For Seventeen Years, [grethel] Beyah Survived In ...  PRO

For seventeen years, [Grethel] Beyah survived in an abusive marriage. The family moved repeatedly, usually after they were evicted when they had no money to pay the rent. One cold Chicago winter, Beyah was trying to help her husband load their furniture from the street into a truck. “I just went to the back and started crying,” she said, “and the tears were freezing to my face it was so cold out.”

The couple went for counseling, but that didn’t help. They eventually called it quits and got a divorce. The young mother was left with nine children, several of whom were too young to go to school. “God gave me insight to do things I didn’t know how to do,” Beyah reflected recently. Her divorce forced her to be both mother and father for her family. “I knew I was left with the responsibility of raising my children to be productive people, and I just had to pull from whatever was inside of me. I wanted to give them a foundation that could take them all the way. My philosophy was ‘If I die today, where would my children be?’ So I tried to prepare them to be self-sustaining.”

Beyah got a job working for Sears, but one person’s salary didn’t go far in clothing and feeding ten people. “We were hungry,” she said. “We were not clothed too well. We did not have anything much to go on except each other.” Still, the busy mother tried to contain her kids. “I figured once the streets got hold them, I would lose them,” she reasoned, so she kept them busy in free dance, music, and gymnastic classes offered through the park district. She limited their exposure to television, supervised what they watched, and often discussed with them what they had seen. One by one the children grew into young adulthood. All were high school honor students; three were valedictorians. Seven of the nine earned university degrees, and two are college seniors.

When it became clear that all nine children would earn bachelor’s degrees (two have gone on to graduate programs), Grethel Beyah decided to go for a tenth degree – one for herself. When she got it last winter, after maintaining a B average and completing all the requirements for a degree in computer science from DeVry Institute of Technology, all of her kids were there. “I sacrificed for my children and got all of...

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