 |
Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
|
Some lives are like elevators heading irretrievably down. Bystanders avert their eyes becoming helpless participators.
Ryan Ruffin, 18, is easy. He might also be a knowing passenger.
He's got this toothy smile. Lately he's taken to decorating it with gold hardware like rappers and lightweight thugs. Ironic, considering the hardship his earlier braces were on his mother, Lena.
Ryan's slyly gregarious nature is charming. It melts, really.
But that's not enough. No, considering his lineage, charm won't be enough to buoy him along.
His personality does little, if anything, to hold at bay his conspirators -- a family of men who have spent more of their lives in prison than out. Pair that with the white-hot pressures of youth culture in a new millennium pushing the excesses of a bling-bling era, and the mixture is toxic.
Ryan's life, then, reads like a handbook of paradoxes: Do not be like the men before and around you. Get what you can any way you can, but don't become the men before you.
Lena is woefully aware of how vulnerable Ryan is to retreading the path forged by his father and six uncles, all of whom have been in and out of prison. She's aware of it, but she doesn't completely buy into it.
Her two sons are as different as their fathers are tall and short.
"I never wanted to contribute to illegitimacy, to two different sons by two different men," Lena says. "God knew if I became a mother that would keep me in, keep me safe. I made all the errors of a single parent."
Mostly Lena is on point. Like any mother worth her stretch marks, she knows her boys.
"Zach is basic," says Lena, a 49-year-old retired Department of Human Services worker living in Price Hill.
Zachary, 27, is the older of her two sons. He's a parking lot attendant. Both he and Ryan live with her, though Zachary is more apt to be at home when not at work.
Ryan, on the other hand, lives in the wind and uses his mother's address as a pit stop. She hears from him every other day and stays in touch by paging him, punching in 911 to let him know it's her calling.
"I sometimes don't talk about it because it depresses me," Lena says of Ryan's affinity for the streets. "What I really rely on is God doing for him what He's done for me. Ryan is very impressionable. He wouldn't dare say so.
"I think Ryan went through some depression. I wish that I would have done something. What I tried didn't work. Everything got in the way. I talked to him every way that I could. He don't want me to feel responsible for anything."
That's either a young man coming into his own or the "don't ask, don't tell" stance affected by a child breaking from the teachings of a weary parent.
When asked if Ryan might be under the subconscious influence of his family's history, Lena denies it.
"I never thought (family) was a direct influence," she says. "If anything, it would've been on Zachary because he was the one going with me to the prisons.
"Zachary is rather easy-going. He is, even for myself or my family, an underachiever. Even though it's true, I don't like that word. We just touch the ceiling. It's, like, too hard to get past, too hard for a change."
Her raspy voice softens as the truth takes sound.
"Ryan is a manipulator," she says flatly. "He tries to (get away) with things. He's always been really, really outgoing. People always just liked him, even as a kid."
She reminisces about Ryan unthawing a racially forked Northside neighborhood.
"All that changed when he was about 15," she says. "He just started doing other things, the personality being the same. Early on, he started not liking school. I think, when I look back at it, I would say I wish I'd done a lot of things different. They say parenting doesn't come with instructions. I've changed that. I say, yes, they do. It's the Ten Commandments.
"I am convinced that the little boy in Ryan needs nurturing, and I can't do it. He needs it from his dad. He can't sit down. He needs patience, and I don't want him to learn that in prison."
The statement is so matter-of-fact it's numbing.
Unfortunately for the Wilson family -- no relation to me, though I've known them my entire life -- incarceration has been an option and a way of life. Prison for them is as commonplace as family reunions and the reoccurrence of physical traits are for others.
It's a Family Affair
One child grows up to be
somebody that just loves to learn.
And another child grows up to be
somebody you'd just love to burn.
Mom loves the both of them.
You see, it's in the blood.
 |
Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
|
Lena Wilson says of her brothers "I always said if I had
money I'd buy them confidence."
|
Both kids are good to Mom.
Blood's thicker than the mud.
It's a family affair.
-- Sly and the Family Stone
While this story was still marinating, I got a phone call.
Just before Christmas, Ryan was arrested and charged with receiving stolen property for knowingly driving a stolen van. He hadn't stolen it, but he knew it was hot nonetheless.
According to records filed with the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, Ryan also had been arrested on Jan. 29, 2000, for possession of drugs and criminal simulation.
