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CHAPTER 2

The Survivors

We are survivors and not victims, and we have to take a stand or take a step or make a statement that allows us to move from being the victim of other people’s decisions to the architect of our own well being and that of our community and country.

—Lani Guinier

African American women, despite their social or economic status, have been called upon to survive and make their way in a Euro-centric culture that is frequently unwelcoming and often downright disdainful of them. Given the fact that their ancestors survived the Middle Passage, then slavery, with its unspeakable hardships, as well as the intervening years from emancipation through the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, and beyond, it is no surprise that endurance is part of their shared cultural history.

The women represented in this chapter have amazing stories of surviving in the face of obstacles, and perseverance despite roadblocks of every sort. They have moved through the challenges they encountered to live enviable lives of success and service, each in her own way and according to her own gifts. When one considers the challenges that African American women in the United States have faced in previous generations, it becomes obvious that the ability to set one’s jaw and push through whatever obstacles are in her path is a birthright, and has become inherent in her character.

Being a Survivor does not mean that a woman should simply endure hardships and endlessly “take it.” But, it does mean that this strength can be called upon to move through difficulties a day at a time, with perseverance and determination. She can rely on the memory of her ancestors and their dogged strength and resolve when she falters or feels disheartened.

During the “midnight hour,” when it feels as though it is time to give up, this strength can carry a woman through. The question becomes, how to illuminate that darkest hour and follow the light.

In this chapter, you will have an opportunity to meet four women whose life stories illustrate this valuable character strength. They demonstrate endurance, persistence, and grit, and have survived in the face of many challenges to achieve their goals. They demonstrate a wonderful blend of courage, ingenuity, and stamina.

Sekyiwa Shakur

“When a person is depressed, there is just a feeling of nowhere to go. This is a worldwide problem that needs to be addressed. So, my best advice is to do something to improve your mental health.”

Of all the women featured in this book, I have known Sekyiwa Shakur the longest, and so it is appropriate to begin these chronicles with her story. Had it not been for her inspiration, this book would probably not have been written.

Set, as she is known to her friends, reached out to me on the recommendation of Sierra Tucson Hospital in Tucson, AZ, where she had been treated for depression and trauma. When she left Sierra Tucson, she decided to move onto a houseboat in Sausalito, CA. She had her two young children with her, and she told me that she had come to Sausalito to learn about gentleness. That was the word she used. Here she would begin the process of creating a new life for herself and continue her recovery from the depression and post-traumatic stress disorder that had stalked her.

Set’s courage and determination were amazing to me! She knew only a handful of people in the area and was essentially alone. She was only twenty-four years old.

I was changed by Set. She was inspirational and challenging all at once. I think she was relieved as well as surprised to learn that I had little knowledge of her famous brother, Tupac, and therefore no judgments or preconceived ideas, and no awe about his fame. Hers was a world largely unknown to me. At the time, I thought this might be a problem, but Set was quite clear in her intention to take time out, albeit temporarily, from the life she had known, to expand her worldview and reinvent herself.

Set is enormously funny and she made me laugh all the time. In addition to her amazing courage and forthrightness, she was completely willing to learn everything she could. If I made a suggestion, whether it was about how to think about something differently or how to approach a particular situation or challenge, she was willing to try it out. At the same time, she was not afraid to tell me when she thought I was off base or simply did not understand her or her situation. And, I often did not. But, I was open to learning, too.

Several years later, when Set told me she was getting ready to return home to Atlanta, I was very sad. We had shared many deep experiences. We were both in very different places from where we had begun. Each of our worldviews had been expanded.

Some time later, it was a joy to attend her wedding and to come to know her family. My life has certainly been blessed by knowing Set.

Sekyiwa is an African name, which means “determined.” It is a perfect name for the baby girl born to Dr. Mutulu and Afeni Shakur in New York City, NY. Set says that she does not remember her parents being together, but she imagines that they were a cute couple. She is told that when she came into the family, they had a hand-made crib and a rocking chair waiting for her. Her brother, Tupac, was four years old by then and happy to have a baby sister. She says that her mother was “big on babies” and sang lullabies to her at night.

Set’s parents were part of the Black Panther Party, an African American organization established in the 1960’s, to promote Black Power and self-defense through acts of social agitation. They instituted a variety of community programs to alleviate poverty and improve health among communities deemed most needful of aid. To that end, Set’s father, Dr. Shakur, practiced acupuncture. He established the Bana Clinic in the basement of his Brownstone in Harlem, and was especially known for successfully treating addicts with the techniques he had learned during his training in China. He supervised a staff of people and also had a clinic at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

Set’s mother, Afeni, and her aunt and Godmother worked in the community at the Harlem Legal Services as paralegals for an attorney working in the area of fair housing.

The Panthers were a community within the larger community. They had dedicated their lives to the transformation of the United States in order to eliminate the injustices of prejudice. They helped each other in the true spirit of community, and there were frequent ceremonies and celebrations, such as Kwanza and naming ceremonies. During a naming ceremony, the baby or young child was anointed with spices, including honey, sugar and cayenne, and then passed among the community as each person made wishes and promises for the child being named. In the year that Set was born, the group had begun honoring children as heroes.

Set was the youngest girl of a small group of children, which she describes as much like The Little Rascals of television reruns. Their mothers, with the idea that the older children would keep track of the younger ones, sent the group off to school. They rode four trains and a bus by themselves to get to the special school their parents had chosen for them. Needless to say, these little rascals did some exploring in New York City without their mother’s knowledge. From time to time, Set would get separated from the group and be lost. The group would frantically search for her and swear each other to secrecy so that they wouldn’t be in trouble for shirking their duties of keeping track of each other. Set is giggling as she says that she was the one who was mischievous and always getting the others in trouble for some minor infraction.

