A Blind Mother of Two Who Makes Her Own Way

By JENNIFER MASCIA
January 14, 2010

Rahkiya Rawlins, legally blind since birth, has found ways of navigating the world.

She has a liquid level indicator, which emits a sound when she’s filling a glass and about to reach the brim. When sweeping the floor, she starts from the corners and works her way to the middle, following set choreography because she cannot see the dirt. She has the layout of at least three supermarkets memorized so she can move from aisle to aisle with no surprises.

“First I go to the vegetable aisle,” Ms. Rawlins, 36, recounted. “Then the juice aisle, then up to the pasta and rice aisle, then back down to the laundry detergent aisle, then the freezer aisle, then the meat aisle, then the register.”

“I don’t go shopping without a list,” she added with a laugh.

Ms. Rawlins is not totally blind. She can make out faces and read large print — with eyeglasses she can even read regular print — but bottles containing clear liquid are all but invisible to her. Despite this, she is self-sufficient, raising two children largely by herself.

But there are things she cannot do, and whenever she needs someone to research something on the computer or take her to BJ’s, the warehouse retail store, she calls her sister, who lives nearby. Ms. Rawlins is grateful for the support, since crime in her Brooklyn neighborhood makes her vulnerable. The spare, brightly lighted Brownsville apartment she shares with her two children stands in contrast to the streets outside, which teem with restless youth day and night.

“You don’t go out at night, you don’t go out early in the morning,” she said. “Being visually impaired, you need to be vigilant. It gets a little stressful.”

When neighborhood children began terrorizing her 9-year-old son, Javon Jackson, she made the difficult decision to send him to live with his father in Jamaica, Queens. Javon comes back to visit on weekends.

Ms. Rawlins and her daughter, Cynthia Battick, 14, a ninth grader at Brooklyn College Academy, share a close bond. Cynthia is the protective one. “She’s always asking, ‘Did anyone say anything to you outside?’ ” Ms. Rawlins said.

The indifference of strangers to her condition is something Ms. Rawlins said she deals with often: The drivers at Access-a-Ride often refuse to assist her, she says, and some customer service operators tell her, “We can’t help you with that.”

“That’s why I want to go into customer service,” she said. “I could never do that.”

She lives on $677 in Supplemental Security Income and disability benefits and $220 in child support each month. She also receives $526 in food stamps. A Section 8 subsidy allows her to pay $334 in rent.

For the last 10 years she has taken vocational classes at the New York City Commission for the Blind, where the computers speak to her. Since May she has attended a weekly writing class at the Catholic Guild for the Blind, a member agency of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Jacqueline Suh, her academic supervisor at the guild, is impressed with her stamina.

“Her voice really comes through in her writing,” Ms. Suh said. “I’ll give her essay assignments and she’ll write pages and pages and pages.”

When the guild discovered that Javon and Cynthia needed books, it donated puzzle books, novels and a dictionary — 23 books in all — bought with $172 from the Neediest Cases Fund.

While Javon excels at math, “Cynthia’s a reader,” Ms. Rawlins said.

Ms. Rawlins will finish her classes at the guild in May; she hopes to secure a job at the Social Security Administration. That is, if the guild can bear to part with her.

“They want to keep me there,” she said, breaking out in a laugh once more.

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