Searching for God
My mother had a strong belief in God but she never took me to church or taught me anything about the bible. I began to gather that she had been raised in some sort of convent or Catholic orphanage where she had been severely traumatized. She never shared any detail, but she told me just enough to know that something very dark had happened in her childhood that was too terrible to speak of. So she decided not to involve her children in religion. But she did believe in prayer and she spoke of God every now and then.
My belief in God began when my neighbor took me to visit her church when I was about eleven. At the time my mother had began using heroine. She had a new boyfriend who introduced her to the drug. From that point on she had moved beyond prostitution to all types of dereliction. Our neighbors began to notice and began to take an interest in me and my little sister. One such neighbor took me to a little Baptist church where I began to hear what I perceived at the time as the voice of God.
Perhaps I had heard it all along. It was the same voice I could hear in my heart that said, “do not steal that candy” or even, “do not walk along the side of that building where the man is standing in the shadow”, but I never paid attention to it. However, while I was sitting in church one day, I heard this voice loud and clear. The voice was telling me I need to know God.
By the time I was 12 years old, I became determined to know God. One day I asked my best friend, “do you want to get baptized? We need to get to know God”. She said sure, so we went to visit another little Baptist church around the corner from where we lived. We enjoyed sitting in the children's section, playing the tamberines and singing songs. We asked them to baptize us, which they did, but we still didn't seem to know God. So we did not continue attending and kept on our search.
As the years began to pass by me, my quest for God became mired in the continued daily struggles of my over traumatized life. I began to seek relief by running away from home, robbing, stealing, fighting, drinking and smoking weed. Ultimately, I ended up dropping out of school. I became a drifter and I wasn't content unless I was constantly on the move.
The Drifter
When I was 14 I decided I needed to work as opposed to going to junior high. So I dropped out and enrolled in The Deloux School of Cosmetology in San Francisco. I had an adult friend fill out the enrollment forms and I told every body from that day forward I was 18.
The first job I found was working in a sandwhich shop on Market Street and I really liked making sandwhiches! It was the easiest thing I ever did. Maybe after all the hardship I encountered in life, I was beginning to appreciate the simplicity of ease.
I heard I could rent a room a few blocks away from my job for $30 each week at a Hostel. A hostel was a boarding house for drifters, tourists and homeless people. In a way, I fit all three, it was perfect! I checked right in and shared a room with a homeless bag lady. She was in her mid 60s, african american, and she kept all her belongings in a shopping cart. We had bunk beds in our room and I remember sleeping at the opposite end of the bunk so I could see her while she talked to me. I remember she was very interesting to talk to and she looked kind of funny upside down.
This may seem like a strange life but to be honest, it was my life and I was beginning to create what I wanted minus all the turmoil, tragedy and drama. I began to realize that the world can be a pretty interesting place, that you get out of it what you put into it, and that if you have a dream, maybe it might come true.
I continued to work part time, attend beauty college and live at the hostel during the entire summer. Some of my friends from Oakland, even came to San Francisco to visit and a very good friend came down and found us both jobs at Fisherman's Wharf where we worked at Pier 39.
It was the summer of 1983 and Break Dancing was sweeping the nation. Pier 39 was a great place to see “Breakers” poppin' and lockin' on the sidewalk while large crowds would gather around. The guys would lay down their cardboard to break on then they would put their “Beatbox” on top of a milk carton blasting all the current hip hop hits. Some of my favorites were “Lookin for the Perfect Beat, Planet Rock, and Genius of Love”. I'd get so excited I'd drop down on the ground and start doing the centepede, then I'd come up with a shuffle and roll out in a back spin. The guys would go crazy!
Oh, back to mys story! When my friend came to stay with me in San Francisco that summer, we got an apartment in the Tenderloin. The tenderloin is a low income neighborhood in the downtown area. It was full of action and excitement. For fun we go down on the strip and hang out with other homeless kids to watch the transvestites work the boulevard. When we weren't hanging out on the strip, we'd hang out at the Larkin Street Youth Center, which was a day center for runaways. It was the youth center that paid for our apartment each month while we went to work and school.
Like all good things must come to an end. When the summer was over, my friend talked me into going back home and attending high school in order to graduate. She told me her mother said it was okay if I came and stayed with them if I wanted to go back to regular school. So I put my beauty career on hold and decided to graduate high school first.
The Bad Girl
I don't have many memories of exactly how things transpired from that point forward but I do remember that me and my friend ended up living in a group home for teenage girls. At the time, we had some pretty negative associations and would some times find ourselves “Boosting”. About five of us would walk into a department store with giant purses, stuff them with merchandise very quickly and then walk out.
Another time, we cased and robbed a girls house who we did not like. That turned out really bad and I ended up getting jumped by her boyfriend in our apartment while all his friends sat around and watched. I ended up knocked out on the floor. However, I still did not learn my lesson. After that, me and my friend jumped the girl. Then we decided to start a small war with a large Somoan family who lived across the hall. That also went bad with me ending up getting jumped by the whole family. Again, I ended up knocked out in the bathtub after trying to lock myself in the bathroom after the family broke down our apartment door to catch me.
