Michael Steele’s mother, Maebell Turner, died in September 2023 at the age of 96, but her words of wisdom and the example of her life continue to guide him, he said in an interview a few days before his first Mother’s Day without her.
“She’s there in everything I do,” he said.
The former lieutenant governor of Maryland who is now a political commentator for MSNBC illustrated that point by telling a story from when he was about 15 and a talkative student at Archbishop Carroll High School. His mother attended an event with him there.
“When I got home, she said, ‘I watched you up at that school. You know, you just walk in that room and start running your mouth. You just need to learn to shut up and listen.’”
Steele said that now as he looks across his desk at his home office in Upper Marlboro, where he also has a framed picture of his mother on the wall behind him, he can see her quote that he had framed – “Shut up and listen.”
“It’s her way of reminding me,” he said. “I’ve applied it to everything I did in leadership, as lieutenant governor, as chairman of the RNC (Republican National Committee), and in business. My mother taught me to shut up and listen, because when you do that, not only do you learn, but then you open your heart up to hear what you’re being asked or you’re called to do.”
In her words and example, “she’s always present to me,” Steele said.
His mother, he said, “was one of the most resilient individuals I could ever imagine or anyone could ever meet.” He noted how she grew up in a family of sharecroppers in South Carolina, and had to give up her own education at an early age to help support her family, picking cotton and peanuts in the fields.
In the mid-1940s, Maebell Walley followed her mother in moving to the Washington, D.C., area, “leaving one hotbed of Jim Crow laws and segregation and coming to the nation’s capital, and still encountering the same thing, still wanting to make life better for her and her family,” Steele said.
In Washington, Steele’s mother and grandmother began working as press operators at Sterling Laundry, which was known for handling the linens from area hospitals. Maebell Walley met and married William Steele, who did landscaping in Washington, including for some senators.
“As it turned out, unfortunately, she could not have children, so they decided to adopt,” said Steele, who noted that his parents then went to St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home in Hyattsville, which is now known as St. Ann’s Center for Children, Youth and Families. That visit began a special lifelong connection with St. Ann’s for Steele and his mother.
Describing what happened next, Steele said the Daughters of Charity at that time had a roomful of cribs “where you could walk up and down and visit with the babies. She (my mom) was going down this particular aisle. She approached my crib. I stood up, I was about eight or nine months old. I stood up, and as she got to the crib, she stood there, and I reached up to her. She picked me up. She looked at the nun and said, ‘This is my son.’”
Reflecting on how he was adopted from St. Ann’s 65 years ago, Steele said, “I think about the woman who gave life to me. I’m very grateful for that.” And he also expressed gratitude for his adoptive mother, Maebell Turner, “and the blessing of having this young woman come and find me.”
When Steele was about 14, his mother told him that he had been adopted, and he said that he responded, “You’re my mother. I never doubted that.”
Now, thinking about how he and his mother found each other all those years ago, Steele said, “I am the luckiest man on the planet.”
After his mother died, a friend consoled Steele, saying, “God led her to you, and she picked you.” Steele said that framed for him the bond of love and care between a mother and her child. “In all those moments, God’s hand is there,” he said.
Michael Steele’s younger sister, Dr. Monica Turner, who works as a neonatal pediatrician, was also adopted by his family as an infant from St. Ann’s. Michael Steele’s adoptive father, William Steele, died when Michael was about four years old. Four years later, Maebell married John Turner on Feb. 26, 1966. John Turner was an Air Force veteran who had served during the Korean War, and who later worked as a truck driver and over the years also drove a D.C. cab and was a chauffeur.
A few months later, his mother told young Michael that she and his stepfather were thinking about adopting a baby. “I really wanted a sister,” Steele remembered, adding, “I said, ‘Can we have a baby girl?’” Maebell and John Turner then adopted Michael’s baby sister, Monica, from St. Ann’s, and it turned out that she had been born the day after the couple got married.
“When I look at my family, I can’t help but believe that this family, Michael and Monica, and John and Maebell, was knitted together by God,” Steele said.
John Turner, who is now 92, was married to Maebell for 57 years before her death.