This happy time came to an abrupt end when the FBI began investigating the Panthers. The homes of most of the Panther families were systematically raided, and agents who were searching for her father kicked in the Shakur’s front door. Dr. Shakur became a fugitive from the FBI when Set was five years old. She says that because she was a naïve and trusting child, she didn’t understand how scary the police and FBI agents could be or that anyone would be trying to avoid them. “This was just my life,” she says. “When the police came to our apartment building asking which apartment was ours, I pointed it out and welcomed them! The authorities dusted our apartment for fingerprints and I remember having to help everyone clean the dusting medium from the banisters, the children’s toys, and everything after they left.” Many of the men were arrested on various charges, one after the other. The women in the community tried to carry on as normally as possible, maintaining the ceremonies and celebrations as well as they could. But, life had changed dramatically.

When Dr. Shakur disappeared, Set’s mother tried to maintain her job and financial security; but within a short time, she, too, was in danger of being arrested and was losing ground financially. By the time Set was eight, her family could no longer hang on in New York, and they moved to Baltimore, where they had family connections. They had been plunged into poverty. While they had lived a life full of culture, pride, and community in New York, what awaited them in Baltimore was quite different. “It was barren in Baltimore,” Set says. “The people were ignorant, mean, and small minded. I had dark skin, short hair, and dressed in African-style clothes. They said things to me like, ‘You’re black as the street!’ It was horrible. Then my brother moved out of the house and my mother fell into deep despair. Eventually my mother’s younger boyfriend moved in with us and I didn’t like him. When I began to enter puberty my personality changed. I wasn’t that sweet little girl anymore.”

At twelve, Set was sent to Marin City, CA, for the summer, to live with the wife of a family friend. The summer came and went, and Set remained in Marin City. Baltimore was not a good place for the family and eventually her mother and brother joined her in California and they lived with one of her aunts. This particular aunt was stressed with the arrival of more relatives in her home, and Set says she thought this woman was mean. In retrospect, she thinks it must have been hard to care for a displaced young teenager, but at the time, the woman just seemed nasty. By the time Set’s mother arrived, Set was no longer speaking to the woman and her mother asked her why she was silent. “Speak up!” her mother encouraged. “I hate her,” Set answered sullenly. Set’s mother was adamant in saying that if that was how she felt; they should pack up and leave immediately. “If that is how you feel, she shouldn’t have to have someone in her home that feels that way about her,” her mother said. “We had no where to go and no place to stay,” Set explains. “It was the beginning of our being homeless. My mother taught me the hard lesson of standing behind my words. She did not blame me and she never spoke of it again. I know that my mouth can be sharp and I am sometimes willing to cut off my nose to spite my face. But, if it comes out of my mouth, then I’ll stand behind it.”

Set is quick to say that she does not blame the woman she said she hated. “She was actually sweet in many ways. She was just tired and I was twelve and thirteen. Marin City is a tough place and it took away the sweet baby girl in me. Whatever Baltimore didn’t drain from us, Marin City did. There was such ignorance there.”

“Tupac had arrived that first October and by May he had left to pursue his career. I was there essentially by myself. Everyone in the community was depressed. My mother was mostly absent, and I was left to raise and fend for myself. I became the girl who didn’t fit in and got beat up on a regular basis. I no longer had my big brother to protect me. There was just no protection for me.”

Set had found some solace in her church’s Christian Youth group, but by the time she was thirteen she had stopped going and had begun hanging out with the “bad girls.” “I was drinking alcohol at thirteen and had a twenty-three year-old boyfriend when I was fourteen. I had gone from being this good, good girl, to being horrible. I was drinking, fighting, and skipping school. My friends were smoking marijuana and some of their parents were “crack heads.” One day I was handed marijuana and for some reason I just saw my life fast-forward to what it would become. I had been kicked out of a store for some sort of misbehavior and Tupac and his girlfriend wouldn’t help me. In school I was getting all “F’s.” So, I made arrangements to go back to New York to be with my Aunt Gloria. Aunt Glo’s husband, Tom, drove the subway, and there was stability in their home. I got a job at Love’s Rite Aid Beauty Supply and finished high school in two years with straight “A’s.” I also worked in the school office. My mother eventually moved back to New York and began getting her life back together.”

Prior to this, in 1986, when Set was ten years old, her father was apprehended and arrested in California. She says she was really happy when he was found because she thought he was dead. But, then she was disappointed, because he was not safely in Africa, as she had hoped.

Dr. Shakur stood trial in 1987 and according to Set he was convicted on the basis of the sole testimony of a confidential informant. He was sentenced to forty years in prison and remains incarcerated at the time of this writing.

Set was fifteen when Tupac Shakur made his first movie. He was nineteen, and though they were fairly distant, she was proud of him. He sent their aunt a check for $100 every month to help support his sister.

Set says that nobody realized that Tupac was her brother until he came to New York on tour. She heard a song he had performed on the radio that he dedicated to her. It was titled, “Pretty Brown Eyes,” and she hadn’t known about it. She says that when he was in New York, she would go to his hotel room to visit him. “I never asked him for money,” she says. “I would make myself busy by straightening up his hotel room. Of course, since hotels have maid service and housekeeping, there wasn’t much straightening to do. He would try to pay me and I would take the money and then hide it where he would eventually find it, like in the refrigerator. It bothered him that I wouldn’t take his money. Some people in the family may have taken money from him, but those of us who were closest to him from the old ‘little rascals’ gang didn’t. His fame really had no part in our relationship,” she says.

When Set’s uncle retired, he and his family moved to Atlanta. She did not want to move. Her mother said that if she could find a place to live, she could remain in New York. She stayed awhile in New York and eventually joined her family in Atlanta.

