A cemetery is the eternal resting place for the forgotten, but Tanya Jones saw it as the most peaceful place on earth to sleep when she was young and homeless. Bodies planted in endless rows and decayed flowers accompanied Jones, protecting her from Boston’s perilous streets at dusk. With headstones for pillows that praised a mother, sister, daughter, aunt, or grandmother, it was hard to imagine that she would live to be them all, harboring an unprecedented love wide enough as the graveyards that guarded her.
She is a paradox: from growing up between houses and the streets, to now opening her Boston home to anyone, including myself. Despite having next to no home throughout her young life, she became a mother figure for others when she got older. Jones has even openly allowed her family members and friends into her home.
Motherhood wasn’t something her birth mother taught her.
“I didn’t know what home was,” Jones said because of her biological mother living away in Delaware. She gave up Jones and her twin brother, Troy, because she wasn’t ready for motherhood. Jones only saw her mother during the summer, but she doesn’t recall any of those visits.
But one figure she does remember is her godmother, Carmel Williams, who was the closest thing she had to home, despite Jones living with a separate adoptive family.
As a child, Jones would pick pears in Carmel’s backyard. She would climb on the shed to feast on the fruits of nature’s labor with nothing but gratitude and joy—not realizing her future would be filled with vulnerability.
Jones’ adoptive mother, Betty, kicked her out when she was 14, and the streets became all she knew. She was trying to juggle work and occasionally sleeping over her friends’ houses, slipping out in the early morning hours before their parents realized she was staying over yet again. On some nights she would rest easily, curled up on graveyards. Eventually, Betty let her come back home, but Jones wanted to get away from her. She ventured to Delaware when she was 15 after receiving a letter from her birth mother. Her mother wrote a letter to Betty, requesting to see her twins.
Jones was anxious at first, eager to meet her mother and her younger sister, Stephanie, whom she never met. She wondered who they were. Yet she was disappointed when she came to terms that she wasn’t going to receive the love.
Home wasn’t what she thought it would be like, and her stay with her mother didn’t last long. While her brother left while she was sleeping, Jones felt alone even amongst her family. She left Delaware at 17 after saving up her paychecks from a pants factory and returned to Boston. Despite having nowhere to go, she had two best friends and a god sister who Jones said gave her hope. Eventually she returned to the backyard.
Her godfather forbade Jones to enter his home, and Jones was forced to sleep in the unkempt shed, crying in total darkness. Sadly, her relationship with Carmel was never the same, as her and Jones didn’t stay in touch while she was in Delaware. Shortly after Jones returned, she learned Carmel died from cancer.
At 19, there was another possibility of home. Jones met Terrence who helped her out of homelessness, and initially, they were friends, then lovers. When she got pregnant with her daughter, Jones briefly stayed with Betty, but she was homeless once more.
Jones struggled with going from various homes, until she met Kevin. At 22, Terrence was murdered and Jones was a single mother. “I put my thinking cap on and thought about how to take care of my daughter,” Jones said. Kevin sent her to Boston Housing where she and her daughter stayed in a shelter for 9 months.
“Nothing’s easy in the shelter,” Jones recalled. She was depressed after losing Terrence, having been with him for four years.
Yet her hardship was lifted when she moved into her first apartment on Wellington Hill in Mattapan. “I could put keys into my door,” Jones said. The freedom was amazing, and she finally had something that belonged to her. Jones watched her daughter celebrate her second birthday in that apartment, overjoyed that her daughter didn’t have to share her struggle. “We didn’t have to knock on doors to ask people if we could stay. We weren’t in a shelter. That was good for me, to know that I could do that for her.”
Graveyards, backyards, and a “home” in Delaware that didn’t feel like her own, she realized that, “Family. That’s what home means to me. Having family around you.”
Illo by: Alex Gilbeaux