Beyond Normal: The Extraordinary True Story of a Macedonian Woman

By Dr. Gregory L. Judd

The average person will never experience even two of the more than twenty scenarios found in Anita's story. Read and start counting.

"Anita is filled with spirit and passion. I have filmed documentary films and movies all over the world. Filming her reminded me of an interview I shot with Louis Zamperini, whose life was told in the bo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685561468

Dr. Gregory L. Judd

Dr. Gregory Judd grew up in Wisconsin. He did his schooling at the UW-Platteville, Palmer College of Chiropractic, Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, and Talbot Theological Seminary. Dr. Judd founded and was the senior administrator of the Back Pain and Wellness Center in Long Beach, California, for forty-two years before retiring. He met Anita through his wife of fifty-one years, Cindy, and later was encouraged to write Anita's story. He is the proud father of five children and thirteen grandchildren.

Book preview

Dedication

To those who were never given the chance to see life filled with love and hope in the arms of two loving parents. Also, for those whose lives’ frequent trials seem to starve one’s energy and hope for a lasting purpose. Anita Hinic can provide an example to such a dysfunctional life and can promise any person that those two things can be found regardless of what hardships life has presented to them.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, thanks to my wife, Cindy, for sacrificing hundreds of hours of our time together to allow me to record someone else’s life and not our own. Further thanks to her for investing additional hundreds of hours in listening, comforting, and mentoring Anita into a life that now makes sense to her. Also, thank you to several others who gave valuable input into how to best express Anita’s story. Film maker Jack Dabner, cinematographer Roger Boller, Hallie Palsgrove, Chris and Danielle Carney, and my first editor Barbara A. Other great advice came from Joe Class, CEO of Contexture Inc., Joel Lueb, CEO of Bigger Dot, Inc., and Kyle from Provident Films. Of course, work on this book would not have happened at all without the gracious and talented Lionel Friedberg, who encouraged its completion from the beginning. Bountiful thanks to all of them.

Co-Author’s Words

You have hidden these things from the wise

and prudent and revealed them to babes.

Matthew 11:25b (NKJV)

The wicked flee when no one pursues,

But the righteous are bold as a lion.

Proverbs 28:1 (NKJV)

Anita’s story must begin with an apology. I cannot put her personality into words that might help the reader to fully experience what it is like to understand the uniqueness of this woman. She is captivating, blunt, totally politically incorrect, passionate, a survivalist, seismically simple, raw, and worldly, but also God-loving and hilarious. In sum, she is brutally honest and brutally loving. She has a few strong faith beliefs, but her life practices are a bit askance from those of stuffy orthodoxy. The two epigraphs above contain the babe and the lion characteristics of this lady. The righteous part will require a big disclaimer, for sure. I say this with a quick retraction and a chuckle, but the babe and lion mix is well stated.

This book about this extraordinary woman is not secular, but neither can it be considered Christian. It is a hybrid that can only be considered as memorializing an individual, warts and all, who lacks a given pattern of life that anyone might want to claim wholeheartedly as representing them. Let’s just call it a book about a woman that begs for apologies from both perspectives. Readers who are secular and those who are faith-based will love the story, for the character behind her persistence and the events that have tempered her unbelievable spirit of survival.

Reader, be patient with this writing because the design is a bit unorthodox. It will be Anita’s story with my occasional inserted comments regarding elements of her history that she would not tell without my forced inclusion. I believe my comments are integral to her story. There is also a warning. Some paragraphs you will be forced to read more than once because the event they describe may be bizarre enough to be considered almost sci-fi. But I have heard the same stories dozens of times, and they never change. So, yes, you read them correctly. Just don’t get stuck there. Move on.

My second apology is for the format of the writing. Most of the book is a record of the events in Anita’s story. That portion is less about her contemporary interactions with people and her personality, but be patient while I relate the circumstances of life that this lady endured to become the character she is today. Now, before her story is over you will be given over forty examples of her raw interactions with people. It will bring you toe to toe with one of the most unique women you will ever meet. Trust me!

Finally, and critically important to your reading, it is important to understand that Anita is not impressed by her own life and sees no big reason to record such a hard-lived life. She has repeatedly been told over the decades by people from HBO and people like Diana and Lionel Friedberg—both prolific media contributors through books, documentaries, and films—that she should write her story. Because my wife, Cindy, and I have spent so much of our lives around her, Lionel said we should engage in the task of writing all that we know about her. I reluctantly said okay.