When Set was eighteen she had her first child, a daughter she named N’Zhinga. Though she was a single mother, she says that she never felt like a single mother, because when she left N’Zhinga’s father, she always had a boyfriend. Within a short time, she had met the man who would become the father of her son, Malik, who was born when she was nineteen.

At this point, Set says that her brother had become a bigger part of her life inasmuch as his financial success allowed him to be more like a father and a protector. “He took care of me and my children and many of the children of our former ‘little rascals’ gang,” she says. But, when Set’s son, Malik, was nine months old, Tupac was killed in Las Vegas in a crime that was never solved. Shortly after Tupac’s death, Set’s God brother, Yaki, was murdered. He was one of the ‘little rascals. ’ He looked up to me,” Set says. “He taught me that I could be admired. Because I am so sensitive and emotional, his admiration bonded us.”

Insightfully, Set explains: “The absence of my father stamped everything in my life. It influenced my relationships with every boyfriend I ever had. I felt dingy and insecure, and that I had no firm ground to stand on. I was clingy and terrified of abandonment.” She also points out that she is proud of her father’s pride in himself. “He’s a Leo, and such a lion. He taught me how to have that pride, but his absence really affected me.”

Set was able to see her father infrequently after his arrest. When he was moved to the penitentiary in Atlanta, she was able to see him weekly. He is moved from time to time, which makes it difficult for Set to see him with any regularity. Though held in a maximum-security prison, Dr. Shakur continues to correspond with and talk to his children frequently; attempting to be the best father and grandfather he can be under the circumstances.

Set speaks in a straightforward way of the rage in her that would break through her more typical sweetness from time to time. “I’d have a huge rage at least once a month. It would happen when I would interpret something as abandonment. Maybe it would come out when Tupac would go out with friends, or when he’d have friends over and I might get teased. I didn’t know it, but I probably also had post-partum depression.” At any rate, shortly after Tupac and Yaki were killed, Set broke up with Malik’s father. She says that she felt fat and ugly. “I just felt that I could not go on without my brothers. I was beginning to have suicidal feelings, just wanting to be with my brothers. I called my mother and let her know this was it. There were other friends around me who were dying, and some by suicide; one of them cut her own throat. I just couldn’t understand it and I asked my mom, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ My mother said that some people were just sad beings, that they had a sad spirit. I asked her if there were any sad beings who ‘made it’. She was very quiet and then she thought of the name of one who had ‘made it’ and gave me her phone number. I had bought my first house and my mother hadn’t been there yet, but she came there and stayed up all night to keep me safe. During this stressful and confusing time, I believed that I saw God, and Tupac and Yaki, who had both died. I was thinking to myself that God would not be mad at me if I just wanted to come home and be with my brothers. But, what I saw was that all three turned their backs on me, and so I decided not to kill myself. My mother asked me if I wanted to go to a hospital or a spa. I said, ‘a hospital,’ and someone recommended Sierra Tucson in Tucson, Arizona.”

Sierra Tucson is a unique treatment center dedicated to the prevention, education and treatment of addictions, and behavioral and psychiatric disorders and Set does not remember how her mother found out about it.

This month-long hospitalization was to be the beginning of Set’s new life. But, it was not an easy experience. “I was one of a handful of urban black people they had treated, and they didn’t really understand me or my experience. I had to teach them, get help for myself, and be with all these white people and try to understand them, too. But, I was able to step away from the urban environment I had been in and find some peace. My friends and family coined a phrase about my volatile emotions. They would say of me, ‘Set trippin.’ I found out that that wasn’t the real me that was so crazy, it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. I learned I have a condition I can control, but I had to attack it the way I attacked my schoolwork. I have wished that my whole nuclear family could learn what I learned in that month. Sierra Tucson saved my life!”

After her discharge from Sierra Tucson, Set settled in Sausalito with her children. She attended intensive psychotherapy for two years, combining individual and group therapy with 12-Step meetings of Codependents Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. She was determined to continue to heal herself and create a foundation of mental health. She says that her rages all but disappeared and she became more aware of herself. Set makes the point that some aspects of mental health can be hereditary as well as environmental. “If you are continuing to have emotional problems or are continuing to use drugs, or going to jail, look into it,” she says. “There is help available.”

Once Set’s emotional health stabilized, she felt ready to return to school. “I’m dyslexic,” she explains. “I was six before I could spell my own name and I couldn’t read well. I hated to read out loud the way you have to do in grade school. And for the longest time I didn’t believe I could have a career. I thought maybe I could do something simple. I tried going to cosmetology school after Tupac died. But, there was too much gossip and everyone always asking, ‘Who killed Tupac?’ I just couldn’t stay. But, I am ambitious and I decided I needed to get the basic skills I had missed in high school. I enrolled in The College of Marin, a local community college near where I was living in California, and I learned so much! In high school I had learned that I could be somebody, but now I learned academic skills I really needed.”

When Set returned to Atlanta, she gained entrance to Clark University. She remained a student for one year, and though she says that she doesn’t remember much of what she learned there, what she did get was the confidence to pursue a career. There were several fitful starts and stops, with Set gaining experience along the way. She opened a beauty salon, but had trusted the wrong person as a partner, and had to leave that behind. She loved fashion and wanted to design clothes, but didn’t find a lot of support. Even so, she persevered and created her clothing line, Madame Velli, based on her own designs. She was determined to bring her ideas to market. “Before I went to Sierra Tucson I was overweight, had no confidence, and didn’t think of myself as pretty,” she says. “My idea of myself was what I saw reflected from the men and what they said about me. I just thought I couldn’t compete. When I received money from my brother’s endowment, I began to wear high fashion clothes, and I saw how I was judged differently as a result. I could see that the clothes were a distraction from me. They held me in a particular way. I wanted to design clothes that empowered women to be themselves.”

