder. I got fifteen to life.
Starting to do that time was hard. It was really hard, because with my time it makes me one of the close status, close to max status. That puts a lot of limitations on what you’re able to do. You’re not able to go to college. You’re not able to go places unescorted. You start at the bottom of the totem pole, and you have to work your way up to minimum status where you can get privileges. At that time, a lot of programs weren’t offered to lifers, which is what I was. A lot of things really discouraged me and made me angry, and I didn’t know how to deal with people younger than me telling me what to do. I was not a career criminal. I felt that I was just as smart or bright as some people, just as educated as some people, and it was difficult to be talked to, sometimes, like a dog. I would curse and go off, and I’d end up in the hole a lot of times, so it was rough on me. I did a lot of time in the hole for my mouth, at first. It was a hard readjustment.
I couldn’t have the medicine that I had depended on for so many years. I was not weaned off of this medicine. Then [when] I was here, I didn’t have the crutch to lean on. I had to deal and I just couldn’t. Not only dealing with the time, but dealing with the fact that I killed somebody that I loved. First love, only love. Despite the abuse, I loved him. I never had time to deal with that. I just kept taking the medication and being numb. Now it was time to deal with a lot of things.
First of all I realized that I was not okay and that I had problems and issues that needed to be dealt with. I think it really took me until maybe three or four years ago to really realize that I’m not as okay as I think I am, and I need to get with self, and need to do things to help myself. I need to start dealing, instead of pushing things, or hiding things, or not talking about things. I need to deal with them. It started through my writing. When I started writing my children’s books, I started writing about things that happened to me as a child, but I would put them in my children’s characters.
People need to know that we are still human beings, even though we have numbers. That, sometimes, things are out of our control, and people make mistakes, and because you make one mistake, your whole life should not be judged or determined. Your destiny should not be determined by that one mistake. People should know that even though you’re incarcerated, you can still be positive, you can still be productive. I’m very productive, every day I’m productive. Prison—now, you might think this is crazy—but prison has brought out the best in me. It has brought out the best in me, because it makes me resourceful.
Both of my daughters have been to jail. One daughter was there for disturbing the peace. She was in a fight somewhere and they arrested her. Just recently, my other daughter went to school with a utility knife in her purse. She says she carries it—we live in a bad neighborhood—she carries it in her purse at night, and she forgot to take it out at school and it beeped the metal detector. They took her to jail, so she’s been to court. She came out of it fine. She’s made the honor roll since. She didn’t let it deter her, but she realized a lot of things by those six hours in jail. She realized, “Mom, I see what you go through now.”
I really want people to be knowledgeable. It’s for people to understand this system, and maybe they can help people not return. You have a lot of returnees. You have young girls that don’t have any direction, and they don’t understand. They think it’s a game. These young girls in prison, they don’t have any respect for anything. They don’t have respect for life, other people, and authority. We need to educate them. Especially the Black community, as a whole, because there are lots of things they don’t understand about the system. Education is a must. I try to tell my kids that education will keep you out of here. Not just school education like myself, but education about different things, like drugs, domestic violence, all kinds of education because I didn’t know anything.