Born in Prison, Bride at 13, Returned to Jail, And Then God Transformed Her Life

Dawn Damon: Hello, beautiful, bravehearts!

Well, if you ever thought that your life was hopeless, too far gone, you've done too many things, God can never forgive you. You're gonna think about that twice today because I have an incredible guest for you. Her life has been extraordinary. Born in jail to a young prostitute, her life was destined to either get better or worse and worse. It was an extraordinary, horrific childhood, which abruptly ended as she became a 13-year-old bride. I can't even imagine. I don't wanna give it all away today, but my guest is the wife of 26 years to Randy, Mr. Forever Wonderful. A mother, a grandmother. She's the author of books, mentor Speaker Georgia, accent included. A prayer intercessor is the most important and powerful. She desires to see women free from their past and experience a life that God intended. Will you please welcome to the Brave Hearted Woman, my guest today, Cheryl Bond.

Hi Cheryl Bonds!

Cheryl Bonds: Hello.

Dawn Damon: We're so glad that you're joining us today, and we're glad that you have come to the place where you're just willing to open up your heart and say, This is my story. I wanna share it. I want others to know that there is a God who heals, changes, transforms, and sets free. So welcome, and we're eager to hear from you. Tell us a little bit about yourself right now. What are you up to these days, Cheryl? Would you believe I'm 77 years old, and God last year opened up a speaking ministry, which led to Him encouraging me to write a book of my life, and I just can't get over him. Why now, Lord? And he said, why not now?

Dawn Damon: So that's so good. I love it.

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: What is the title of your book?

Cheryl Bonds: We're going back and forth on that. That's the book that was written, but my editor and I are going back and forth on the title.

Dawn Damon: Okay. Well, we will just be anticipating whatever title it is that you land on, but you're not going back and forth on the story. You're very clear about your story. Tell us a little bit about your beginnings, Cheryl.

Cheryl Bonds: Well, as you said, I was born in a women's state prison. My mother was a prostitute. She wasn't married. And when I started my journey in writing, I wanted to get some facts. Of course, back then, they didn't keep records, so I couldn't get what I wanted to. But I did learn that when a child is born in prison to an unwed mother, that baby is immediately put in an orphanage. Oh, but I see God didn't allow that to happen. God was already working in my life, and then she put me up for adoption. And again, God stopped that. And there was somebody, because he called my mother's family wanting to know about my background, and that's when my mother's family first knew about me, because my mother had run away. She changed her name. And so her family hadn't heard anything from her in several years, so God stopped that. And so when my mother didn't even name me, I guess I was probably three months old when she said, I need to give this chicken a name. So, oh my goodness. See, the headlines of the newspaper at that time were reading. Cheryl Turner, Lana Turner's daughter, at 14, killed her mother's boyfriend. So my mama named me Cheryl. Oh, I said years later, I said, no wonder I was stinking mean. You named me after a murderer. And so I do try to tell people, watch what you name your children, because they'll grow up to their expectations of what you keep calling them every day.

Dawn Damon: So, that is so true that, you know, I just wanna pause for a moment because you know, you're exactly right. That is so true, and we don't think of it as it's a type of prophecy you're speaking over their life. It doesn't have to be because God can intervene. But, so at three months old, you're finally named, you're given the name after Cheryl Turner. And what happens to you? Your mom kept you in the state penitentiary with the women for three months?

Cheryl Bonds: That part, I don't know. Okay. I don't, you know, my mother and I wouldn't talk about. So, and I didn't think to, you know, press her for more before she died. I did try to get her to gimme her testimony, and she said, what will my friends think? And I said, they'll probably think I'm glad it's you telling it all instead of me. But she just wouldn't tell. Of her story, but she did apologize to me on her deathbed. And that meant a lot. I didn't need it, but it meant a lot to me because I never thought she noticed all of her bad choices.