Set says that she decided to continue recreating herself. She had some cosmetic surgery despite disapproval from others. “Its what I wanted, and I just didn’t care what others said about it.” She married Gregory Jackson, in a magnificent and meaningful ceremony in her mother’s backyard. “Greg is totally supportive of me,” she says. “He adds stability to my life and I enjoy being a stepmother to his children.”

Nowadays, Set is one of the proud owners of a boutique clothing store in Decatur, GA, called The Wild Seed, in honor of her favorite author, Octavia Butler, who wrote a book by the same name.

“I’m a girl who most people wouldn’t think I’d read Octavia Butler. But I began reading her stories and books when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I wept when she died recently and I wanted to acknowledge her in this way.”

In addition to her work at The Wild Seed, Set serves on the Board of Directors of The Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, GA. She is the liaison for “Pac’s Kids,” who are students at the Center, and teaches healthy empowerment classes to them in the summer program, employing some of the ideas and techniques she learned during her own recovery process.

Set is an advocate for mental health whenever the opportunity arises. She is emotional and adamant when she says, “I truly believe that improving people’s mental health and addressing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder would lessen poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction, and gang activity.” She alludes to a recent trip she made to South Africa where she visited in Soweto. “There was so much despair and depression and it reminded me of what I felt like when I was depressed. When a person is depressed, there is just a feeling of nowhere to go. This is an issue that needs addressing worldwide. So, my best advice is to attend to your mental health. Doing that changed my life.”

Denise Stokes

“I can’t be who I am, if I don’t know who I am.”

I heard about Denise Stokes through another woman I interviewed for this book. “You should really be talking to Denise Stokes,” Sonya Lockett said to me. “She is amazing in her work educating people about HIV and AID’s.”

I went to Atlanta, Georgia to meet with Denise, who came to my hotel wearing a beautiful dress with a flowing cape over it. She looked absolutely elegant, and though she has been HIV positive for many years now, she is the picture of health.

Denise has also been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for many years. And so, we had a brief discussion about my career treating substance abusers before moving on to talk about her very remarkable life.

Denise Stokes says that she grew up in a family that was secretive and confusing. She never really knew her father, and her mother had a fury in her that kept her children from asking any questions or approaching her much at all. Denise found out that she had older siblings when she had a crush on a neighborhood boy and her cousin explained that he was actually Denise’s brother. She found out about a sister by noticing a photo in an album at her grandmother’s house and asking whom it was.

Trying to figure out such basic information as family ties made Denise quite a detective. Her mother told the children very little, and though she could be fun and outgoing, she didn’t know how to express love for them. There was little in the way of conversation and no affection whatsoever. It was a barren environment.

Denise found comfort in all types of music. She found that certain song lyrics seemed to validate her feelings. When she heard Prince sing “Let’s Go Crazy,” it let her know that someone else understood the way she questioned the world and its meaning.

She also loved words and the dictionary. Denise would write poetry as a way to express her feelings and then hide it so that no one would see it.

Early on, Denise was labeled as a bad child. Since there was no one to explain things to her, she explored and tried to figure things out on her own. This frequently got her in trouble. For example, there was a black cat at her grandmother’s house that everyone chased away. Denise was only seven at the time and she thought that if this cat weren’t black, he would have a better life. So, she got a can of white paint and a brush and painted the cat white. The poor cat died and the word went out that Denise hated the cat and intentionally killed it. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the “bad” label stuck.

Denise says that she comes from several generations of abused and abusive women, so it is not surprising that she began running away from home when she was eleven to escape the cruelty there. She was always returned to her mother, where she endured the instability of many moves and a string of stepfathers.

When she was in the ninth grade, a construction worker raped Denise near her home. Her mother’s rule was that Denise had to be home when the streetlights came on; and, because she was late, her mother began hitting her with a belt as she came in the door. She was in shock and never said anything about the sexual assault. But, she wrote poems about her experience and through this poetry she expressed herself without concern about judgment.

Denise was fifteen when she began dating a twenty-one year old man. She was convinced that she was in love. He gave her things that she wanted and said nice things to her and about her. He saw how attractive she was in every way and encouraged her. He also read the poetry she wrote, and really understood it.

When her mother forbade her from seeing this man, Denise became defiant. She wasn’t about to give up the positive attention she was getting. So she ran away again, this time for four months.

Denise was eventually caught and placed in a Youth Detention Center as a runaway. Though she tried to explain herself and her situation to the staff, it was no use. Finally, Denise figured out that if she just said what the staff wanted to hear, such as, “I’ve been bad, but I promise to appreciate my mother,” she would be sent home.

When Denise went home, she had had that four-month taste of freedom. And when she was sixteen, her mother turned her over to this same young man.

Denise says that there was really no one to talk to about any of this. She had been emotionally abused, and had had no help with the trauma of the assault. She wondered if her mother had ever even wanted her.

Denise tried to make a life with the young man she now lived with. There was a lot of drinking, but no drugs. She had been a brilliant student, but living on her own, staying up late and being wild ended her academic success during twelfth grade. It wasn’t until many years later that she finished high school.

With the inevitable end of Denise’s relationship, she decided to enter the military. She was intrigued by the idea of the GI bill for education and signed on with a recruiter. Denise was not quite eighteen years old when she passed the entrance exams with high marks. The military doctor who had performed her physical called her back. With absolutely no emotion in his voice, he informed her that her tests indicated that she was HIV positive and was unacceptable for military service. “You’ll be dead in a year,” the doctor announced impassively. The rape she survived at thirteen had come back to haunt her in the form of HIV.

