Cyarra and her sisters grew up living in most all of the housing projects in Norfolk. Leaving the loving care of her grandparents, she had to grow up quickly–navigating the difficulties of living with a parent struggling with addiction. Despite the odds, she has managed to carve out a different life than what was forecast for her.
Cyarra and her sisters grew up living in most all of the housing projects in Norfolk. Leaving the loving care of her grandparents, she had to grow up quickly–navigating the difficulties of living with a parent struggling with addiction. Despite the odds, she has managed to carve out a different life than what was forecast for her.
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(Slow piano music tinkles)
Cyarra: And our house then become the house where everybody's starting to knock on the door. And so you start to wonder like why everybody come knocking at our door like what's going on?
Nichole Hill: Throughout our Norfolk conversations–people often shared stories of triumphs–but we know that there are other experiences. We would only be telling half the story if we discussed the phoenix and not the fire.
Enter Cyarra- a beautiful young woman who is never without perfectly applied bright red lipstick. Being around her feels like drinking a cup of chamomile tea.
Cyarra is a woman whose survived the fire and is willing to talk about it.
Cyarra: My name is Cyarra Goodman. I'm from Norfolk, Virginia, born and raised.
(The following overlaps itself )
Cyarra: I have stayed in several places in the city of Norfolk. Born and raised in Lamberts Point. I have moved over to the south side of Norfolk. I have lived in Oak Leaf Park. I have moved back over off of Church Street, Huntersville. I had lived in Young's Park. I have stayed in Chesapeake for some time. Just recently live in Portsmouth
Oh, I stayed out. Grandy Park, Huntersville Lambert's point. (End overlap)
So I did, I literally stayed all over the 757. Pretty much every project in the 757 area.
(Music ends)
What they all have in common? I think what meshed all those places that I lived together was the people. It was really the the street mentality. It was really the it-girl mentality back then.
I was not a it-girl, but my mom was a it-girl. (Laughs) My mom was definitely one of the it girls. Everyone knew her from Lamberts Point to Huntsville to Grandy Park.
Nichole Hill: But…what is an “it” girl?
Cyarra: It was really by if--if you were in the streets. And when I mean if you were in the streets. Either you sold drugs. Either you were a booster. Either you did hair. You did nails. It was more so the person what they would call today like today's "plug," like you were able to plug somebody into something at a discounted rate. (Laughs) I can say that.
But everyone knew my Mom like... She was fly. She was cute. She had made a name for herself. So we had rarely seen my Mom at that time. All we knew is my Grandmother and my Grandfather. And of course we did know my Mom but you know she had drop in every now and then.
I remember this one time. My Mom had bought groceries to the house for us. And she had like all the candy and I don't know if that was just her way of like just making up for her absence. Let me bring kids all the candy. And so we had like all of these Fruit by the Foot. I don't know if y’all remember those. We had like ring pops. We just had all of this candy and I remember we were sitting in my grandparents kitchen and the floor. I can't remember what they used to call that type of tile. But it was like that plastic tile and it was yellow and brown. I remember like the floor was like pilling up or whatever.
And I remember me and my sisters sittin' the middle of the floor my mom catching up with my grandparents, you know, in the bedroom or something, we just sitting there going through all the bags just eating all this candy.
And so that was just kind of how our relationship was with my mom.
(Sound of an organ playing slowly with echo)
I remember a few times, she would come to my Grandparents house, and she would do our hair and get us ready for school. But then after that she was gone again. So my Grandparents, my Grandmother, my Grandfather, Abraham and Hermina, they actually raised my two older sisters and I.
(Music ends)
My Grandfather was financially well, you know, he was a Longshoreman. He took great care of my Grandmother, he took great care of my Mom, he took great care of my Aunt and her kids, and, my siblings and I. We played with the neighborhood kids, we live right across the street from the play park that all the kids came to.
We had the tire, like it was literally a rubber tire. And it was attached to these, these thick chains on this wooden post. And you put however many people they could fit on a tire and you holding on for dear life.
And that was fun for me. Despite the absence of my Mom not being there. My siblings, (my two older siblings and I) we had fun because we enjoyed ourselves
And so we didn't have an understanding of what was really happening around us.
Nichole Hill: Around this time, Cyarra’s Grandmother passed away, forcing them out of their Grandparent’s home, and into a very different reality.
Cyarra: So once we moved into the projects, the first project that me and my sister had ever lived in. It was fun it and what made it fun was it was a lot of kids that lived out there. And I remember we used to be in the middle of our court and we used to play kickball. So you had about 20 kids out in the front yard. And you know we out there playing kickball, we playing dodgeball, you know, you will see like the older people, our parents or our neighbors, sitting on their front porch, you know, they're talking, they're laughing, they drinking their beer, either they sit on a porch that is sitting on the picnic table, they hanging clothes on the clothesline, but we literally just ran around our neighborhood. And it was always some game.
But, not too long after that, you know, certain realizations have started to set in.
It felt different. And it felt different in the sense of not having, it didn't feel like safety. It didn't feel like the home that my Grandparents had created for us. It didn't feel like the home that oh, that my, that my Grandparents created for us.
The home that we had, when we lived with our Grandparents, it was love. It was structure, we had cooked meals. Whenever we went in the bathroom to wash our hands or to bathe we had running water. The lights we're always turned on. And that was that. Those are essentials, things that a child should have. But moving with my Mom, my siblings and I, we have experienced times where we didn't have running water. When we had to use the bathroom we peed in cups, and we threw it out the window. Our toilet was filled with feces and tissue.
