Life Is Not a Fairy Tale (3 page)

People who have never experienced Holiness often ask me, “What is it like?” I get that question a lot. Holiness is not somethin’ that I can easily describe, but because I’m tellin’ it all, I’ll try my best.

When I walk into the church, I’m always moved by the sense of order in the room. Church is the only place that people seem to act like they have some respect. Everyone is always dressed neatly and modestly. The walls of the sanctuary are starch white, like new Easter clothes. The mahogany pews are always polished in anticipation of the high emotions that will fly around them, wetting them with sweat and tears. The same wooden cross that was part of that first basement church is hangin’ right there at the pulpit. It’s draped with the same purple velvet that Grandma saw in her vision. The pulpit is small, with six white upholstered chairs arranged in a semicircle where the ministers sit. The choir sings below the pulpit when they are called. The church has an impressive sound system and features a bandstand, which shows that music is a part of my family’s ministry and is a part of every aspect of our family’s life.

Once I sit down, I carry on—shoutin’, praisin’, and doing my BoBo. I always carry on that way when I’m in church. It’s the only place that I feel free enough to let myself loose. The wood pews are a comfort to me when I fall in exhaustion at the power of the spirit in the church.

During the praise and worship service, people who are feeling somethin’ come up and speak about what had happened to them during the last week. They discuss a health problem that has been resolved or a new diagnosis that has scared them and talk about how they are afraid that they’re goin’ to die. They mention family members who are in trouble, sick, or who have died. Most importantly, they speak about what God had done for their life in the last seven days. They talk about the ways that God has healed and solved a problem and had strengthened them to handle whatever it was.

At that point, I always cry. Everyone in the congregation, including me, listens and agrees with the power of God. Hearing these stories relieves my stress and everyone else’s. It makes me feel that I’m not alone in my struggles. It makes me feel the need to say something out loud. Some say, exuberantly, “Yes, God!” or “Praise the Lord!” I say in agreement, “Yes, He did!”

Within several minutes, after the opening songs have been sung and the visitors have been welcomed, the feeling in the air escalates and everyone is thinkin’ about how God has helped them or healed them. Everyone in the room is thinkin’ of their own miracles that God has performed. My mother used to tell me that she would always think about me and how God had shown me and our whole family favor, despite the mistakes that we have made.

Looking around the sanctuary and seeing women and children cryin’ and grown men runnin’ up and down the aisles of the church as if they were runnin’ for their life—or runnin’ from their demons—always moves me. It shows me how fragile we all are. Graying women put down their crutches and jump up and down as though they were exercising. Women sitting next to me begin to shake and quake. I would see them tumbling to the ground. Beads of sweat drench everybody’s foreheads. A woman in a white nursing uniform once pushed me aside to comfort a fallen woman, while I yearned for the breeze of the white blanket to be fanned over my wet head, too.

People scream and shout around me. There are clusters of people behind me repeating: “Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, Lord…” as though they are under a spell. Another chorus from the front is chanting, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.” A younger woman two rows ahead of me is repeating “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” The musicians in the front of the pulpit are playing a tune that is hyper and jubilant, yet everyone is cryin’ and fallin’ down. I hear unintelligible phrases coming out of my own mouth—that is me speaking directly to God, but others call it “speaking in tongues.”

People are losing their balance all around me. Some are humbled and on their knees. Others are sitting in their seats upright and calm. A young girl is waving her arms like she will fly away. I feel myself going in and out of consciousness. I stand up with new energy and find myself running in place, with my shoulders hunched and my arms in the running position. My fists are balled up as if I’m beginning to box. I have a smile on my face that is blinding. I am doing the BoBo.

The minister, my grandma Addie, comes to the center of the pulpit with the comforting clouds that she had painted above her as an imaginary “Heaven above.” She is calm and serene and says these simple words, “The Holy Ghost is in the house! Amen.” And she waits until the Spirit takes its time and tames itself.

That is how it is in a Holiness church.

This is the place where the BoBo lives.

Whenever I go to church, I think hard about what God has done for my life and how he continues to appear in my life, like a daily miracle. I think about the dreams and visions where He came to me and told me the things that I needed to hear. I think about how I got into the
Idol
audition when it wasn’t even possible. I think about Zion and how she turned my “bad” act into a blessing. I think about my mother and how she has stood by me through everything. I think about how blessed I am to have her. I cry every time I think about my cousins, Kima and Kadijah, who don’t have their mother, Aunt Rayda, anymore, because she was murdered. I think about my father and how he built my career by leading all of us kids to music. I think about the small, lopsided three-bedroom house at 511 Montlieu Avenue with all its memories of music, family, friends, and hunger…and how far we all have come. I think about all the places I have been to around the world. I think about how amazing it is that my singing got me out of High Point and out into the world. I think about the anointing I have with my voice and how powerful it is for others.

