'To Reach Up Higher' -
Through Her Own Willpower and Others' Helping Hands, Ellender Rhodes'
Long, Lonely Journey Ends With Hope

State, The (Columbia, SC) - Sunday, March 12, 1995
Author: CLAUDIA SMITH BRINSON , Senior Writer
 
The one-room house with the tin roof has burned to charred and rusted ruins on a lonely loop of a road with no name near Martin.

That is what's left of the house where Ellender Rhodes was born in 1962, delivered by a midwife who never registered her birth, to a mother she remembers seeing only twice.

A few miles closer to town, where a trailer park has sprung up, was once the house where Rhodes ' paternal grandparents brought up her and two sisters. When Rhodes was 9, her grandfather, who loved her, died. Her grandmother then began drinking heavily.

Rhodes ' nickname was Stuffy because "I crawled around on the floor, eating cornbread, just stuffing myself."

But Rhodes was not beloved. Her grandmother cursed, chastised and criticized her to the point that when she was 15, Rhodes took 100 aspirin and climbed out a window, heading for the railroad tracks and a train, intending to die.

She left a note on the kitchen table: "I'm going to kill myself, and here's $2 to get your Anacin back." Friends found the note, and one discovered Rhodes , lying on the tracks as the train drew near. "I got up and started running. I don't know if I was running from the train or him," says Rhodes .

Between these two memories, around what's known as deadman's curve and hidden by a new forest of pine, rot the ruins of Classie Mae Williams' house. After her suicide attempt, Rhodes spent two weeks with her father in Saluda, then retreated to Martin, near Barnwell, and this maternal aunt's home.

At 13, Rhodes went to bars because her grandmother insisted she accompany her older sister. At 14, she dropped out of school at her grandmother's insistence. A month after her 15th birthday, she had her first child, conceived during her first sexual experience by a man in his 30s she later discovered was married.

"I was nothing but a child," she says. "I was real small. But when you've done had a baby, you don't feel like a child anymore."

The Martin landscape can be desolate: scrub pines, decaying shacks, dirt roads, few jobs and most of them minimum-wage. Rhodes grew up poorly, as Southerners say, which might be expected in such barrenness: a child abandoned, disliked by the relative who raised her; a mother too young, surrounded by adults who drank their days and nights away.

But this is also a landscape where women cornrow girls' hair in the shade of oaks, where friends fish in dark creek water, where peas and corn and tomatoes and watermelon grow. Where Rhodes and Williams' children helped slaughter hogs, cure meat and grind sausage; where they listened to 45s, played spades and slept on the porch in the summer heat.

So somewhere in Rhodes , as in the land, was the possibility of greenness, of ripening. It was out of the worst of events that this happened.

Ellender Rhodes ' journey -- to health, to friendship, to true motherhood -- began when the state took her children in 1989. Her six-year journey has incorporated hard work by her and devotion by others, everyone intent on building Rhodes a self, and out of that, a life.

Barely listening.

In Barnwell is a red building known as Big T's, often surrounded by men with beer or bagged "eights," 8-ounce bottles of cheap whiskey.

T's is one of the bars where Rhodes did her drinking. She'd sit on the homemade bench before the front door, drinking until she fell off it. She says, "I stayed drunk."

She adds, "It's sad to say, but you can get a drink, even if you can't get nothing to eat. It was easy. I'd just walk down the road."

When she was 18, Rhodes had a second daughter. During her 20s, the three floated around Barnwell. Breaking corn, picking peas and planting pines were the only jobs she could find. Often the houses she lived in included adults taking or selling drugs.

Sometimes she'd return to her aunt's home, now a trailer behind a convenience store/bar spray-painted "Welcome to Classie's." All Rhodes had to do was walk down a few rickety wooden steps to be surrounded by drinkers sitting at homemade picnic benches or squatting around a fire where chicken stewed in an iron pot.

Her nickname now was Slick. She'd lost four of her upper teeth, and she was 110 pounds of anger, despair and alcohol-saturated flesh.

Williams -- who runs Classie's with her oldest son -- remembers those days with a shake of her head. She sits on a stool in her two-room store, where she sells beer, cigarettes, pork rinds and pickled eggs.

"I used to sit and talk to her, try to tell her right from wrong. She seemed like mine, like my daughter," says Williams.

Rhodes says she'd barely listen. "I might tell her, 'I know it,' or 'I'm going to get help,' and then I'd take another drink."