Long but Fun and Feisty Interviews

Many of the interviews with Anita in this book were recorded on video. To make the book more succinct, many detailed facts were edited out. I hope to add those to a later writing. Anita is a hoot. She is unpredictable, fascinating in some ways, and truly earthy in others.

Most characters’ names have been changed, but their interactions with Anita are monumental to understanding Anita’s journey. Special thanks to them. The details of those interactions are recorded from Anita’s memory and reflect her opinion and behavior only, and not necessarily my own. She is on the stage, and I am in the audience recording her story.

Foreword

Every now and again, one is fortunate enough to encounter an individual whose life leaves an indelible imprint upon you. Anita Hinic is such a person. She is one of those very rare people whose troubles and travails, yearnings and strivings, suffering and successes make you rethink everything you know about what it is to be human.

Born in humble circumstances, her journey through life followed a meandering course that leaves you breathless when you consider the obstacles and circumstances that have brought this remarkable woman to where she is now. Her path traversed countless continents and time zones away from the land of her birth, during which she endured the sort of traumas, adventures, pains, and accomplishments that are the stuff of fiction. Her biography—so sensitively and empathetically documented by my good friend Dr. Gregory Judd—is sometimes so starkly outrageous and incredible that if it were the foundations of a movie script, a Hollywood producer might balk at the prospect of believing a single word of it. Yet I know that every sentence, every utterance, every event is true.

Anita suffered more than most people could even begin to imagine, yet her achievements in the face of larger-than-life adversities were met with the kind of courage, fortitude, and tenacity to which we all aspire. She is blessed with a faith so strong that she survived the impossible. Her experiences have imbued her with a heart of gold and a spirit so endurable that it can act as a beacon for readers of all generations. Imbedded within this amazing dichotomy of light and dark are also unforgettable escapades of humor and mirth, of hope and optimism from which we can all learn.

This is a remarkable story, and I feel blessed to know the lady upon whom the spotlight of this unique biography shines. Thank you, Anita, for enriching my life. Thank you, Greg, for bringing this telling to fruition. You both have my very profound respect.

—Lionel Friedberg

New York Times best-selling author

and National Primetime Emmy Award-winning producer

Lionel Friedberg

Introduction

I was born on July 27, 1954, in the village of Strumica in the land of Macedonia, which is a small country to the north of Greece and south of Serbia and separated from the Adriatic Sea by Albania to the east. I was given the name Anita Kostadinovska by my birth mother and father. I was six months old when my mother became extremely ill. Her flesh turned black, her eyes became hollow and bloodshot, and her limbs lay motionless. She was taken to the small hospital in Strumica while my aunt, Milka, cared for me during her three-month stay. She vomited constantly, and her body became emaciated while doctors stood aside, completely baffled. The symptoms were so bizarre and the prognosis so grave that they couldn’t arrive at a reasonable diagnosis. She drifted in and out of a comatose abyss, her breathing reduced to shallow gasps of air. Finally, the death rattle came, and she died at twenty-three years of age in the early months of 1955.

Being only six months old, I knew little of the horrible event. I recall only cloudy moments of my mother’s warm embrace and her dark eyes gazing into mine while she lovingly cuddled me. Whether these moments were real or are mixed with imagination that has grown stronger during the years, I have only memories of her nurturing love for me. But as I was so young, she left me before I could permanently relate to her as my birth mother. Thus, was born a deep void in my life. Ever since she passed away, I have longed for a personal connection with a soul like hers. Throughout my life, however, I have always been disappointed.

Sometime between six and nine months old, I got sick with the same disease. I had identical symptoms and spent the next eight months fighting for my life in the same Strumica hospital. Again, no clear diagnosis. The doctors said that the only reason I survived that same cold, deathly grip on my life was because I was young and strong. More likely, it was a miracle. God only knows how I survived those eight months. 

Truthfully, I have sometimes wished I hadn’t survived. You see, my father, Strojan, was a well-known architect in Strumica and traveled extensively. As a result, he was gone during much of my childhood. On one of his escapades a few years prior to my mother’s death, he bumped into a seductive woman who made it her goal to destroy his family and move in with him permanently. My birth mother and I were the only obstacles to making that happen. This woman was also from Strumica, and when my mother got sick, she and my father made plans for her to care for me after my mother died. She moved in with us three weeks later and married my father. It was later shown, but could not be proven, that this woman had poisoned both my mother and me. But when she was unable to kill me like she had my mother, she decided to kill every spark of youth in me. I don’t believe that my father was in on the plot to poison my mother.