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: And so that meant a lot to me that she didn't forget that when she did that. I told her, Well mama, look, I'm the one standing here. Yeah, maybe I did have a rough growing up, but it gave me grit to be able to do the things that I can do today to be able to stand.

Dawn Damon: Yes, ma'am. That's beautiful. So your family found out about you when you were three months old or so, and then did they take custody of you?

Cheryl Bonds: No.

Dawn Damon: Okay.

Cheryl Bonds: No, they weren't that kind of family.

Dawn Damon: Okay.

Cheryl Bonds: No. Well, I was the sixth child, and she had already given up the first five children.

Dawn Damon: Oh my goodness.

Cheryl Bonds: So two of them went to their grandparents. One of them went to an uncle, and one of them she just left in the hospital. Um, another one she left with a friend. So that was God, too. She could have left me.

Dawn Damon: Yes, she could.

Cheryl Bonds: Yep.

Dawn Damon: So what happened and who raised you? Where did you go?

Cheryl Bonds: Well, she went to a bar, you know, back to what she was familiar with, and that's where she met my dad. I wanna say a good looking at a full-blooded Italian, and he was a longshoreman. But he loved me. He loved me. He told my mother, he said, I'm not close to my family. If I tell them this is my baby, they'll believe it. And so that's what he did. But he, being a longshoreman and a full-blooded Italian, drank all day, and they fought all night. But she would have to put a lock on my bedroom door because when he would get drunk, he was always gonna leave her, but he was always gonna take me with him.

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: And that was kind of the first in many years where I really felt loved. Even now that I've got some experience with drunk husbands, I'm sure he was just doing that to spite her, to say, I'm taking her with me. Sure. So. But I loved him. I loved him, and I bore his name. I still bear his name, but she couldn't take it anymore. And so there were some neighbors that were visiting, and they were heading out, and my mother said, Can I bum a ride with you? Well, nobody had money, so they were working as migrant workers. Across the state, in different fields and different things. Now, this is a four-year-old's memory.

Dawn Damon: Okay.

Cheryl Bonds: But, I believe the first farm was green beans. I'm telling you, green beans as far as you can see. I worked in the field just like the grown-ups. I dragged my sack of green beans to the flatbed truck that would pay us immediately for how much our beans weighed. I still remember being so hungry, just eating green beans off the vine. Mm-hmm. We lived in bunkhouses, and there were a lot of people there. A lot of people. And in the bunk house were beds all the way around the wall of the bunk house. And a lot of bad things happened to me in that bunkhouse.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: And I don't wanna believe my mother was selling me, but she would put me in an abandoned car out in the field and leave me. And I remember one shadow after another visiting the car, and I thought to myself, I don't like this. This can't be real. I bet if my daddy were here, this wouldn't be happening. So it made me very angry at her for leaving him. Nothing could have been as bad as being with him.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: And so I was very rebellious. And two, she called me a bad seed. She said I was put on earth to torment her. Again, I tell ladies, don't call your kids names.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: Wow. Because I thought, I'll show you what a bad seed looks like. And I was very, I was mean. I was rebellious, of course. I was bad at fighting. And then the next big farm we went to was peaches. I thought of peaches all day long. But as pretty as peach orchards look, there were monsters there, too.

And so we finally left San Francisco, California, and landed up in San Antonio, Texas, where we lived till I was, I think I was 12, but I was a habitual runaway. I wanted a home. I wanted family. We lived in a little two-room house that the landlord built in his backyard, and it was covered in tar paper, no heat, no air. I would see people's houses and the lights on, and I thought, how beautiful, and I would go and sleep on their front porch. I wanted a home so bad.

One time, I stole the chair off a front porch and dragged it home. And when I don't know, somebody had to have told on me because here comes the police and the homeowner, and the homeowner said, Why did you do that? And I said, because it was so pretty. He said, Yeah, my wife thinks so too, but I had no guidance, and I didn't know right from wrong until I was born again, and I read proverbs till I started learning what was right from wrong.