She was drinking under an oak tree at Williams' in June 1989 when a Department of Social Services worker came to take her children. When she argued with him, the reply was, "Look at you. You're drunk."

Rhodes took her girls back to Williams' old house, where Rhodes was living, but two DSS workers showed up soon thereafter. Rhodes cried; the children cried. The youngest was allowed to pack a few toys.

"I sat out on the porch drinking. They all came out on the porch." Rhodes cursed and said, "You got them. Take them."

She doesn't remember much about that summer. She drank herself into blackouts. She cried. In January 1990, she ended up imprisoned at the Women's Correctional Center for seven months, two of them in the new Addiction Treatment Unit. Upon her release in August, she returned to Martin. Her first day home, she drank a half-case of beer.

She kept drinking. Ashamed, she avoided seeing her daughters, who had been placed at Epworth Children's Home in Columbia.

A call for help.

Rhodes did report regularly to her probation officer, Ted Weathersbee. And she attended outpatient counseling through the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission. She would show up both places sober, but often radiating the fumes of the previous day's drinking.

Weathersbee found her a job in New Ellenton, but that was too far away for Rhodes , penniless and carless in a rural area without public transportation. Even attending counseling was difficult -- a 13-mile walk into Barnwell.

A high-energy man who tells parolees to call him day or night -- and means it -- Weathersbee points to a photo of Rhodes stapled to her file. "Anyone could see the anguish in her eyes, and the scars, the battle scars on her face.

"I saw a young lady with no self-esteem. She didn't care about herself so she didn't care about anybody else. She was as low as low could get. I saw a women mentally and physically abused by men all her life. She drank continuously to ease her pain. She was seriously ill."

He saw something else, too.

"There was something in her eyes, something in Ellender crying for help. When I looked deeper I saw something in her heart crying out. I saw a goodness, that she could do right. When you see good in somebody, you've to take every step you can to pull them out."

There were stumbling blocks. "Our job can be overwhelmingly negative," observes Weathersbee. "Everyone who comes in here has a problem."

Rhodes ' were legion: no high-school diploma, no job skills, no sense of self-worth and no cure in sight for her addictions.

In November, an off-duty Weathersbee took Rhodes to Columbia to discuss the return of her children. They were told the home wanted to terminate Rhodes ' parental rights.

"That really hit her hard," remembers Weathersbee.

Rhodes wanted her children back. She says she knew if she didn't get her children back, she had nothing to live for.

Most of all, Weathersbee worried that "I couldn't take her out of the environment she was in. She'd step out of that trailer, and there they were, juking and partying right there.

"I believe for some people the addiction is so strong, if they are back on the same playground, they will play with the same toys, have the same playmates. They'll fall again," says Weathersbee.

Rhodes took care of that. She fell deep, then she made a late-night call for help.

Weathersbee remembers that night: March 4, 1991. "She called me at home, and she was plastered, I could tell. She told me she couldn't take it any more. She said, 'I have a pint bottle of Jim Beam, and I'm drinking it.' "

By the time Weathersbee reached Rhodes , she had chugged the whiskey and passed out. Weathersbee, who is smaller than Rhodes , slung her over his shoulder and headed to the hospital.

Rhodes came to in a hospital bed to see Weathersbee standing over her. "I told him I needed help," says Rhodes . And he told her he would get it for her. The next morning Weathersbee took Rhodes to the county's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission and argued and begged for a bed at Morris Village, a state treatment center. He was sure this was a door out for Rhodes , that she knew "she was at her dead end."

She got in March 22.

Different intentions. This time, Rhodes had building blocks.

She had the memory of what she'd learned, but couldn't put into action, from ATU. This time, she knew she had been close to death, and she knew she didn't want to die.

Rhodes ' cousins Dot and Glenda Williams drove her to Morris Village in Columbia. "I thought she'd die young," says Dot Williams.

On the way, the trio stopped in Blackville, and Rhodes bought a quart of beer. "I was drunk when I got there. I knew it was the last time. I'd promised myself and God I'd never take another drink."

While the counselors at Morris Village said the same things as the counselors at ATU, Rhodes heard with different ears, different intentions.

"When I told Mr. Weathersbee I needed help, I'd decided."

Tina Turnipseed, Rhodes ' caseworker, says that's the way it works. "She decided she wanted something different. That was courageous. Especially because up 'til then, nobody had believed in Ellender , so she didn't believe in herself.

"Whenever I think of Ellender , I think about her sitting under an oak tree, drunk every day. That's what she had been taught -- this is all there is -- and we do what we've been taught."