When I was sixteen years old, she sold me to a homosexual American businessman, and to permanently get rid of me, she sent me with him as his wife to the United States. I was to be arm candy for this man at parties and social events in those days when being gay was shameful and gay men were the objects of intense ridicule. Being gay was definitely damaging to a man’s career. I was part of his disguise, therefore, as a heterosexual man. I was also a bit of a trophy: an older man married to such a young woman. I was very attractive at sixteen. At that age, however, I was totally unaware of what that marriage truly meant. I still hadn’t even graduated from high school. Because I skipped such a huge part of my normal development throughout the remainder of my life, I have not accepted other people’s compliments gracefully because there is something still blocking that part of my identity. I think I was too lost in trying to just figure life itself out. My body and my appearance were nothing more than vehicles to carry me from one situation to the next.

My father’s mistress was named Lena. Remember, I was less than a year old when my mother died, and this woman was so brazen that she moved into our house three weeks after my mother was buried. She had this all planned out and would have done it even sooner if she could have conceived an even more sinister plan. My grandmother Anita said, My daughter-in-law’s eyes weren’t even closed yet, and this shameless woman moved into the home. My son has no shame either. Strange as it seems, I did not know about my birth mother or her death until sometime after seven years old.

Birth Mom Dotsa Mitrevski-Kostadinovska

As I grew into understanding, Lena began to take every opportunity to tell me how ugly I was and how repulsive my dark hair and eyes were. I later learned why she spent so much time criticizing those distinguishing details. It was because I was a spitting image of my mother, the woman she had killed. My stepmother, Lena, was consumed by witchcraft and the occult. I was the primary subject of her practices during the first seven years of my life while she was essentially my sole guardian. The children that came along later as my half brothers and sisters had blonde hair and blue eyes like my father. Lena repeatedly called me a freak, and now I had to believe it.

It is important to remember that I didn’t know she was not my birth mother until I was somewhere between seven and eleven years old. I spent all of my early childhood wondering why she hated me so much and what it would require for me to create the relationship she had with the other children. The other adult family members didn’t think it was necessary to tell me that she wasn’t my birth mother. I still don’t know why they didn’t tell me until later. Being a child, I just couldn’t figure out what I might have done or continued to do that would cause my stepmother to hate me so mercilessly. I guess I’ve struggled all my life trying to overcome the mental mechanism that a child constructs to add sense to an abusive childhood and then form wholesome self-worth and identity. In part, I think that’s why I am considered to be brutally honest and brutally loving. I never had that nurturing love, so I naturally gravitated to being a more real and authentic type of person. I’ve always said I had a mouth but never a tongue. I didn’t dare use it, or it would cost me my life while living with Lena. That is not my problem today. I really love people, but I am completely honest.

I also believe every person is exactly the same in God’s eyes, as when standing stark naked in front of the Creator of the universe, we are surely the same. Everything else is a façade, a false fortress, or a shield to hide our worst insecurities. I see things for what they are and never consider being politically correct or even being tactful. What I mean is that I really can’t keep quiet. There is too much to be said, and I can’t stand the silence. Silence makes me feel uncomfortable unless it is late at night and I am alone reading my Bible, writing out my prayers, or coloring. I love to color.

It is a strange thing, my talking. People are shocked and offended by me at first, but then they absorb the honesty of what I’m saying, and soon they enjoy my company because I say what everyone is thinking but would never say aloud themselves. I truly love everyone that I’m speaking with, and I have no intention of hurting them in any way. I just think being truthful and real is better than pretending as if we are building some character on stage while off stage; we are wishing we were who that imagery person is. People like me find this hilarious, and I guess if I thought it through, which I seldom do since thinking is such a waste of time, I think they wish they could say what was on their minds like I do and still get away with it too. My friends tell me that I get away with speaking truth because my politically incorrect and blunt statements are countered by a certain kind of innocence. They just can’t get too offended.

