Uncle Sets Aside His Own Dreams to Give 5 a Chance at Their Own

When 12-year-old Gabriel won third place for his tornado-in-a-bottle science project, Eugene Helm IV jumped to his feet and erupted in joy.

The four other children roared too. Then, wanting to be part of the action, 11-year-old Randy looked at Eugene and blurted, “I’m almost finished with my science project!”

Just months before, Gabriel--a bully at school who wore gang-style clothes--would laugh out loud when handed back a failed assignment. But here he was on stage, gripping a trophy and basking in the applause, while Eugene beamed from the audience.

“You could see, me, like a proud father,” Eugene said, shaking his head incredulously.

In fact, Eugene is not the father of these five children--three boys and twin girls. He is their uncle.

And therein lies an unusual story--the story of how Eugene Helm IV became an instant father, putting aside his own dreams to embrace five children whose lives had been too harsh to harbor dreams.

Just a year ago, Eugene was a 25-year-old college student in Chicago, thinking of little else than organic chemistry, his job as a pharmacy assistant at a drugstore and his fiancee, Taneen.

His mother’s death last July changed all that: It left homeless the five grandchildren she had been rearing.

Quite honestly, Eugene hadn’t given the youngsters much thought. He had come to Dallas to bury his mother and be on his way. He figured the kids--boys ages 7, 11 and 12 and 4-year-old twin girls--would be farmed out to relatives or foster care.

No one could blame him for going back to Chicago. He was a college student pursuing a career as a pharmacist and looking forward to a $60,000 salary. And there was his girlfriend. The week before his mother died, Taneen had mapped out their future--and that included three kids, tops.

Eugene would be out of his mind to consider becoming a dad to the kids. And, besides, they didn’t expect him to stay. Relatives had told them “Mr. Preppy” was leaving.

Even at their young ages, they were used to that. The boys’ mother had died and the girls’ mother had been in and out of jail on drug charges. Eugene didn’t even know who the children’s fathers were.

But when he looked into their innocent faces, he saw his sisters. If he walked away, he worried the children would end up just like them--dead or addicted.

He toured the west Dallas housing projects where the twins were staying and found the buildings soul-deadeningly grim. A relative who volunteered to take the boys never showed to pick them up. And Eugene got the feeling that some of the relatives just wanted the kids for their welfare benefits. Others, he knew, were drug abusers.

“What do I do? What do I do?,” Eugene asked himself. “I’ve got a good job, school. . . .”

Not to mention a bus ticket back to Chicago.

Eugene had a lot waiting for him there. As a teenager, he had moved to Chicago to live with his father. Crime was taking over his south Dallas neighborhood, and his older brother was in prison. Eugene’s grades were so bad as a high school freshman that he was disqualified from playing after-school sports. His mother believed he needed a male role model and sent him packing.

“Son,” his father told him when he arrived, “I want you to do something with yourself.”

He did. He was elected to his high school’s student council and made the National Honor Society.

His father brimmed with pride when Eugene announced his plans to become a pharmacist, just like him. Eugene had nearly finished his college prerequisites to apply for pharmacy school when he was called to Dallas for the funeral.

When he saw the bleak future facing his nieces and nephews, he couldn’t so easily turn his back.

He called his father and told him he was considering dropping out of college to rear the five kids.

“Your mom would be proud,” his father said quietly.

“Dad, what about you, man?”

With his father torn by his high expectations for his son, Eugene knew the decision was his alone.

“What kind of man would I be to abandon my family?” he asked himself.

He scrapped the bus ticket and moved into his mother’s apartment with the kids and his sister, Kim, the twins’ mother. She had been out of jail since the funeral but was tethered to the courts by an electronic monitoring device on her ankle.

Life had been so hard on these children. The boys had been at the deathbeds of their mother, who died of tuberculosis, and their grandmother, who died after an asthma attack.

Gabriel and Randy, the oldest, were tough guys, bullies at school. They wore their pants slung low around their hips and baseball caps cocked at an angle. At the tender age of 7, Chris wanted to be just like them. Eugene knew they’d be in gangs for sure, if he didn’t do something.

Darnisha and LaEunice, the twins, had been shuttled among relatives as their mother went in and out of prison. Once, they barely escaped a fire when a Molotov cocktail was thrown into their grandmother’s apartment by drug dealers looking for their mother. Another time, they told Eugene, they had watched their mother stab their father.

