Voices From the Shadows

She sits hunched forward most of the time and stares at the floor, speaking in a monotone from a far corner of her mind, muted by the limitations life has imposed on her.

Only when she discusses her dream does she look up and smile. She wants to become a restaurant hostess. It’s a dream of modest proportions, one that won’t make a ripple in the face of the economy, but for her it’s an awesome ambition.

I sing today of LaDonna Galbreath, who edges her way hesitantly back into the world from a place of shadows and devils, and who pursues her dream like a child crawling toward a toy.

Both schizophrenic and diabetic, she’s a hulking woman of 32 with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, three times damned by her own birth to an existence on the outer edges of society.

I met her in a small room at Goodwill Industries, where a program has been instituted to help those like LaDonna who tote heavy loads of both physical and mental incapacities.

It’s the only such program in California and one of very few in the nation that undertakes to assist those struggling against multiple hardships; the slow dancers in a world of fast music.

Thirty people at a time are led through sessions designed to prepare them to deal with their own problems and to learn to exist in a society that won’t slow down for them. LaDonna is one of them.

She’s learning to support herself and to deal, through counseling and medication, with the demons that schizophrenia creates. As she told me one quiet spring afternoon, “I don’t hear voices anymore that tell me to kill.”

*

We all hear voices. They come from sunlit places and are the subconscious whispers of motivation that tell us to love and care and achieve. They damp our rages and control our excesses.

LaDonna’s voices come from the shadows of hallucination. She can’t remember when they began, but she’s sure it had something to do with an acid trip she took when she was 14 that plunged her into a state of distortion from which she has never fully emerged.

The voices were the voices of the devil in all his multiple levels of evil. They told LaDonna she was bad. They told her to kill her son.

Abandoned by her father and orphaned by her mother, she was raised by a grandmother who did her best to give her charge a decent life. But “slow” by her own definition, LaDonna couldn’t handle the demands of school and dropped out in the 10th grade.

Vulnerable and desperate for someone to care about her, she turned to men for comfort and became pregnant shortly thereafter. They beat her and took what subsistence money she got from the state.

LaDonna attempted in her own way to shake the voices that by now roared through her mind like cyclonic winds. She thought her oldest son the devil and gave him to an aunt in an effort to still the roar.

It didn’t work. The voices persisted. She struggled with their commands to smother her youngest child; sometimes she could feel the presence of evil in her darkened bedroom.

“I just shut the voices out,” she said the other day. “I just listened and went on about my business. I wasn’t going to kill my boy. He was just a baby and I loved him.”

*

State-sponsored psychiatric treatment got LaDonna started on medication that began dealing with her hallucinations.

Meanwhile, Goodwill Industries’ Special Projects Program had come into being. An evaluation by the California Department of Rehabilitation called it “the finest program of its kind we have ever seen.”

LaDonna Galbreath entered the program almost a year ago, withdrawn and confused. A psychologist, a therapist and counselors began working with her.

Slowly, she began to improve. The voices became less frequent and finally disappeared. The commands to kill receded into the shadows and have never been heard again.

Simultaneously, LaDonna began taking classes as part of the program. She’s learning custodial work and good parenting, and earns $4.60 an hour working for Goodwill. A “care provider” lives with her and tends her son while LaDonna works, attends classes and undergoes therapy.

Life is different for her now, and the future clear enough to allow for the entrance of modest ambitions.

I’m not sure that anyone so burdened will ever achieve the goals they set for themselves, but at least one person in a city of millions is taking a few tentative steps away from her own terrible night of the soul.

That the wonder of a simple dream will cause LaDonna Galbreath to look up and smile reminds us that the world exists for the slow dancers too. Welcome them into it.