By Roenettie Blount
Biographical Data
Everybody calls me Roe. I was born in 1955 in a small, but loving town called Colerain, in North Carolina. I started working in the tobacco and cornfields when I was eight years old. When I reached the age of ten, my grandmother would set me free from the matchbox of Colerain every summer. The first week of June, she would put me on a bus to Brooklyn, New York where I would stay with my “sister,” Sister, until mid-July. My grandmother raised me, and did not learn that “Sister” was actually my mother until I was past thirteen.
I was the second of my mother’s six children. The first, my older sister, Alice was growing up in a household that was just a stone’s throw from my grandmother and me lived, but the people who were raising her would not allow her to acknowledge my grandmother and me as kin. I didn’t get to know my siblings until after we were all grown ups and on our own.
I left North Carolina when I was nineteen, and went to live in the at the fast city of New York. Of course, being there grown and on my own was a lot different from being there as a kid for six weeks of the summer. I had to make a way for myself, meet people, and get established. The fast life of drugs and noise, noise, noise very quickly overwhelmed the young, country girl. “Coke” was still just a cold drink to me, and “weed” was something that grew in the yard as far as any connection with the lingo was concerned, but I did smoke a lot of reefer! I had been brought up in the church as a child in the south, so it would take a while for the harder stuff to take hold. I had always believed in God, and when I felt myself slipping farther and farther away from my roots, I knew there was something better out there for me, somewhere. I needed to change my life around.
At age twenty-two, I moved to Middletown, Connecticut. It was there that I first met up with crack cocaine, sitting on a bed of cigarette ash, atop a bent soda can. My next-door neighbors had been all too glad to introduce us. It was a match made in hell, and it lasted through twenty-three years of ups and downs, including the births of my two children.
Finally getting clean from drugs, as well as from other things, in April of the year 2000, lead me to know that I was still recovering from both sexual and mental abuse—a condition of victimization that I had long desired to change, but did not know the change I needed had to begin within.
I have three major achievements that I am proud of today. I have successfully maintained my current job for more than ten years; I have been free from drugs for eight years; and have been born again in Christ for seven years.
I have a strong sense of spirituality, and 191914 Ministries has helped me see that I can do anything if I try and put my mind to it. There is still so much more to me to be explored and fulfilled. At 191914, I have found the outlet I need to set my poetry free and to show the world that nothing is impossible with God.
Go to RENAISSANCE of the CREATIVE SPIRIT