Theft is wrong. But the whims of an idle young man feebly escaping boredom can perhaps otherwise be easily corrected.
That is, if he didn't have six uncles -- James Earl "Chuck" Wilson Jr., 59; Jesse Allen "Romeo" Wilson, 54; Gilbert Lee Wilson, 52; Edward Wilson, 50; Zachary Wilson, 42; and Rudolph, who died in 1994 at age 58 -- and his father, Ryan Ruffin Sr., 43, as well as several male cousins who have all done stints in prison.
Romeo did time for shooting with intent to kill, armed robbery and receiving stolen property. Gilbert was imprisoned for vandalism, forgery, a drug violation and promoting prostitution. Along with more recent charges of aggravated menacing, disorderly conduct, domestic violence, drug abuse and burglary, Edward received, along with Chuck, a death sentence in 1970 for murder. It was commuted to life, and Edward has since been paroled.
Since 1990, Ryan's cousin Charles Lee Wilson, 32, has been incarcerated in Mansfield Correctional Institution on a 15-30 year sentence for domestic violence and attempted rape. Another cousin, Angelo, also Chuck's only son, did time alongside his father for aggravated robbery, attempted robbery, theft and possessing criminal tools.
Chuck currently is serving a life sentence in the London Correctional Institution for murder and escape. That killing was the defining debacle that heralded this family's affinity for prison.
But this story isn't so much about Ryan as it is about what might be in store for him based on what's already been.
This is really about an American family. Deeper still, it's about the women in the Wilson family who, heads sometimes down and backs often arched, help chug it along despite itself.
But there will be no halo handouts. These women themselves are flawed. Yet they've remained free to reminisce about a family as resourceful, mournful, cracked, close-knit and resilient as any other.
It began early. Back in the day, all the Wilson boys had game. They all had some type of hustle.
Malinda, 51 and Lena's only sister, remembers unwittingly being an accomplice to some of her brothers' early criminal forays.
"Eddie was real young," Malinda says in her trademark soft drawl. "He would drag me out of bed sometimes to help with these TVs he was getting. I'd go outside and help put these TVs in the garage. He'd say, 'Come here, Malinda, I got something for you.' I didn't know no better.
"I remember Gilbert used to take me around to different drug stores and get prescriptions (for menstrual painkillers). They were using them for drugs. I used to get Robitussin for them."
Lena says her family splintered when her parents started drinking and fighting.
"It was just like everybody found another way, went somewhere else," she says. "Gilbert and Romeo liked entertaining company. Malinda went to stay with my grandmother. Eddie was out claiming other folks' stuff. Rudy was a young alcoholic, so was Romeo. Gilbert was doing cough syrup, Robitussin."
Still, like any other family, the personalities and roles of each person emerged and were fixed. Chuck and his young wife, Latifah, became the caretakers. Malinda was attached to her mother, Willa Mae, and retreated into a reserved shell after years of abuse and retrieving her mother from bars and stepping between her warring parents during their regular alcohol-soaked battles.
Lena, longing for domestic bliss and inner peace, sought refuge in church at a young age. She also became known as the finger-snapping, skinny-legged girl who could sing, imitating girl groups of the day. Rudolph was the gentle, violently abused and misunderstood quiet one who, at one time, sang with the Isley Brothers. Romeo was the angry aggressor, taking what didn't belong to him.
Romeo, along with Gilbert and Edward, were the family's comedic relief. They did dead-on imitations of their curmudgeonly father, J.E. Raucous laughter saved them. It soothed them and transported them.
But it was Lena who emerged as an unlikely amalgamation of her brothers and sister. She was wild, rebellious, loving, responsible, a raging sinner, a hard worker and a struggling Christian.
She's done and continues to do as much for her family as her tired, diabetic body and fallible soul will allow.
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
"I'm the catalyst that brings us together on occasions," Lena says. "I think that, when anything important needs to be done, they definitely rely on me."
That reliance is evident in the decor of her comfortable Price Hill townhouse. Her home, its walls lined frame-to-frame with photo collages of her brothers, parents, nieces and nephews, is a shrine to the improbability of her family being a family.
Beneath all the images of shiny, happy people, though, remains the fact that in their midst are a murderer, ex-pimps and recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. They're also parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents.
Lena is the one who always had the work ethic, always held down some kind of job. Not that she's never done anything wrong. She's just never bet all her chips against her freedom.
