Easter Morning Brings New Life
- By Karen Free -

Each of the families who now live in the Easter Morning Community was required to contribute 500 hours of "sweat equity" prior to construction of their own homes. For at least one, the resolve to work hard on a new construction project came six years earlier, when she began building her life anew.

With God's help and her own sheer grit, Sallie Smith's six-year effort to rebuild her life culminated with building her own Habitat house.  Smith is pictured hwere with her family: husband David; son Ralph 12; and twin daughters, Tanesha and Danesha, 9

There is no one quite like Sallie Thomas Smith. It's not because she's a recovering alcoholic and addict, or because she's "found God," or because she is a Habitat homeowner, exactly; it's because she is a portrait of endurance, an overcomer of hardship and an inspiration, and it's because she bares her soul as few others would.

Smith grew up as the seventh child in a family of 12 in southwest Georgia. Her alcoholic father worked as a trash collector; her mother as a housekeeper. Although just 43 years old, when she recalls her childhood, it brings history uncomfortably alive: "Growing up black in Americus (Ga.), you didn't matter," Smith explains. "First we were called 'niggers,' then we were told we were Negroes, then colored, then Afro-Americans, and I think today, it's African Americans. I felt like I wished I was white. I didn't know what restaurants or stores I could go into - at the fairgrounds, the white girls' bathroom door was nicely painted; the colored girls' bathroom was over by the bushes. It hurt that people would do you like that.

"I watched my mother get picked up for work, and even though she was the only other person in the car, she had to sit in the back seat. I thought the only thing black people were born for was to shine [white people's] shoes, cook [their] food, raise [their] kids, and come in the back door. My mother never was allowed to walk in the front door of the home she cleaned," says Smith.

"Going to school was painful. I wore long dresses and raggedy shoes. The kids would pick at me all the time. I hated it. Then, when I came home from school, things there weren't too good, either."

Because her father made "home-brew" to keep himself supplied and to make extra money on the side, the resulting chaos and constant flow of strangers made normalcy and nurturing impossible, and, says Smith, "caused these questions to start in my mind: 'Why was I born?,' 'What is love?,' 'Where do I belong?' "

Smith cannot recall any fond memories of childhood. When asked, she offers instead: "I remember my daddy cutting off my dog's head and me watching it run around in the yard with no head." She also remembers that she started drinking when she was 11 or 12.

Not surprisingly, she dropped out of school at 16. She moved to Philadelphia, Pa., and lived with her grandmother. There she learned about the world of drugs - and discovered how much worse life could become.

And did become.

For the next 22 years.

"I became a crack addict," says Smith. "I hated waking up every morning, and I thought about suicide a lot. One day, I was sitting in front of the television drinking a beer and my twin daughters (then 3 years old) stood in front of me. They had on dirty clothes and had dirty feet...finally, I was so sick and so tired, I couldn't take it anymore. I asked God to help me and to guide me somewhere."

To get sober, Smith left the twins and 9-year-old son with her oldest daughter, Tracy, who was 21 at the time. For the next 18 months, Smith worked to rehabilitate herself. In July 1994, she returned to Americus, Ga., and within four months her children were in school, she secured rental housing, began studying for a general equivalency diploma, and became part of a local AmeriCorps/Habitat construction crew.

"The reason I was so messed up was because I hated everybody and everything," she explains. "I found out that forgiveness set me free. Black people are not prejudiced against white people because they're white; it's because we were mistreated by them. I didn't trust white people when I first came to Habitat, but after awhile I learned we was the same kind of people.

"I never wanted to be the only black person [working] on a [Habitat] house. I didn't think we would have anything in common, [I thought] that they'd just talk about books and classical music. But I knew my heart was changing the day that I was the only black person in the group and I didn't realize it. God really changed my heart, and caused me to be able to change my outlook on a whole race of people."

Today, Smith is married, and along with her husband, David, the twins and her son, she lives in a sandstone-colored house in Americus' Easter Morning Community. Daughter Tracy, now 27, lives and works in Atlanta, Ga.

Several of Smith's co-workers helped build her house during Holy Week because they find her to be not only a good friend, but also an inspiration. But Smith sees it another way: "God is wantin' all of us together anyway. [Building houses together] is how he has to do it. That's just the way God set it up."


Karen Free is associate editor of Habitat World.

For more information please visit our Easter Morning Build pages at www.habitat.org/build/emb


Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, August/September, 1999.
This article may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
©1999 Habitat for Humanity International