The bandages on Brianna Donald’s arm when she started high school concealed not only bullet fragments but also fear and guilt.
Donald was an innocent bystander during a shooting at a football game the summer before her ninth-grade year at Chandler Park Academy. Thankfully, she wasn’t critically injured, but her mental health suffered so much, she switched schools the following year.
“It was a really awkward year for me. I had to start school a few weeks late and by the time I got there I had missed that chance to find and make friends,” she recalls. “It put a hindrance on the outgoing person that I was and really made me retreat back into myself because I was scared to go outside or scared to go different places. And it made me feel a bit of guilt… because my mom didn’t want me to go (to the football game).”
Without time to properly process the events, Donald buried her trauma in her school work and became an “overachiever.” But when she got to Sirrita Darby’s English class at Detroit Collegiate in 2018, the floodgates to her pent-up emotions were unleashed.
Darby had begun a healing circle where students would share their personal experiences with each other and write poetry and essays about their trauma. The students published a book, Forbidden Tears, featuring writings and drawings that came out of the sessions. They then launched the nonprofit Detroit Heals Detroit, which opened a new youth-led Healing Hub on Detroit’s east side this month.
At an opening party for the Healing Hub, kids from the neighborhood came out for the bounce house, horse rides, and dancing. Smoke from the backyard grill and excited laughter filled the air, in stark contrast with the gun violence residents often face.
As a born and raised Eastsider who lives in the community in which she teaches, Darby knows these issues firsthand.
“I witnessed one student who saw her uncle get shot and came to school the next day,” Darby tells Metro Times. “All trauma is brought to school, and as teachers, we’re first responders… A lot of teachers go home to their suburban neighborhoods at the end of the day and they don’t see how trauma exists outside the classroom.”
She continues, “I approached the school and said we need more trauma counselors, like my students cannot even focus on learning every day because of these traumas, and they said they didn’t have the money. So I just started doing this in my classroom.”
“It feels more like a communal family space versus an environment that’s clinical and feels like you’re trying to diagnose the kids with something,” she says. “Sometimes people just need someone to talk to who may not be in their family, so we’re here for that. They may just need something to eat or a space that’s not chaotic. So if you want to just come here and chill or sleep, we have a room full of beds for youth that just need a place to relax.”
The Healing Hub is open daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and also offers food, washer and dryer services, and temporary shelter.
Darby says she wanted the Healing Hub to be located in “the deepest, darkest, depths of the hood” so it can be accessible to the people that need it the most.
“Even at the hub the other day, there was a shootout and we all had to run inside… but we didn’t want to be in Midtown or downtown,” she says. “We wanted to be where trauma lives the most, and that is in the zip code in which we chose. We’re very intentional about the Healing Hub being in 48205 because people say that’s the highest crime rate in the city, which turns into the highest trauma rates.”
Donald, who is now 21 years old, is the president of Detroit Heals Detroit and is one of the organization's founding members. She wrote about her experience with gun violence in Forbidden Tears. After it was published she and her peers were invited to lead healing circles at other schools.
“The youth that founded this organization are very normal Detroit youth who you probably wouldn’t expect to lead an organization,” Darby says. “When I say ‘normal Detroit youth,’ some of them have been in jail, have been shot at — they’ve dealt with all of those challenges.”
Donald adds, “We wanted to keep doing this kind of work, helping people in our community that look like us, the younger kids that don’t really get to have a voice because they’re kids. The things that I was seeing in school are still happening and kids don’t really have an outlet to go to.”
Silyce Lee is another one of Darby’s former students from Detroit Collegiate who was published in Forbidden Tears. The 21-year-old is now the director of the Healing Hub and Detroit Heals Detroit’s treasurer.
Lee laughs as he remembers how everyone was initially reluctant to being vulnerable during the first healing circle in Darby’s English class.
“[Darby] was like, ‘No one’s leaving my classroom until someone shares out at least one deep story, one trauma, or something that’s making them sad!'” he says, mimicking his teacher. “Everyone was like, ‘I don’t want them to know what I’m going through!’ But it literally took one person for everybody to share out. As soon as that one person told their story, everybody else around the room started feeling like, 'Okay, I can trust them, they’re going through something and it’s not just me.' By the time class was over, everybody’s face was soaked. We was still [sic] crying and had to go to our next class.”
Lee had shared how his cousin’s death in a car accident left him feeling angry and disoriented. He says there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the details of his cousin’s death, but he returned to school the morning after his family received the tragic news.
“She was enjoying her 30th birthday with some coworkers.. and we got the call in the middle of the night,” he says. “It was like, it can’t be her because my whole family knows she don’t [sic] like to drive. We just knew it was something more to it. I was dumbfounded. We still don’t have any answers as to what happened that night. The people that were in the car with her, it’s like they went ghost. We know they’re still alive but they’re literally not telling us anything, and it’s been more than five years.”
Lee continued going to school like nothing had happened. He would wear headphones to tune everything out until Darby’s class taught him how to acknowledge his emotions.
“I didn't think I could ever move on from it, especially without knowing any answers,” he says. “She got ripped away from us, but I’m here looking on the other side. God does everything for a reason, so that's what I had to keep telling myself.”
Now, Lee wants to help other young Detroiters like Darby helped him.
“She literally read through her kids’ souls and saw like, these babies is drowning,” he says. “She has gone through almost everything that we are going through. Who else is a better person to help guide us and correct our path to success? I just know I can heal someone else from my trauma, my experience, and the route I took to heal from it. I know young people might hear this all the time, but you’re definitely not alone.”
For Donald, the healing circle was the first time she felt free to express herself through writing. She wants young people to know that someone will always be at the Healing Hub to help, whether they need someone to talk to or a safe place to sleep.
“I had to come to terms with the fact that my experience was affecting me and that it was traumatic, and being in that safe space allowed me to do that,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot of runaway kids or people who don’t have the support that other people would have, so we are here to be providers for our community. Just reach out, because we’re here.”
Donald, Lee, and the rest of the team are planning to host a community baby shower for young mothers, free Sunday dinners, summer camp, and a Black joy abolitionist picnic at the Healing Hub this summer.
The Healing Hub is located at 19510 Alcoy Ave. For more information, see detroithealsdetroit.org or follow detroithealsdetroit on Instagram.Subscribe to Metro Times newsletters.
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