Plus, there's God. She's almost sick with devotion to her church, New Prospect Baptist, and its minister, the Rev. Damon Lynch III.
One of the photos in her house shows her on the steps in front of the West End church. It's corny and sincere, typical of Lena herself. She appears to be walking up the steps but is stationary. Her left foot is a step or two above her right, her body is slightly turned toward the camera and her left hand is cupped, held aloft toward the building as if presenting an offering.
She's smiling hard in the picture. Like her soul is at ease.
 |
Oh, happy day: Lena with her son Zachary Wilson
(left) and Ryan Ruffin Jr.
|
Lena remembers the "spiritual revelation" she had in 1971.
"I had a spiritual revelation under the ministry of Rev. Lloyd C. Blue and I'll never forget it," she says. "I had already been bothered by the messages of my pastor earlier that day. That night I joined. I just couldn't hold my seat. I felt like drums were beating so hard, and I finally made it to the front to say that God is who He says He is."
Until then, Lena had been a bit of a wild child, getting expelled from school in Hamilton yet lighting onto people who provided her with what she missed at home.
One such person was Jane Gross, a prominent doctor's wife in Hamilton. Gross got Lena lodging at the YWCA when times got bad and saw to it that she enrolled in and ultimately graduated from Badin High School, the private Catholic school in Hamilton.
Throughout, Lena was very much then who she is now: a resourceful, resilient black woman who laughs at what she cannot fix and prays for everything else. Amazing, considering who and what she came from.
Your Daddy's Rich and Your Mama's Good Lookin'
Every family has a beginning and an end. In the Wilson clan, those bookends are J.E. and Willa Mae, both alcoholics, both deceased.
J.E. died of emphysema in February 1979 at the age of 62. Willa Mae died of pancreatitis complicated by diabetes in March 1991 at 70.
J.E. was 20 years old when he married 17-year-old Willa Mae. When he died, they'd been married 42 years.
"I've always felt they were two people who were strongly never meant to be together, especially in raising children," Lena says. "My mother was real, real pretty and my dad was dark and handsome, according to her. When my parents met, Dad was in the Army. Rudolph was conceived on a leave.
"My grandfather had told him, 'I'll raise Rudolph myself.' My mother told me (Dad) swam a channel to come out of the service. That's how he got that cough. My mom was pursued by many men and I guess he thought, 'I don't want to lose that.' "
Beauty is only skin deep, and lust isn't enough to start or nurture a family, as J.E. and Willa Mae discovered at everyone else's expense.
"I had a good childhood when my parents were together sober," Lena says. "My mom was a good housekeeper and was a mother to the hilt. And then it was the extreme, that if she felt the need to drink she had to go away.
"My father introduced her to drinking but wouldn't allow her to be social in the home. She'd be with one of those people, look-out people. She was afraid of my father. They'd keep her away from him until she was sober. He came from the era when the women were oppressed."
While the family was still living in Lincoln Heights before moving to Hamilton in 1958, Lena says she was ashamed to bring school friends home, the drinking and fighting were so bad. Once she tricked a classmate into thinking they'd stepped into the wrong apartment.
"I opened up the door and there they were, Mamma in her slip and Daddy in his boxers," Lena says. "I opened it up so fast and there (my friend) was behind me trying to peek in. I closed the door and said, 'Ah ha! That's the wrong apartment! Let's go out and play!'
"We all had strong insecurities, my mother and father used to drink and fight so much."
J.E. was a trucker who, along with his brother, owned Wilson Brothers Trucking. He loved nice cars, suits, furniture and buying clothes for his kids during the holidays.
He also loved to drink. Malinda remembers daring her father to lay a hand on her mother during their drunken bouts.
"Mom was a pretty good mom and she raised us the best she could," Malinda says softly.
There's a permanent and palpable longing, sadness and disappointment to her voice. She sounds like a tear feels.
"Her and Dad started drinking," Malinda says. "I think Dad pushed her to drinking, then she got to be a depressed drinker. It was kind of rough. A lot of times I would go at night looking for her because I wanted my Momma at home.
"She wouldn't be ready to go and she'd sit me down and buy me a pop. I was 9 or 10 years old. I done that a lot of times. I'd dare Daddy to mess with her. I jumped between them a lot. I even jumped on Daddy's back. Daddy used to fight Mom a lot, mostly because she was drinking and he's the one started her to drinking."
