Victoria began to try to make contact with her biological mother and her three brothers. Her mother’s sister always blocked her access to her mother until she took it upon herself to show up uninvited at her mother’s funeral in 1983. She was able to learn the details of her mother’s long struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, and in addition, she was able to locate and meet her brothers.
Victoria says that during this time, she had to remove herself from a relationship with a man who had provided for her, but had become controlling and threatening. This is an all too common experience for young women who are emancipated from foster care. Because they are needy of love, attention, food, and a place to live, they are vulnerable. The intricacies of intimate, mutually supportive relationships are unknown to most foster children as they navigate the field of broken attachments or no attachments. Fortunately, for Victoria, she was able to recognize her situation and move on from it.
She secretly continued her battle with hyperhidrosis, soaking her hands and feet in pure aluminum chloride and wrapping them in plastic bags secured with rubber bands. An additional regimen of immersion in positively and negatively charged water allowed four perspiration free hours per day.
Her career continued to grow by fits and starts. She was dancing, modeling, and acting. When she was finally able to be represented by a pair of agents, her professional life began to blossom.
Ultimately, she has become an award-winning actor, veteran of many acclaimed feature films and several television series, including eight seasons on Diagnosis Murder, and thirteen years as Drucilla Winters on CBS’s number one daytime drama, The Young and the Restless.
Today, Victoria is using her creativity in yet another venue – writing. She has been writing since she was a child; writing to the various women who raised her and saving their letters to her. She speaks of the spiritual component of writing when one puts pen to paper in a personal communication so absent from email. The paper is sacred space for her.
Victoria has written her first book, The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir, which stands as a collage of women so central to her life, and to her own tenacity and resilience. She has written a children’s book that is ready for publication. She makes the important point that to do this writing has meant letting go of a lucrative income in show business, to return to the basics. It has been a leap of faith.
The mother of two children, Victoria has married and divorced. She says that the defense of detachment that exemplifies many adults, who were foster children, makes issues of intimacy and lasting relationship challenging. She wholeheartedly endorses psychological help as a means for bridging that gap to healthy relating. She says that her journey in therapy was “relieving—as though a weight had been lifted. It allowed me to be honest about my circumstances, lifted my shame, and acknowledged how strong I was.”
Victoria is adamant in her advice for all women. “The only way to sustain our strength is to honor ourselves with rest. There are so many demands on women today as mothers, wives, workers, and volunteers. We must listen to our minds and bodies. Otherwise, we leave ourselves open to peril and depression. We women are susceptible to compassion fatigue, because we feel the sorrows of the world. So, honor yourself with rest, time, and sisterhood. Understand that the world’s work will never be completed; it will always be there. So, replenish yourself.”
Victoria is the founder of The Rowell Foster Children’s Positive Plan, which provides scholarships in the arts and education to foster youth. She speaks on behalf of foster children and the issues they face while in the foster care system and upon their emancipation. She is a tireless traveler and speaker on behalf of disadvantaged and at-risk youth.
Lastly, Victoria advises women to pray. Though baptized Catholic, she practices no particular religion today. She says that she prays as a spiritual exercise and her vision of God is in the biggest sense and includes all ancestral mothers. “The landscape of Mother Earth is my church,” she says, “So, lean into the bigger message.”
Vickie Stringer
“There are so many doors that we don’t go through. Always be ready, because preparation makes opportunity.”
My friend, Martin Shore, heard about my book-writing project and called me to say that he knew of someone I should interview. He said that this woman was the owner of a publishing house; the largest African American female-owned publishing house in the United States. He made an e-mail introduction for me, but Vickie said she didn’t know Martin. As it turned out, Martin knew someone who worked with Vickie, and so the connection was made.
Vickie was friendly and generous from the beginning. She sent me copies of books she had written and a book about the publishing business that has been helpful.
When I sent her the draft of her interview, it came back to me by return mail with her corrections. She is efficient! And when I arrived at my office the next day, there was a box that had arrived with gifts for me. I received a T-shirt with her logo that says “I Read Triple Crown Books,” which I have done and that I wear to the gym. There was a coffee mug with her logo, which I use daily, and it was filled with candy.
Vickie Stringer is the second to the youngest of seven children born to her parents, who divorced when she was seven. She says that apparently her parents had conflicts, but she wasn’t aware of them and didn’t feel tension at home. “I wouldn’t trade my childhood family life for anything. Everyone looked out for me and so I was spoiled.”
Vickie’s father was an engineer at General Motors in Detroit, and her mother was a schoolteacher. They lived a middle to upper middle-class life. At Cass Tech, the best high school in Detroit, she was quiet and studious and “nothing to write home about.” She had four sisters who were her friends and being home with them was definitely more fun than being at school. As she reflects on this now, Vickie says that though she loved being with her sisters, at the same time she believes that it was limiting, inasmuch as having girlfriends outside her family would have broadened her perspective at that time.
Vickie graduated from high school at sixteen. She wanted to go away to college and chose Western Michigan University, where she pledged a sorority and majored in business administration. She was smart and has been described as charismatic. After her freshman year in college, she transferred to Ohio State University.
Vickie was at a fraternity party when party crashers arrived and one of them caught her attention. She noticed his nice car and his good looks. She claims that it was “love at first sight.” “He seemed like a nice guy,” she says, “but not a good influence.” As she spent more time with him and his friends, “The Triple Crown Posse,” her values began to change. Eventually, she dropped out of school and followed this man into a life of crime, which culminated in her becoming pregnant. At that point, her boyfriend abandoned her and married someone else.
Indulged as a child in her family, Vickie’s life with the father of her son had been one of indulgence, as well. She didn’t really know how to manage money and she was struggling. Since crime was what she had come to know, she continued on this path, starting her own escort service as well as drug trafficking. Vickie says that she developed an addiction to money, which she believes was her downfall. She was arrested for drug trafficking when she was twenty-six years old, and a year later she pleaded guilty to money laundering and conspiring to traffic drugs. Prosecutors had agreed to a lighter sentence in exchange for her cooperation against others involved in the case, though she actually