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For all that Anne Grady has been through in her life — years of drug abuse, human trafficking and dodging death — it may have been triggered by an innocent childhood activity.
Grady said her father died when she was 3, and five years later, hoping to impress her mother, she took a page from her coloring book into the bathroom and closed the door. The 8-year-old sat there for hours, making sure to stay within the lines on the picture.
“I wanted it perfect,” Grady said of her coloring project. “I wanted my mother to see it. It was for her. I had a very specific purpose. I wanted her acceptance of this coloring book page to be symbolic of her acceptance and approval of me as a daughter.”
The plan backfired.
“When I got finished, instead of writing ‘by,’ I wrote ‘die’ followed by my name,” Grady said, the enthusiasm in her voice gone. “I wanted her to say, ‘You’re beautiful. You’re smart. You’re creative. I love you and you have a purpose.’ Instead she became angry, and in that moment, she shattered every hope and dream inside that little girl.”
Grady paused, wiped away a tear that smeared her mascara, and added: “I spent the next 30 years or so looking for that acceptance of that love and approval.”
Instead, what she found was a lifetime of hell. A lifetime fearfully looking over her shoulder, a lifetime diving on the floorboard of her husband’s car to avoid being shot by rival gang members, a lifetime facing knives to her throat, guns pointed at her face, a lifetime of being paid for her love, but never being loved.
Now that street walker is a scholarship winner.
Grady, 51, a 4.0 GPA student, a single mother and grandmother, recently was awarded a $3,000 Leading Women of Cincinnati Scholarship to continue her studies at Cincinnati State Middletown. She’s two semesters shy of earning her degree and hopes to become a paralegal, a career that matches her passion and history, she said.
Grady recently spoke at the college’s scholarship and donor banquet.
Tom Hale, interim director of the Middletown campus, called Grady “the perfect” recipient of the scholarship based on her grades, financial need and the obstacles she has overcome. When she speaks to Middletown youth, he said, they see her as a role model.
“They say, ‘If she can do it, maybe I can too,’ ” Hale said. “She’s a good ambassador.”
But before we can celebrate Grady’s accomplishments, we first must appreciate her background.
She eventually ran away from her home in Minnesota when she was 13. She spent eight years, starting when she was 16, as a prostitute in Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Detroit and Texas. She was arrested in Texas in 1982 and was charged with 13 felony counts of prostitution because some of the prostitutes with her were under 18. She pleaded guilty to three charges and since she was a first-time offender, she was sentenced to 10 years in the Texas prison system.
She served 90 days and was released.
Days later, she was back on the streets in Minnesota.
“Prison doesn’t change you,” she said. “I didn’t know anything else. I was good at making money. Good at hustling.”
Not good in relationships. She said her ex-husband and a gang leader were physically abusive. She said one time he took her in the bathroom, repeatedly beat her in the head, and said that if she cried, he’d kill her mother who was in the living room.
“He was sick,” Grady said.
One day, when Grady was out, her ex-husband raped a young woman and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, she said. He was released two years ago.
“God had him arrested and that preserved my life,” she said. “I know in my head that is how God saved my life.”
Grady came to Middletown in 1998 to be reconnected with one of her sisters. Another of her sisters, who lost her husband, Steve Stivers, a former youth pastor at Faith Fellowship Church, that same year also lived in Middletown.
“He was the first man who ever showed me respect,” she said of her brother-in-law. “He never crossed that line like I was used to. He always looked at me through the eyes of God.”
What has she learned since she was saved in 1998?
“I had to learn to accept God’s love,” she said. “I had never been loved before. It has been a long process learning my value as a woman, a human being and as a child of God. For years I never saw my worth.”
She lives in Middletown, works three jobs and remains close to her three children, Miko, 27, Arianah, 25, and Rio, 24, and three grandsons. Daily, she asks her grandsons: Where are the two places you won’t go? Hell and jail, they respond.
She has started a fitness program and has lost 70 pounds. She always takes the stairs at Cincinnati State even on those days when she wears 5-inch heels.
“Never felt better,” she said.
There are things she’d like to change about her appearance. After she was saved, she went through a tattoo phase, she said. She has at least 35 tattoos — “I stopped counting,” she said — that stretch from her neck, down her shoulders and chest to her arms. Each of the tattoos represents a stage in her life. There are tattoos of murder victims, her oldest grandson, tear drops on her chest, and the words “La Familia” on her neck.
Next to that tattoo is the number 187, the police code for murder. That also happened to be the nickname of a boyfriend eight years ago. He is gone. His tattoo remains.
“It was stupidity,” she said of that tattoo.
Some of the tattoos aside, Grady wouldn’t change much about her troubled past. Her life is a book and some chapters can’t be rewritten.
“It all made me stronger,” she said. “If I took it all away, the human trafficking away, I wouldn’t have my kids. If I didn’t have my kids, I wouldn’t have my grandkids. And they’re my world and I know I’m their world. God’s hand was on me and He preserved me for a propose. Success is within our reach. I wasn’t created to fit in. I was created to stand out.”
Then she slowly made the walk down three flights of stairs and headed toward the computers in the Cincinnati State lobby. She had some online homework to complete. She is the poster child for everything right about Cincinnati State.
“They are not ashamed of me,” she said of the college administrators. “Shame is a bondage. I spent years in bondage. They have embraced me and ignored my past. They look at you for your potential.”
Anne Grady has been admired by potential customers for years.
It’s reassuring people are seeing a different potential.
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