Latifah, Chuck's wife who got pregnant with their first child, Terah, when they were both 17, remembers a pitiful domestic situation when she first met Chuck.
"When I first met his family, I was kind of surprised they were poor," Latifah says from her Columbus home. "His mother was drunk, she had been drinking. J.E. wasn't there. I just pretty much knew what kind of family it was.
"Willa Mae was almost uncontrollable. We managed to get Willa Mae committed to the Longview State Hospital. She was a basket case. She would drink and disappear for days and days. They'd find her and she'd be drunk and smelling bad and sometimes she'd be on her period, messing up her clothes. It was an embarrassment to the kids. Willa Mae was a disappointment to J.E."
Latifah says it was common knowledge in the family that J.E. wasn't the father of Edward, Malinda or Zachary.
Malinda says J.E. called her names, but as a child she knew him to be her father.
"Daddy used to call me a yellow heifer," Malinda says. "We didn't know, we didn't pay that any attention. I always called J.E. 'Dad' because I never got to be close to my real father. I just learned that at 29 or 30 (who her real father was)."
Discussions of parentage were off limits, Lena says.
"All of us children were in the same house raised together, and when my Mom was pregnant she just came home with a baby to add to the household," she says. "When I was younger people would say, 'How come some of y'all light and some of y'all dark?' I thought it was because my (maternal) grandfather was half-white. My Daddy was just Daddy.
"I used to ask my mother (about her infidelities). 'Why do you do that?' I'd ask. What she was saying, they were all babies (born) while my father was with another woman. When he was gone, someone else would step in. She was vulnerable."
 |
Family bookends: J.E. (left) and Willa Mae Wilson, the
late parents of six men who spent time in prison.
|
Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
Vulnerability to the streets and to their vices is perhaps the one trait Willa Mae passed on to her children. Especially to her sons.
It was that vulnerability -- to possess what didn't belong to them, to abuse drugs and alcohol as escape mechanisms and to return again and again to prison when rehabilitation failed them -- that ultimately did in the Wilson men.
The women -- Lena, Malinda and Latifah -- were also vulnerable. They haven't always chosen the right men, the right jobs or been the best mothers. But they somehow maintained, surviving in spite of themselves.
But the seminal moment in 1968 when Chuck and Edward robbed a store owner and Chuck shot the man to death initiated the unraveling of all factions of the Wilson clan.
Latifah and Chuck, teen-aged parents at the time, had already seen their share of trouble. Her family conspired to have their first-born child aborted.
"Behind my back they'd planned to abort my child," Latifah says. "Behind their backs, Chuck and I planed to get married."
Her family took her to the doctor's office where the procedure would be performed.
"His office was in a sleazy part of downtown Cincinnati," she says. "You could smell the coal. He didn't use an instrument. He had me take some pills which I didn't swallow."
Meanwhile, Chuck, running with the wrong crowd, had his first tangle with the cops.
"Chuck and some guys got into some trouble with a woman," Latifah says. "They picked up a known prostitute who (the others) had sex with. Chuck didn't have anything to do with it, but they had sex with her in Chuck's car."
Chuck's friends left the woman, an epileptic, in his car. He returned to find her having a seizure. Not knowing what to do and in an attempt to help her regain consciousness, he hit her with a pair of brass knuckles he kept for protection beneath his car seat. He was later charged with and convicted of rape and assault.
The woman tried to extort money from J.E. in exchange for dropped charges. J.E. wouldn't consent to the deal.
The woman had a sexually transmitted disease which she gave to Chuck's cohorts. Chuck never tested positive for the STD, which should have cleared him of the rape charge. He did two and a half years at Mansfield anyway.
Latifah's family put her in the Catherine Booth Home for Unwed Mothers. When she got out, her family treated her like a maid and threatened to evict her if she didn't give up the baby who was supposed to have been aborted.
She was encouraged to keep her baby by a house mother while at the home. She eventually went to live with Chuck's family while they were still in Lincoln Heights. From there, she secretly visited Terah in a foster home.
"When Chuck got out of Mansfield, he came to see us," Latifah says. "We decided we'd take our baby and leave. We went to Chuck's grandparents, and my mother called the Welfare Department and the police. Chuck's grandfather knew a preacher that would marry us."
Chuck was 21 and Latifah was 20. She describes their early lives as "blissful."
