Laurel author’s rebound from drugs inspires others

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Laurel author’s rebound from drugs inspires others

by Raymond M. Lane | Special to the Gazette

E-mail this article \ Print this article

Photo courtesy of Maya Gilliam

Laurel author Stanice Anderson turned his personal story of tragedy into an inspirational spiritual book. A spoken word production inspired by her book is scheduled to debut in June.

‘‘We didn’t talk much in my house when I was a child,” said Stanice Anderson of Laurel. ‘‘I remember I had to write notes to leave for my father to read, just to express myself.”

That was when the 56-year-old was growing up on Stanton Road in Anacostia in the 1960s, just across the road from what she called the ‘‘farm land of Prince George’s County.” She lived with her brother and parents in the house her dad bought before he graduated from Howard University.

Stan Anderson, after whom she is named, was starting a life of public activism and service, capped when President Johnson appointed him and Nixon reappointed him to serve as a D.C. Commissioner before there was home rule in the District. He owned businesses and a local amateur baseball team.

‘‘He was never home,” Anderson said.

Not that life was bleak. She remembers the busy social life of her parents, and the extended family’s ties to Bethlehem Baptist Church in the District. Her great-grand uncles and fathers had helped build it. Everyone in the family sang and worshipped there for generations, she said.

The Andersons even had a beach cottage at Arundel on the Bay, a private enclave on the Chesapeake where black families could retreat in summer when most public beaches legally excluded African Americans. Harry Belafonte’s family had a house around the corner, said Anderson, remembering ‘‘teachers from Howard and politicians and artists would come and hang at our place.”

‘‘It was quite a time,” she said.

Everything changed, though, when one spring day in 1965 the 14-year old Girl Scout and Baptist choir stalwart decided to play hooky from school.

‘‘I was bored,” she said. ‘‘I wanted to get out and be free for a while.”

She bumped into a classmate, ‘‘a tough girl,” she remembered, who said she knew a place where they could mingle with other teens at a friend’s house. Once there, the ‘‘girl friend” excused herself to ‘‘go to the store,” and there emerged a pack of boys who first beat her senseless and repeatedly raped her.

After threatening to kill her, the boys let her go. Walking to a bus stop, she saw a police station and got to the steps, planning to report the attack.

‘‘I couldn’t go in,” she said. ‘‘My parents would know I was raped, and they wouldn’t like me after that.”

Once home, she told them that a group of girls had beaten her up. After emergency room treatment, and 10 days at home healing, she returned to school. Everyone knew what happened, she remembered, ‘‘and suddenly, I became the class tramp.”

Her parents never mentioned the attack again.

Somehow she graduated and even attended college before taking on a string of lower-paid office and service jobs. And somewhere along the way, she began to use drugs, becoming an 18-year heroin addict who suffered near-death overdoses and still could not kick the addiction despite numerous intervention and self-help programs. She lost custody of her only child.

‘‘I couldn’t get any lower,” she said. ‘‘What saved me was finding God, letting Jesus into my life. In May, I’m having a party to celebrate 22 years of being sober and drug free. I was able to let Lord come into my life.”

What could have been a quiet religious and personal awakening took a quick turn in 1999, when former Washington Post reporter Patrice Gaines was induced by a friend to read an e-mail posting about Anderson’s life story.

‘‘What I saw astonished me,” said Gaines in a telephone interview from South Carolina, where she retired to start her own program to help black women with AIDS. ‘‘There’s a lot of self-help out there, plenty of ‘God’ books,’” said Gaines, herself an author of two award-winning biographies. ‘‘Stanice writes for everybody, with a wisdom about the central truths in everybody’s life — to belong in the world, to be loved.”

Gaines encouraged Anderson to turn the e-mails into a book, and then made her own agent read Anderson’s draft.

‘‘I couldn’t have done it without Patrice,” said Anderson, who never took writing seriously.

The result was ‘‘I Say A Prayer For Me,” a hardback published by AOL Time-Warner Books in 2002, and reissued in paperback in 2003. Steady sales followed, along with guest appearances on radio and television, including ABC radio, the 700 Club, WHUR’s The Daily Drum, and invitations to speak around the country about both her book and recovery.

Her agent currently is negotiating a five-book contract, even as Anderson earlier this year wrote and debuted a one-woman play called ‘‘Walkin’ On Water When The Ground Ain’t Enuf,” a spoken word, poetic, and sung take-off from her autobiography.

Sheryl Lee Ralph, a playwright herself who played Moisha’s mother on the television show of the same name, and the Deena character in the original Broadway iteration of ‘‘Dream Girls,” will introduce Anderson’s work in June at the Studio Theatre in the District.

Said Black Women Playwrights’ Group founder Karen L.B. Evans, ‘‘What Stanice has done is reconfigure her life, her triumphs and sorrow, through art in a way that takes us to unspeakable uplift.”

IF YOU GO

‘‘Walkin” is part of the 18th annual staged reading by the Black Women Playwrights’ Group June 18-19, at the Studio Theatre, 7 p.m. Call 202-315-1321.