Denise went back to her apartment in shock. When her landlord got home, she asked him to go to the liquor store for her. Teetering between numbness and terror, her drunken state became the norm and soon she began to associate with the neighborhood cocaine dealer. This began a year of unimaginable degradation.

“Cocaine eventually led to crack,” Denise says. “I was running all over and could not land. I was becoming more and more degraded, and I crossed every moral line you can imagine. I would have occasional moments of consciousness, and then lapse back into that dark, dark world of crack addiction and alcoholism.”

Denise awoke from her fog one morning to realize that she was twenty-one years old. The doctor had said she’d be dead and she wasn’t. “What happens if I live?” she wondered. She had never considered this possibility and had hidden her pitiful state from her family.

“I really wanted to live. I thought it might be great to live, to write again, to listen to music, and enjoy the sun.”

Denise went through several treatment programs trying to get clean and sober. She kept relapsing. At one point, someone had broken her jaw and she was found wandering the streets of Atlanta.

Finally, her stay at The Fulton County Drug and Alcohol Treatment Program, followed by living at Saint Jude’s Halfway House allowed Denise to obtain and maintain her sobriety.

“I loved the 12-Step work,” Denise says. I talked and talked and talked, and everyone listened. It felt so good to share. I had been waiting a long time to have people to relate to and talk to. There was real dialogue, and it was a power base for me.”

One day, a woman named Dottie came to visit Denise at the treatment center. Denise told her about being HIV positive. Dottie told her that there were many women who needed to hear her story and arranged for Denise to meet and encourage other women facing the same challenge. Because her health was compromised, she was able to receive disability payments to survive during this period of time.

Denise began doing outreach work as a peer counselor at a local AIDS clinic, where she eventually served on the board. She delivered culturally sensitive HIV/AIDS education, incorporating messages about addiction and recovery. She says that she constantly rode the bus here and there for speaking engagements related to AIDS education. She tried to convey to infected people that they had a right to live productive lives despite their HIV status.

When Denise had been sober for three years, she received what she thought was a crank call. The person on the telephone said he was a White House aide and asked if she would be interested in working in Washington, D.C. for the Clinton administration, advising the President and other government officials on AIDS policy. He went on to say that her name was on a very short list of possible appointees. “I thought it was just some weirdo,” she says. But, very soon a packet of papers appeared in the mail that made the offer official. Her appointment to The National HIV/AIDS Advisory Council began to be noticed by the press and she received numerous notes of congratulations from various government officials. People approached her and asked, “Now that you have the ear of the President, what are you going to do with it?”

Denise thought about her constituency of disenfranchised people with HIV and AIDS. Some had addiction problems. Many had been hurt by homophobia and/or racism. She knew that what she wanted to do with “the President’s ear” was to represent these people. She wanted the President to know about the problems they faced. She says that she focused on writing sound policy and making sure the focus was on practical help and getting things done.

Denise says that from 1995 until 2000, when her term ended, she put her whole heart into this work. “My integrity spoke for itself and my voice was heard,” she says. She goes on to say that President Clinton was attentive to the issues she presented and appreciated her.

“This is how I finished growing up,” Denise says. “I went from the crack house to the White House and I found my womanhood. To this day, I can go to the White House website and pull up speeches I gave. I am proud of what I was able to do there.”

Denise has continued her public speaking engagements. She has spoken at two Democratic National Conventions, including one for nominee John Kerry. She is a regular speaker at NFL Rookie Symposiums and on Black-Entertainment Television’s, Rap It Up, HIV/AIDS education programs.

“I tell my story,” she says. “I don’t like telling people what to do or not to do, or how to behave. I just tell them where I’ve been and what I’ve done. People melt into the feelings and they relate to the feelings. I want them to be introspective and realize how their decisions affect themselves and others. I let people come to their own resolution.”

In addition, Denise is an emerging writer, with work contributed to James Adler’s Memento More —An AIDS Requiem. She has released a spoken word project called Elevation.

In reflecting on her life, Denise says that she sees the connection between having no father and being attracted as a teenager to an older man. “It took me a long time to let go of my father. I had no consistent father figure and it left a hole in my identity. I had no idea about how to do a relationship. But, I now know what I want and where my lines are. I won’t move my lines for anyone.”

She goes on to say, “My life had begun to unravel even before I knew I had HIV. With the diagnosis, I became immobilized. When I realized that I would live, I had no idea how to live. I just knew I didn’t want to hurt inside anymore and that there were things I needed to learn. I had spent so much of my life trying to get my mother to love me. I tried to earn her love and this spilled over into my other relationships. It just didn’t work.”

“So, I realized that I can’t be who I am if I don’t know who I am and I set about to find out. I found my passion in life and that’s when I found myself. When the noise in my head stopped, and I got other people’s voices out, I could just really be me.”

Victoria Rowell

“Wow is me! Not woe is me.”

I received an invitation to a “High Tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel” benefit for Victoria Rowell’s nonprofit foundation, which provides money to children in foster care for lessons of various sorts in the performing arts. It was a beautiful invitation, but I couldn’t afford to go. I’m not a television watcher, so I had not heard of Victoria. But when it was suggested that I interview her for this book, I decided to find out more about her. I read her book, The Women Who Raised Me, and was amazed by her story.

I made arrangements to attend her fundraiser the next year with my daughter-in-law, and it was great fun, as well as a delicious and elegant tea.

When Victoria modeled her cute outfit for the audience, I loved it when she made mention that she was experiencing menopause and that it was definitely changing her body. “It’s a natural thing!” she said so publicly and easily as she walked down the stage runway.

Victoria Rowell is an accomplished and successful dancer and actress. She is living proof of her advice to others, which is: “Do not let your circumstances define you, but use them as a cornerstone of your strength.”