"It was a new experience for both of us," she says. "We didn't have a lot of money, but we were so determined to make it because no one wanted us to."
Chuck drove trucks for his father and worked part time at Dunkin' Donuts, while Latifah worked for a woman making $22.50 a week. But whenever employers found out about his jail stint, Chuck lost his job.
They helped each other through the early rough spots, feeling invincible because of their reliance on one another. Chuck encouraged Latifah to get her GED, and she helped him become mere proficient in reading and ultimately helped him get a welder's certificate.
So the couple who, at 16 years old, had met each other at a roller-skating rink in Lincoln Heights were struggling, but they felt they were on their way. Then the 1960s happened.
Black folks grew their hair, toughened their rhetoric and began to covet what for generations had been denied them. Black folks in the '60s wanted everything their parents before them never enjoyed. They wanted every freedom. They wanted everything.
And Chuck Wilson, the son of an alcoholic truck driver and an alcoholic housewife, was no different.
"We started hanging out with couples," Latifah says. "It was like a new era. People were becoming aware of their blackness. Chuck was listening to these other guys try to tell him what to do with his wife, and I resented that. Chuck started drinking really, really heavy. I don't know what he wanted, because we had everything we needed."
Chuck began stealing because he thought Latifah wanted more.
"He thought I wanted something outside our marriage," she says. "He thought money would get it."
The fights started, then the cycle of estrangement and reconciliation. During one such period, they decided to sit down and talk things out. It was shortly before Thanksgiving 1968.
"He was going to get some beer and we were going to sit and talk about our troubles," she says. "Eddie and Chuck went to get the beer. The next thing I know, it's getting late. The news came on about a robbery.
"About that time, Chuck busted in, shaking like a leaf. I knew it was him. He cursed me out and threw the money on the dresser. It was some change, not enough money to talk about. He said if anybody found that money (to say) it was for Grandpa, who collected money for the church.
"I always got after Chuck about stealing. He would steal petty things. He wanted to provide for me, but I didn't want him to provide that way. All I know is he left and I didn't see him for months. The next thing I knew the police invaded my home and my job and I lost my job because of it."
While Chuck was on the lam to Canada and then California, Edward had been in hiding at his grandfather's house with a bullet wound in his hand, a wound he received after returning to get more from the store owner they'd robbed. After Edward got shot, Chuck went back to the store and shot the man four times for shooting his brother.
"He shot Eddie in his hand and Chuck put four bullets in his head," Lena says.
The hunters became the prey. Meanwhile, the cops closed ranks around Latifah and the rest of Chuck's family.
 |
Roll call: Lena visits brothers (left-right) Edward,
Chuck and Gilbert in the London Correctional Institute
in the late 1980's.
|
"The police had even set up a place across from mine so they could look and see if Chuck came back," Latifah says. "I told them I didn't know where he was, and I didn't. They followed me. They watched his Grandpop's house. Eddie went back to Hamilton and destroyed the bloody clothes.
"He turned himself in because he couldn't stand the pain. Chuck managed to sneak back into the city and Grandpop called me. We had a code. And I went downtown and met Chuck and we made love. That was the last time we ever made love."
While in California, Chuck assumed his son's identity. He'd been picked up and released for petty street crimes because the cops didn't know his true identity. He eventually turned himself in.
Malinda says her brothers' arrests and original death sentences sent her into a depressive tailspin.
"I was real shocked, then I got real depressed and upset," she says. "When they were on death row, I thought they were really gonna go through with that. We stayed nervous and praying about that."
Lena, still living at the YWCA in Hamilton, heard about her brothers' troubles from Malinda.
"That was a hard incident," Lena says. "Linda called me. She said, 'Lena? You seen the TV?' I said, 'Why, Linda?' She said, 'It's bad. Eddie and Chuck, they killed ... somebody got killed ... and they said it's Eddie and Chuck.' Even with what we went through, that was too much."
For as much as the robbery and murder debilitated the Wilsons, the boys' victims were never far from Lena's thoughts. She says she thinks often of the man's family.
"I think my brothers do, too," she says. "A lot of times I think this guy said, 'These Negroes is not coming in here and taking my stuff!' I think, why didn't you just give it up? They would've been still punished and you'd have still been alive."
All told, Edward served 26 years for the crime. Chuck has so far served 30 years.
