She’s making the jump from an East End women’s shelter to Vassar to ... Jupiter?
19 Neighbors
How Western Pennsylvanians are helping, hoping and coping during the COVID-19 pandemic
Last in a series.
She’s an 18- year- old dynamo, a supernova of personality who talks about the cosmos with the same gushing enthusiasm that her peers discuss pop stars or video games. Jupiter is her favorite planet, and she can rattle off random facts about it and the universe.
Mariah Jones is a Baldwin High School senior now working with an astrophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh as a part of a project that endeavors to estimate the distance to other galaxies. It is complicated but ultimately quantifiable.
So, too, is plotting the
distance from Whitehall to elite Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., where she’ll start in the fall on a full scholarship. It’s 397 miles, sure. But the actual route she’s taken to get there is immeasurable.
She was 6 years old when her mother woke her in the middle of the night and whisked her and her two older sisters from
their home to the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh in the East End.
“My father was verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive with my mother and my older sisters,” Ms. Jones said. He also struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. “I saw a lot of things I wish I could erase out of my brain.”
She hasn’t spoken to her father since.
That’s where a lot of people’s stories might (understandably) get stuck. For Mariah; her sisters, Minnie and Shawnee; and their mother, it was an inflection point.
Chawning Jones said of leaving her husband of 12 years: “I came to a point where I do not want my girls to grow up and think this was normal or OK to accept this kind of behavior from any person, so I had to make that decision. It was scary.
“But when we went, it was the best experience that we have ever had. The first night there, we rested so peacefully. We were suffering from [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We had therapy. It totally helped me. I had lost myself. I was so numb, and it’s hard to describe it unless you’ve gone through it yourself.”
A class she took while living at the shelter saved her life, Chawning Jones said.
“I came out of that like I can conquer the world. I was determined to make a new life for me and my girls. And I’m still working on it. It has been an uphill battle. But I’ve accomplished a lot, and my girls have accomplished a lot. I’m proud of my girls. They’re my jewels.”
The girls are protective of their mother, too. When she went on a date a few years ago, they followed her to TGI Friday’s in Monroeville in their cousin’s car to make sure she was OK.
Chawning Jones calls her
“This girl is a whirlwind. She’s my strong-willed child. She’s very persistent. She loves trying new things and has a boldness about her and she’ll just do it. No fear.”
youngest daughter her “challenge” simply because she seeks them out.
“This girl is a whirlwind. She’s my strong- willed child. She’s very persistent. She loves trying new things and has a boldness about her, and she’ll just do it. No fear.”
Mariah Jones loves not just the stars and planets, but also physics, because it pushes her to her limits.
She can play more than a half-dozen instruments. At Baldwin, she is a member of Student Council and the National Honor Society and runs track and cross-country. She snowboards and skateboards with her friends and has two parttime jobs, one of them in dining services at a senior living facility in Bethel
Park. She started working there two weeks before the “world shut down” from COVID-19.
“I had no idea what an impact the youth can make on the elderly, especially when they can’t really see their visitors,” Mariah Jones said. “You can just tell the joy on their faces when we sit and we talk with them. I love it so much. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to say goodbye when I leave for college.”
But working there came at a cost: She contracted COVID-19. She has asthma and, despite her young age and athleticism, had a rough go of it. She was bedridden for more than a week, with sore muscles, pinkeye and trouble breathing.
“My chest was so heavy, and I had a cough for a month. It was awful.”
She was most concerned about falling behind in her schoolwork. Her science acumen and fearless nature earned her a spot working on a National Science Academy-funded research team with Brett Andrews, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is a research assistant professor at Pitt. It wasn’t something she won or applied for: She essentially cold-called him and got the job.
“She had reached out to me and a bunch of other professors at Pitt,” he said. “Her curiosity and her drive make her unique. She’s taken the initiative and reached out to people she doesn’t know to make an opportunity for herself.”
— Chawing Jones, on her daughter, Mariah
That opportunity culminated in a prestigious QuestBridge scholarship to Vassar, which counts among its alumni Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Meryl Streep, Anthony Bourdain and Edith Clarke, America’s first female electrical engineer, QuestBridge is a national nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., that connects exceptional, low- income youth with leading colleges and opportunities. “I’ve always been a very aggressive, very strongwilled person, and I’m very open to taking challenges head- on,” Mariah Jones said. “I don’t let anything stop me.” She repeated it for emphasis: “Nothing will stop me. Nothing. I’m ready for the world. I’m ready for it.” Mariah Jones credits her mother for setting an example. The former school bus driver now repairs industrial machinery for a Canonsburg company. At age 51, she is pursuing a degree in electronics engineering technology. “My mom is such a strong woman. It’s beyond me, honestly. For her to leave an abusive relationship and raise us all on her own ... and all three of us are successful, well-educated and had a really nice upbringing. You would never have known that my mom did this all by herself.” One year — on Father’s Day, no less — the girls bought her a Wonder Woman superhero outfit. “Because she is Wonder Woman, but in actual human form. She is incredible.” Chawning Jones, too, has traveled an incredible distance from that woman who fled with her children in the middle of the night 12 years ago. If she met that scared woman in the shelter today, she said she would tell her, “There is hope.” “I would constantly tell them that you can do this. You can do this.” Mariah knows. She did.