As tired as I get of telling small parts of my story, people around me continue to insist that we sit down and spend hours repeating the unabridged version. I only did this once, and that was with my friend Dr. Greg, the one helping me write this book. It took hours of videoing my story, and the time was filled with some laughter but mostly tears, and I even got sick to my stomach and had to stop from time to time. I had an overload of sad moments that I had suppressed and were vividly brought to mind once again. My life’s been so full of unhappiness and unexplainable, supernatural twists and turns that some people have said that if I hadn’t given these events in such repetitive detail, they would have difficulty believing what I was saying was true. Truthfully, I don’t care. I don’t do it for any reaction. It just comes out. I have lived a life full of hardships and unhappiness with only short periods of relief. That is just the way my life happened. I was abused as a child, abandoned in a foreign country, and endured abusive and dysfunctional marriages. I gave birth to a handicapped child and have had leukemia, breast cancer, and heart failure. I’ve been beaten, lived in a car with three children, and was the object of a failed mafia hit. I have lived a life around the poverty line and cooked for pay and made deliveries on a bicycle as I faced the constant weight of monthly rent…and on and on it goes. I know I have left several things out of this list, but I think you will get the picture. And I am tired of whining about it.

Strangely, however, I don’t see anything terribly unusual about my life. It’s my normal. That is why I am often in tears and constantly calling out to Jesus to help me. I have no other outlet. Truthfully, I found that He is always supplying me with enough—not abundance for sure—but enough, and though I often worry, He never fails to take care of my basic needs. That may mean beans for a few days, but I am not starving. It is amazing what just the right seasoning can do to a boring pot of beans. Bizarre as it may be, I only feel that beautiful remembrance of my birth mother’s gaze during my alone times. Most everything else, except for my special times with my friend Cindy, is either stressful or neutral at best.

I think some people’s interest in my life might be that I don’t speak original English, as my late Croatian husband calls my accent. Both the accent and lost words in a sentence draw smirks and laughter as I gesture with both arms telling some story or anecdote that my grandmother Anita (I’m named after her), or, in Macedonian, what my Baka told me when I was a child. My life’s philosophy is a summary of what I learned from my grandmother. My audience will know when it is coming when my sentence begins with: My Grandma Anita, or Baka, always said….

It doesn’t matter that I know five languages well enough to make me dangerous. At any time, I can randomly mix a word from any one of those five languages into my English sentence. I know that the confusion is happening when whoever is listening gives a quick shake of their head before I finish my internationally interpreted sentence. When I mix those foreign languages with the language I learned when I first got off the plane in the US, it sounds like the Tower of Babel. Also, it is important to remember that when I left my homeland, Macedonia was backward and reeling from the world war and hadn’t progressed at anything near the pace that the US had. So I stepped off the airplane from Macedonia as a sixteen-year-old, fifteen years behind this new world’s progress in time, into a world of Daisy Dukes, short shorts, really short skirts, cleavage, and wild hairdos. The music in vogue in 1970 wasn’t like my old-world folk music played on an accordion and slapping one’s knees for rhythm, but was a freakish rock ’n’ roll with screeching electric guitars and mind-numbing drums. It would be like a teenager in the fifties seeing a Star Wars movie. I stood aghast, my mouth wide open. I was so confused. I didn’t know if I should be ashamed, repulsed, frightened, or amazed by what I was seeing or hearing. All I knew was the unspoken rule I was being forced to learn: just adapt.

Chapter 1

Early Childhood in Macedonia

I first saw an indoor toilet when I was sixteen years old, after being sent to Chicago. When I initially laid eyes on it, I could not figure out what it was. And what was the purpose of that strange little roll of tissue paper next to it? Like a cat lording it over a mouse, I decided to stand on the rim of the throne and gaze down into the water-well inside. I then tried to find an explanation for what this was. It seemed obvious that it was something to sit on; however, there was a hole in the seat. Next, I noticed there was a plugged hole in the bottom of the well of water too. That now made me flash back to the outdoor toilets we had in Macedonia. Aha! That was it. This was just a rich person’s version of our old outhouse toilet. The rim I was standing on was just a wonderfully comfortable seat for the person relieving themselves. Then I had another question. What is done after the person has finished? There was no hole in the ground under the seat, so what did they do? Still wondering, I stepped down off the throne and tried to figure out what the solution was going to be. After looking the toilet over again, I saw a shiny lever. I wiggled it and pushed it until a flood of water replaced the water in the bowl. I thought how amazing it is that this all works. That was fascinating enough that I didn’t need to know where the water went after the flush. Just as a side note, my father was a well-to-do businessman, and his toilet was a hole in the floor with two pads to show where your feet must be placed. The person had no seat to sit on but had to squat over the hole in the floor. Then there was a cord that released water into the hole for a flush.

When I finally was given an explanation, it took me a lot of imagination to make sense of such luxury for such a basic bodily function. In Macedonia, when the urge came, you headed for the field, a large rock, or the outdoor toilet that was just a hole in the ground with a little hut around it. And the tidy little roll of paper was nowhere to be found in my neighborhood or even anywhere in the little town. We used a tobacco leaf, corn husks, weeds, an occasional piece of paper, or (when luxury prevailed) an old cloth that was thrown away after being used.