Since Chuck has been in the London Correctional Institute, his brothers Gilbert, Edward and Romeo served time there alongside him -- as did his son, Angelo.
Angelo was 28 years old when he went in, the exact same age as his father when Chuck began his own sentence.
"That broke my heart," Latifah says of the father-son convicts. "Me and Terah used to say he was trying to bust the walls down to get to where his dad was. I don't know what took Angelo there. Drugs took him there. He held up a drugstore with a sawed-off shotgun that didn't work.
"I think that's when I really started doing drugs. I thought, my husband's gone, now there goes my son. Then I thought I was going to end up like Willa Mae."
Latifah says Angelo got a rude awakening when he arrived at London. He thought he'd surely benefit from the inside influence his father had amassed from his years there.
"When he got there, he found out his dad was a Christian," Latifah says. "He found out it was quite another story."
They Reminisce Over You
While Chuck did his time, he divorced Latifah early, saying he wanted to give her her freedom. But the ordeal of the robbery/murder and the fact she'd married so young into a family of criminals took its toll on her.
"Something about Chuck would always resurface," Latifah says. "Every time he talked about coming home, I'd get into a blue funk. Mostly, (I found refuge in) relationships. Whatever the guy was into that's what I was into."
And if her current lover was into drugs, then that was also her pastime of choice. It was why she returned briefly to Cincinnati from 1992 to 1994, "because I had become crack addicted while I was living in Georgia," she says. "I always had to have something to escape."
She floundered, moving from Dayton to Atlanta to Cincinnati and finally to Columbus, where her life is back on track and her children are flourishing.
Angelo, now 37, got his barber's license and is managing a barbershop there. Terah, now 41, works in the office of undergraduate admissions at Ohio State University. Chuck and Latifah have eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Latifah, Malinda and Lena each think if Chuck were free he'd be preaching and working with youth.
And that's because he's always been family-oriented, even stepping in as a teen-ager when his parents were too drunk to facilitate.
"He was a good father," Malinda says. "He'd work, and he was creative. He was a good worker and would provide for his family. He was a pretty good man coming up."
Lena says her brother is doing his best work in prison, that it's God's will for him to be where he is.
"Chuck's in prison today, and there are shackles on his feet but not on his soul," she says. "He's a Paul in that prison. He's been saved for over 15 years. He'll tell you he wants to come home, but then God gives him another soul or two."
Even doing time with his son, she says, was a thinly veiled blessing.
"Angelo came in there and got reunited with his father," she says. "He said when Angelo came through he realized he wasn't able to leave because he had to have time with his son."
Epilogue: Someday We'll All Be Free
As optimistic as that scenario sounds -- father and son convicts reconnecting behind bars -- the utter sadness of it all isn't lost on the Wilson women.
They're saddened by and even sometimes depressed over the lives lost to crime, drugs, alcohol and prison.
Yet, there is hope. Always hope.
"I just hope and pray for them to get away from the stress of life and have a happy life with the little time we've got left on this earth," Malinda says.
For Lena, it comes down to feeling guilty for having opportunities and love from outside forces that her siblings never had.
"I would like them to know their own personal dream," she says. "I always said if I had money, I'd buy them confidence, that's what I would do. Each one of them, when I take them apart, you find some good hearts. I used to feel so guilty when people would choose me, the surrogates. Chuck felt so unloved, and Eddie went away at 18.
"I thought that if somebody treated them like I was treated, things would be different."
Latifah, now a born-again Christian herself and an active member of a Seven-Day Baptist congregation, says she's grateful for her second chances -- at life, love and spirituality.
"Who could appreciate God's forgiveness more than a sinner?," she says.
The forgiveness has blossomed into hopefulness, accentuated by a reconciliation with Chuck in 1996.
"I'm very hopeful," Latifah says. "I wouldn't have put myself out there like that (with Chuck) if there wasn't somehow a chance. I believe God has brought us together. Chuck has helped me be where I am right now, spiritually. He's helped me see that God is a forgiving God.
"In all of that, we became friends again. In talking to him, it helped me know that whatever problems we would have in the future we could work it out the right way. If we never get together, I have to thank God for allowing me to know someone with a faith so strong."
They communicate with letters and phone calls, and she says she keeps a neat townhouse in Columbus with a small garden out back.
"I feel blessed," Latifah says. "I'm making a home for me and Chuck." ©