Victoria was born as a ward of the state of Maine. Her mother had received no prenatal care and was kept in quarantine because she was mentally ill and filthy. Victoria’s first five days were spent with the nuns at Mercy Hospital before she was transferred to The Holy Innocents Home for orphans. Her Caucasian mother immediately lost custody of three other children, due to her continuing mental illness and instability. Her father was an unknown black man.

Ultimately, her mother gave birth to six children—three boys and three girls. The boys remained virtually unknown to Victoria until she searched for and found them when she was an adult. She and her sisters all had fathers from various minority groups. Her brothers all had white fathers, which made them acceptable to her mother’s white family. Victoria and her sisters were rejected and referred to as her mother’s “nigger children.”

At three weeks of age, Victoria was placed in foster care with a white family. The mother of this family, Bertha Taylor, had to argue with the social worker to take this baby home. Social Services did not believe that a minority child should reside with a white family. In fact, there were antiquated laws on the books in Maine at that time disallowing adoptions of black children by white families. However, adoption was never an option for Victoria anyway, as her birth mother refused to relinquish her children, hoping to be reunited with them at some later time—an event that never happened.

Though Victoria has no memory of her two years in the loving care of the Taylor family, she says that she knows that the time spent there, surrounded by love and kindness, gave her a foundation of resilience so essential to healthy emotional development.

Though the Taylors had every expectation of raising Victoria to adulthood, this dream ended when the Child Welfare department determined that the “racial difference” between her and the Taylors would present a problem in the future. No amount of pleading on the part of the Taylors or their close friends could persuade the social worker otherwise.

And so, Victoria was removed from the only family she had known and placed with a new foster family on a rural farm. Interestingly, this family was already providing foster care for Victoria’s two sisters. So, she was reunited with them, though she had never previously met them. The social worker had hoped to find adoptive parents for Victoria, but again, her biological mother objected.

Mrs. Armstead, Victoria’s new foster mother, moved her foster children to Dorchester, Maine where she could enroll them in a local Head Start program. She believed this city could provide the girls with a better education. But, they would return to the Maine countryside, which they loved, each spring.

Victoria says that like many children who struggle with instabilities in their home and family lives, she learned to depend on her early observational skills for stability. She says that she became a close personal friend of the ultimate mother, Mother Earth, herself. She speaks of her deep gratitude for the grounding effects of growing up off and on at “Forest Edge,” the Armstead’s farm. “When you care for a garden, reap a harvest, can identify flowers, birds, animals and trees before you can read and write; this is to understand basic survival. It is so important. Mother Earth has been my most influential mother,” she says.

Mother Earth and Mrs. Armstead taught Victoria that there are no shortcuts in life to completing a full cycle. It was not how life or nature worked. Indeed, she learned that follow-through and completion were the one and only means to a desired result.

When Victoria was six, Mrs. Armstead noticed that she wore holes in the toes of her Keds shoes faster than the other children. When asked about this, Victoria demonstrated how she emulated dancers she saw on television by standing on her toes and dancing in the barn. Thus, holes in the toes of her Keds launched Victoria’s dancing career, as her foster mother recognized a creative potential in her and arranged for her to have lessons. Victoria says, “At age eight, I began to understand that physical struggle was part of learning to dance. I also realized something else that became clearer later on – that my love affair with ballet was a double-edged sword, a dance/fight to channel pain, to stave off exhaustion, to defy gravity, and to make something extraordinarily difficult appear effortless.”

When Victoria was nine, her foster mother looked in earnest for formal ballet training for her and Victoria received a scholarship to The Cambridge School of Ballet. She had arrived for her audition in Boston on a Trailways bus with homemade sherbet-colored interfacing strips, instead of ribbons, sewn onto her black, mail-order pointe shoes. Up until then, her ballet lessons had taken place in her living room, with a doorknob substituting for a ballet bar and her foster mother coaching her from lessons read from a book on ballet. She had neither leotard, nor tights.

Victoria expresses the utmost gratitude for the tutelage of her first formal ballet teacher, Esther Brooks. She learned the simplest, most universal truth from Miss Brooks; that one person could make a world of difference in someone else’s life. Victoria attended The Cambridge School of Ballet for the next eight years, funded by a scholarship from The Ford Foundation.

During this time, Victoria developed a socially debilitating malady called hyperhidrosis. The physical symptoms of this genetic anomaly are extreme, excessive, and uncontrollable perspiration of the hands and feet. For Victoria, this meant that she was reticent to touch others, even just to shake hands, as perspiration literally dripped from the ends of her fingers and palms. At school, she kept an extra piece of paper under her writing hand so that she didn’t leave a puddle on the desk or on the paper she wrote on. She tried numerous difficult, expensive and painful procedures to little or no avail. For seventeen years she wore gloves to hide her symptoms. She was secretive and ashamed of her condition. It was not until she was thirty-one years old that this could be corrected through a dangerous, but ultimately successful surgery. She had lived her life until then, being afraid to touch or be touched by anyone.

Throughout Victoria’s junior high and high school years, ballet and her ballet teachers were the constant in her life, along with her social worker, Linda Webb, to whom she expresses deep gratitude.

She traveled among various other foster placements, formal and informal, during her years in Boston. She learned that her fate often rode on the kindness or whims, positive and negative, of others.

But, as for all foster children, at the age of eighteen, emancipation loomed for Victoria. There would be no more support checks from the Child Welfare Department of Maine. She was expected to be completely self-supporting by May 10, 1977.

