Real People, Real Stories - Part 5

Welcome to the fifth in a series of stories about the people whom you may have never otherwise had the pleasure to meet. Some subjects have chosen not to reveal their real names or towns / cities in which they live. They are real people, interviewed via telephone, email, or traditional letters. I found my subjects by choosing a phone number at random and dialing or via a random email address search. It was my promise to them and it is my promise to the reader to present their stories in a manner that is as true to life as it gets.

Meet Dibella Woodson, 33. Dibella was an only child whose mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, stepping out of the picture when she was 10. She had never known her father. Dibella, who has chosen to use her real first name but not her actual surname, was raised by her grandparents on the south side of Chicago. She has no brothers or sisters, but has several cousins that she considers her siblings and a couple of cousins that she says, "I wouldn't give a (expletive) if I never saw them again."

Dibella gave her grandparents a lot of trouble as a teen. She dropped out of high school when she was sixteen, became pregnant at seventeen, and ran away from her grandparents house before she had to tell them about her predicament. She ran away with her boyfriend to a very small town in downstate Illinois. Although she would not reveal the name of the town, she did tell me the population, 388 according to the sign.

Life in an area that is only a minuscule fraction of the size of where she grew up was nice to her. By the time she was living there just three days, everyone she met would say something like, "Oh, you must be Dibella", or "you're that girl from Chicago." She liked the attention and she attributes it to what landed her the first job she had ever held - waitress at Deb's Diner.

She learned the job and the patron's names within the first couple of days working there. Deb, owner of Deb's Diner, had told Dibella, that hiring her was better than any advertising she could have ever done. Business had nearly tripled within the first couple of weeks and Deb was very happy with her new hire, so much so that she gave her a raise on the second Saturday that she worked there.

Dibella's boyfriend however, was not exactly happy with her new-found fame. She was on top of the world with all of her new friends and he was upset that people liked her more than they liked him, or at least, that was all Dibella thought it could be. She would go to the place where they were staying and tell him all about her day, how Mr. Jones complimented her hair, or how Mrs. Murphy asked where she got her shoes. After only a few days, he began to get hateful with her and tell her that he didn't care about her day, only about how much cash she was bringing home.

One morning she woke up at 4 a.m. just like every other morning that she had a shift to work, only to find that her boyfriend and her tip money she had kept in a cookie jar were gone. Upset, broke, alone, she went into work, seeking kindness from the people that she had thought were her new friends, but instead she was met with hatefulness. Deb fired her as she walked in the door. Dibella was utterly shocked and confused.

The man whose child she was carrying had been in the local saloon the night before spreading terrible rumors about Dibella, telling them that she was carrying some sort of rare infectious disease and he had brought her to the small town to get her into the fresh country air.

Left in a small town, five months pregnant, and living in the backyard of her now ex-boyfriend's friend's house, she was faced with a very difficult decision. She wanted to call her grandparents but was terrified of their reaction. She left Deb's diner and walked back to the house where the camping trailer sat to use their phone. Gerri, the woman of the house, greeted her with a right jab to the eye.

Dibella fell to the ground and Gerri, who Dibella believes was "high our of her gourd", had no idea what she was doing. Dibella stuck out a foot and tripped Gerri who also fell to the ground and hit her head on a wooden log.

Gerri was bruised, but fine; Dibella, on the other hand, was feeling deep, excruciating pain in her abdomen. Gerri's bump on the noggin, must have straightened her out as she suddenly realized what she had done and helped Dibella up and into her car. She apologized as she drove her to the nearest emergency room some fifteen miles away. She got Dibella's grandparent's phone number and called them.

Dibella and the baby were fine, but as she left the hospital, the doctor had given her strict orders to rest and see her physician back in Chicago. Her grandparents drove her back to Gerri's to gather her belongings. Soon they were on their way back home.

In December, Dibella gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who is now sixteen and an honor student in a high school in the NW suburbs of Chicago. Dibella finished high school, went to college, and is now the CFO for a manufacturing company. She married Sam, her college sweetheart, and he has raised her daughter as if she were his own.