Thinkin’ about all these things, I start to feel full. I feel full of pain and joy all at once. I feel regret for those who don’t know about God’s love. I feel proud that I do know His love firsthand. I think that there is evidence of Him everywhere. These thoughts and feelings come up like a wave. It’s unexpected and I feel more tears coming. I feel my mouth twisting up to hide the wail inside my soul. These thoughts cause me to shake with excitement and gratitude. I think of my amazement at all the blessings that have come to me, a girl who was undeserving so many times, but God continued to give me chances time and time again. I feel a tightness in my body. I feel like I’m going to burst with joy and gratitude. These feelings cause me to rise out of my seat. I start to shake myself away from earthly concerns and worries. Standing in the church, my mind travels to a private place and I feel like I’m no longer there.

What brings me back to the church is the young people who seem bored and uninterested in church. Many young people who I have met and even some of my old friends seem ashamed to show off their faith in God, which has always been so natural to me that I can’t really understand them. They seem embarrassed to flaunt their relationship with God. Most young people would much rather talk about their relationship with a man or a woman. Most people would rather flaunt their new clothes or their new bling-bling. I always wonder why God is not worthy of praise and acknowledgment? Why are young people ashamed to show their faith? Take it from me—faith is really all you have.

Through lots of patience, God has shown me how to use my precious gift of music. It was a difficult journey just to find the gift that God had already placed inside of me. He has done the same for you—he has given you an extraordinary gift. You just have to have faith and he will lead you to it.

L
ooking for your gift
can be painful. It’s a journey that requires that you go through things. I must have been looking for my gift for years. Even though people were constantly praising me about my voice, I wasn’t listening. I was searching for my gift but didn’t know it was as simple as it being my singing voice. I was like a dog chasing her tail. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t hold it in my hands.

So I made some mistakes in order to find my gift and find myself. They were big mistakes because I was sittin’ in High Point with nothin’ to do, no money, no plans for the future, no role models of people who had left High Point, and only the “borin’ ” reminder that God and church were always the only thing to do for the rest of my life. Like most twelve and thirteen-year-olds, I was restless, and going to church four days a week was wearin’ thin. By now, my brothers had left home and left the singing group and I was lonely in every way.

My heart was empty and seeking somethin’ to do. I cried a lot because I could feel God’s spirit pulling me toward Him and boredom pulling me toward trouble.
Trouble won.

It was a feeling too overwhelming to describe. The confusion of curiosity and possible danger mixed with God’s pull on me made me weepy and sad. The heat of being frisky and “grown” just took over me and made me feel like cryin’ even more. Although I had been anointed when I was five, I didn’t realize that my anointing was God’s special gift. I took it for granted. As I got more curious about the world, God’s grip was loosened and His mysterious ways started to kick in. And little by little I could feel myself beginning to change—and not for the better.

Let me go back a little. When I was a child, I was always so skinny and I had big lips. People teased me about it all the time. I used to go home to my mother and cry and tell her that everyone thought I was ugly. It’s lonely when you feel like you’re not good enough. When I got a bit older, I started imitating the girls I admired. I wanted to be like the girls who had it “goin’ on”—the ones with fingernails, makeup, and cell phones. The girls who got their hair done. I thought that if I was like them, I would be happy. Happiness was my gift, I thought.

So, after years of growing up in the church, I went astray. I left the church with the idea that I was going to fit in with all the other girls, the girls who were not in church but seemingly having all the fun. I was going to fit into the world.

By the time I reached the eighth grade and was going to T. Wingate Andrews High School, “sex, sex, sex” was all everyone was talking about at the lunchroom table every day. All the girls were talking about how fun it was and how
good
it was. I didn’t have anything to say about it because I wasn’t “doin’ it.” I wasn’t even thinking about how sex would feel or what it would do for me. I started dating the pastor’s son, who I’ll call B. He was sixteen years old and I was fourteen. B. tried to convince me to have sex with him. He talked and I listened. All I was thinking was that if I didn’t have sex with the preacher’s son, he would find someone else who would be willing and he would leave me behind. Finally, he convinced me. I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. At best, I was “tryin’ to have sex.”