Morris Village, says Turnipseed, was a chance for Rhodes to see "everybody's life is not like that," and for her to sample "a positive focus on her, people telling her they believed in her."

Twenty-eight days later, it was time for Rhodes to go home. She had plans to return to Martin. Her counselors encouraged her instead to apply to the Women's Shelter in Columbia.

Home, they knew, was poison.

Her last night, Rhodes had a dream. She dreamed her older daughter stood before her and said, "I don't know why you're going back there, and I'm trying to get away."

Rhodes woke up knowing, "I can't go back there. I can't."

She told everyone she could about the dream. She told them, "That was God, and I heard."

What to do.

Despite the one-day notice, Kathy Riley and Joanne Kernahan took Rhodes into the Women's Shelter in April 1991. "I remember, after asking about 1,000 questions, wondering, 'What will we do with her?' " says Kernahan.

"Her only skill was picking tobacco. She had lost her teeth. She didn't know how to fill out a job application or do an interview. She wouldn't look you in the eyes when she talked to you."

Says Riley, director of the nonprofit home: "The one thing Ellender had going for her was she was like a sponge. She would accept whatever you told her and learn."

Kernahan nods. "Her determination was incredible."

Rhodes ' job hunt was discouraging. She had no skills, little education, no smile -- and no legal identity without a birth certificate. The shelter found her dental care, coached her in social skills and twisted a few employers' arms.

Seven weeks into the search, Rhodes was hired by the Americana Home Factory. She moved into the shelter's extension housing, becoming a volunteer and role model at the main shelter.

In her year at the factory -- before she got caught in a winter layoff, followed by the factory closing -- Rhodes was promoted four times: from cutting to pillow to end-tacking to pleating. Her boss wrote her a letter of praise that she framed: "No matter what the job is, you can always count on Ellender to give 110 percent."

Now Rhodes had a taste of what it felt like to be good at something.

At first, "Because I was low-grade so much of my life, I'd think, 'They're just saying that,' " Rhodes remembers. "Finally, I guess I believed I had changed from what I used to be, and I had a good chance at life."

Kernahan says: "It wasn't until she was able to say, 'I did a good job today,' that she could look you in the eye and feel good about herself. It was wrapped around work."

Riley asks: "Isn't that true of all of us? We find our worth in work. Work helps reclaim a sense of dignity. We are what we do, and women who can't find work have the hardest time of fighting depression, of staying sober."
 

A place to live.

In February 1992, Rhodes was accepted by Trinity Housing Corp. The new program provided homeless families housing for 12 to 18 months, along with counseling and training in job and family skills.

Rhodes told the selection committee she wanted a new life, that she dreamed of being able to call home from work and tell her children, "Please put on the water. I'm coming home for dinner."

Beebe James, then executive director of Trinity, says: "Listening to Ellender 's story blew us out of the water. She had lived a life beyond what we could imagine. Yet she seemed so strong, so determined to change it.

"It overwhelmed me that someone could have that kind of harshness in her life and still have hope. I'm not sure I could have, and that was powerful to me."

Rhodes received a supplementary training wage from Trinity so she could return to school. She found work as a waitress, a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift at $2.16 an hour, serving night people with the shakes and a dollar while she worried about holdups.

When her shift ended, she would change out of her uniform, drink coffee and wait for the 7:50 a.m. bus to Logan Community School and its Single Parent Program. There, Rhodes attended classes in English, math, political science and geography from 8:30 a.m. to noon to prepare for the GED.

School, after all these years, was hard, as was staying awake in a warm classroom when sleep amounted to a few hours a week. But Rhodes kept at it, because, she says, she was "looking for something else to reach up higher.

"I found out that education is the key to success. That's why I'm still making $4.75 -- because I don't have the skills a higher-paying job requires. Anything you show me I can do, but a lot of people don't give you chances."

Eventually, Rhodes switched to tutoring to improve her chances with the GED. She has passed three of the five sections and will be taking the last two again in May.

Trinity moved Rhodes and some furniture from its warehouse into a duplex on Hope Street. The significance of the address was lost on no one.

In the recipe for hope, one of the most important ingredients was Lee Coggiola, a Trinity volunteer and attorney. She offered to help with the legal end of getting Rhodes ' children back.

"Lee Coggiola has been almost joined at the hip to Ellender ," says Margaret McFaddin, Trinity's current director. "We look at it as a covenant, which goes on forever, not a contract, which has an end."