Fortunately, Victoria had become a professional member of The American Ballet Theater’s second company. She was thrilled to be able to survive, but just barely. In addition, she had landed work with Seventeen magazine as a model. She kept herself on a strict diet. She had learned without quite knowing how, that she could deny herself food in order to not feel. Likewise, she could do the opposite and overeat and stuff herself in order not to feel. Eating had been problematic off and on since childhood. Victoria was well into adulthood before she could feed herself easily and adequately, and understand the connection between her eating problems and her losses in early infancy and childhood.

Victoria’s years as a dancer were marked by very hard work and gradual success. She was paying her dues, touring with the Ballet Repertory Company and then on circuits performing with other ballet companies. This allowed her to earn money, as well as have travel and adventure. But, a real crossroads came when she was asked to work with choreographer Twyla Tharp on the feature film of Hair. She had to make a choice between this opportunity and furthering her dance career with The Julliard School of Dance as a ballerina. She chose to do Hair. When it was completed, she returned to her dance career. Victoria danced with numerous companies; but, she also took other jobs to stay afloat financially. She discovered that she wasn’t much good at clerical work and was a poor typist, although she did both at times.

Victoria began to try to make contact with her biological mother and her three brothers. Her mother’s sister always blocked her access to her mother until she took it upon herself to show up uninvited at her mother’s funeral in 1983. She was able to learn the details of her mother’s long struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, and in addition, she was able to locate and meet her brothers.

Victoria says that during this time, she had to remove herself from a relationship with a man who had provided for her, but had become controlling and threatening. This is an all too common experience for young women who are emancipated from foster care. Because they are needy of love, attention, food, and a place to live, they are vulnerable. The intricacies of intimate, mutually supportive relationships are unknown to most foster children as they navigate the field of broken attachments or no attachments. Fortunately, for Victoria, she was able to recognize her situation and move on from it.

She secretly continued her battle with hyperhidrosis, soaking her hands and feet in pure aluminum chloride and wrapping them in plastic bags secured with rubber bands. An additional regimen of immersion in positively and negatively charged water allowed four perspiration free hours per day.

Her career continued to grow by fits and starts. She was dancing, modeling, and acting. When she was finally able to be represented by a pair of agents, her professional life began to blossom.

Ultimately, she has become an award-winning actor, veteran of many acclaimed feature films and several television series, including eight seasons on Diagnosis Murder, and thirteen years as Drucilla Winters on CBS’s number one daytime drama, The Young and the Restless.

Today, Victoria is using her creativity in yet another venue – writing. She has been writing since she was a child; writing to the various women who raised her and saving their letters to her. She speaks of the spiritual component of writing when one puts pen to paper in a personal communication so absent from email. The paper is sacred space for her.

Victoria has written her first book, The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir, which stands as a collage of women so central to her life, and to her own tenacity and resilience. She has written a children’s book that is ready for publication. She makes the important point that to do this writing has meant letting go of a lucrative income in show business, to return to the basics. It has been a leap of faith.

The mother of two children, Victoria has married and divorced. She says that the defense of detachment that exemplifies many adults, who were foster children, makes issues of intimacy and lasting relationship challenging. She wholeheartedly endorses psychological help as a means for bridging that gap to healthy relating. She says that her journey in therapy was “relieving—as though a weight had been lifted. It allowed me to be honest about my circumstances, lifted my shame, and acknowledged how strong I was.”

Victoria is adamant in her advice for all women. “The only way to sustain our strength is to honor ourselves with rest. There are so many demands on women today as mothers, wives, workers, and volunteers. We must listen to our minds and bodies. Otherwise, we leave ourselves open to peril and depression. We women are susceptible to compassion fatigue, because we feel the sorrows of the world. So, honor yourself with rest, time, and sisterhood. Understand that the world’s work will never be completed; it will always be there. So, replenish yourself.”

Victoria is the founder of The Rowell Foster Children’s Positive Plan, which provides scholarships in the arts and education to foster youth. She speaks on behalf of foster children and the issues they face while in the foster care system and upon their emancipation. She is a tireless traveler and speaker on behalf of disadvantaged and at-risk youth.

Lastly, Victoria advises women to pray. Though baptized Catholic, she practices no particular religion today. She says that she prays as a spiritual exercise and her vision of God is in the biggest sense and includes all ancestral mothers. “The landscape of Mother Earth is my church,” she says, “So, lean into the bigger message.”

Vickie Stringer

“There are so many doors that we don’t go through. Always be ready, because preparation makes opportunity.”

My friend, Martin Shore, heard about my book-writing project and called me to say that he knew of someone I should interview. He said that this woman was the owner of a publishing house; the largest African American female-owned publishing house in the United States. He made an e-mail introduction for me, but Vickie said she didn’t know Martin. As it turned out, Martin knew someone who worked with Vickie, and so the connection was made.

Vickie was friendly and generous from the beginning. She sent me copies of books she had written and a book about the publishing business that has been helpful.

When I sent her the draft of her interview, it came back to me by return mail with her corrections. She is efficient! And when I arrived at my office the next day, there was a box that had arrived with gifts for me. I received a T-shirt with her logo that says “I Read Triple Crown Books,” which I have done and that I wear to the gym. There was a coffee mug with her logo, which I use daily, and it was filled with candy.

Vickie Stringer is the second to the youngest of seven children born to her parents, who divorced when she was seven. She says that apparently her parents had conflicts, but she wasn’t aware of them and didn’t feel tension at home. “I wouldn’t trade my childhood family life for anything. Everyone looked out for me and so I was spoiled.”

Vickie’s father was an engineer at General Motors in Detroit, and her mother was a schoolteacher. They lived a middle to upper middle-class life. At Cass Tech, the best high school in Detroit, she was quiet and studious and “nothing to write home about.” She had four sisters who were her friends and being home with them was definitely more fun than being at school. As she reflects on this now, Vickie says that though she loved being with her sisters, at the same time she believes that it was limiting, inasmuch as having girlfriends outside her family would have broadened her perspective at that time.

