Bianca Perry's difficult path from poverty and abandonment to college graduation

PAWTUCKET, R.I. - The door was open, and Bianca Perry stepped into the vacant room that had changed her life. The bed was made. The dresser emptied.

Brother Michael had always promised a place for her in the large residence next to St. Joseph's Church in Pawtucket. A few of her belongings remained untouched last week, long after Perry had departed for college in Philadelphia and broken her family's cycle of despair.

The scars are etched into her soul:

Three hungry siblings trying to boil a raw potato while their stoned mother locked herself in a room.

The opening shift at McDonald's, a day of classes at high school, followed by the night shift at Dunkin' Donuts.

Her mother's confession to stealing an income-tax check.

A habit of shoplifting, so ingrained.

The homeless nights when a made-up bed and dresser never felt more distant.

At St. Joseph's, the sun shone into the second-floor room. Perry, a lithe 23-year-old criminal-justice student at La Salle University, inspected the space.

"Here, I didn't have to worry about randomly having to move or losing my stuff," she said. "I still have stuff here. That's rare for me. We'd just get up and go."

Old shoes sat in the closet. A picture of St. John Baptist de La Salle rested on the desk. Perry opened the bottom drawer.

"Yes," she said, "I still have books."

She grabbed the one on top, Children of Incarcerated Parents, and plopped it on the desk. Underneath, Perry found an LSAT prep book. She put that one under her arm.

"I may need this," she said.

Once upon a time I heard that my mother had went to a place she should have never went. A place called jail. I felt like I wanted to die.

- Bianca Perry, in a 2002 school essay

On Sunday, Bianca Perry will graduate from La Salle University. She made dean's list every semester of her junior and senior year. In the fall, she will become a La Sallian Volunteer to work at a school in a poor neighborhood for at least a year.

"That's beautiful," said her brother, Haywood House. "That's the best thing to ever happen for all of us."

But her past is an unending burden. It is a twinge of guilt that tugs at her with every success.

Perry suffers from fits of depression, which manifest in the form of frantic late-night text messages or calls to her sister and mentors: I give up. I just want to die.

She worries about her grandmother, mentally unstable and alone in a low-income housing complex. She wonders if her older sister and brother can ever escape the cycle. Sometimes, Perry blames herself for the death of her mother.

"Trust me, it wasn't always easy," said Heather Ferro, the school social worker who arranged for Perry's housing at St. Joseph's. "You can't go through what Bianca has gone through and come out completely unscathed. There's a lot of emotional damage."

Perry's mother, Angelique Braxton, was arrested in Rhode Island 27 times between 1991 to 2011, according to court records. Braxton, who used 14 different aliases, pleaded guilty to charges including drug possession, shoplifting, and assaulting a correctional officer.

She died of a drug overdose in May 2013.

Perry's 26-year-old sister has two children and lives on welfare. Her brother, 25, is a convicted drug dealer recently released from prison.

All three children bounced between foster parents and group homes. When Braxton reappeared - whether from prison or one of her "missions," as Perry called her binges - she reunited with her youngest child.

Perry attended private school through a program for children of incarcerated parents called Rhode Islanders Supporting Education. She did well in class. But she twice had to repeat a grade when her mother stopped sending her to school.

She concealed her hardships until early in her junior year at La Salle Academy in Providence.

Braxton was arrested, and Perry found herself alone. She scraped for rent money, but was eventually evicted. She slept on couches, stashed school uniforms in her grandmother's room at a subsidized complex for the elderly, and sometimes sneaked in a shower there.

At school, Ferro, the social worker, noticed that Perry was showing up late for class and asked if everything was OK. For the first time, Perry explained everything.

"She had one foot in one life," Ferro said, "and another foot in another life."

Sometimes I feel as though I'm two different people, like I am leading a double life. Picture it this way, when I look into a mirror I see the reflection of my past rather than who I am today along side of what I will become tomorrow.

- Bianca Perry, in her college application essay

It is Monday, unseasonably warm for a May afternoon in Rhode Island. Four children - two of them Perry's nieces - scamper around the apartment that her sister, Erica House, rents with a Section 8 voucher. Watching over them is an enlarged photo of Braxton, the centerpiece of a kitchen shrine to the family's matriarch.

