I Testify

I TESTIFY

I TESTIFY

FROM THE STREETS, TO THE STRIP CLUB TO FINDING PURPOSE IN HER PAIN…

SHE TESTIFIES

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

DAHLIA MCCUTCHEN

Dahlia McCutchen Inc.

PO BOX 420224

Houston, Texas 77242-0224

Copyright © 2017 Dahlia McCutchen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

{This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of Dahlia McCutchen’s memory. While all the stories in this book are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.}

ISBN: ISBN-13:  978-1545490396

THIS BOOK WAS MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the women of The BOP and all domestic violence victims and survivors! To the women and men, who have no support of family, friends and loved ones! This Book is dedicated to anyone who feels alone in a world full of people.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One………. Torn and Scarred

Chapter Two ……….New Beginnings

Chapter Three ……….Runaway

Chapter Four ……….Fed Up

Chapter Five ………Home Away From Home

Chapter Six ……….The Second Family

Chapter Seven ………..Pimped Out

Chapter Eight ……….Running Scared

Chapter Nine ……….The Game

Chapter Ten ……….Celeb-Reality

Chapter Eleven ……….Alter-Ego

Chapter Twelve ……….Switching Gears

Chapter Thirteen………. The United States of America vs. Dahlia McCutchen

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank GOD first and foremost! Had it not been for His covering, His protection, His favor, and mercy, I would not have been able to finish this book. He allowed me to survive to tell my story. My two beautiful children, they keep me lifted, they are the reason I keep pushing as hard as I do. They are the reason for my smile, my joy…my strength. They truly are the loves of my life. They saved my life. Lorna, Doug, Chris, and the Barnhart family, thank you for being there when I had no one to lean on when it mattered the most. Thank you, for always being my family. Lorna, thank you for always being my backbone, for always being there when I needed someone to just… be there. I love you with all my heart. To all the women in Bryan Federal Prison, thank you for everything…the good and the bad. The highs and the lows… We made it out!

To my family, Glenda, Kai. Tis, and Q, I love you with all my heart! Mama Glenda, thank you for being the mother I needed when times got rough. Thank you for teaching me how to pray, how to call on God and being the woman that God needed you to be for me. Love you, Mama Hicks. To Russell, Katy, Verily, Rhonda, Peedy, Kita and her mother Sheena …you all have been my family when I had none to turn to. You all have opened your doors and your hearts when I felt alone in a world full of people! I love each and every last one of you as God loves me. A.Brown, thank you for teaching me how to be a diva, how to be glamorous at all times and loving me through all my pain. Thank you for being my friend and so much more. You rock and I love you. T.D, thank you for pushing me, for motivating me to be a better me. Thank you for being hard on me when I hated to be told that I was wrong, and when I needed to be told to keep going and push forward. Thank you for being there when I wanted to throw in the towel and call it quits. Thank you for pain and love. Thank you for showing me what God truly needed me to see in people, myself, and what I deserved in life, I love you more than you’ll ever imagine. Terri Wright, I tried to find the words to express my deepest gratitude because thank you just wasn’t good enough, I love you and Cathy with everything I have left in me. Thank you both for being in my life all these years and coming to my aid when I thought God forgot about me. My story will be heard. Tameka Foxx and Gods of the arena, Thank you for taking the torch and bringing me into the arena! I love you because when it mattered, God placed you where you needed to be when you needed to be HERE! To anyone that I have forgotten, thank you for just being you and being a part of my life’s journey. So many of you have left lasting impressions on my life, good and bad. However, had we never crossed paths, I would have never had this story to tell. I truly thank YOU all.