Dawn Damon: Wow. So let me, I mean, first of all, I'm just almost speechless. You have such an incredible story already. Monsters in the peach orchard, just. Takes my breath away to think about the things that you endured already, and you're only 12 years old, and there's a whole lot of life to live yet. So I know that when we opened this up, I read your bio that you were a bride already at 13. So this is the next year of your life. At 12, you're still in the peach orchard. And then what does your mom move? Again, I can't even imagine this.

Cheryl Bonds: When we got to Texas. As I said, I was very rebellious. She, of course, worked. She worked second shift at a restaurant slash bar, and so we would come home from school, she wouldn't be there, and then when we would get up to go to school, she was asleep.

So, as I said, I had no guidance. I had a younger brother whom I took care of. I never heard the word babysitter until I needed one. And like I said, I was a habitual runaway, and the police would drag me and bring me back home, and my mother said, know what to do with her. And I'm guessing, I don't know, I'm guessing there weren't juveniles back then, and he said, I know of a place. That'll take her in. And it was kind of like a juvenile, it was for wayward girls, but it was run by nuns.

So off they take me there, and of course, it's just like jail. I can't see my mother. It's got Bob Wire on the top of the stone wall. A lot of rules that I've never had, and so I finally get it. If I behave myself, I get a reward and my reward would be to go, I get to go home and spend the night. So I behaved myself, and I got to go home, since my mother didn't have a car. She, she didn't drive till she was up in her fifties and somebody was there, and they said, Well, we'll drop her off as we leave. But it was before time for me to leave, and I didn't wanna go back, much less go back earlier. And my mother had cancer, so I went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, and I took everything that was in there, and I hit the floor like a rock.

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: Nobody took me to the hospital. They just folded me up and stuck me in the car and took me back to the convent.

Where I slept for three days, I, uh, wet the bed. All they told me, mm-hmm. I was gonna go to hell for trying to commit suicide. But no one ever asked me, What is wrong with you? What’s the matter? Why are you so angry? Why are you so, you know, hard to get along with?

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: Then, while I'm there. My mother had written me a letter, but I didn't receive it till the day of my birthday. On my 13th birthday I received, I didn't receive the letter. The nuns called me in to say, Your dad has died. And so I started crying, and they said, What are you crying for? He ain't your daddy. Well, that was the first time I'd ever heard that, and I thought, Why are you lying to me? It hurt me so bad. I never even asked my mother, are they telling the truth?

Dawn Damon: Wow.

Cheryl Bonds: Because I didn't wanna know the truth, right? It was many, many years. LA, it was when I got married before I questioned her, well, when I was getting my divorce, and I needed to go to work, so I needed a Social Security card. So I told my mother, How do I get a security card? She said, Well, I'll have to write to California, blah, blah, blah. And then she told me that your dad's name is not on your birth certificate. So that made me ask questions. So it is just one mess after another, one story after another.

Dawn Damon: And you know, we don't know for sure. Maybe you have some facts, but you know that old saying, hurt people, hurt people, and you have to wonder what happened to your mom. I wonder if she had the very same type of upbringing or childhood, or if she didn't have any other kind of wisdom or strength to draw from, something was desperately wrong in her life.

Cheryl Bonds: What little bit did I know because back then, people just didn't air their laundry. They didn't tell you about their skeletons. You know, if something happened in the family, it just stayed there. You just didn't talk about it. And my mother was the youngest of five siblings. Her parents were up in age when she was born. Well, they had gotten in a fight before she was born, and they never spoke to each other till the day they died.

So my mother grew up in a home with nothing, no love, no compassion, no conversation. She married when she was 19 years old, and my mother lived on a dirt farm in Missouri. She married a man who worked on the railroad, and he moved her to the big city of Chicago within a year of their marriage. Of course, she was pregnant. She had a little baby boy, but her husband got TB and had to, back then, they put him in a, like a nursing home because they believed TB was contagious, and he wasn't there maybe a year before he got pneumonia and he died. So there she is in a big city in Chicago, a 20-year-old widow don't know her head from a hole in the ground.