House cannot read. She does not have a driver's license. Her friends, facing similar problems, squat in the apartment.

"I'm so broke," one of them said, as she pointed to holes in her stretch pants.

"We came from a rough background," House said. "Other people blame their parents for that. I hate that. You're an adult now, and you can make your own decisions. I'm not going to sit here and blame my mom because I'm in this situation. It's not her fault. I made my own choices."

Her sister and brother rely on Perry for money. While at La Salle University, she worked at Dunkin' Donuts at Broad and Olney. But the 40-hour weeks got to be too much combined with a full college schedule.

One day, a customer complimented Perry on her looks and suggested she become a dancer.

She found work at Delilah's, a gentleman's club on Spring Garden Street. Perry made more in one night at the club, she said, than in two weeks at her minimum-wage job.

"That's probably why I made dean's list," she said. "I didn't have to work as much."

She paid bills. She bought a red Mazda. She planned a trip to Miami with a friend as a graduation gift.

Her sister, evicted and homeless with her two kids, once asked Perry for a $1,000 security deposit. Perry sent it. Her brother needed bail money. She paid it.

"I definitely feel obligated to take care of them," Perry said. "I'm sitting here saying, 'You need to do something with your life.' And I feel guilty, too. I'm over here going on trips and vacations. I'm seeing the world, and they're just stuck. That makes me feel guilty.

"I want to help them up. I don't know how to help them up without taking care of myself first and making sure I can stay on the right path."

My whole life I wondered how a person like my mom could choose a drug over her own children.

- Bianca Perry, in a February speech at La Salle

Some of her first lessons were in shoplifting. Perry's mother and grandmother employed her as the distraction while they snatched clothes, cold cuts, and toiletries. It became a habit.

Perry says she was arrested three times for shoplifting before she turned 18. After her 21st birthday, she drank too much and had a confrontation with police. Her record is clean now. Every charge was either dropped or expunged.

"I started taking little steps," Perry said. "I knew if I went to the store, I would have the temptation to steal. So I wouldn't bring purses or bags in. Even to this day, I don't bring a purse into a store."

Perry's intelligence spawned a self-awareness that Ferro said is unusual in such situations.

"She had the ability at a very young age to take a look at her surroundings and say, 'I want more than this,' " Ferro said. "She knew she wanted something different, and she knew education was the way to get it."

During her studies at La Salle University, Perry questioned why some in her position accept help when others, such as her brother, do not.

Kate Ward-Gaus, director of the Alcohol & Other Drug Education Center at La Salle, helped organize a homeless and hunger awareness event in November. Perry spoke in front of 100 people. She detailed her mother's drug abuse in another speech.

"It's always been clear to me Bianca loves her family and loves her mother," Ward-Gaus said. "Despite it all. She could see it as addiction and not a lack of love."

Perry now has a second family. Lisa Guillette, executive director of a nonprofit called Foster Forward, plans to adopt her as an adult. She turned her basement into a room for Perry, another refuge that she could call home.

Guillette said studies had shown that fewer than 3 percent of young people who age out of foster care (at 18) attend college.

"The odds she has beaten in her life are pretty extraordinary," Guillette, 44, said of Perry.

Last week, she looked at Perry, who returned to Rhode Island to fetch her siblings for graduation, and tears flowed.

"You're a gift," she told Perry. "You've been a gift to all of us."

Maybe Perry will go into law, or advocacy. She had college internships at the Montgomery County Courthouse and the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia.

"Anybody who meets Bianca can tell she's going to do something good with her life," said Brittany Wilson, a friend and former La Salle basketball star. "She's so motivated to do good in life."

The Christian Brothers wanted Perry to volunteer in Tulsa, Okla., but she did not feel comfortable there after a brief visit. She likes the idea of a volunteer year in St. Louis. The pull of Rhode Island, where her fractured family struggles, is strong.

"I never had control over where I was being placed," Perry said. "I want to find somewhere where I fit."

Bianca Perry, college graduate, has a choice. Soon, she will pack her red Mazda and start the next journey.

But the past is inescapable. Tucked into the dashboard, a photo of her mother will always remind her.