After 20 years, a call helped a mom find her once-homeless daughter

It had been over 20 years since they had met, and a decade since Vinnie, now 74, had lost track of her only child.“I’d just feel so bad when people would call me — ‘Oh, how’s Zena?’ I didn’t know where she was,” said Vinnie, a jazz singer.When it came to mothering, Vinnie hadn’t had much of an example. After moving in 2020 into a two-bedroom apartment in a complex in Brookland, Zena told her service coordinator at Pathways, Len Williams, that she wanted to find her mother.“I got on Facebook on my phone and saw that Vinnie had a Facebook page,” Williams said. She has bought her medications and a new bed, and connected Zena to her own daughter, Kachurie, and Kachurie’s children.“I said to myself and God that I will do everything I can as long as I’m on this earth to help this child,” Vinnie said. “We’re built the same, got the same knockers,” Vinnie said, chuckling.Recalling her time on the street, Zena began to sing. “You may need to go to the eye doctor, because you may have dry eye.”From the outdoor table, Zena noticed a man at a bus stop and said she was going to go ask him for a cigarette; her mother stopped her.“She still has some of the symptoms of living on the street,” Vinnie said. “I say, ‘Don’t do that, you don’t need to do that, I’ll take you over to the Family Dollar and buy you a pack.’ I’m trying to get her to do things properly in society.”The catfish morsels, the eye doctor, the cigarettes — each moment reminded Zena what it means to have a mother.“That I’m somebody that has one,” she marveled, comparing life now to before their reunion.