The grand fanale came when I decided to steal a car. I wanted to impress my friends so I made friends with a guy I met out on the street. I agreed to go to a motel with him. When he got out the car to get a room, I jumped in the driver seat and sped off with his car. He caught up to me real quick and grabbed on to the side view mirror in order to stop me. I became possessed and determined to get away so I was driving 50 mph down the boulevard with him holding on and flying beside the car. I could have killed him but that thought never crossed my mind.
I must have been watching too many movies with car chases because I got the idea to shake him off. So I shifted the steering wheel to the right with a real quick jerking motion which caused him to fly off to the side of the road. That is when I realized that my shifting to the right caused me to hit a divider and loose control of the car. I was suddenly sailing down the boulevard on two wheels! I was not wearing a seatbelt and I was holding on to the steering wheel for dear life. Then the car collapsed onto the hood as it continued to glide down the street.
As I flew down the road upside down I began to think about God. It was one of those moments when your whole life flashes before your eyes. I thought to myself, this is how I'm going to die. Then I thought, God please don't let me die as the car rolled over once again right side up and came to a stop. As the car rocked from side to side with windows smashed in, I was still gripping the steering wheel, saying Oh My God! Oh My God!
I looked behind me and I could see the guy walking towards me in a daze as people began gathering around. Instinctively, I tried to open the door but it was jammed. So then I jumped out the window and ran. I ran into the night crying in disbelief at the horrible and tragic collision that I had just caused. I kept saying to myself, I could have died, I could have died. Then I began to wonder how I even survived. I began to tell myself, it was nothing short of a miracle. God's angels must have protected me. My life must have some purpose. This is when I began to ask the question, why am I here? Its also when I began to realize that if I didn't get God in my life I was going to die if I didn't kill somebody first.
I tried to push the whole incident out of my mind and pretend like it never happened. For the first few days, I was really scared, afraid that the police would show up at the group home or at my school but nothing ever happened. What did end up happening, however, is that my bad girl ways were beginning to catch up with me.
I liked living in the group home but the other girls in the home (housemates) didn't like me. When I would come home from school, I would find that my clothes had been stolen and one day when I was walking home from school they got some boys to jump me.
I hadn't really gone to school that day. I found that I would only go to school on days when I felt like I could deal with being there. On other days, I'd hang out at the park with friends or hang out at their house. But on my way back to the group home a couple of my housemates were sitting on the side of the house with a couple of guys. I just walked by silently as I usually do with my books in hand.
As I walked by one of the boys yanked my sleeve and said come here. I pulled away from him and he slapped me so hard my books flew to the ground. Instead of picking them up, I just marched in the house and downstairs toward my room. Suddenly I heard a loud thundering sound and when I turned around, I saw all four of them rushing down the stairs behind me. The next thing I saw was stars. I don't even think I felt them pummeling my head with fists. I woke up on the floor crying. If I had to pin this act of violence down to one word, it would be Jealousy. I always felt like I attracted this incident to myself through vanity and arrogance. I was a little stuck up in those days, maybe even snooty.
It was these kind of questions that began to rekindle my thoughts about God. Why did this happen to me? Did I have this coming? What can I do to change my behavior? I began to try and think of ways that I could change. So I decided to quit smoking weed. Smoking weed had become my favorite past time. Although I didn't smoke it every day, I smoked it whenever it was available. And it was not like me to refuse a puff puff pass.
After this episode, I was kicked out the group home and my housemates were allowed to stay. The reason being that my presence in the home creates a disturbance in the other girls. It would be easier if I just went somewhere else. In other words, the home gets paid for three of them and only one of me. So I moved out and ended up living in a foster home for awhile with a really sweet old lady.
The Angel
If thoughts have the power to create reality, then my thoughts must have led me to my next destination or simply put, God must have heard my prayer. Although I had been in a lot of trouble, my own personal reflections began to create a way for me to escape, and my next destination would prove that inspite of my bad girl ways, there was still mercy, grace and acceptance somewhere for me.
My social worker took me to small little house in one of the worst neighborhoods in East Oakland and introduced me to my new foster mother. She sat on the couch with eyes full of joy and excitement to meet me. She was very bubbly and you could tell she had a lot of spunk for a woman her age. She reminded me of an angel. She didnt' hesitate to tell me she was 71 years old and she still liked to drive. She was creole with black, wavy hair and she was full of life and love. I was instantly drawn to her.
“Shell! You come on back here and let me show you your room.” She had it all fixed up and waiting for me. It looked like a room made for a princess with pretty curtains, bed sweetly made with a little throw blanked folded neatly on the end and a fluffy pink rug placed on the floor in front. The whole scene really helped me to relax and made me feel relieved. This was the first time in a long time I had ever seen anyone go out of their way for me. It made me want to be good. If one person can walk into your life and change the entire course of your life, this was that person.
Living with her, I began to understand the meaning of family and accountability. She showed me what it looked like to be consistent and be there for somebody every single day. She taught me what its like to greet the day with joy and to live one's life in service to somebody else. She gave her entire life helping troubled teens and she truly made a difference. From the day that I met her, my life began to take a turn.
