Tanesha Walker: Growing Up With Grandma

Honors student talks about growing up without parents in West Oakland

Wendy Tokuda ― OAKLAND (CBS 5) ― Shiny gold trophies fill an entire shelf, in the front room of Tanesha Walker's home, not far from the West Oakland BART station. Most of them are debate trophies, but there is even a small one from a spelling bee in grade school. Her grandmother displays them all, along with photos of all her four grandchildren, whom she's raised.

"I don't know what I'd do without her," said Tanesha. "She's been there for everything in my life."

Every field trip, parent teacher meeting and school orientation- she could count on her grandmother. She struggles to find the words to describe her feelings. "If she needed a kidney or something, I'd be the person to give it to her," Tanesha said.

Later I meet her grandmother and I find out where she gets her plain manner of speaking. "I'd jump in front of a train for her too!" says Mae Walker. And they both mean it, deeply.

Mae Walker began parenting Tanesha long before the police took the children from their parents.

"I would have to go get the kids, bring them here…wash, bathe, everything. I had clothes here I would put them in," Walker said. She always knew it was a matter of time before she would get custody. Their parents were, as she said, "incapable of caring for them". Substance abuse pulled her son and his wife to the streets, and the children were moved from place to place, sometimes homeless.

But Tanesha holds on to the positive memories of her parents like precious stones. She remembers clearly running toward her father and him lifting her up into the air, or her mother bringing her a book for Christmas. Only when you push, does she talk about growing up without them.

"You always see, on TV shows, the father walking the child on their wedding day. I always thought of that, my father walking me down the aisle for my wedding day. The father-daughter dance....I thought about that stuff when I saw TV shows," she said. Those things only happened on TV for Tanesha.

Her mother died a few years ago, and she occasionally sees her father. But her grandmother has had custody from the time Tanesha was a little girl. Even when her parents were ordered to appear in court, they wouldn't show up. Tanesha learned that from legal papers she found one day. Tanesha said, "It kind of like shocked me. ...Why didn't they come? Why didn't they cooperate with them? Did you not want me?" They never talked about it much, but these were the unspoken questions her grandmother would have to answer with her straightforward love and care.

"I want them to feel secure," she says. "I love them and they can depend on me… Whatever they need me to do, I do it."

The miracle of Tanesha Walker is that she did much more than simply survive. "The odds against her are like a mile high wall," said Magen Clay, at the Boys and Girls Club in West Oakland. "You kind of just have to climb, a day at a time and she does that."

Tanesha started as an intern at the club four years ago, and never left. "She's an amazing person," says Magen. "I see her living a full and happy productive life, which I can't say for many kids I come across."

The Boys and Girls Club is right around the corner from McClymonds High, which now houses two smaller schools: Excel College Prep and Best High School. Along Myrtle Street, you can see what these kids live with: the boarded up windows, graffiti, and trash strewn across the yards. Young men gather on corners, and near the liquor store. A man walks down the street, with a grocery cart overloaded with odds and ends. A police car sits parked in front of the school.

"Kids aren't waking up happy to go to school, and thinking about college and thinking about what they're going to do with their lives," said Magen. "They're thinking, how am I going to get through this day or here's another day."

What presents as apathy at school, is often desperation here. Magen sees it all, "Lack of food, lack of daily needs, and being hungry, not feeling loved, and not feeling worthy of love," she said. 41 percent of the people in West Oakland live below the federal poverty line.

It's dangerous too. The city is infamous for its homicide rate, but most murders are clustered in the tough neighborhoods in West and East Oakland. Tanesha is all too aware of that, but inside her school and the Boys and Girls Club, it is safe.

"We actually want to go to college. We actually want to make something of ourselves," said Tanesha. "Our teachers stress that."

It bothers her that some people are afraid to even come to her school. "People have these stereotypes. Then when … they actually come into the school they're blown away, because they don't expect us to be here," she said. Tanesha has a 3.68 grade point average.

"She's a bright light, a ray of hope," Magen said. If other kids only had a fraction of that something she has inside her, she adds, they would make it.

This year, Tanesha will go to college and set a new course: "If you want things to be changed, you have to go do it yourself. You can't wait for somebody to come and give something to you, or you're just going to be waiting forever. You have to go out and get what you want." (© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)