Vickie graduated from high school at sixteen. She wanted to go away to college and chose Western Michigan University, where she pledged a sorority and majored in business administration. She was smart and has been described as charismatic. After her freshman year in college, she transferred to Ohio State University.

Vickie was at a fraternity party when party crashers arrived and one of them caught her attention. She noticed his nice car and his good looks. She claims that it was “love at first sight.” “He seemed like a nice guy,” she says, “but not a good influence.” As she spent more time with him and his friends, “The Triple Crown Posse,” her values began to change. Eventually, she dropped out of school and followed this man into a life of crime, which culminated in her becoming pregnant. At that point, her boyfriend abandoned her and married someone else.

Indulged as a child in her family, Vickie’s life with the father of her son had been one of indulgence, as well. She didn’t really know how to manage money and she was struggling. Since crime was what she had come to know, she continued on this path, starting her own escort service as well as drug trafficking. Vickie says that she developed an addiction to money, which she believes was her downfall. She was arrested for drug trafficking when she was twenty-six years old, and a year later she pleaded guilty to money laundering and conspiring to traffic drugs. Prosecutors had agreed to a lighter sentence in exchange for her cooperation against others involved in the case, though she actually never had to testify against anyone. Eventually, Vickie served seven years in federal prison, which she describes as “the most trying time of my life”. She was absent from her son’s life. He was only two when she was arrested. Thankfully, her mother and stepfather raised her son while she was away. During those long years, she only saw him once.

Incarcerated in Texas, far from family and friends, Vickie had a lot of time to reflect and to think about what she really wanted for herself and her life. “I decided to use that time to heal myself,” she says. “I had learned that association brings assimilation, and so I read extensively and wrote in my journal.” Reading works by Donald Goines, who was also an ex-convict, inspired her.

Vickie began writing her own stories. She would go to the prison’s law library and hang a sign saying, “Research in Progress,” on the window to discourage others. There, she would move into the life of her fictional character, Pamela Xavier. She says that she often cried as she wrote, and eventually completed the first drafts of Let That Be the Reason and Imagine This while still imprisoned. She tried out these stories on her fellow inmates and received high marks for them.

In addition, Vickie wrote a powerful letter to God with a list of her goals and desires. In a way, it was a challenge to God. She was essentially saying, “Since you’re God, you can do this!”

“It’s been a blessed experience,” Vickie says emphatically. “God showed me that He is a restorer. He restored me. We often don’t have much faith in restoration and we need to have more.”

Vickie’s list of goals and desires has been met. She has a lovely home, the car she hoped for, clothes, a computer, financial stability and an emotionally fulfilling job. She has blessed her mother; and, she has done good things for her friends and family, just as she desired.

These more tangible goals were fulfilled by persevering through twenty-six rejection letters she received from mainstream publishers whom she approached to publish her manuscripts. She redirected her entrepreneurial abilities and charismatic people skills that had made her a good criminal, and self-published her first novel, Let That Be the Reason. She proved herself a creative marketer, traveling on her own to many cities and selling copies of her novel out of beauty shops and through friends. Vickie’s first printing of 1600 copies sold out in three weeks, thereby negating the concern that her hip-hop audience simply weren’t readers, and wouldn’t buy books. They were and they did!

A small New York City publishing house bought her book in 2002 and gave Vickie a $50,000 advance. She was on her way as an author, but really wanted to be a publisher for other authors with the hip-hop audience in mind. By December of that year, Vickie founded Triple Crown Publishing, revolutionizing the literary industry as a pioneer of the Hip-Hop Literature genre. She has signed thirty other authors to her publishing house, and has published over thirty-six titles, distributing over one million books to bookstores and libraries worldwide.

The intangibles she longed for from her letter to God were to be at peace and be happy, to hear the voice of God, and to have a clear vision for her life. She paraphrases a Bible verse in which God promises, “I can restore unto you that which the locusts have eaten.” And she gratefully acknowledges that God gave her her life back and then some.

“I’m not afraid of challenges that I am faced with today,” Vickie says, “Because things can and do change with what God is able to do.”

Upon being paroled from prison and returning to Columbus, Ohio, Vickie lived in a halfway house, worked twelve hours a day and performed community service to prove her reliability and to pay restitution for her crimes. She was working tirelessly to demonstrate to the authorities that she was able to parent her son. She wanted to regain custody of him. In addition, she wanted a good father for him.

Vickie has been out of prison for over nine years now. She says her family was willing to support her in not breaking the law. She has a new man in her life, and a new baby. She has custody of her older son, Valen, and in 2004 she founded The Valen Foundation, a nonprofit organization named for her son and dedicated to reuniting and restoring bonds between children and their incarcerated parents.

Vickie Stringer and Triple Crown Publications have been featured in such prominent news media as The New York Times, Newsweek, MTV News, Publisher’s Weekly, The Boston Globe, Vibe, Essence, Inc Magazine, The Washington Post and many others. As an inspiration and motivation to aspiring authors and self-publishers, Vickie has published her advice in How to Succeed in the Publishing Game.

Vickie has much to say to other women. “Divine intervention changes lives,” she says. “Have faith that miracles overcome obstacles.”

She goes on to say, “Trust your gut. The Holy Spirit is your intuition. It never will fail you. I am God fearing and happy to be so. I would also tell every woman to Be Ready! There are so many doors that we don’t go through. Always be ready, because preparation makes opportunity. I have a sense of expectancy and I make sure I’m ready. My credit is good; I’ve taken classes in time management, among other things. I got a speech coach to help me to improve my speaking ability. Look good! Fortify who you are!” And finally, “Be Blessed.”