One Step Approach
By Indigo Washington
Picture this, you’re in a
jail cell in winter, Christmas time. Three of your closest friends have just died, leaving you and your best friend out of the whole lot. The reason you’re in jail is your drug addiction and what you do to get your drugs or sell the drugs. A series of unfortunate events has brought you to prison countless times. As you’re sitting in your jail cell contemplating life, you find out that the last of your friends has died. You get her funeral program to see that it is a
poorly constructed, black and white, handwritten mess, printed at Kinkos. This is all the life your best friend had to show for. Along with three of your other closest friends. This is when you decide its time to change your life, but how? Wilma Traylor was in that very situation and she decided to turn to Jesus and put her faith in him. This worked for her, it made her feel better and it made her see the light of life. In her jail cell, she devoted her life to Jesus and changed her whole outlook on life. When she got out of jail,
she started living the life of a Christian, going to church, reading the word of god, and practicing being a good Christian. Eventually, she started to teach a Bible study class at the church she was a member of. Gradually, that somehow turned her into a pastor. She now has her own church in Oakland. As a child, Wilma was molested and she had a lot of anger toward her abuser. Her anger and resentment lead to her trying so-called “gateway drugs” such as Marijuana in her teenage years. When she first smoked
Marijuana, she said she felt as though nothing mattered and she loved it. It was, to her, a way to control her anger and push it to the back of her mind, to self-medicate and mask the initial pain. After that started losing its effect, she started smoking Marijuana and drinking alcohol, which worked for a while. But then when that started losing its effect, and the environment she hung out in, she was exposed to many more drugs. At that time in her life, she was referred to as a “poly-substance abuser” she had smoked PCP, popped pills like Valium, Codeine, Vicodin, and many others. At the time when Crack came along, she just did not care about anything and she had, in her point of view, nothing to lose. She said, “Cocaine tends to make you feel like you can accomplish the world, yet you’re not going to accomplish much if you’re paranoid and you’re moving too fast.” After she became a frequent abuser she would do things like sell other drugs and rob people, but she never sold her body. At this time, she was also snorting heroin and smoking crack. She had a reputation as a drug dealer around her parts of town. She was a self-medicator
and crack cocaine was her medicine. The first time she tried crack she knew her life “would never be the same again”. When she finally got
Before and during her time of incarceration, a total of five of her friends had died. Her “posse” as many would call it. After the last of her friends
copied and hand written. She then realized that that was all her friends life had amounted to, and she was immensely sad about it. She then
died in January, she realized that she needed to change if she did not want to end up like them. Her last friends funeral program was photo-
heard Jesus tell her to “do jumping jacks”, so she did. Then she started to do lunges and other stretches, she then felt better. The many exer-
arrested for one reason or another, she was in and out of prison for about seventeen years of her life. During that time, she was almost always in maximum security. She was not the nicest toward the guards and she did not really want to be nice. And then, gradually, she decided to not be as mean, and when people brought her the food she was supposed to eat, instead of not saying anything, she would say, “hi”, or she would ask them how they are and how their day was. The guards started to like her and she got transferred to medium, then minimum security. There, she was still angry and she decided to turn to God for the answers.
cises she did started to improve her health and her outlook on life. She began to see the beauty in life, even behind bars. She began to see the power of faith moving in her life. She then began to read the Bible and books by Christian authors, such as Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra. She also began to write and get others to be inspired by the word of God. She became an active member of the jail where she was incarcerated. In the eight months of jail after she found jesus, she read a number of books, completed two plays called, Its Like A Jungle Sometimes, and Got Nothing But Love For You, Mama. Both Plays deal with situations that most people are not comfortable talking about,
such as, child molestation and toxic domestic violence relationships, but she presents them in a way that people are “willing to have the con-
versation and sit through the process�. When she finished writing the plays, she wanted to produce them in the jail where she was staying, and they let her. The staff and warden at the jail could see what a positive influence she was on the inmates and what a natural born leader she was. They began to trust her so much that when it was time to produce the play, the staff left her and her inmates-turned-actors alone to practice. Immediately after she got out of jail, she was staying with her sister and sleeping on her floor. The first thing she want-
ed to do was go get her daughter, because she knew that she would go places alone, that she would not dare take her daughter. She said that she knew she “would not be safe” without her daughter. After she got her first job out of jail was Chuck-E-Cheese, and she worked there for one payroll. Then, she decided that she had more skills than were required at ChuckE-Cheese. She and her
daughter then stayed at a domestic abuse shelter, she wasn’t in a domestic violence situation, but she “could not see herself staying in a regular shelter where the let all people stay regardless of their background” because there could be pedophiles there or anyone of that nature. While she was staying at a shelter, she was also working at the Berkeley-Oakland Support Services. It was her first job “working
with dual-diagnosed individuals” with their problems. The shelter she was living in helped her get subsidised housing within ninety days. When Wilma and her daughter got the house, they had “ had a key, a fork, a spoon, two packs of instant oatmeal, a cover, a blanket, and a pillow. We were doing the cabbage patch in the middle of the floor--me and my daughter”.