And so that was dysfunctional, and to have a household where, you know, people are welcome in your home, all times of the day, it can be early in the morning, midday, late at night, and you just always got a lot of people just in and out your house. And so it was a sense of—that was a culture shock for my siblings and I, because we wasn't used to that.
My Grandparents protected us. But when we move with my Mom, she didn't know how to raise her children because my Grandparents raised us. So I started to feel this sense of like this sense of fear...
...like something was missing. Yes, it just always felt like something was missing. And I remember my siblings and I, we will always say I want to go back to my Grandparents house. And when my Grandfather would come over there, and he was always there just for a short moment. Because he was coming to drop off food or he was coming to drop off toys and clothes.
And he always give us money, which was the worst thing he could have ever did. Because when he will leave we knew that my mom was coming to take our money.
So it was that sense of just feeling so unsafe. That sense of just feeling so unsafe. And we knew it from the time when we left our Grandparents house like this is different.
Even the kids was different. Because we had trouble with these one girls that stayed a couple of blocks over from us. Because they used to always say, “Oh y'all spoiled y'all think y'all are that”
We didn’t know what that was, like we were so sheltered. We were sheltered we would naive, so naive. We didn't know about fighting and getting jumped. And we had to start to learn that and I became the one like "Oh, I'm gonna fight!"
(Echo organ music with trinkles in it plays)
And so I will fight and to protect myself. I was fighting to protect my older Sisters like the jumping my oldest sister face. I'm gonna fight you. So we just that transition was you have to learn how to defend yourself because you're not safe anymore.
(Tinkling music ends)
And our house then become the house where everybody's starting to knock on the door. And so you start to wonder like 'why everybody come knocking at our door like what's going on?' Drugs is being sold.
Then it goes from that to 'Why ain’t my mama here? It's the whole week and my mom ain't been home.' And you know, my oldest sibling at the time, she 11 years old. My Sister underneath her. She's probably 10 and I'm 9.
I'm getting up in the morning and I'm getting myself ready for school. I have to go in the kitchen and I have to figure out what I'm going to eat and sometimes me figuring out what I was going to eat. It was syrup bread. It was sugar water. It was whatever in the refrigerator it probably wasn't healthy didn't make sense, but you know you just want to put something on your stomach and that's when a realization has set in.
Like, this ain't a regular household. Like my mom shouldn't be gone for a week or I shouldn't be going outside to play and the kids teasing me, because they hear their parents. talkin about, “Oh, your mom walked across the bridge, and she's sold y’all food.” And you know it has some truth to it because you don't have any food in your refrigerator. You knew your Grandparents dropped off some food for y'all to eat, and the food is gone.
(Tinkling music returns )
I realize, there is a misconception about everyone who comes from the projects that they don't want to do anything with themselves.
My story is not that I didn't want more for myself. I just didn't have access to resources, I always knew that I wanted better, but how to get better, or where to go to get better. I didn't know where that resided.
Majority of my life, my Mom did drugs. And I felt if I did something or I change the narrative to my story, that before my Mom died and left this earth, I could give her what she never had, which was the sense of stability and peace, gave her a sense of normalcy of having a place she could call home, being able to sit down at a dinner table with all her kids with her. I always said it that’s what I would do, for my family.
It wasn't until I got older.23, 26 something like that, where I started making different decisions.
My church was up the street off of Balentine. And I'll never forget one day, we was in service and God spoke to me and he said, "I am God and I don't honor no lies." He said, "If you go back to school to get your GED, I'll bless you to get a job. And I'll bless you to get your own place." Because I was lying on my job application on my resume, putting that I had a high school diploma and I didn't. And I was lying really bad. And just as God had showed it to me, had spoken into my heart is exactly how it happened.
I experienced another culture shock and I'm meeting other students that come from different walks of life. I realized that I had lived in a bubble, I realized that I was surrounded by addiction and perversion, and things like that. People who didn't get a chance to dream beyond where they came from. And now I'm around dreamers.
At that point in my life, I had lived so much life, and I had tried so many different things. And nothing was working. But when I got in church, and I gave my life to God, one of the biggest things that God has done for me, it wasn't the home. It wasn't the car. It wasn't me going from H&M to working for a Fortune 500 company, working in corporate America making good money. It wasn't any of that. The biggest miracle that God had did in my life was my mind. He saved my mind because so much trauma had happened to me that I started to feel like I was going to lose my mind.
But when God started to heal me and I started to forgive myself, and I started to forgive other people for the things that had happened in my life and I started dealing with the disappointment the hurt the rejection, the abandonment. I started to heal from the inside out. And, yeah, I got saved and I gave Jesus my life and yeah, I'm gonna stick beside him.
(Tinkling music starts again, with drums)
I'm gonna stick beside him. (Laughs) Yeah.
Nichole Hill: No two stories are the same. But the struggles Cyarra encountered are experienced by many. To access local resources for those struggling with addiction, check the link in our bio.
Visit our website Truthbetoldcommunity.com to find out ways to get involved, and share this episode with friends.
This series was written by Jackie Glass and Hannah Sobol, edited and hosted by me, Nichole Hill, Sound Design by Trendel Lightburn, and our work has been supported by the Virginia African American Cultural Center through a grant from Virginia Tourism Corporation. Follow our work by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts. We couldn’t do this without people brave enough to share their experiences, so thank you Cyarra Goodman.