Mona Lisa’s family has a tradition that whenever a new baby’s born, the whole crew comes to the nursery and prays for a name.
It was her aunt, she says, who called her Mona Lisa.
As I do with all people I profile, I left our first interview and ran a background check to verify key parts of her story — where she was born, the number of kids she had, where she’s lived. They were all true, with the technical exception of her last name. It still lists her married name, but she’s trying to shed her ex-husband as fast as she can.
She has only one criminal offense listed, from 2017, for a “defective speedometer.”
Mona Lisa was born in northern New Jersey, near Newark, around the time people like Shaquille O’Neal and Queen Latifah were born in the same area. Here’s where we get to some unverifiable parts, but she’d like me to let people know about them.
She says she was friends with both. She says Shaq stepped on her feet at school dances and that she sang with Queen Latifah when the star was just Dana Owens. Regardless whether they check out, over the course of our time together she’s mentioned them so much it’s clear she believes them.
She says her grandfather was abusive toward her, says her mother was beautiful but elusive, a woman who preferred her boyfriends to her children. She also says that she lived for a time in Alabama with her grandfather — which checks out — and adds that she was kidnapped there and held hostage by her abductors, but I couldn’t find arrest records.
Whatever the case, most of what she tells me is verifiable, and it’s clear she has parts of her childhood she wants to remember and parts she absolutely does not.
Mona Lisa met the man who’d become her husband in New Jersey. They moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where his family lived. She worked at Roanoke Memorial Hospital in environmental services. She won certificates for her devotion to the job. She eventually moved to the dietary department.
At home, though, she and her husband fought. He had a long history of arrest. They called off their marriage. His family had a big presence in the area. She’d see them everywhere she went. She started to believe that each unfortunate circumstance in her life was somehow tied to them and their network. She blames his family for dismissal from the dietary department at the hospital.
“They all were in it together,” she says.
One morning in 2017, she sent Rebekah to school and went to a custody hearing. When she heard the words that told her social services would be removing her daughter, Mona Lisa crumpled to the courtroom floor. To this day, she says she doesn’t know why. She blames the social services worker for creating a false report about Rebekah’s well-being.
Rebekah spent a year in a foster home, then lived with a cousin in Philadelphia, then to Memphis.
Mona Lisa spiraled. She lost her hospital job and fell into more rental debt before deciding that she couldn’t make it in Roanoke. She’d lived in Charlotte for a few years in the late 2000s and liked it, so she turned her sights here.
It’s natural to believe that place can determine happiness or change a fortune. Mona Lisa thought Charlotte would turn her life. She took the train here without any plan except to start over, find good work, and bring Rebekah back with her.
In fundraising efforts and board rooms and homeless counts, Charlotte’s affordability troubles can seem like Charlotte’s problem. But the city is only a highway or train ride away for problems born elsewhere, from the migration of young people leaving rural areas for work, to social issues in other cities in the region.
Mona Lisa started her trip through Charlotte’s network of homeless services here by going to Urban Ministry Center. “They fed us and were nice,” she says. “They would give out scarves, hats, and socks.”
She says she’d walk up and down the street in the daytime, wondering what to do. Some folks on the street offered the wrong kind of assistance. They suggested she start using drugs, or drink heavily, because people with substance abuse problems always find help, they told her. But she believes drugs and alcohol are wastes of money.
Twice, she was the victim of attempted robbery. The second time, she put down her bag and looked the assailant in the eyes.
“Dude, I’m homeless,” she told him. “I ain’t even got nothing myself. What you want me to say? What you want me to give you?”
Mona Lisa landed her first Charlotte job in April 2019, driving rental cars from the airport parking deck to a car wash. But the rental company cut her hours in May, and around the same time, Salvation Army Center for Women and Children told her she’d exhausted her time there. The Area Fund helped Mona Lisa find a bed at Church in the City, a shelter for women on the west side.
Mona Lisa couldn’t enroll in trucking school until she figured out how to navigate the shelter’s hours.
One thing you learn quickly about homelessness in Charlotte is that there’s always a line to wait in.
Sometimes it’s a line at the DMV for a license, or at a cafeteria for a meal, or outside a shelter in mid-afternoon for that evening. And sometimes it’s a line of priorities, arranged based on the basic needs of the day. How, Mona Lisa wondered, could she make it to the trucking school at Hovis Road and put in her time there, and still get back to the shelter before the doors were locked?
Months passed while she worked at the rental-car facility, making part-time wages. Then in August, she finally took the chance and started at the trucking school. Within a few days, she’d made a friend there who agreed to give her a ride.
When you strip away the troubles of getting around and making money, Mona Lisa is a joyful person who makes fast friends. And when you put her behind the wheel, she seems unburdened.
The gears and turn signals and signs — she’s free in a place where the rules are clear.
On Monday, November 4, four days before she’s scheduled to take her learner’s permit test, Mona Lisa spends two hours on the phone with Rebekah.
She calls me later from her bunk. She’s sniffling.
She’d pulled two shifts this weekend at the airport to help pay the $34.99 for a study guide for her learner’s permit test. She’s already passed the air brakes and combinations test.
“I have to stay focused, so I can pass this test,” she says, then she rattles off her list, “and get my license and then get a job and then I can get my baby back here with me and have a place for her to come.”