To further complicate my adjustment to my new life in the United States, I lived in Los Angeles, near the heart of Hollywood. This new country and its people were five to ten years ahead of even the second most advanced countries in the world at that time, let alone an even slower developing European country like Macedonia. I had never seen a TV or a movie. I remember repeating over and over, Where is God in this place? Where is God in this place? I didn’t have my grandmother to comfort me. She never again would comfort me because—and this is unconscionable to me—because she favored my quasi kidnapping that brought me to California. I understood her behavior much later. It was because she was battle-worn at eighty-eight years of age, having been widowed at thirty-five and working all her life. My childhood suffering broke her heart too. She felt tortured seeing me go, but she also saw it as the best and safest alternative. She died within three weeks after my departure. They said she folded her hands across her chest and wept until they asked her why she was unable to let go. What was holding her back? She mouthed my name and slipped into eternity. She knew that soon she would be unable to care for me and reasoned that I would not be sexually abused by a gay man of means. She was also comforted to know that I would be out of reach of my stepmother. She committed me to God and told me, Go now so I can die in peace. God will go with you, and you will be okay.

I was devastated. I felt betrayed by the one human being who had always offered me a warm embrace and gentle finger directing me toward a sovereign God and a commonsense, moral way of life. When I learned that she had favored releasing me to go to the United States, I was broken-hearted and felt betrayed. I ran to the cemetery where my birth mother was buried and sprawled across her grave, digging my fingernails deep into the sod and weeping to exhaustion. I lay on the damp, cold earth for what seemed like hours, begging to die and begging for my birth mother to pull me through the six feet of dirt to where she was. I continued to plead with her and God long after I could no longer cry. I soon boarded a plane, only a shell of a young girl, never to see my grandmother again.

No one will ever replace my grandma Anita’s influence on my life. She was so in tune with my needs as a child that a brief story will represent her well. I had just received a vicious beating from my stepmother. It was so violent that to save my life, even as I knew the consequences of later returning to my home, I ran into the freezing winter’s night in just a thin pajama and barefoot. I ran and ran until I was out of breath and could run no more. But I went on until I reached my grandmother’s house, a long distance away. There were wild animals, including wild dogs, in that countryside. But I was desperate. As I approached my grandmother’s home, I saw her kneeling outside the house in the blistering cold behind her prayer boulder. She had drawn her shawl over her braided hair and was praying and weeping. As I approached, I heard her wailing. When I ran to her, she swept me up and told me that God had stirred her soul to pray immediately for a young child in desperation and that she had needed to enter the cold to pray at her sacred prayer boulder. Well, I was that child. She warmed me under her dress and held me tightly against her warm, plump flesh. I still remember the flesh that hid any indication that a bone might be found anywhere in her body. I loved it. Her soft flesh was extra comforting to me. At that moment, soft meant safe.

She took me into her little house, heated some bricks in the fire, and wrapped them in rags, then placed them in my bed as she piled the blankets on top of me until only my eyes were peering out. Grandma’s hand completed the covering as the palm of her hand softly blanketed my exposed forehead. (That became the camel that broke its back. I mean, the straw that broke the camel’s back. I do that a lot, mixing up English sayings.)

My uncle heard how my stepmother, Lena, had nearly killed me and wasted no time or words. As I learned later, he confronted her to her face and threatened to kill her with his own two hands if he ever saw such abuse again. My stepmother’s verbal abuse escalated after that, but she was more cautious and strategic with the beatings. Nevertheless, the endless damage is still vivid in my memory. Soon after that incident, the government agency that is like our Child Protective Services in the United States arrived at my stepmother’s door. She was questioned at length, and then I was questioned, too, separately, of course. She had gotten to me first and threatened to beat me and then kill me if I said anything that would make her look bad in front of the agency. So when the agents came, I sat there as the questions flew, but I would not risk the consequences of being honest. The agents understood my dilemma regarding answering their questions too accurately, as my body language, my fidgeting, and my inability to look them in the eye told them the truth. They dealt with my stepmother with an iron fist and made her sign some papers. After this encounter with the agents, she approached me as if to duplicate her former beatings but withheld her hand, a close household object, or a willow switch that she had used in the past.

