It was God that said to just lie there and don’t move. After I closed my eyes, I never felt more assured in my life that God really had my back. I was rushed to the trauma unit at Brookdale Hospital and was asked all kinds of questions: Do you know where you are? How many fingers am I holding up? What’s your name? The doctors and nurses were astonished. They were all wondering, if she got shot in her head, where’s the blood?
My five-year journey after being shot wasn’t easy. I went through horrifying nightmares. I used to wake up, screaming, in a cold sweat. I couldn’t stop crying. I would think that if I fell asleep, I wouldn’t wake up again. When I walked down the street I was so paranoid, thinking that someone was going to walk up behind me and shoot me in my head. I felt so numb; I couldn’t talk half of the time. I had to walk around with a gash in my leg where I could stick two of my fingers inside. It was a time when I didn’t want to look at my own leg.
My friends and family suggested that I go to counseling. They wanted me to talk to a stranger about what happened to me. I felt this was the most embarrassing thing in life. I’m a twenty-four-year-old female, and I wasn’t a loose female. I graduated from high school and continued to college. My grandmother raised me in the church, and I was involved in every activity from the choir to the usher board. Why did this happen to me?
Being in a domestic violence incident had made me close off every part of my life. I isolated myself from everything and everybody. I was scared all the time. I didn’t want to meet anybody new out of fear they might do the same thing. I needed something to keep me busy, so I enrolled in beauty school in 2005. Even though I’d been working for the Department of Education for seven years, I needed something else to do. I strived for the best grades in school. I graduated with a GPA of 98.7. I worked at the school in the mornings, went to school at night, and styled hair every day. I was angry, scared, frustrated, and sick about the whole situation.
I started thinking, Maybe I can open my own hair salon. I wanted to write an awesome business plan, so I got in front of the computer and started to type. I prayed and told God, “This is what I really want to do with my life, can you please help me?” It took two years to write my business plan, and I finally finished it in 2007. I wrote a sixty-five-page business plan out of sheer anger. At that point I didn’t want to go to sleep. I guess God said, “If you’re not sleeping anyway, let’s put that to good use.” After completing my business plan, I decided to get incorporated. My business is now called Ebbie’s Hair and Nail Salon, Inc. I just love the Inc. at the end.
October 23, 2004, was the worst and best day of my life! It was the worst day because I never would have thought he could do something like that to me. It was the best day because my relationship with God became stronger. I was never one to take life for granted. I appreciated everything, especially life. I have so much planned for the future. I want to be married and have someone to share the rest of my life with. I just realized that I’m stronger than I think I am, and whatever life has to throw at me, I’m going to throw it right back. I have purpose and meaning in life. I’m here for a reason!
Everyone has a purpose in life—a unique gift or special talent to give to others and the world. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of our own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals!
Ebony Fletcher is the proud owner of Ebbie’s Hair and Nail Salon, Inc., in Brooklyn, New York.
FIRE AND WATER
By Ihotu Jennifer Ali
I love my parents. Truly I do. And I don’t say that just because I should, or because I grew up believing that is what good children should do, or because television and music and pop culture taught me what I came to view as normalcy between a mother and father and their daughter. I actually love them. But love is complicated.
I was born into a family of great love, and in fact, “love” in my father’s native tribal language was the name given to me: Ihotu. I was the eldest child, the pride and joy. And in the beginning, there was nothing but a love that was pure and simple. A love that drove my mother to follow my father from humble Minnesota to an equally humble Nigerian village where she endured lurking lizards and an unknown language and bathed her newborn child in public rivers. That love drove my father to also leave his family and return to the United States so that his children could experience the best education, one he had never known himself. That love also raised me to adore and mentor my two little sisters from the moment each was born. One, with mental and physical disabilities, I took under my four-year-old wing and loved her as if it were I, and not my mother, that had carried her for nine long months. An un-complicated love compelled my mom to fight, even though she despised confrontation, for the ones she loved. She fought with immigration officials to allow my father back into the country; she fought with doctors for the best care for her daughter and her special needs. Despite humble beginnings, my family was rich in love.
But love, even in its richness, eventually becomes complicated. It began with my parents. My dad is a Nigerian. This would have been fine, except that not even twenty-five years in the United States, an American wife and in-laws, and American friends—not even years of marriage and family counseling—could teach him what it is to be an American husband, or father. I have brief, gasping memories of him carrying me on his shoulders or dancing to Okanga drums to the sounds of “Sweet Mother,” and I admired his adventurous spirit and warm smile. Yet even I recognized a strained silence in the house. After years of abuse, neglect, and failed attempts at compromise, my mother finally ended it. She still loved him, even after he abandoned her and her children. My father became a distant memory, an occasional source of intense pain, and the impetus to my sister’s nightmares and my emotional detachment.
I loved my mother and admired her strength. She fought for me to stay in a school district I knew, after multiple moves and new faces and so many changes I could barely keep up. We kept moving, and I never bothered to unpack, yet at least I could stay in the same classroom, if not on the same street. She and my sisters rooted me to reality; wherever we were was home, and anywhere without them would be foreign. It was a comfortable existence, insular and safe, and we were enmeshed in a tight love—too tight, perhaps.
Then she started to falter. As I grew older she seemed to grow smaller, less capable, less aware. Increasingly wrapped in her own world, occasional men wandered in and out of our lives, and I earned the nickname of “mom” among my sisters. I took over when she wasn’t around, sleeping, unable to think clearly, or upset. In short, I took over. I love my mother, and I love my sisters, so I did what needed to be done for us. I was thirteen, and I began working, knowing that she would fall short for rent at the end of the month. And when she asked, apologizing and claiming each time would be the last time, I was neither surprised nor trusting. I knew we survived on the back of food stamps, community Christmas donations, and my hours on the clock or in the kitchen, rather than my hours in any classroom. When she took antidepressants for months, or spent weekends in the hospital, or threatened to commit suicide, I held her up and tried my best to show my sisters that nothing was wrong. I took over. I did this without regrets, because I loved them.
But over time, I realized the love they needed was more than just a shoulder to cry on, or a dependable hand that would prepare dinner or help with rent without complaint. At a certain point, I realized that I had given up myself entirely, for them. I loved them so deeply that I would sacrifice it all—my happiness, my health, my ambitions for a future career and family of my own—for them, and yet we were still only barely surviving. I had fallen into a life of such dangerous love that I was little better off than my mother, and my volatile emotions had been so solidly suppressed that I could no longer feel. I cared for her in times of sickness with the same passion that I recoiled at her inability to raise her daughters. I felt she failed me as a mother by not teaching me to be strong, yet her absence forced me into a role that forever defined my inner