In reflecting on his mother’s legacy, Steele also noted how hard she worked to support her family. Maebell Turner worked for about 45 years for Sterling Laundry, and Steele said she was such a valued employee, that at one point the owner asked her to help train his son about all the aspects of the laundry business.
From about the time he was 14 years old and a student at St. Gabriel School in Washington, Michael Steele began working during summers at Sterling Laundry, and continued working there during school breaks as an Archbishop Carroll student. At the laundry, he cleaned bathrooms and swept floors, and later worked on the leading docks, unloading soiled sheets and linens and sorting them out. The hardest job he had there, he said, was untangling sheets that had become twisted and knotted up in the washing machines.
In introducing him to the working world, Steele said his mother was “instilling in me a work ethic and the importance of taking responsibility for yourself.”
Steele said his parents’ example also showed him and his sister the importance of “sacrifice, putting others before yourself, and making sure that your family was taken care of.” By their lives, they also showed the importance of having faith, getting a good education, and serving others, he said.
Noting how his own mother’s schooling was cut short because she had to work in the fields to help support her sharecropping family when she was young, Steele said, “Her appreciation for education was profound.”
Their sacrifice in support of their children getting a good education could be seen as Maebell and John Turner, after working long hours during the day, took on extra work at night cleaning office buildings. That hard work and sacrifice by his parents paved the way for Michael Steele to graduate from Archbishop Carroll High School, then earn a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a degree from the Georgetown University Law Center, while his sister Monica Turner graduated from Regina High School in Hyattsville, earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and later graduated from medical school at Georgetown University.
Steele also noted how his mother’s “faith was very strong. She made sure both of us were in church every Sunday… She really instilled in me an appreciation for the Mass, so much so, that I wanted to be a priest ever since the third grade.”
Before starting work at 6:30 a.m. at Sterling Laundry, Maebell Turner dropped her son Michael off at St. Gabriel’s to be an altar server at early morning Masses when he was a student there. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he was a seminarian with the Augustinians for awhile before entering law school. Later he married his wife Andrea, and they have two adult sons, Michael and Drew. Steele and his wife are parishioners at St. Mary’s in Landover Hills, and over the years he has helped train the altar servers there.
On May 8, Steele will serve as the master of ceremonies for St. Ann’s Hope Blossoms fundraising event at the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase.
Reflecting on his special connection to the place where he and his sister were adopted from, Steele said, “St. Ann’s was that meeting place, that cornerstone for both me and my sister Monica. We are both very grateful for that. That’s why I call St. Ann’s home.”
Supporting St. Ann’s, he said, gives him “an opportunity to continue to be a part of their story, and to be an example of the love and the care that they provide to young mothers and babies and now today to young families. That is so important, and so in line with the work of the Church.”
St. Ann’s Center – which was founded in 1860 by the Daughters of Charity and chartered by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 – originally served women who were widowed and children who were orphaned during the Civil War. To meet changing needs in the past century, St. Ann’s modified its outreach to emphasize foster care for children, and then in recent decades, the center evolved to offer supportive housing programs for mothers and their children, including Grace House that offers residential care for pregnant adolescents and young mothers and their babies, and Hope House and Faith House that offer transitional and supporting housing programs for pregnant and parenting women experiencing homelessness and instability.
St. Ann’s wraparound support services for mothers and children include an education and employment program, clinical and social work services, and a licensed child care center.
Steele noted that when his mother died, “I asked friends, ‘Don’t send flowers, just donate some love to the children and families at St. Ann’s in my mother’s name. Some folks are still giving today” in her memory, he said.
“My mother Maebell taught me to pay it forward,” Steele said, adding that he can pass on to others that love and care that he received at St. Ann’s and that love and care that his mother shared over her long life. “That’s what I try to do in being a part of the celebration of St. Ann’s and the work they’re doing, paying forth the blessing of having me there in that crib 65 years ago, and to be there today, 65 years later, still being an example of the love and the work that they do.”
(For information on St. Ann’s Center for Children, Youth and Families, go online to stanns.org.)