Preface

It has been said repeatedly that my story needed to be told, but where do I begin? You see this story is not your average damsel in distress, prince charming, come and save me type story. Therefore, I am not going to bore you with any once upon a time, happily ever after fairytale. What I want to tell you starts with pain, evolves into hurt, yet graduates into triumph. This story is about the good, the bad, the blessings, and ME. How do you grow up in a loveless life, void of validation with an absence of support…alone in a world full of people? Now think of a little girl asking this question, but wait for the answer…because I have not found that out yet. What I am going to tell you in this book is life according to me, and I say according to me because I don’t want anyone else’s interpretation of what I went through to twist what really happened. Someone else’s account of your life is always different. If they have the opportunity to speak negatively about you, they will in every way possible if they can. I had no idea that I was afraid to tell my story until 10 plus years passed and all I had were the pages that I continued to scribble on. I would look up and a year would pass, two…three…five, and I was still screaming the same song via social media. My book is coming soon…The more I said it, the more people stopped believing in me and I stopped believing in myself. I would ask for help, but the support wasn’t there, while some offered, they never came to my aid. I realized that they were just words that were lost in conversation. I watched my childhood friends’ rise in their careers intermittently checking on me to see if I was still… just talking about this book. It was almost as if they were checking to see if I was still being a disappointment, and that I was no threat to them in any way at all. I am not going to get exaggeratingly spiritual, but to be honest; during the course of my journey, God and I had problems. I had apprehensions about Him and on some days, I felt like He had given up on me. I lost my faith in Him. I was tested and learned some very valuable lessons and for the first time ever in my life, God used someone who purposely injected herself into my life to show ME who I never wanted to be again! There were lessons to learn, pain to endure and some developing to do. I am no celebrity; I am NOT a vixen or video model, although, on some days in my youth, I wished I had been. I am just a survivor! A survivor of domestic violence, physical, mental, emotional abuse… and those cold cruel streets! Now what I want is that when you come to the end of my story you will see that my storms are what built my strength, and my hope is that my strength will get you through your storm. Nothing in life is ever easy…but if you just keep pushing and keep dreaming...and dream BIG, You will come out winning if you just believe in yourself and trust God. So brace yourself because here is my story. It’s real, it is raw and it is my truth. The streets are rough and I am a living witness that if it doesn’t kill you…it truly makes you stronger!

Chapter I

Torn and Scarred

I have always said that black and white is easy, but it’s the shades of gray that change us, at least that’s my theory! What do I consider the shades of gray and how do I define the shades of gray? Well, when you come to the end of this book, you’ll get it. Many people are going to ask what makes my story distinct from any other woman out there and what makes me so unique. I have always felt that certain situations in life are better unsaid; however, there are times in our life when we are presented with opportunities to help someone who has faced a similar situation. You guide them and let them know that it does get better and tell them how you got through it or how you plan to fix it if you have not already. I am often asked, What do you do when you are tackled with the trials and tribulations that life has to offer. I have learned that you try your best to deal with them, you learn from them and if you pass the tests, you learn the lessons and prepare for the blessings after your journey.

Some of us go through great depressions, defeats, endure pain and most times fail at this game called Life. I realized that life was a game… and you have to know your place on the board to have a plan for your next move. I’ve never really done that. I didn’t have a plan; I never took complete control over my life because I was a follower in my premature years but possessed leadership qualities. I have lived everyone else’s life and dreamed everyone else’s dream, but dared to think for myself and dream my own dream. I have longed to be a woman that people looked up to and admired. It would never happen because I listened to all the disbelievers around me telling me what not to do, what I needed to be doing, and how to live MY life. That was their way of keeping me bound to the standards they set for me.

I lived in a world where I let everyone control my thoughts, my feelings as well as my actions. However, that would all change when I finally realized that I possessed the one thing that every woman had. A hustle, a drive to succeed. There isn’t one woman alive that does not know how to get her hustle on or know how to survive. Women were taught young how to survive if their mother possessed that quality. It is so amazing to know that when you are faced with the harsh realities that life has to offer, you reach from deep within and find that you have a hustle and a drive to get to the top. You have a plan on what to do and how to get your life together. You learn how to chase your dreams, make money and how to live the life that you want to live. I have lived my life wanting and longing to be "that bitch"…but not understanding the definition of that bitch. When you brand yourself as that bitch, it’s hard to get away from that label because you are known, stamped and categorized as "A Bitch!" If you aren’t careful, some people will see you as an individual who is on a mission to use people to gain the things in life that you want. You’re called a gold digger and even worse a whore.

I have been one of the fortunate ones to make it off the streets from living the life of a hustler to leading a normal productive life. On the other hand, there have been days when the other side of me says I can do it just one last time but then the mere thought of ever being a caged bird worries me to death. We all have three sides to our story. Heads, tails and the coin’s edge, that’s the rough and jagged side of our lives. The part that is so hard to smooth out and polish but so easy to overlook. We rarely pay attention to the coin’s edge because we worry so much about heads and tails. Those parts usually get a few scrapes and scratches but can always be polished. That’s how I looked at life, like a coin. We tend to worry about the parts that can be smoothed out and polished but not the part that is rough and graveled.

I know you are asking…Who is Dahlia? I am just a woman with a vision, a dream, and a woman who wants what everyone else wants. Love and happiness, and to live a productive and prosperous life. I’m the ‘round the way girl from the ghetto streets of south Philadelphia. The girl who comes from a long bloodline of hustlers, moguls and a family that would fight you at the drop of a dime. Hustle runs through my blood and pumps through my veins. It is no surprise I ended up the way I did. I watched my family grab life by its neck. I watched my cousin chase it and my uncles run to it as my aunts snatched it. I was the first-born girl in our family.

