From the Gates of Hell to the Doorways of Heaven

By Marion Jones

From the doorways of Hell to the gates of Heaven!



Marion Jones Sr. was born September 13th, 1945 in the town of Dunn, NC. He graduated from Harnett High School 1963 and is married to Linda A. Smith. He is the father of 5 children, has 9 grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great-grandchild. He is now living in Erwin, NC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645311096

Marion Jones

Marion Jones is a former world champion track and field athlete. She won five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia but voluntarily returned all her Olympic medals and forfieted all her race results from September 2000 after admitting she lied to federal investigators about her use of a performance-enhancing drug. After her release from prison, Marion sought to take her experiences and encourage others to learn from them. She is actively speaking to teens and other groups and spreading her "Take a Break" message through which she advices young people to stop, take a break, think and seek proper advice from people you trust and who have your best interests at heart before making critical decisions that will have a profound impact on their lives. In short, Marion encourages young and older people alike to stay on track and just do what's right. Currently, Marion is living a dream deferred and is playing professional basketball as a Rookie for the WNBA team the Tulsa Shock in 2010. She and her husband and children make their home in Austin, Texas.

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From the Gates of Hell, to the Doorways of Heaven

My birth name is Marion Jones. My street name is Shamp Jones. I was born in the month of September on the thirteenth day in the year 1945. My father was Jerry Jones and my mother was Maude Jones and was born in a small town called Dunn, North Carolina. I was a spoiled child from birth.

My sister Thelma, my oldest sister, goes by the name of Tip. she asked my mom to give me to her for her birthday gift. It worked out just right. I was born in September, and her birthday was October. So at my birth, my mom gave me to her; and from that day until this day, she has been both sister and mother to me.

I was blessed with a good family. My mother was a good mother. She worked as a maid. She would leave home every morning at 8:00 a.m. with her green-and-white uniform on and walk to work. Doing the summer months, when school was out on break, I would walk to her job to have lunch with her.

I fell in love with that big, old house where she worked, and all the flowers and the landscape were just so pretty to me that’s what I wanted. I remember her going to the food store shopping every day because we needed food. Some of the people who was not as fortunate as we were. It was hard back in those days. She would go by some of their houses and leave bags of food on the porches.

We were very close. My mother and I used to play together all the time. I used to watch her cook, and that is where I got my cooking from. I stayed in trouble all the time, in school and out of school. I would get home from school, and she would send me to the movie theater. I was one spoiled child.

My father was a good man. I was blessed to have both my mother and father in the same house. A lot of my friends only had just one parent living in the home, and that mainly was the mother. My dad was a good man and a great father. I wanted to be just like him. He would do anything at any time to help people, and he had me spoiled.

I remember one night he came home from work and got cleaned up and got him something to eat and told me there was a good cowboy movie playing at the picture show and that we would go see it. He loved cowboy movies, and I did too. He used to dress me up like a cowboy, and to this day, I’m still dressing like a cowboy.

On our way to the movies, we ran into some people who was having some problems with their car, and he stopped to help them. He didn’t know them, but he saw where they were in need of help. He pulled up and asked them what’s wrong, and the man said he didn’t know what the problem was. My father got his car to check it out. My father wanted to see if he could do anything.

He looked underneath the hood of the man’s car, listening to it run, trying to figure out the problem that kept making the car cut off. As he was checking the problem, his hand hit the fan blade, and blood flew everywhere. I thought his hand was cut off, but it was just a small cut.

Even after his hand was cut, he still fixed the car. He didn’t charge the man anything, and he still took me to the movie theater.

Even then, God was watching over us, but I couldn’t see it. Oh, how I wish I would have known then what I know now. How many times have you said those same words, if you knew than what you know now?

My father used to let me wash his car on the weekend. He would give me five dollars for washing it. Back in those days, five dollars was like a hundred dollars to a child. I remember having dollars and going to school when a lot of children didn’t even have pennies. Oh, by the way, I would wash the car with Tide washing powder so you know about how that would come out. I remember him sending me new bicycles to school and not because I was doing that well in school; it was just because.

There is one thing he taught me that always stayed with me, and that was, "Just because you have all these things I give you, that don’t make you no better than anyone else. If you act like you are, I will take those things from you and