Coggiola says: "(Trinity) counselors were intended to help with budgeting and goal-setting, but Ellender didn't need that. Her checkbook was meticulous, her use of money wise and reasonable, and she came from the Women's Shelter ready to move on to her next phase.

"So I just thought I'd guide her through the legal system and fighting with DSS (Department of Social Services), which we did."

That turned into hours on the phone and full days in DSS offices or Family Court as Coggiola and Rhodes tried to regain custody of Rhodes ' daughters, who had moved to a foster home in Allendale.

Rhodes took to proudly introducing Coggiola as "my lawyer." In September 1992, the two achieved one step, custody of Rhodes ' younger daughter.

Coggiola says: "We all fold at simple things. Ellender had come such a distance and had such a distance to go. But when there were setbacks, she would get up the next day and take another baby step.

"I was taken by her courage and perseverance against odds I would never have to deal with, simply by accident of birth. And her hard work. I didn't know that people had to work so hard to get things they're entitled to. She's entitled to a home, her children, to work, to calling her daughter to put the water on.

"When people say, 'You've done so much for Ellender ,' I want to say, 'You're missing the point. It's not that I've worked hard or bent over backward or sacrificed. It's who I am that gets things done that should have been done for her no matter what. The quiet message between us is she knows that, and I know that, and we can't change that."

From homeless to working poor.

As Rhodes ' tenure with Trinity drew to a close, she fretted.

She made $4.75 an hour as a hotel housekeeper. She paid all her utility bills and $100 a month to Trinity toward her duplex rent. Nowhere in town would she be able to find such low rent, except public housing, and Rhodes was determined not to go there.

That's when Central South Carolina Habitat for Humanity stepped in with a grant from the state's Housing Trust Fund, which allowed the charitable organization to buy and repair houses. Habitat usually builds from scratch.

Rhodes dived with enthusiasm into her "sweat equity," 300 hours of work for Habitat. That, along with $175.20 a month on a 20-year, $29,000 mortgage, will pay for her Eau Claire home.

At her housewarming in March 1994, both Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and Coggiola presented her with sets of Revere Ware, mindful of Rhodes ' dream phone call to put the water on.

In December, the five-room house with a white picket fence got another resident when Rhodes ' older daughter decided to rejoin her mother.

As with most fantasies, however, Rhodes ' reunited family is not exactly what she envisioned.

Rhodes found a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., six-day-a-week job at a nearby convenience store, which guaranteed more hours and allows her to be home when school lets out. While she manages to pay all her bills, she still makes minimum wage.

Her older daughter is making As in high school and hopes to enter the military upon graduation. But her younger daughter, despite counseling and medical help, has problems with health and school.

And Rhodes is being treated for ulcers.

What she learned.

The people who have walked down the road with Rhodes sound grateful, not tired.

Turnipseed, of Morris Village, observes: "For the most part, we have a poor success rate. She's one match light in the darkness. A lot of people here look to Ellender as one we helped."

Coggiola, the Trinity counselor, says, "We all saw something in Ellender that was just truly believable. You felt like, 'Yeah, if there's something I can do to make her trip easier, I want to do it.'

"I just love her. And I hope I will always be in her life."

Rhodes says, "It's still hard for me to trust anybody."

But she can count on many fingers now people she believes care about her, starting with Weathersbee and ending with Habitat's director, Jim Nichols.

"They believe in me," she says. "They know I have more willpower than I do myself. From them I've learned to keep going, don't give up, it won't be like this always.

"I can be thinking negative all day, and they can say a few positive words, and I'm on the right track again, even if it ain't nothing but, 'We love you, Ellender . Things will work out.' "

Rhodes visits Martin at least every other month. She stays in Williams' trailer, talks with cousins and a younger half-brother. At first she would cry, and those who noticed the red eyes would accuse her of drinking, which made her even sadder.

But one night, she awoke on a sofa to hear Williams say, "I'm so proud of Ellender . She stopped drinking. I wish the other children would."

That's the closest to praise she's heard.

But that's OK. Rhodes says, "It's a weird thing. You got to be determined. You got to be willing to take the steps. In the end, you got to do it for yourself."
 

Editor's note: A four-year series chronicling Ellender Rhodes ' journey ends today because Rhodes has met her goals: work, a home, the return of her children.

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Posted with permission from The State Newspaper, Columbia, South Carolina. Copyright and all rights reserved by The State Newspaper.