Born in 1974 when the weather was cool and breezy, not cold but just right. On August 12th the world welcomed a menace, a lioness, a breed of her own. Destined to rise, to fall and rise again to the top…. but to go beyond what my family might have expected of me. The world was not ready for what was to come and neither was I. My Yaya became a single parent at the tender age of 18, as my father did like most and left us to live his life as a single man! I was still in diapers when he finally decided to disappear from our lives. Without my father in my life, I desired and wanted the attention of a father figure, but not the kind that I got at the age of six years old.

Innocence taken...precious moments turned into harsh realities. Molested…stripped of everything innocent and pure. I felt like there was no one there listening to me, no one was hearing the silent cries at night…no one there to silence the screams in my head. I was told to stop lying on HIM! He was the man I was taught to trust, the man who my Yaya trusted, and the man who was not even my blood, but the man who became my first. I called him "uncle." He was the man who made me believe that what he was doing to me was ok. Bathroom tactics were his way of getting it up and getting it off. After bathing me, he would rub his hard penis between my tiny legs as he dried off my naked and innocent 6-year-old body.

This is how he made himself feel good. Touching my tiny body, kissing me in a way that I knew was wrong, but too afraid of the consequences if I told what he’d been doing. He promised me that there would be suffering if I told and that no one would believe me anyway. He would get my little sister bathed and out the way so he could have his way with me. He never touched my then 1-year-old sister or did anything to hurt her, but it was I who made him feel like a man.

I could not understand why such a thing was happening to me. What did I do so wrong to make this man take away my life…my freedom…my soul….my yet to come. For three years, I endured the most horrific thing that life could offer any little girl in my position. I finally broke down and told my secret to the girls next door. They were my sister’s god sisters I think. I will never forget…Ashley, Belinda, and their mother Ms. Esther. I had a secret to tell and I asked them to promise not to tell or I would get into trouble. Of course, Ashley and Belinda told their mother and that is when my Yaya's life fell apart. Torn….is what I thought she was supposed to feel but hatred was more like it. A hatred for me…her own daughter. You see, she had a man; my sister’s father, who was a good man, and my yaya did not want to lose him because of what she felt to be a lie. My Yaya was a loose cannon and asked me to tell the truth and to stop lying. She asked me to stop telling stories! She told Ashley and Belinda’s mother that I had a tendency to tell lies, but Ms. Esther asked why would a child lie about such a thing. I caused so much commotion that things got way out of hand. I cannot remember all of the events that happened afterward, but what I do know is that he walked away scot free. I would be damaged for years and years to follow. Unable to forgive…unable to forget and in my mind, I knew that revenge not only belonged to me but also belonged to the Lord. I often asked… When?

Afterward, I know my Yaya assumed, and to this day still thinks that I lied about a grown man molesting her six-year-old daughter. I have been damaged for many years and I have always said before he dies I want to see his face one last time and ask him why, how could he do such a horrible thing? There are so many babies, girls, women…young and young at heart who experience being taken advantage of…raped of everything pure! We are not alone and some of us do get through it. Some days are harder than others but we try to move past it. My life took a huge turn and my family went through so much hurt that life would no longer be the same; I was no longer the same. I’d become a seed inside of a seashell, living in a world of my own. The world was a terrifying place, and no one could be trusted. You know, you sit back and ask yourself whose fault was it. Was it mine? Was it my Yaya? Was it my dad, because he wasn’t there to protect me? Was it that HE had his own issues and demons to deal with? Who truly knows, but what I do know is that the hurt never goes away and every now and again, we think about it, but we never truly move on from it until we come face to face with the truth…our truth of what happened to us.

As I got older, I started to forget, but there was still hatred and rage hidden deep within my soul. I would always tell myself if I am able to help just one person, one woman, one teenager, one soul, I would know my story and my life actually meant something. I had gone through life with a big hole in my heart in search of something. I really didn’t know what that something was but I was going to find it. Trying to find some peace of mind, searching for that piece of happiness I never got. I have walked through life with my eyes wide shut; walking dead. Living in a world of my own…my journey at life began. The last thing I can remember is talking to my dad after it was all over and him saying he was coming for me… to protect me, but that day never came. The one time I met his family is the last time I saw his family. As I cried for him, I hated him because I needed him!! My heart yearned for the man who left me but I knew the day would never come for him to hold me and be my daddy! Who am I? Torn and Scarred!