She says she has to get off the phone for chores at the shelter. I ask if she’ll be OK.
“I have my crying days. I’ve got my times when I know I’m not strong,” she says. “I’m not going to be straight and the tears are not going to dry up until I get this CDL.”
Four days later, she passes her learner’s test. She starts to envision it again. She wants not just to drive trucks but to have a whole fleet of trucks.
“The secret to the truck, it’s not the going forward,” she tells me. “It’s the backing up.”
Church in the City doesn’t allow visitors, so I can’t see her there. We talk a few times over the next month and meet for breakfast in mid-December at the
Community Matters Café, a restaurant and coffee shop where all of the employees are going through addiction-treatment programs through the Charlotte Rescue Mission.
She walks in wearing a reflective vest and orders hot tea. When it comes she shakes up and pours out five sugar packets.
On the television in the café is a bit of big news in Charlotte: Billionaire Panthers owner David Tepper and mayor Vi Lyles are on the screen, announcing the new MLS franchise. I ask her what she would do if she had money like Tepper has.
“I would have two or three businesses,” she says, “and hire people nobody else wants to hire.”
Mona Lisa and Rebekah, just a few days after Rebekah moved to Charlotte in January.
Over the holidays, Rebekah calls her mother from Memphis and says she wants to come live with her.
Mona Lisa spends the rest of the week whirling. But she always lands back on the course that’s grounded her all these months, repeated over and over again.
“I have to stay focused on this license,” she says. “I have to stay focused.”
It’s plain to see the toll the past few months have taken on Mona Lisa’s mind and body. Her mood’s shifted up and down in all of our conversations, but this is by far the lowest point.
“My body is so tired,” she says on January 3, her voice weak. “It’s just too much.”
That Friday, the Charlotte Area Fund jumps in to find a hotel room for her; that Saturday, Rebekah arrives from Memphis. They move into the hotel off of North Tryon Street. It has one bed and a small kitchen with electric burners on the stove.
Mona Lisa switches her focus from a Class A license to a Class B license. She still hopes to land the Class A and have a trucking business one day. But she can achieve the Class B faster, and it allows her to find a paying job as a bus driver. She’s talked to CATS about working for them. But soon she comes across a program with CMS.
It takes a minimum of one month, from start to finish, for a person with a learner’s permit to become a certified school bus driver.
She passes the drug test and the background check with no problem, then takes a weeklong School Bus and Traffic Safety instruction class at the DMV. At the end of the week she passes a classroom test. Then she passes a physical and enrolls in a 14-day program working directly with CMS trainers to gain experience driving a bus.
Between the first and second week of the 14-day program, the hotel where she’s living tells her something’s wrong with her payment. They try to throw her and Rebekah out on a Saturday. Ms. O calls and argues, and eventually it’s settled. It costs Mona Lisa eight hours, though, and they have to move rooms.
The next week she’s still ready for the three-day test with a DMV trainer.
From kindergarten on, people encounter tough teachers and more forgiving teachers. There’s one teacher in the DMV bus program who has a reputation for being brutal. “She don’t play,” one of the instructors tells Mona Lisa.
Sitting in the waiting room, Mona Lisa already knows who’ll walk out. Mona Lisa drives for the toughest teacher at the school for two days, then schedules her final exam for Thursday, January 30.
That morning, Mona Lisa leaves Rebekah in the room and catches a train, then a bus, and another bus, to the testing site. She runs through through each item in her head, from the exhaust to the headlights and all places in between. If anything goes wrong with the bus, she needs to know how to fix it.
With the gaze of the difficult instructor on her, Mona Lisa nails each part. She passes. “I’m just so happy,” Mona Lisa says. “I got my CDL. Nobody can ever take a job away from me.”
As she leaves the testing site, she texts Rebekah, who responds, “I’m so proud of you, Mommy!”
Rebekah is a tall 15-year-old with big glasses, white Vans shoes, and a shy smile. On the Monday afternoon after her mother passed the test, Rebekah looks out the window of the first-floor room at the extended stay and sees a group of girls, probably a year or two younger than she is, throwing rocks at something in the woods. She turns her head back into the room and listens to her mother talk about what’s next.
She needs to enroll Rebekah in Vance High. The girl says she can’t wait to go to school.
“I like Charlotte a lot,” she says. “The weather is nice. I hope my mom can get an apartment for us.”
For more than a year in Virginia, the only time Rebekah could see her mom was in a glass-windowed room at the social services building. Everywhere she’s moved since then, she says, she’s wished she could be with Mona Lisa.
“I just missed my mom,” she says of the past two years. “I was getting my hair done and going to school, so everything looked fine. I didn’t really want to show emotions, though.”
Two books are on a table in the hotel room. One is the devotional
Come Up Higher by Marilyn Good. The other is the Holy Bible. Mona Lisa checks her phone and slips into a few more stories about her road here, and all the things that went wrong along the way.
Rebekah rolls over on her side and curls her legs into her knees on the end of the bed and takes a short nap.
An hour or so later, it’s dark, dinnertime.
“I want Showmars,” Rebekah says. The restaurant is next door to the hotel.
“Ha,” Mona Lisa says. “I don’t have Showmars money.”
Mona Lisa cooks for her and her daughter each night, even if it’s just a quick meal before she has to get to bed. She wakes up before 4 each morning.
the southside of A&T.
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