After we had done it, I was disappointed. It wasn’t anything like I had hoped. I thought sex would make me see fireworks and make my temperature go up. I thought it would change everything for me. And, I guess it did. Sex didn’t feel good at all. It just felt like loneliness. The next day I sat down at lunch and said to my girlfriends, “It was not all you said it was. It isn’t
all that.
” I think my main disappointment was that B. really didn’t care anything about me. But I didn’t say that to them. I figured I just needed more practice.

I thought that I was in love. B. had taught me
everything
I knew about sex, even how to French kiss. He was two years older than me and more experienced, so I thought he held the world in his hands. I was head over heels in love with him. I thought he couldn’t be bad: he was the preacher’s son.

After a while, I started to feel more independent and rebellious, like I didn’t want to hear anyone’s opinions or thoughts about my life. I didn’t want to hear from my mama about what I was wearin’. I didn’t want to hear from my daddy about what time to come home. I didn’t want to hear from anybody about how I was doin’ in school. The only person I wanted to hear from was B. Anything he said was OK. I was
gone
over this guy. I used to follow him around. I was always calling him and going to the mall, where he and his friends were hangin’ out. I would show up just so that he could see me and be reminded that I was there. He never went looking for where I was unless we had planned it. And then he would be late or not show up at all. That should have been a sign to me that our love was one-sided.

I was so busy chasing B. around, I was messin’ up in school. Going to school became inconvenient for the chase. There were too many rules. I felt like an independent woman in the way I was dressing and in my actions. The people at my school just thought I was a bad kid. The boys at school didn’t think of me as a woman—they thought of me as a “ho.”

I hated having to be in school and hated having to be at class at a certain time. I hated the teachers and I hated not being able to spend all my time with my boyfriend. I thought that I was grown up and that I didn’t need any of this anymore. I felt this even stronger now that I was “in love.” I was frisky at the time, too. As the older women from church used to say, “I was smellin’ myself,” kind of like a female dog in heat. My body was hot all the time. I wanted to wear little clothes and get attention from boys. I remember one skirt that I made where I cut the hem so high up that you could see everything that I should have been keeping sacred.

B. and I continued to see each other every opportunity we had and slowly my thoughts on sex changed from disappointment to
need.
I would sneak out every opportunity I got to be with him. I skipped school regularly so we could be together. The misunderstanding at that time was that I thought we were in love with each other and he thought that I was easy.

The next misunderstanding I had to deal with changed me forever. I was raped. I want to share this with you because if I can save one of you from having to go through this, like I did, this story is worth sharing. Girls, I know so many of you have had the same thing happen to you, which makes me so mad, sad, and worried for my daughter, Zion. But as long as I’m telling it all, I may as well be as open and honest as I can be. I don’t want to leave nothin’ out.

One day a popular guy in school gave me more attention than I wanted. I was seeing B., but there was always someone new to flirt with and he was one of the guys I always wanted to notice me. It made me feel good to get attention from the guys. When I was wearing something short, I would make a point to go up to this one particular guy and wave, or brush against him by accident, or drop something in front of him. Finally, he noticed me. He raped me in the auditorium after school. I can barely recall the details. I just know that I shudder to think of how that single act changed me in a way that I didn’t need to be changed. I remember pulling myself together and going down to the girls’ locker room and hiding. I was thinking to myself that I was goin’ crazy. I could hear my own voice saying, “It’s your own fault. You was friskin’ around.” I was shaking like a leaf behind a wall of lockers hiding my face and speaking into my tear-drenched hands. I hid in the locker room until everyone had left the gym and the school. When I finally walked the long road up Montlieu Avenue, I went straight to bed. I didn’t get out of my bed for two days. When my mother asked me why I wouldn’t go to school, I said simply, “I’m not going.” I was too paralyzed to even wash the rape off of me. I felt
filthy.

Finally my mom came to me and said, “Something has happened to you.” I didn’t even have to tell her, she could see it all over my face. I told her exactly what happened. She took me back to school, marched me into the principal’s office, and forced me tell them the name of the boy who raped me. He ended up getting into some trouble, but not the trouble he deserved for stripping me of the little innocence I had left.

I dropped the case with the police, because I was constantly being harassed by the other guys in school who used to taunt me with “I’m going to do the same thing that he did to you.” They were friends of the guy who raped me. I was their joke. They were laughing while I was slowly dying inside.

