PUBLISHER BOBBY HENRY WHEN DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL IS HIV

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Publisher Bobby Henry: When Daddy’s Little Girl is HIV Positive

Publisher Bobby Henry: When Daddy’s Little Girl is HIV Positive
by George E. Curry
NNPA Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – After Bobby R. Henry, Sr. and his 18-year-old daughter, Yolonda, had discussed her plans to join the Air Force, he was surprised to learn that she had changed her plans and even more surprised by why she had changed them.

“She called me on the phone and she said, ‘Daddy, I got something to tell you,’” Henry recounted. “And I said, ‘What is it? I know you told me you were going into the Air Force.

What is it?’ And she said, ‘I got a letter from the Air Force and it was from the medical people and they told me I need to get checked again because I’m showing that I am HIV positive.’”

Placing that call 18 years ago from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. to her father in Dayton, Ohio was one of the hardest things Yolonda had to do in her young life. Today, it is difficult for Henry, publisher of the Westside Gazette in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to discuss that conversation.

“It shocked me first,” Henry said. “I was totally blown away. This was my little girl…” Henry’s incomplete sentence dissolved into 20 seconds of agonizing silence, with tears streaming down his cheeks. When a reporter gently surmised that it must have been a difficult conversation, Henry replied, “Especially when you were’ there.” He added, “You question yourself. If you were there, could you have made a difference?”

Henry, who was divorced from Yolonda’s mother and remarried, knows intellectually that even if he had been in the same city as his daughter, it probably would not have changed the outcome. Emotionally, he remains wracked by guilt and pain.

“If you sit and really think about it – which I have – somehow you just can’t shake it,” he said.

The newspaper publisher has been unable to shake the past, even though he made a decision to return to his hometown in Florida, where his daughter was living.

”I immediately left Dayton, Ohio and came back to Ft. Lauderdale and began to find help for her anywhere I could,” Henry stated. “Fortunately, that early intervention with the virus, to find rhea help she needed and to get her into the counseling she needed, it helped prepare her for what she had to deal with.”

But Yolonda had difficulty dealing with her new health status.
“Initially, when she found out, of course, she tried to find a way to deal with it. So, she did the drug thing – she got on drugs, dated – what’s the term I want to use – no good [men]. She did that, searching for love in all the wrong places.

“The final straw came for her when she got busted with some pills, some prescription pills. She had to go to jail and, no, Daddy didn’t get her out this time. She did about eight or nine months and she went into rehabilitation. She got out of that, she got off drugs.”

Not only has she kicked the habit, she frequently lectures in hopes of getting teens not to follow in her footsteps.

“About two years ago, she was speaking to a group of kids about HIV/AIDS,” Henry recalled. “She didn’t know I was there – I was back in the back.”
With his voice cracking, Henry struggled to describe that event.

“She was talking about how you couldn’t get AIDS just from touching somebody, how people treated folks, different folks, with AIDS.” After remaining silent for eight seconds, Henry slowly continued the story.
“As she was speaking, I got up and I walked from the back of the room, she could see me coming. She said, ‘Oh, that’s my daddy. I didn’t know he was here.’ So I came up to the podium where she was – we hugged and kissed.

“She always said that her family didn’t treat her differently,” said Henry, still trying to regain his composure. “So, right then, I decided that wherever she spoke, I would be there to support her and to give my side of the story from a father’s standpoint accepting that this little girl did some things she shouldn’t have done and because of that, she’s now infected with HIV/AIDS.”

His daughter wasn’t the first in Henry’s immediate family to be touched by the epidemic. His youngest brother, serving time in prison for bank robbery, died of AIDS at the age of 25.

“He was in prison fighting and he got cut,” Henry said. “…He had to be taken to the hospital and while he was in the hospital, he got a blood transfusion. We got called. We visited him. In prison, you don’t get proper health care. Basically, you’re treated like a leper. So, he didn’t get the basic health care, his health went down, he got a cold. He was in the last stages, we went to see him. He died about six hours after we had an opportunity to talk with him.”

Henry said he is at peace with his brother’s death, because he was at peace with it before he died.

“What I think about most is how he and I would have been running our newspaper,” Henry said, referring to the family-owned business. “He had this air about himself. I’m me. If I just had somebody to watch my back, I wonder where we could have taken this newspaper. That’s the major thing I think about.”

He has also been thinking about two more family members who were HIV infected.

“I have two aunts – older aunts. I’m not talking about younger aunts, I’m talking about older aunts at least in their 60s,” Henry stated. “Their boyfriends, messing with some of those young girls, brought it home. It’s something that has touched our lives.”

And as a newspaper publisher, Henry hopes to touch many lives – before anyone else in the family tests HIV positive.

“As ugly as it is, there’s a sense of beauty also,” he explained. “…We can perhaps help some other families understand and deal with this, not run away from it and hide from it.”

He is particularly interested in reaching the youth. African-American teens represent only 16 percent of those 13 to 19 in the United States, but 69 percent of all new AIDS cases reported among teens in 2006.

Many parents are being naïve if they think their teenagers aren’t having sex. According to a 2007 CDC survey, nearly half of the high school teenagers admitted having had sexual intercourse, which means the percentage is probably much higher than the official number.

Henry’s daughter has now been drug-free for five years, has two children, and is about to move into her first home.

He said, “A part of her speech is that, ‘Parents don’t think that your children are not out there having sex.’ She says, ‘I was 15 when I was messing with an older guy. My parents didn’t know. And little did I know what I was getting myself into.’”

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