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood. Sam Ewing

Chapter 2

New Beginnings

1985 … I was 11 years old and it was a new life, the fresh start that my family needed. My Yaya met a new man, a navy man. 6 feet, 210 pounds, solid muscle and was a very quiet man with southern hospitality. I heard that he wasn’t the type of man my Yaya would normally date; as a matter of fact, he was actually supposed to go out with one of my aunts, at least that is the rumor I was told. Yaya rushed to sweep him off his feet. They started going out on the town and things seemed to get a bit serious. They dated for a while, getting to know one another and enjoying each other’s company. Yaya’s guy was a country boy from Silsbee, Texas, and he had come to Philly where most of the navy and army men hung out at that time while serving for our country. He’d been living on the navy base and was coming back and forth to spend time with my yaya and the family because his family was back home in Texas. After dating for quite a while they decided to make things official, not marriage but taking things a step further than where they were.

My Yaya and our ‘new dad’ both had baggage. Back in Texas, there were two boys and there were me and my little sister. Things must have been going good because I recall packing up our things and moving to Delaware, not too far from south Philly. We had a good life from what I remember. Having a new home on the navy base and a fresh start, after all we’d been through, this was really good for us. It was a huge change and it’s what we needed. Thoughts and dreams of what happen to me still haunted me but, I tried to block out the madness, sadness and focus on what we now had. A Family. I had taken that away from my Yaya, or so I thought. Now that things seemed to be in place, we could start new...start fresh.

Leaving all of the chaos behind, leaving my sister’s family behind, we could now move onward to bigger and better things. I know that I may possibly have taken my sister away from her father because of what happened to me, but this is where we now were. If it wasn’t for me he would have probably still been around, at least that is what my Yaya made me believe. There have been days where my Yaya grilled me and reminded every chance she got that I lied and HE never did that to me. It made me feel despised and unwanted every day that I had to relive it through her words and her actions. We had a new life now and every second I got to breathe life, I embraced it. I lived it…I loved it. We instantly became navy kids and we lived on the base. It was different, yet the change is what I know we needed. This man my Yaya was dating, took on a huge responsibility that most wouldn’t take on. A single mother of two, with no fathers in their lives. He became a father of two other men's children. Yaya came with baggage. I was the abused one, the black sheep, the outcast, the child she didn't want and the one she hated; and then there was my younger sister, who she loved more than life itself. He accepted her baggage and became the man in our lives.

The new beginning was unbelievable because we would do things that normal families did. Living on the navy base came with rules. We had to abide by those rules. You see, I was familiar with the harsh ghetto streets of south Philly, but this was no south Philly. There was no hopscotch, no double Dutch or my friends next door. We would infrequently go back to Philly, but we were living a new life and were now moving on. Things were sure to get better, they had to.

Yaya decided that she needed a change and that change meant packing up and moving from the east coast to move to Texas. We relocated to the country back roads of Silsbee Texas. Talk about a change of scenery. We went from being on the block and on the navy base to the country back streets of Silsbee Texas. Horses, snakes, mosquitoes, trees, cows and anything else country you could think of was now our life. We had a new family and that meant, we were now a part of HIS family.

When we moved to Texas, we moved in with our new grandparents. It was very different from what we were used to and it was definitely an adjustment, but his family accepting us into the family was never an issue. I remember when we first met them it was an amazing feeling and the breeze of the trees and the country air was exactly what we needed. We had new cousins, new aunts, and uncles…and happiness…finally kicked in. The only problem for me were the mosquitoes (smiling big right now). They tore my little legs up on a regular basis. I left my favorite aunt Judy, but Aunt Pat replaced her for the moment though I missed my aunt Judy. I still have my two favorite aunts in my life and will always love them both just the same. Even at my early age, they both spoiled me and when I moved to Texas my aunt Pat did just that. I had never been anywhere outside of Philadelphia and Delaware, but my aunt took me and my cousin, her son to Florida. My first trip to Disney World. I had so much fun and to this day, we still talk about that trip like it was yesterday. I would go everywhere with my aunt and cousin and finally…I felt a sense of happiness and hadn’t thought about what happened to me back in Philly.

Things were looking up, my sister and I were finally blessed with the opportunity to meet our new siblings, two stepbrothers. I was around 12 or so at the time we met them and they looked just like their dad. From the looks of things, I think they liked us. They gained two sisters and we came to love our two brothers as if they were our flesh and blood. We went everywhere together and like brothers and sisters we fought…a lot… and we argued…a lot! But we loved…a whole lot. These were my brothers. Their mom was a bit irritated about their father moving on and starting a family with another