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Life learned the hard way finds its way to the light
© St. Petersburg Times Clarissa Hersey strikes a pose in her chair that suggests a hip version of the American flag. It's not just the snug blue jeans. It's the red-tipped nails, the red boots and the big round earrings that frame her face. Try overlooking all that. You can't. She won't let you. She wants you to know how she "has stepped into the light." Hersey is now a top manager for CASA, St. Petersburg's domestic violence shelter. The story about how she got there could have been taken from the Ike and Tina Turner songbook, where the tunes are all about survival. Clarissa wasn't going to be a maid or a migrant worker, like her mother, and that at least she avoided. She wasn't going to have a big family like her mother, who had eight children. That too Clarissa Hersey avoided. She had only one son. She was going to finish high school. She was the first member of her family to do so. And dedication to school in Sanford where she grew up meant she'd get away from the rest of what was around her. She would rise. She would fly. She didn't. Her father beat her mother, and Clarissa's boyfriends beat her. Families around her were so broken, sexual abuse was not uncommon in them. Clarissa was sexually abused by one of her relatives too. Untold damage was done. "I hated myself as a girl," she says. People around her used drugs. She sold them too. Women around her sold themselves. She sold herself too. She learned desperation and shame, shame that she thinks now was rooted in the sexual abuse she had suffered, shame that she repeated in every trick turned on the street. She was so ashamed she wouldn't act up in Sanford but Orlando, where nobody knew her. She was so ashamed she called herself Candy. "Clarissa wouldn't do those things that Candy would do." And Orlando was where Clarissa hit bottom. She had no home. She was on the soup line. She had fallen to the place where she had no self-respect, a place she remembers that "a lot of people don't come back from." But she was exhausted. She was so exhausted she turned herself in to the county jail. She was wanted for a probation violation. Jail was a wonderful place. The bottom was beginning to look a little like the top. For from jail Clarissa landed in a drug treatment program that she had never heard of, Operation PAR, in a town she had never heard of, Largo. Clarissa Hersey had so much to unlearn she was in PAR for two years. She had to learn how to live without alcohol or drugs. She had to learn all over how to live. She did. She has been clean and sober 16 years. She learned her lessons so well that eventually she got a job at PAR, counseling other addicts. Then she moved to CASA. Now, at 42, she supervises the residential programs for women and their families who have no place else to go. "I'm pretty up there," she says, almost embarrassed. "It's a blessing." Clarissa Hersey tells the kind of story that makes you never want to complain about your own problems. You have a house, you have dinner to eat. People around you communicate with words, not fists. The breaks go your way. They were always going to go your way. They were not supposed to go the right way for Clarissa Hersey. Never. That they did is a not so small miracle, an act of great faith. Tina Turner would understand. -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Eric Deggans Mary Jo Melone Darrell Fry Tampa Uncuffed From the Times Metro desk |
