On their first day together, mostly what they did was stare at each other.
“I just kept looking at this man, a man who looks like me,” Yasmine Arrington told me. ”And he just kept looking back at me saying, ‘You look just like me. But with hair.’ ”
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Yasmine hadn’t seen her father in 16 years, not since she was 3. He’d been in and out of prison for most of her life.
By the time they reunited this year, she was a freshman at Elon University in North Carolina.
His incarceration was a constant shadow over her life — an absence compounded by the death of her mother five years ago. Her grandmother raised her.
Every time the subject of “Daddy” came up, she had to make a decision whether to explain his whereabouts, or just shake her head as though his absence was something more conventional, like a divorce. But in that near-daily dilemma, she also forged her strength.
Last week, Yasmine stood on the stage at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, her alma mater, and before the entire school she said the word she’d avoided for so long: Incarcerated.
I met Yasmine two years ago, when she was part of a program in the District called LearnServe, which was somewhat like a day camp for aspiring social-issues wonks.
They were doing their presentations when I came in, poster boards, charts and PowerPoints on the various nonprofit groups they would create: recycling in the jungle, potlucks to mingle nationalities, and so forth.
Yasmine stood out because her proposal was so real, personal and raw. Her fantasy nonprofit, she explained, would be a college scholarship fund for kids whose parents are incarcerated.
She got excellent scores on her presentation, but that wasn’t the end of her story.
Throughout her senior year in high school and freshman year at Elon, Yasmine chiseled away at her dream. A scholarship student herself, she formed a board, held a kickoff event (Grandma cooked) and started raising money for the nonprofit, called ScholarCHIPS.
And she finally met her father, Tony Arrington. It was strange in many ways. “He had so many tattoos,” she said. “All over.”
A skull with wings, a naked woman and Yasmine herself.
“I have her whole face on my arm. And it says ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and ‘My Flesh and Blood,’ surrounded by tulips and roses,” Tony Arrington told me. “The whole top half of my arm is like an ode to Yaz.”
He’s proud of her. “She could’ve been anything,” said Arrington, who has found work as a cook at a country club and a Golden Corral restaurant. “She could’ve been a whore. She could’ve been a drug addict. But my child is a college student.”
Arrington is living with his mother in North Carolina, and that is the part Yasmine likes best, visiting and surrounding herself with cousins, aunts and uncles. Reconstructing her family.
Last month, she returned to her home town with nearly $13,000 to give away to students whose situations are like hers. Nine graduating seniors applied for the money, and all had heartbreaking stories that they recounted in essays.
There was the girl who will never forget the day in her sophomore year of high school when her home was raided and her mother was taken away in handcuffs. And another whose parents were locked up when she was an infant. She was raised by an 85-year-old grandparent.
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