Last March, Dorothy DeBose was given 10 minutes to clear her belongings out of the home she lived in for most of her life.

The 76-year-old retired phone company employee was evicted from the East Oakland house her mother had left her after she fell behind on loan payments, a victim of predatory lending. I wrote several columns about DeBose and her attempts to buy back her house from the property management firm that had acquired it in a foreclosure auction.

Things weren’t looking good a few months ago until a generous Chronicle reader stepped in to help DeBose get her home back. The reader gave DeBose and her nephew, Omar Taylor, the downpayment they needed to buy back the home: $120,000.

Yes, you read that amount correctly.

Yes, someone gave DeBose and Taylor a $120,000 gift to buy back the house in which DeBose spent four decades of her life.

Merry Christmas.

The donor, who asked to remain anonymous because she did not want to draw attention to herself, told me she read about DeBose in one of my columns not long after she’d read “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” a book by author Matthew Desmond that follows eight families struggling to pay rent in Milwaukee around the 2008 financial crisis.

“It’s going to make me feel good to put this one little Band-Aid on the world,” she told me during a phone interview.

The donor said she’d also been struck by a September New York Times piece titled “What the Rich Won’t Tell You” that described affluent people going out of their way to hide their wealth and trying to act “normal.”

“I think it prevents us people who have resources from thinking honestly about whether we’re doing what we think we should be doing with that wealth,” she said. “People who don’t have money don’t have the luxury of hiding that they’re on one side of this divide. I do have the luxury of hiding, and that seems unfair and a way to perpetuate inequality.”

Here’s another thing we talked about that isn’t discussed enough: Are well-meaning wealthy people stopped from helping because they don’t want to be seen as the “white savior.” That’s something the woman, who is white, has considered — and moved past. DeBose and Taylor are black.

The married mother of four children, who grew up on the Peninsula and earned an engineering degree from UC Berkeley, gets it: If the problems we face in society — race, gender, education and income inequality, for starters — are to be alleviated, rich people need to help more by digging into their pockets.

She’s an example of a woman whose gift kept two people from being displaced.

Taylor said he and DeBose were shocked when they first learned about the donor.

“It’s an incredible feeling, because when you go through something like this, it can be very isolating,” Taylor said when I asked about the gift. “It’s incredible to know that there are people willing to support people in need. It’s just very humbling.”

Let’s recap how DeBose’s eviction saga began. Her mother, Bessie DeBose, died in 2009 and bequeathed the house to her daughter, Dorothy. Dorothy DeBose continued making loan payments on a perilous pick-a-pay loan her mother had taken out that allowed borrowers to choose among four payment options. Most borrowers paid just the minimum, which didn’t cover even the interest. After a set time period, the mandatory payment would jump.

Dorothy DeBose owed $128,000 to Wells Fargo when the bank foreclosed on the property after she fell behind on the payments following her sister’s death. In October 2016, Community Fund LLC, a San Leandro property-management company, bought the house for $347,100 at a foreclosure auction.

Taylor, who rented the attached unit as he traveled between Oakland and Seattle for work, said he didn’t learn Wells Fargo had foreclosed and sold the house at auction until the eviction process began a year ago. DeBose was evicted and moved into the back unit with her nephew.

In April, DeBose and Taylor struck an agreement with Community Fund to allow DeBose to move back into her home in May, but the deal hinged on securing a mortgage by Aug. 20. The plan was to use money from the foreclosure sale, because when a house is sold at auction, the foreclosed owner is entitled to the sale surplus above the amount the homeowner owed the bank.

In DeBose’s case, that was $219,000. But the plan was shredded, because a woman in San Bernardino made a claim on the money. The woman, whose middle name is DeBose, claimed that Dorothy DeBose was dead. The case is in probate court.

Without the donation, DeBose and Taylor might be looking for another place to live right now.

“If we had relied solely on that to repurchase the house, that would not have happened,” said Taylor, 45, a union organizer for the International Federation of Professional Technical Engineers, Local 21.

Community Fund extended deadlines, including pushing back the cutoff to buy the house for three months. Taylor and DeBose agreed to pay Community Fund $420,000 to buy the house back.

“We did everything we could to make sure that they had plenty of time and whatever they needed to get it done,” Jessica Marr, Community Fund’s property manager, told me. “We never wanted to see her displaced from her home. That’s obviously not our goal, but the property — we ended up purchasing it, and those were the circumstances.”

The circumstances include a purchase price that was three times what DeBose owed Wells Fargo before the foreclosure. According to Taylor, the mortgage payment is $2,100 per month, about double what DeBose paid before the foreclosure.

The closing paperwork was signed Nov. 15, but the sale didn’t go through for another week because the mortgage company found a previously undetected lien on the property. The anonymous donor wrote a check — $8,000 — for that, too.

“We still have headaches, but at least we’re addressing the headaches within the sanctity of our own home,” Taylor said.

And DeBose, who prefers to sleep on her living room couch, can rest easy for the first time in months.

“She’s been through an emotional roller coaster ride,” Taylor said. “She was incredibly emotional in a good way when this was solidified. She was just incredibly thankful.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr