God's Visitation

By Lashawna Canty

This is the unadulterated true life story of how God brought me from a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly with all the messy stages in between! Through many trials and tribulations, my life is being shaped into the person God intends me to be. The Bible says in Ephesians 5:8-10, 20 (KJV), "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of the light: For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth: Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord. Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name our Lord Jesus Christ." The author wants to thank all her family and friends, for it is not our beginning that determines our ending, but it is our repentance and salvation through Jesus Christ and His blood covenant that restores our relationships and saves our lives. Nothing but the blood of Jesus! Which cross is your cross? We all must choose one, no matter what. Jesus has the middle. The cross on the right is salvation, and the one on the left is for unbelievers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643009827

Book preview

Family

My mother and birth father were born and reared in Chicago, Illinois. My mother, Karen, was eighteen years old when she got pregnant with my oldest sister, LaTrice. My mother told me that my grandparents said, Since you’re pregnant, you two will have to get married. So they did.

Pregnant at eighteen, forced into a marriage at eighteen, pregnant again at nineteen, and pregnant once again at twenty was more than my mother could handle. She and my biological father decided to have an abortion. My mother was sitting in the window, waiting for the mailman to come with her check so that she could go get an abortion. While waiting there, she felt me move in her stomach and said to herself, Oh well, I guess it’s too late for an abortion. That is how I am able to be here today. When I learned about this as a young adult, I felt unwanted by my parents.

My mother told us our birth father was very abusive to her throughout their marriage. So after three to four years of constant fighting, my mother got tired of the abuse and decided to get a divorce. Shortly after the divorce from Charles, my biological father, she met Michael. She told me I was almost four months old when Michael came into my life, and he would become my father and the daddy I love and call father to this day.

I see how difficult it must have been for my mother at the age of twenty-one to be a single parent with three daughters. So when she met Michael and he loved all of us, I know it had to seem like a match made in heaven. My mother and father were married for twenty-three years before they got divorced. I was in college.

As far back as I can remember, my father Michael was a very controlling, mean, and angry man. I recall as a child always being scared around him and afraid of him. I never wanted to be around him because I didn’t want him to ask me a question that I didn’t have an answer for, because the backlash from not knowing was horrible. My father was a physical and mental abuser, and most of my life I felt he hated me and my sisters no matter what we did. When I was just about ten years old, he came home from working nights, and all I could remember was my sisters and I being woken up to the sound of "Get the f—— up and Who had the kitchen?"

It was about three o’clock in the morning. I do not remember who had the kitchen, but I do remember one of us saying to him, We already cleaned up, Daddy, and him holding a dirty cup at us and saying, I found this in the cabinet. He then took all the dishes from the cabinet and told us, whoever had the kitchen had to wash all the dishes, both clean and dirty, all over again right now. Then he told the remaining two to clean the whole house again. So we all had to clean the living room and bathrooms all over again at three in the morning.

This was the first time I remember wanting my mother to stand up for us and let my daddy know that his actions were wrong, but she just stayed in her room with the door closed like nothing was happening. I remember feeling hatred toward her for the first time in my life.

My mother was a twenty-six-year-old woman with four kids and a husband that ran the house. This caused a lot of issues with my older two sisters because they knew Michael wasn’t our biological father. They rebelled at a very young age, and my father hated that. I remember the first time I saw my mother as a victim of my father’s controlling ways. My youngest sister, Veronica, was about two, and my father wanted her to stop drinking from a bottle. However, my mother didn’t feel the same way about it. I remember him taking all the bottles and throwing them all away, and my mother went to the store and bought new ones. When my father came home, they got into a big fight, and my mother told me to hide the bottles. After he left for work, she would give Veronica a bottle and have me hide them again when he returned home.

My father’s mean, controlling ways didn’t just stop with people; he was just as mean to the family cat too. I remember when we were living in an apartment, we had a cat, and the cat wasn’t doing what my father wanted him to do, so he put the cat in the bathroom window, which was about six inches wide. The cat would just cry all day. As a child, whenever I went to that bathroom, I would see the poor cat and start crying and feeling I needed to save the cat, but I knew I couldn’t because I would get in trouble too, so again I was stuck with just anger and helplessness.

As my sisters and I grew older, the anger we had toward my parents started to become hate and disrespect; it was worse for my older sister LaTrice because she was more aware of what was happening. As far as I can remember, I never liked or had any good feelings toward my older sister LaTrice, because she too was mean from the day I was born as far as I was concerned, and I disliked her the most.

When LaTrice was born, my mother was in college, so my grandmother took care of her, but this caused a bond between LaTrice and my grandmother that LaTrice did not develop with our mom. Each time my mother came home, my sister treated my grandmother like she was her mother, and that bothered my mother, but what could she do at that point. I have been told my grandmother had an equal hand in raising my sister, and the bond that was established between mother and daughter never really developed the way it should have. I believe my mother was always trying to let it be known that LaTrice was her daughter and not my grandmother’s, but this caused issues because my sister would always run to my grandmother, who would side with her when things went bad at home with Mom or Dad.

LaTrice thought she was all that and a bag of chips, and yes, from my view, my grandmother did treat her differently, which made her feel she was more special to her than the rest of us. This aided in the rift between my mother and sister’s relationship. My sister would call my grandmother every time anything happened. When my parents would get into arguments, she would call my grandmother, and my grandmother would tell my mother how much she disliked my father, and thus the division between my father and grandmother began.

I remember LaToya, my second sister, and me becoming very close. We played together, and we equally disliked LaTrice, and so our bond grew closer. The closeness of our relationship caused LaTrice to dislike us even more. We never wanted to be around her, and we treated her differently, so she was always mad at us. I always believed my grandmother favored my older sister, and it was more evident at Christmas, birthdays, and graduations.

LaTrice would never play fair, and we always had to follow her rules. One day my father had us cook dinner, so LaToya and I decided we were going to kill LaTrice. Yes, we hated her that much. I must have been around ten years old, because we still lived in the same house my father made us clean at three in the morning. LaToya and I were making hamburgers and decided to take three of the blue rocks with algae on them out of the fish tank and put them in LaTrice’s burger to poison and kill her. We got the rock, put it in her burger, and my sister made an X with the spatula so we would know which one had the rocks in it so we didn’t accidentally eat it and kill ourselves or our parents. As we were making the plates for everyone, we were watching LaTrice eat her burger. She ate the whole burger, and nothing happened. She didn’t even see the rocks, and I remember feeling so disappointed that she didn’t die that night. I know that sounds horrible, but LaTrice made our lives a living he—— to the point we wanted her dead. She would lie on us to get us in trouble with Dad, she would make us do things we didn’t want to, and she would beat us up if we didn’t do what she wanted us to do. She was creative in her evil ways.

I also remember, at the same house, my father was sitting in the living room and asked me to get a saucer out of the cabinet. He had instilled so much fear in us by now that we couldn’t just come out and ask, What is a saucer? I was clueless because he had never used that word before. I went to the kitchen and just stood there. My heart was pounding, and I knew I was going to get in trouble, so I just looked aimlessly in the cabinet, praying he wouldn’t come in the kitchen and see my ignorance. He did, and his response to me standing there looking lost was, You mean to tell me you are ten years old and don’t know what the he—— a saucer is? For a ten-year-old little girl, those kinds of words are very hurtful and powerful, and the sad thing about it all is that the people who say those hurtful words don’t even remember saying them, and the ones who hear it hold on to them for the rest of their lives. Your words are very powerful, people. Be careful what you say to others, especially children. They can hold on to them for the rest of their lives. The Bible says, Let no corrupting talk come out your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear (ESV). So be careful what you say; it can make or break a child.

As time went on and we got older, my sister’s relationship with my father got worse and worse. LaTrice began to rebel against his evil ways. Yes, she was the first, but certainly not the last. My father hated this and began to play us against each other. He would get mad at one of us for whatever reason. Let’s say it was around lunchtime, he would go to McDonald’s and get food for everyone except the person he was upset with. If you were the one that was on his good side, meaning he liked you for that moment, you would go downstairs, eat, and be happy, while the one he was upset with was left to sit and listen to the rest of the family eating and laughing. He was extra nice and funny, knowing he was casting out the one child he was mad at. My father was cruel. He didn’t give you a choice to come downstairs or not because he would call the three out of four of us by name to come eat, knowing one of us was not going to share in the meal. I dare you to tell him you’re not hungry if you got called.

By doing that this way, he would cause us to hate each other, I mean really hate each other. We all had our turn in the hot seat with meals. When it wasn’t you that made him mad, you were happy to be on his good side, and you played along because you were hungry and happy he was being nice to you. This cruel treatment went on for years. I don’t really remember where my mother was during those times, but thinking back, I have a strong feeling it wouldn’t have mattered. I remember not feeling like I could fight back with my words like LaTrice and LaToya were doing, but I did fight back nonverbally. One day my father had the windows cracked during the wintertime. I asked him if he could put the window up because we were cold in the back. He said no. As I sat in the back freezing, I decided if I was going to freeze, so was he. What I did was crack my window too, so he could freeze like us. Since he had his window cracked, he couldn’t really tell me to put my window up. I was even prepared for the question of, Why do you have your window cracked? I would have responded, I’m hot. This was the first time I can remember feeling I beat the dragon at his own game.

I did have some good moments with my father, like when he took me to my daddy-daughter dance. I remember it like it was yesterday. We got all dressed up, he opened the door, and during a slow dance, he let me stand on his shoes. I was never so happy to be his daughter as I was that night. I also remember my father supporting me when I wanted to play the trombone in fifth grade. He purchased one for me and pushed me to practice every day, even though my lips were about to fall off at the end of practice.

I also remember when I was nine or ten years old watching Unsolved Mysteries alone one night, and this man had the ability to see people’s aura. He could literally see the color draped around everyone. He knew when people were happy, sad, angry, sick, and everything else. One day he was about to get on this elevator, but when the door opened, everybody’s aura on that elevator started flashing. He had never seen that before and decided not to get on. When the door closed, the elevator cable broke, and everyone was killed. I remember asking God to bless me with that same ability one day. It was the coolest thing I ever saw.

Middle School

As we got older, the fighting and arguments got worse. My mother and father were fighting more, and we saw more of the physical side of both of them. I remember always wanting to go to the skating lock-in with my school to get away from it all. I would have, but my mother would never want to drive us. She never attended any of my school events and always had an excuse as to why she couldn’t make it to school functions.

My parents were so divided on everything. I remember my mother allowed my sister LaToya to have a birthday party at our house during her eighth-grade year and not tell my dad. The party was one of the biggest parties of the year. We had a DJ, and there were about one hundred people in the house. All I remember from that party was my father coming home and walking up the stairs, yelling at the top of his lungs, "Get the f—— out of my house!" I’m telling you I’ve never seen so many people run out the door at one time so fast in my whole life.

I was one year younger than LaToya, so I was in middle school too, but my year didn’t end in a party but more like a funeral. My first day of middle school was when I met this guy named Jerry, who was one of the popular boys in my grade. On the first day of school, he started talking to me in study hall, and all of a sudden while we were talking, my nose started bleeding. I went down to the nurse’s office, and I ran into another boy named Matt who was also in the nurse’s office, taking his medication. I remember him making a joke, Who beat you up? I started laughing and don’t remember much after that.

Jerry and I began talking every day in study hall, and at the end of the week, he asked me out. I thought to myself how lucky I was to get a boyfriend the first week of school and by one of the popular boys. Jerry was like my first real boyfriend, not that I hadn’t kissed a boy before or anything, but he was my real Will you go with me? kind of boyfriend, and that felt great, being it was the first week. Wow! See, I was one of those girls that felt uncomfortable in my own skin at that time, and it didn’t help that I was almost five feet, eleven inches in middle school. Self-confidence was at an all-time low because all the boys seemed to be two feet tall to me in middle school.

I was now dating Jerry, and things were going great at first, until one day a group of girls whom I thought were my friends started talking bad about me because they liked Jerry and he was going out with me and that was a problem for them. D-Day, which was Sunday the day before picture day, I had just returned home from going somewhere with my mother and little sister, Veronica. As we pulled up to my house, I could see this large crowd of people, but then I saw my boyfriend, who lived only four streets down from me, on his bike, so I knew I was going to ask if I could go outside to see him when we got home.

As we pulled into the driveway, I saw my friend Kim walking down the stairs going past my house. When I got out of the car, I said Hey, girl and walked up to her. I noticed her hair was done in finger waves, which was the style back then, and I told her that her hair looked nice. She said thanks. Then I heard my other friend Rachel from down the street, where Jerry was riding his bike, yell for Kim to come down there where they were. Kim just walked off without saying bye or anything. I shook it off and went into the house, but because I saw all my friends plus my boyfriend at the end of the street where he lived, I asked my mom if I could go outside with my friends. She said yes, but I had to take my little sister with me, so off we went.

As we got closer to this big crowd, I could see all my friends were now sitting and some standing in front of my boyfriend’s front porch. I walked right up to them all and said Hey, but no one really said hello back. That should have been my sign, but I didn’t pay it any mind and just sat on the porch with some of the girls. Out of the blue, my friend Rachel was like, So I heard you were talking about my mother, and she was looking directly at me when she said it. It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. I asked, Who, me? I then said, How can I talk about your mother? I’ve never even seen your mother. Kim got up and said, Yes, you did. You said her mother was fat as he——. At this point, I got up because I was still sitting down, and I was in the middle of this big group of ten or so boys and girls and said, No, I didn’t, why are you lying on me? She got in my face and proclaimed her truth to this group, and they believed her and not me at all. I was angry now, and we were now in each other’s face, yelling. The fight was on.

As we were fighting and rolling around on the ground, she got on top of me. Rachel and some of the other girls were holding my arms down. She was punching me in my face, and I couldn’t even hit her back because I couldn’t move my arms. When she put her hand close to my mouth, I bit down on the palm of her hand with all my might. I remember biting so hard that I thought I bit a big chunk off the bottom part of her hand. I could see my little sister kicking and trying to pull them off me out of the corner of my eye, but she was only about six years old, so her efforts had no effect on them. She let me go when I bit down on her hand, and when I stood up, the whole crowd just stopped and gasped. I didn’t know why at the time, but my boyfriend, who never helped me during the fight, yelled out Da—— when he saw my face. Kim had these long fingernails; when I thought she was punching me in my face, she was really scratching and ripping my face apart, but I didn’t feel it at the time, nor did I know what she was doing. She never punched me, not one time, now that I remember looking back at it. They had a plan, and that was to ruin my face for life, I think, because that’s what she did. She ripped my face apart. I was bleeding from every point on my face.

Once I stood up, she looked at me and started walking away. I’m still unaware of what happened to my face. I went after her and started punching her in the face, but the fight was over. I ran into my house screaming and yelling for my mom to help me. My mother came running to me, but when she reached me, she came to a complete stop before getting to me. That was when I realized something was wrong with my face because she just started screaming, Shawna, what happened? I told her, They jumped me. She asked, Who? and I think she was crying by now. I told her it was Kim and my friend Rachel. I don’t recall what happened next. I think she called the police, but what I do remember is my mother telling my dad and two sisters when they got home that night to not respond to the way my face looked when they saw me.

My father came to my room and started to cry. I think it was the first time I ever saw my dad cry in front of me. I asked him if it looked that bad, and he said what any father would tell his daughter when her face was totally unrecognizable, No, baby, it’s not that bad. He gave me a hug and a kiss. I could see it all on his face and my sisters too, but my sisters told me they were going to beat those two girls up and for me to not worry. My mother decided to send my two older sisters to beat the two girls up. She even took off work just to be home when the cops got there to greet them with shock and surprise. My mother told my sisters, You had better beat the he—— out of them. If my baby can’t go to picture day, then neither will they, and that was exactly what my sisters did. They beat the he—— out of them on their way to the bus stop on Monday. My sisters pulled hair, kicked, and punched them like their life depended on it, and at that point, I think it did. I remember feeling somewhat better after the two fights were over.

Later my mother, Rachel’s, and Kim’s mother had a sit-down to stop the madness. My mother made me come, and I remember seeing Rachel’s mother for the first time. She appeared to weigh about three hundred pounds, and she made a comment when she saw my face, something like, Oh my god. Nothing came from the meeting, and my mother let me stay home for two days before sending me back to school. I remember crying and wanting to kill myself from the shame and embarrassment I was about to face when I went back to school. I never really recovered from the aftermath of that fight. I lost all my friends, and needless to say, Jerry and I never talked again. After the fight, Rachel and Kim made fun of me in the halls and would yell out Look at her face! when I would walk by them at the lockers. My sister LaToya helped me by fighting them, but nothing more after that, and the sad part was I needed her help emotionally most of all.

I ate by myself, I sat by myself, and I talked to myself until the day I ran into Matt, the boy from the nurse’s office, in the hall. We started hanging out and eventually became boyfriend and girlfriend. The only problem with that was he was white, and I was black, but my parents didn’t have a problem with it, and neither did his. We became best friends, but I was still in a depression that never lifted. I never went out to play, I hated going to school, my grades started slipping, and from there, I had straight bad grades, because I didn’t care about anything anymore. It was so bad that I hated waking up in the morning Monday through Friday. All I wanted to do was spend all my free time with Matt, but we lived far away from each other, so it was hard to see him all the time.

Near the end of the school year, my mother told us we were moving to Algonquin, Illinois. I remember wanting to leave that day, but that wasn’t possible. I remember thinking I would get a new start in life, and believe it or not, us moving away probably saved my life, because I was at the point where I wanted to kill myself from all the bullying I was going through, still. The week we moved, I told no one, and I remember my sisters not wanting to move and missing their friends badly, but me, I went singing and dancing.

Algonquin—A New Start

We moved to Algonquin, Illinois, and it felt like we were the only black people in this town. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to move, but not to a place where we were the only black people. That was not what I prayed about when I put my relocation request to God. My mother drove all of us kids to the high school to see what the school looked like. I remember seeing cows in the front of the school and my sisters yelling, Mom, where have you brought us? They have cows at this school! I went to a different school because I was only in the eighth grade. Dundee Middle School was the name of my school. I was excited that my past was in the past, and my face was all healed up, and no one knew anything about me—a new start.

On the first day of school, I was looking around for any other black person, and I finally saw one. We ran to each other like long-lost lovers do in the movies in slow motion, on a beach with the sun shining bright behind us. Just joking. She said, Hello, and I said, Thank God I’m not the only black person in this school. She said, Yeah, me too, and we both laughed. Her name was Kathy, and she was about four feet tall, and I stood at almost six feet tall and still growing strong. Yes, we were an odd-looking pair, but from where I came from, she was all right. After hanging around her for a while, we both realized we were just too different to be good friends. She was more hood and proud of it, and I was more reserved and the total opposite of hood. We eventually parted ways, and I started to hang out with this group of girls and this boy I really liked. His name was Johnny.

Johnny was my height, played basketball, and yes, he was white. What other color could he be at an all-white school? Things started going bad a little after we started dating because some of the other students didn’t like the fact that I was dating him, me being black and all. Some of the white boys at school wore white shirts on Friday for white power. Now the messed-up part about this was these were the same boys that I talked to and hung out with at parties from time to time. Now if that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is. I asked this one boy, when I was about to get into a fight with him after he made a racist comment, why he hated black people, and he told me, I don’t hate you, I just hate Kathy, but I like you as a person. Wow, now if that’s not dumb, I don’t know what is.

I also remember on Valentine’s Day our school allowed you to send a card and a flower to a secret crush. So on Valentine’s Day, one of my male friends came to me and told me that something was put in my locker and to not look at it no matter what, just throw it away and to not read it. I ran to my locker and opened my locker and saw this Valentine’s Day card. I was like, okay, this was a gift from him to me, right? I opened the card, and written inside was Happy Valentine’s Day to Nigger from Adolf Hitler. My heart sank, and I was so upset and angry that I was ready to fight everyone in the school that day.

I took the card home, showed it to my mom and dad, and they went to the school the next day to talk to the principal. He acted as if he didn’t know anything and maybe I was mistaken about the white shirts on Friday and everything that I’d told him. I felt alone, again. I couldn’t believe he was brushing this off like I was the one causing the problem in the school, and all he did was tell the kids they couldn’t wear white shirts on Fridays. I called my boyfriend, Johnny, that day and told him we could tell everyone we broke up, but we would still be together just in secret so they would leave him alone. He told me, No, I don’t care what they say or do. I remember feeling so happy that he liked me more than losing his friends. I will always love him for standing up to them like that.

I also remember leaving Hoffman Estates and getting jumped by my friends and getting picked on because I was black. What a life and I haven’t even made it to high school yet. Johnny and I broke up later that year over regular boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, loss of interest or something like that.

One good thing did come out of Dundee Middle School. I learned that I was really good at track and field and especially the high jump. I was so good in eighth grade that the two high schools within the district started recruiting me to go to their school, but I stayed in my district and went to Jacobs High School. Yes, the school with the cows in the front of it where my sisters were going.

High School

Out-of-Control Household

By the time I made it to high school, I was six feet, one inch tall and still growing. My biological father, Charles, was six feet, nine inches, and my mother was six feet, two inches, so me being tall was nothing less of a surprise. My older sister LaTrice was about six feet, three inches, and LaToya was stuck at six feet, one inch. We looked like trees coming down the hall if you could ever get us all together, but that never really happened.

LaToya and I still disliked LaTrice most of the time, but we never hung out together very much in high school because we had different friends. LaToya and LaTrice became a bit closer because they hung out with the same crowd.

Things at home were getting worse for LaTrice. Everyone really, but mainly her. I remember my father finding a letter she wrote to him, saying, I wish he would crawl back under the rock in which he came out from. He went off and told my mother LaTrice had to go. LaTrice really didn’t care about school, and she didn’t have a problem going head-to-head with my parents. She disliked the way my mother allowed Daddy to talk and treat her still, but now she was part of the problem too. She was getting bad grades and got caught with weed in her locker. My mother decided to take her to live with my grandparents. LaTrice wanted to live with them all along, because my grandmother would give her anything she wanted, and she could get away with murder if she lived at their house.

When we lived in Hoffman Estates, LaToya tried smoking weed and maybe a little drinking but mostly weed. When we moved to Algonquin, weed was child’s play. We lived in a predominantly white neighborhood with kids that had an abundant amount of money and time, and that was a very bad recipe. LaToya’s friends were using crack, meth, blow, pills, and of course, weed. So my sister went from going to school, getting good grades, and playing sports, to a full-blown addict in two years. It was crazy. She was doing so badly in school that she eventually had to go to a behavioral school to graduate high school on time. My older sister ran away from my grandparents’ house, fell in love with this boy, and ran as far as Texas to be with him, only to return back home to live again in our household. My other sister, LaToya, was a full-blown drug addict about to do her first live-in rehab center stint.

I remember when my sister LaTrice would run away, and I would see my mom crying in her room. I would go to the grocery store and buy my mom flowers to say I still loved her and it was okay. I would try to make up for the pain my sisters caused with acts of love from me. I remember telling myself, I’m going to do the opposite of what my sisters are doing. They did drugs, so I was never doing drugs. They ran away, so I was never running away. They used hurtful words and anger, so I was quiet and endured most things silently. I did the same with my father. He said I was slow, so I was fast on the track. He said I was stupid, so I was going to graduate from high school and go to college. He tried to break me, so I went to God to hold me together.

My family life was completely out of control, but at this point, I was so used to it that I didn’t really react to all the bad things happening around me anymore. I remember when my mom saw the effect of how I was dealing with all the pain and craziness I was experiencing. One day my mother and LaTrice got into it about something. LaTrice was being disrespectful, and my mom wanted her out of the house. She refused to leave, so my mother called the police. When the police came into the house, my mother was talking and telling them she wanted her to leave. As my sister was walking down the stairs, she said something to my mom causing her to react without thinking, and Mom slapped her right in front of the police. Needless to say, the police took both of them to jail, but that was not the part that stood out. That part was when my mother pointed out to me when she returned home from jail and said, Shawna, something is wrong with you. The fact that while they were fighting and getting arrested, I never stopped cleaning the kitchen, not even when the cops rushed my mom or when my mom hit LaTrice. My mother told me when she got out of jail, which was three days later, because it was a weekend and a holiday at that, she would hate to be around or see the person I finally blew up on. She said, Who keeps cleaning while all that is happening? She thought I must have some deep-rooted problems I needed to deal with soon.

So life went on, and I was now a sophomore in high school, and my little sister Veronica was in middle school. We were five years apart in age, and she was now old enough to start and fine-tune her manipulative ways with my father. Veronica knew from a young age that Daddy was her real father and we had a different dad, so she grew up feeling better than us because she had her dad all her life. My other sisters and I always felt she was treated better than us in all areas, and once she became aware of this, she played Daddy like a fiddle. She could do no wrong in his eyes ever, not his baby girl. I remember getting into a fight with Veronica about something, and she would say, I’m calling ‘my dad,’ and he’s going to kick your butt, now what? She would pick up the phone and call him at work and tell him we beat her up. Daddy would leave work, come all the way home, and say to whomever she got into the fight with, Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, and then he would whip us. At some point we started hitting and fighting back, but he didn’t care; that would only add fuel to the fire, so he would drag us down the stairs by our hair, hit, kick, whatever.

Our mother was more on our side these days, so we would call and tell her what happened with Daddy. She would come home, and they would get into an argument and sometimes a fight. The truth be known, my mother started to take up for us a little too late, because the damage was already done from years and years of what I felt like was her doing nothing. I really felt like better late than never, and I’d take all the help I could get.

Another incident I had with Veronica was one day I came home from school, and Veronica was wearing my shirt that she didn’t ask to wear. Naturally I got upset and told her to take my shirt off now and to stop taking my clothes without asking. She took the shirt off, and instead of hanging it back up or putting it in my room, she took it off and threw it at my face and said, Here’s your dumb shirt back. We started fighting, and I remember no one being home except my dad, but he was in the basement, which was where he now lived because of all the fussing and fighting between him and my mom. We were fighting like normal sisters, and my dad must have heard us because he ran upstairs to see what was going on. Veronica was screaming when he got to the room, and I was sitting on top of her, not hitting her, just holding her hands and telling her to stop. Daddy just ran into the room and saw his baby girl getting beat up. The next thing I know, I was being thrown across the room, where I fell over the bed. I only had on a shirt and underwear. My head and body were facedown between the dresser and the bed, and my father was still trying to hit and punch me. I started kicking him with my feet because they were in the air, and I couldn’t get up yet. He was punching my legs, and I was trying to kick the he—— out of him in my underwear and a T-shirt because Veronica was acting like a spoiled brat. My father never even asked what was going on; he just wanted to save his little girl from the big bad wolf.

Going to Church

Growing up in our household, we never went to church on a consistent basis unless we stayed at my grandparents’ house for the weekend, and at their house it was a must. I remember feeling very uncomfortable talking about God around my father. Well, God must have spoken to my mother one day, because all of a sudden, my mother started going to church on Sunday by herself. After she went a few times, she came home and was like, We are all going to church, talking to all four of us kids.

I was still a sophomore in high school when my mother went back to church, and she was taking all her babies with her even if it was by force. We definitely went by force, because we didn’t want to go at all. We were all like, You can go to church if you want, but why do we have to? See, we never went to church, so now we had to get up early on Sunday and go to church all of a sudden. I remember trying to make sure I had to work on Sundays, because I hated going to church. It was so boring to me, and I can’t say any of us were jumping for joy when we started going. Let’s be honest, we were being forced to go to church, but my mother knew this and didn’t care if we wanted to go or not. We had to go, and that was final.

The first church we went to was in a high school gym. Kathy, my only black friend from middle school, and her family went there too, but it was still oh so very boring even with a friend there. I’m not sure how long we went there, but it wasn’t that long because my mother found another church called Life Changers International Church in Barrington Hills, Illinois, with Pastor Gregory Dickow, a very anointed man of God. This church had hundreds of people in attendance. Famous football players went there, and they had a large youth group that met on Wednesdays. I loved this church, but for all the wrong reasons—boys. I remember wanting to go to church on Wednesday nights just to see and hang out with the boys that attended that church. My father never went with us, and he and my mother were now more divided than ever. One day my father gave me something, not really sure what, but I know I said Thank God, and my father replied back to me with Don’t thank God, thank me. From that point on, I felt very uncomfortable praying or even talking about Jesus around him.

One Sunday my mother came home from church. I’m not really sure why we didn’t go that Sunday with her. Maybe we played sleep or something, and my mother wasn’t in the mood to force us to go that day. She came home and said I’m getting baptized tonight and asked if we wanted to come, not You have to come, but Do y’all want to come, which was a different approach from what we were used to. LaToya and I took it as a choice, because we really wanted to go to Red Lobster that night, so we opted to not go. I didn’t really know at the time the real significance of what she was doing. I mean, come on, my mother was giving her life back over to Christ, and my sister and I wanted to go eat Red Lobster more than seeing my mom get baptized. Who does that?

Mom went off to church by herself, and LaToya and I went off to Red Lobster. To get to Red Lobster from our house, you had to drive down a road called Highway 31. It was a long dark two-lane road, and it went on for some ten miles with all side roads cutting across, but no signal lights until you got to Spring Hill Mall, where Red Lobster was.

We left from the house, and I noticed LaToya didn’t have her seat belt on, but I didn’t want to be that person who was always telling people to put their seat belt on even though I always have mine on. The reason was, I was in a car accident that previous year, and my head almost went through the windshield of my friend’s car. While we were waiting for an opening to cross the street, I took my seat belt off so I could take off my new jacket. We had just bought a burger from Burger King, and I didn’t want to get my jacket messed up by spilling sauce on it. So I took off my jacket and turned around to put it in the back seat of the car as my friend took off to cross the street, but so did a van on the opposite side of the street, and we hit head-on. Since I was just turning around at the time of impact, my forehead hit the rearview mirror, bent it upward, and then continued to crack the