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Story by Russ Dilday • Photography by Mike McLean


S


tephanie Ellison sings with a voice that blends coun- try and contemporary styles into a beautiful melody. Where the music soothes, however, the lyrics haunt:


Stolen innocence, bleeding and blind. Nothing but a broken shell, Lingering hope inside. I can hear him calling, Calling out my name, As he hears me whisper, Lord, I need your change. I am broken, but don’t throw me away. He is going to fix and make me new today.


“One of the reasons I wrote that,” she explained, “is because my whole life – years and years of my life – I just felt like this broken, empty vessel, and I felt like it was impossible to feel loved, and I felt like it was impossible to truly accept it, really, to embrace it, to accept it, that anyone would really want to love me.” For Ellison, the music isn’t an outgrowth of an artistic imagination. It’s a product of her memory. Now 30, she remembers her childhood like no child should: in brief, distant, painful glimpses.


• I was born into a family of poverty. My mom was a prostitute and drug addict. My dad was in prison most of my life. There was a lot of drug use, alcoholism, abuse and things like that in my life growing up.


• I was the youngest of four children. We moved a lot growing up. We lived in cars, tents, motels, trailers and lots of different places. I moved about nine times a year and really relied more on the school system to help me…mainly because there was food.


• Living in an environment of prostitution and drug addicts, there were men in and out, and there were dark situations.


• We would have to stay up, looking out windows, and make sure that if cars were going by, that they weren’t going to stop, because every car that went by, according to my mom, and whoever she was with, was the people that were going to murder us.


• My mom was also bipolar and schizophrenic, and she, because of that, had trouble controlling her anger. She would use physical violence on all of us children in order to make things happen the way she wanted them to happen.


SUMMER 2015 ISSUE • Buckner Today 29


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