Being raped was just another reminder that I was losin’ control of myself. All those short skirts and frisky ways were gaining me nothing, and I was losing any pride that I had left. I was so ashamed that rape happened to me. I was so helpless and powerless. At the time, I wondered if it was partially my fault, because of the message that I was sending out, with my actions and dressing that way and being so…frisky. Looking back, now I realize that this was my main misunderstanding in high school: I was trying to be one thing, which I thought was grown up and independent, but other people thought I was something else. I couldn’t bring myself to either side of the misunderstanding, mature like I thought I was or the “ho” that I had portrayed for the boys. I was neither one.

Eventually my family moved to Charlotte. We moved because my father had found a small house and was working with a trucking company. My mother was growing depressed and my father wanted our family to make a new start.

In Charlotte, I started going to a new school, and I was making better grades than I ever made in High Point, although my grades were never really great. I thought I was finally separating myself from my past, forgetting the rape and becoming humble again. I wanted to learn and be smart, for once. But being so focused on school was not enough for my spirit. I had no friends at the new school. I desperately wanted to go back to High Point, because I was lonely. I missed my friends and I missed my boyfriend.

After many family debates, I was allowed to move back to High Point and stay with my grandmother. When I got back to High Point, I never went back to school. But I went back to B.’s arms. I had officially dropped out of school in the ninth grade. My mother was depressed and she knew that whatever she said, I wouldn’t listen. The fact that I had stopped going to school didn’t even come to her attention for a couple of months. My grandmother was too involved with her church, and what I didn’t tell her, she didn’t know.

My grandmother had given up on me and decided to let me see what life was really about.
My mother had given up on herself.
Things with my parents had gotten rough. None of us were getting along. At my parents’ home, there was always fighting. I was arguing with my father, my mother was arguing with my brothers, my mother was arguing with my father. My parents were fighting every day about money and the fact that they didn’t ever have enough. My mother was accusing my father of being with other women and he just kept saying that he wasn’t cheating on her.

My mother had once been a very vocal person with a lot of spunk. As their relationship got worse, my mother said less and less to my father and everyone else. I moved out of my grandmother’s house and was staying with my friend, Tonya, who was living in the projects. Tonya was thirty years old at the time. I wasn’t really doing anything with my days, except for watching TV and hangin’ out with older women. Tonya didn’t work; she was receiving assistance, so we were home together a lot, watching her child. I no longer wanted to listen to my mom, although she wasn’t ever really strict with me. She never tried to pressure me. She let me make my own mistakes. But what she really did was let me go.

My mother’s mounting depression allowed her to let me go so easily. She was frustrated because she couldn’t be a role model herself, so she had nothing to show me or tell me about doing the right thing. She had married too soon, had children too soon, and didn’t have an education or a way out of the situation she was in. She had done everything I was doing, so I guess she felt like she couldn’t judge me.

At the age of seventeen I started going to clubs. I was drinkin’, smokin’, and partyin’. I wasn’t even old enough to be drinkin’, and I was already partyin’ like an adult woman. When I should have been getting ready to graduate from high school with other kids my age, I was hanging out with these older women who were supposed to be my friends. These older women friends were buying drinks for me and I was drinkin’ them.

I was still seeing B., off and on, and having sex with him. Although I thought I was
so
in love with him, we weren’t even a couple.

Pretty soon, my period didn’t come. I realized that I was pregnant. I was still living with Tonya. She was already a baby mama with one child of her own. She knew that I was pregnant without me even having to say the words. One day I woke up, ate breakfast, and threw it all up on Tonya’s kitchen table. Tonya said, “Girl, what is wrong with you?” I was so embarrassed looking at the mess that I had made on the tabletop. I said, “I threw up,” and as soon as I said it, Tonya and I both knew. Tonya came over to me, shook her head, and said, “Girl, you may be pregnant.” I knew I was.

I couldn’t call my mother because she would have either gone crazy or just said nothing at all, which is how she had been responding to me for the last year. I called my brother, Tiny. He and I were both party animals. He took me to the health department for the free pregnancy test. If you are pregnant, the health department counselor asks you some simple questions:
Do you want to keep the baby? Do you want to have an abortion? Or do you want to have the child and then give it to someone else?

It wasn’t a hard decision. I looked at the light green walls of the clinic and I thought:
I am not getting rid of this baby. This baby was my own doing. I was out there being “grown” and left school, the church, and my family. I made my bed, and I am going to lie in it.
I also couldn’t help but think that my mama could have gotten rid of Rico or Tiny or me, and I wouldn’t be here today talkin’ about it.