Macon woman hopes for safer home, new outfit for her two children

Editor's note: The Reindeer Gang is an annual holiday feature about people and families in need. Donations to Debra Hughes and her children can be made through the Mentors Project, P.O. Box 13750, Macon, 31208. For information, call 765-8624 or email june.oneal@bcsdk12.net

Debra Hughes grew up in a pocket of east Macon that was racked by crime in the early 1990s. Her father drove a beer truck. Her mother was a baker in the kitchen there at the hospital on Coliseum Drive.

Their Fort Hill neighborhood was the local backdrop for a wave of violence that saw homicide rates soar across the country. Shootings and stabbings were at times an everyday thing there in the maze of side streets between Emery Highway and Shurling Drive. Drug dealing was rampant.

While the dangers of the '90s there have subsided somewhat and she has avoided falling victim to violent crime's perils, Hughes has never gotten out.

Now 36, she is on disability because of diabetes. Hughes and her teenage children, a son and a daughter, live in a run-down apartment off Shurling.

"They are half a step away from being homeless," said Rusty Poss, a local contractor who has recently come to know the family through the Mentors Project of Bibb County.

Poss mentors Hughes' son, 16, who didn't want his name printed. The son is a Northeast High School student with a 3.7 grade-point average and dreams of attending the University of Georgia.

The other week, outside the Rookery, a downtown restaurant, Poss and the son, a soft-spoken, unassuming young man, encountered a woman on the street. She was hitting up passersby for spare change.

The son had a nickel and gave it to the woman.

"Then he reached in his hoodie pockets," Poss recalled, "and pulled out three dollars. He gave two to her. I said to myself, 'Maybe this guy's got more going for him than I think.'"

One afternoon last month, Hughes sat in a chair at the Mentors Project headquarters on Mulberry Street and tried to explain her family's hardships.

She didn't say much. Her voice was often a low mumble as she spoke of her struggles, of her late mother and father, of her past jobs at Subway and in nursing homes, of her childhood.

In high school, she played tuba and clarinet in the Northeast marching band. Friends called her "Big Deb."

When she was a little girl, on Sunday mornings before church, her father, Eugene, would walk with her down Lexington Street, across Emery Highway to the hospital kitchen were her mother, Georgia, worked.

They'd go there so Debra's mom could put pigtails in Debra's hair -- and sneak Debra breakfast.

"Every time, she'd give me a sausage biscuit out of the oven," Hughes recalled. "She'd say, 'Don't say nothing.' And she'd do my hair up."

Hughes' father was in his early 50s when he died in 1997. She was in high school.

"That was rough on me," she said. "We were close."

Hughes and her son and daughter, who is 13, lived with her mom until Georgia Hughes died in April 2014. They had split the cost of a rental house along Jeffersonville Road, over near the Indian Mounds. But with her mother gone, paying for a place to live was hard.

The apartment they live in now is run-down. There are details about the place that this story cannot mention.

June O'Neal, of the Mentors Project, did her best to put it nicely. The family's living conditions, O'Neal said, "are not very desirable."

They hadn't lived there long when their place was broken into. The thief took a video game system and a TV.

"We didn't have that much," Hughes said, "but that's what they stole."

She wants out of there and hopes to find a better place to rent.

Hughes has been on disability for three years. Her monthly check is $733.

She has worked in the past delivering newspapers. She was also a certified nursing assistant, but her diabetes caused so much foot pain that she had to quit. She said her patients liked her.

"I tried to treat them like I would want to be treated," Hughes said.

Asked what Christmas will be like for her and her kids, she said, "If they do get anything, it'll be clothes and shoes."

When she thinks about the future, where she sees herself headed, Hughes said she wonders, "How I'm gonna live from month to month. $733 ain't cutting it."

She wants to find a desk job, perhaps in medical billing. To do that, she'll need more schooling.

Hughes said, "I love my kids. I'll do just about anything for them if I can."

This story was originally published December 4, 2015 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Macon woman hopes for safer home, new outfit for her two children ."