So his parents took the baby, and you know, told my mama to hit the road. And I guess that's when her prostitution life must have started, 'cause she had no career, no education. It was right during World War II, so there weren't many jobs. She did what she all she knew to do to survive. I don't even think birth control was popular back then, 'cause it looks like every two years she had a baby. Right?

Dawn Damon: So you needed a Social Security card, and your mom says, Yes, I can help you get that. But, warning, I'm gonna get the birth certificate, and your dad's name is not gonna be on that birth certificate. Is that when you kind of felt like, okay, what the nuns were telling me is true?

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah. I still didn't wanna believe it, and I thought he was the only dad that loved me, and I'm just gonna always carry his name.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: I did ask her, well, who's my daddy?

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: And she was very vague about it. And I said, well, I'm gonna go find him. She said, Well, he is dead. I said, how do you know that? She said, I read it in the paper, but I wonder to this day.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: And what good would it have done? He threw her out when she got pregnant. And I believe now, after I have found the rest of my siblings, when I did my ancestry,

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: Yes, DNA thing. So, talking with them and putting puzzle pieces together. I think my dad was her John.

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: That makes sense, right?

Cheryl Bonds: Yes. And where she was living, it looked like the girls that he worked with all lived together. My mother was getting pregnant every two years, I guess he thought I was spending more money on her than she was making. And, um, he threw her out, but she left a child there that was raised by the woman who was running the nightclub.

Dawn Damon: Oh boy.

Cheryl Bonds: So it's just, it's just the mess we can get ourselves into.

Dawn Damon: Well, that's so true, and it's kind of one layer upon another layer. You know, there's poverty, there's no education, there is. Then the abused girl is getting abused. Then it's just on and on and on it goes. But you broke the mold. You broke the mold, but your story's still not done. You're only 13 now. Do you get emancipated at 13, or how is it that you are out of the girls' home for wayward girls?

Cheryl Bonds: When my dad died, he left, and they were still divorced. They'd never divorced, so he still had her on his insurance. So she got his insurance, and he got everything he had, which wasn't that much, but he did have an insurance policy. So she gathered us up, and we moved back to California because she, too, had a hunger for family.

So she thought they would open her. Welcome her with open arms, but they really didn't. One of them wanted to borrow some money, and my mother gave it to her, but then she never spoke to my mother. She wouldn't pay her back, so my mother felt very wounded and unwelcome. So she had a brother who lived in Georgia. And my mother came to visit him 'cause she's been estranged from her family for many years.

Dawn Damon: Okay.

Cheryl Bonds: And she fell in love with Georgia, the beauty of Georgia. So she packed us up and moved us to Georgia. And that was, you know, teenagers, they don't like being moved around. They don't.

Dawn Damon: No.

Cheryl Bonds: I didn't have that many friends, but I certainly didn't wanna leave the ones that I had bonded with.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: So here we come to Georgia, and coming from California to Georgia is two different worlds.

Dawn Damon: Oh, yes.

Cheryl Bonds: In California, I got taken to the principal's office for saying, Yes, ma'am. No, for not saying, Yes ma'am. Come to Georgia. Got taken to the principal's office for vice versa. I didn't say it at one, and I said it, and I got in trouble at both schools.

Dawn Damon: So, trying to figure out the rules here, like the different cultures are unbelievable.

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah. It was, it was a big difference in my eyes.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: So just haphazardly. I met my husband. He was 18. I was 13, of course, I told him I was 16.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: So you can't hold him at fault, but I can't; I don't say too much about him. I wrote a little bit in my book about him, but I do have two children by him, and outta love and respect for my children. I didn't say too much about it; I said enough to show that it was rough, but not too much. I gave him a lot of grace. A lot of grace.

Dawn Damon: I respect that and I understand that. And so you married him, and now you're living in Georgia, you're married, you have two children by him. How long did that marriage last?