Truthfully, I really was a very good kid and had no tendencies for rebellion or getting even. I just wanted to be loved and treated like the other kids in the village, and later, as my half brothers and sisters came along, like they were treated. It is interesting to me now that the town’s people even had a song called The Ode to Little Anita of Strumica that sang of my disheveled neglect but resilient, joyful spirit. I wish I had the words and music to that song now. The people didn’t have a clue to the details of what was happening, just their superficial observations. I am sure it was the jerking of my arm in the store or my not being present with the rest of the family when they left me at home alone. Maybe it was my unkempt appearance, my uncombed hair, or my clothing that was so unkempt. Who knows? The picture I added below tells the whole story. I am mentally traumatized, sitting like I don’t belong in the family, am curled up in the fetal position, and not one bit engaged in taking any pictures. That picture summarized about half of what I was experiencing in the first seven years of my life. It doesn’t show my confusion, fear of going back home, or the difficulty of trying not to wet myself.

TOP RIGHT TO LEFT: Lena, Strojan and Grandma.

FRONT: I am the Second Child from the left.

The Stepmother’s Abuses

My stepmother was into witchcraft. I would wake in the morning’s first light to see her blocking my bedroom door, peering through the bristles of a broom, and chanting all sorts of weird, frightening curses and rhyming things. I would frequently wet my pants when she came into my room because anything was fair game for her, and most often, either emotionally and/or physically painful to me. When I was very little, she would push my cradle under an open window in the winter and remove my blankets so I had nothing to protect me from the cold. I remember coiling myself into a ball and squeezing as tight to the wall as possible so the cold air would trickle over my back and into the room while I captured my body heat between the mattress and the slats of the bed. When I was able to walk fast enough, she would jerk me out of a deep sleep and take me to the graveyard. She made me stand in the cold around my mother’s grave while she mumbled and threw things randomly over my mother’s burial plot. (It wasn’t until later that I realized that the grave we always visited was that of my birth mother.) I always hated and feared graveyards after dark because of these confusing jolts and dreadful meetings in the night. For some reason, she felt I needed to be there, even though she usually ignored me during her rituals. At times it was as if she was talking to someone else that only she could see. There are so many other situations like this that climb up and out of my memory at the oddest times. The emotions I feel during those times are just like the ones I felt during my childhood days. If depression is possible for a toddler and young girl, I think I chronically lived in it.

Randomly, and with no improper behavior on my part, she banged my head against the wall. She also made me sit on the floor with the dog at meals to fight over the scraps that she would throw down from the table. I was always hungry and malnourished. She also fed me rotten food and insisted I eat it all or I would be punished. It wasn’t unusual for me to have digestive problems. Sometimes I had severe stomach problems and sharp, painful cramping. On one occasion, I had become infected with a tapeworm. Shortly after the pains began, my grandmother saw evidence in my stool and gave me some horrible tasting cod liver oil. After waiting for it to pass through my digestive system and suffocate the worm, she began to pull sections of the worm from my rectum as I cried in horror. That had a terrible effect on me. Since that day, I abhor any kind of noodles because they remind me of that dreadful experience of my grandmother’s pulling that disgusting worm out of my body. It must have been two to three feet long.

Another disgusting thing my stepmother did was to mix short strands of human hair with blood and forced me to drink it. Maybe I was able to do so because I was so young and innocent that I was more repulsed by the texture and taste than the source of the blood. The hair was clearly a foreign object for me. The blood was just gross. I remember the lingering and vulgar taste in my mouth. It was so awful that I didn’t even want to drink water to chase the remaining concoction down my throat. After I drank it, I began to gag and throw it back up. I stopped the vomit in my throat because I knew I would be severely punished if I did throw up. Plus, she would certainly make me clean it up. The hair in the last mixture was nothing like my own, but I recognized it when I grew into adolescence. However, she did cut hair from my head and mixed it with my fingernails and put it into a little packet that was sewn to the inside of my pajamas and blouse. I was instructed to never talk about it nor remove it. Again, I do not know why.

On another occasion, she took me to a voodoo priest. He refused to do what my stepmother demanded. He told her, You can’t do that to a child! I see a python at the top of the tree in a nest. I don’t know what she had requested, but even a voodoo priest was appalled by the request and couldn’t force himself, even for money, to perform for her. I never found out what he was asked to do or what the significance of the python meant to my curse. However, that python had several resurgences in my life to come. More details of that later.

Lena’s cruelty was relentless. She burned me with a hot poker several times, but one type of hatred stuck with me my whole life. It was being locked in the closet. It felt