“It wasn’t about me anymore,” Eugene said. “It took a lot of humility . . . to search inside to find strength and ask God, ‘Is this really what you want me to do?’ ”

Three months later, the family was evicted from the apartment when they couldn’t pay back rent.

Kim quickly qualified to move into an apartment for ex-convicts and their families run by Exodus, a private, nonprofit organization. Since Eugene was neither husband nor father, he couldn’t stay with them. He had a job at a fast-food restaurant that earned him enough to buy a $500 car at auction, so he lived out of that for a few weeks.

But when Kim started having trouble rearing the kids and couldn’t get them to school on time, Exodus asked Eugene to move in and help. Then came another blow: Within a week, Kim failed a random drug test and was kicked out.

Exodus administrators offered to find foster homes for the children, but again Eugene said no. They were his responsibility. Exodus Director Debbie Rouse was so impressed that she invited him to stay.

But what did Eugene know about rearing kids? The closest he had come was volunteering to help with a church youth program. And here he was fixing the girls’ hair, helping the boys with homework and taking them all to church on Sundays.

“I can do this,” he told himself.

He got a new job across town as a pharmacy assistant but, within weeks, his car was stolen. So he started taking the bus--four buses each way.

That meant rising at 4:30 a.m., waking the boys, then the girls, picking up around the apartment and sitting down for morning prayer. They’d be out of the house by 7 a.m.--the boys on the way to school, the girls to a Head Start program, and Eugene on his two-hour bus ride to get to work by 9 a.m.

He missed Taneen terribly but couldn’t bear to call her. Their conversation the week before his mother died rang in his ears. “We have no kids,” she had told him. “We can do so much together.”

What would he say to her? I have five kids, no money and I’m living in a housing project for ex-cons. Will you still marry me? He couldn’t ask that of her.

Instead, he concentrated on the children; they needed love, religion and self-esteem. After homework and dinner, he read them bedtime stories. Eugene remembered a chant from his youth and taught it to them: “Good, better, best, never let it rest, till the good get better and the better get best.”

After the girls gradually became more sociable in the Head Start program, teachers asked Eugene for his secret. The boys started doing better in school and made the honor roll. Gabriel took home that science fair trophy.

But amid the rewards, Eugene was still overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of parenting. Just one example: He had to take unpaid time off when the girls got sick with chicken pox and when they had dental appointments.

It was November when Taneen finally tracked down Eugene. She had tried calling him at Exodus, but her messages never reached him.

Finally, she got a list of the chain of drugstores Eugene worked for and started at the top. On the fourth call, she found him.

“Eugene!” she squealed.

“I’m going to kill you!” she added, but she soon softened.

She didn’t care about the five kids or the apartment for ex-cons. She wanted to be with the man she loved and respected now more than ever, the man who took her to church on their first date and proposed after midnight Mass at Christmas two years earlier.

“I love you,” she told him. “I don’t care.”

She bought a bus ticket and asked God to bless the trip.

When she met the children, she fell in love. Gabriel and Randy insisted on accompanying her on a walk to the store.

“You’re not from here,” they said. “We have to protect you.”

They were meant to be a family, Taneen thought. She and Eugene set a July wedding date. They would just put their other goals and dreams on hold. For now, their priority was rearing these children in a warm, loving home.

In the meantime, the Dallas Morning News heard of Eugene’s dedication and wrote a front-page story about him. Within days, thousands of letters, checks and offers of cars poured into Exodus, care of Eugene Helm.

More than $80,000 stacked up, including $5,000 from Black Entertainment Television.

“There’s been a stereotype of the black man of always being on drugs and all the other things,” said Curtis Symonds, BET executive vice president of sales and marketing. “This is the kind of uplifting story that there are role models out there that are doing the right thing.”

Eugene and Taneen moved up their wedding date and were married in April. He is taking the summer off so his new wife and family can get to know each other. Already, the kids are calling Taneen “momma-auntie”; they call Eugene “unkie” or “dad.”

Eugene hopes to go back to school soon and Taneen wants to complete her teaching degree, but those plans may have to wait.

Exodus has handed over nearly $20,000 to Eugene but deposited another $65,000 with a district court to determine how it should be distributed. Exodus lawyer Braden Sparks says the twins’ mother and other relatives, including fathers, could make a claim on the money.

Eugene feels blessed.

“God allowed me to be with the woman I love dearly,” he said, “and to give these kids a better life.”