by Sheila E.
I lay in my bed crying and praying to God for another chance: “Please, Father God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” I asked a friend in Israel to send me some holy water. I read my Bible every day and night, looking for a cure in the Scriptures, looking for healing in His Word. And when I slept, I laid my Bible on my chest.
When my body eventually began to recover, I hoped that my mind would, too. But I’d been an invalid for so long that I was now terrified of going outside. My home was my comfort zone, and the thought of going anywhere else totally freaked me out. My faith in myself was wavering. And my faith in the outside world as a safe place was no longer.
Then one day Ia made me get up and told me I had to try and go outside. Somehow I felt the need to do what scared me most. I got in the elevator, and slowly I walked outside. I hadn’t felt fresh air in over a month. As soon as I stepped out into the sunny brightness of the day, I dropped to my knees in gratitude and kissed a crack in the pavement. Even that pavement was beautiful.
I never realized how many colors there were in my surroundings—the green of the grass, the rich brown of the tree bark, the white of the clouds, the deep blue of the sky. I ran my fingers through the grass as if it was the first time I’d ever seen or touched it. I walked to a tree and I hugged it like it was a long-lost friend.
The words of the poet E. E. Cummings sprang to mind: I thank you God, I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
Lying back on the grass, I cast my eyes to heaven. God had given all of this to me. And it took nearly losing myself to truly see it. I had taken so much for granted. I thought I needed money and belongings and applause, but all I needed was this.
Soon enough, my strength and health returned. It was time to start over. I had a second chance, and I needed another beginning. I missed my music. I needed to make some noise, this time on my own terms and at my own—slower—pace.
No job, no relationship, no nothin’ was worth sacrificing my well-being for ever again.
There was still some heartache to come, though. In the middle of the next major tour with Prince, my Nanny died. Pops’s crazy mother with the lewd sense of humor would never make us laugh again. When I heard the news, I told my parents I’d fly home for the funeral. But when I told Prince, he just looked at me blankly and said, “No.”
That was the beginning of the end with Prince. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t allow me to leave for a few days. He didn’t seem to understand how important this was to me, how much I needed my family right then, and how much they needed me. Prince claimed he couldn’t possibly get anyone to replace me, even for just a few days. He was my boss, he reminded me. He signed the paychecks.
I screamed and yelled at him for a while, and then I stormed off. I thought about jumping on a plane and flying home to the East Bay right then and there. But for some reason I couldn’t let myself go.
There was one thing I could do, though. I told Prince, “Don’t even pay me anymore. I don’t want your money.” Every week for the rest of the tour when the accounts guy came by with my check, I refused to take it.
“You have to!” he’d say, but I’d just tear it up in front of him.
“You have to take your check,” Prince would tell me later.
“I don’t need your money,” I’d reply. “That ain’t why I’m here. I’m here to play music and I’m here because I love you, and when people love each other money doesn’t matter.” We went on like that for weeks.
My heart was hurting. I knew that once the tour was over I’d have to walk away. Leaving the man I loved would be hard. He was my best friend, but if I couldn’t get along with my best friend, why would I stay near him just because he was paying me?
When the tour ended, I quietly slipped away to my place in Minneapolis. I took a few months to recover, to savor the silence and space. I still saw Prince from time to time, not yet able to make the final break. But we weren’t getting along that well. He was busier than ever and he was seeing other women.
I needed something else to believe in. And then came along a woman who became my dearest friend, Lynn Mabry. Peter Michael got to know her first when they were both on George Michael’s tour, and he encouraged the two of us to meet up, sensing we’d get along well.
Lynn and I quickly realized we’d actually met years before, as teenagers, since she sang backup for my uncle Coke. I was sixteen when I went with Pops to a club called King Richard’s by our house in Oakland to see Uncle Coke perform. I vaguely remember meeting her then, and she remembered meeting Pops and me. It is incredible that years later we’d become friends, she’d end up being my manager, and we’d compose and create a foundation together.
Lynn had spent the intervening years on the same kind of crazy roller coaster ride that I’d been on. She’d worked with George Clinton, Talking Heads, George Michael, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac. Sly Stone was her cousin, and she was the co-lead singer of the seventies duo the Brides of Funkenstein. A single mom, she had raised her daughter and somehow managed to hold her life together and glow with inner happiness in spite of all the touring and the noise.
After I reconnected with Lynn, we decided to go into partnership to run my new company, Heaven Productions Music. In the midst of that, she was hired to sing for Bette Midler, but she was also ready to try something different. I wanted a new business manager—I kept firing mine. We got along so well, and she was so great at her job, that she ended up becoming my manager for fifteen years. She was someone I could trust.
Thanks to Lynn, I found work in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a session musician with the likes of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Gloria Estefan, as well as various television appearances and national commercials. She also helped me launch my next two solo projects, Writes of Passage and Heaven, on Concord Records with my new band, the E Train, playing a mix of Latin, soul, funk, and jazz and touring Europe and the States.
The more I got to know Lynn, the more I liked her. She had a quiet calm about her that I’d seen and envied in a few people I’d met along my path. It wasn’t a surprise to learn that she was a Christian. When she saw the way I lived my life and how I treated people sometimes, she gently encouraged me to go to church with her. Although I wasn’t interested at the time, she never stopped asking. I said no to her time and time again, but it was Easter Sunday 1992 when I was so unhappy that I thought, Why not?
Lynn attended the Bible Enrichment Fellowship International Church, pastored by Bam Crawford, who had a very intense way of doing things. She’d written books and preached worldwide. She ran her church like a boot camp and didn’t mess around.
A few minutes into the service, Pastor Bam invited those in the congregation who wanted a new beginning to come to the pulpit and join her.
Something inside me stirred.
“We all make mistakes and sin every day,” she cried. “Don’t carry it with you. Come up, leave it all here, and give your heart to the Lord.”
I felt a tugging at my heart, and I was strangely drawn to go up with the others around me who clearly felt it too. I heard a voice inside me say, You can let go. You don’t have to carry this around with you anymore. You can be free.
I was scared, though—I didn’t want to go up there on my own. Lynn could see I was struggling as she gently encouraged me, but I kept saying no.
With all of us standing, my body started shaking—my hands and knees went weak. I thought, What is happening to me? I wondered if I was having some sort of relapse, which scared me even more. But the more scared I became, the more I felt the need to make my way to the front of the church.
In the end, I couldn’t stop myself.
I couldn’t fight it anymore.
The seed of hope from my physical and mental collapse was ready to flower.
By the time I made it to the front of the church, I had purged it all and openly de
clared my love for Jesus Christ. I sat on the steps of the pulpit and cried like a baby. My life had been out of control for many long years, and I realized it there and then. I wanted to do better and be better. Before I knew it, I had fully redirected my life to surrender to God.
That Easter Sunday in Los Angeles was an intense and personal experience. In the following weeks and months, it became even more so. Once I gave my heart to Christ, it felt to me like all hell broke loose. I felt a negative pull on my life. It was dark—it was the enemy, Satan. The moment I said yes to the Lord, I felt attacked from everywhere.
Strange things started to happen—a series of events and misfortunes that seemed too coincidental to be happening to me and to those I loved all at once. I became increasingly paranoid and felt like something was trying to get to me, and then—if it couldn’t reach me—it would try to hurt my friends and family. That really scared me.
Afraid of what I may have triggered by declaring my love for God, I stayed away from church for a year. I slipped back into being my old self and saw Lynn’s concern and sadness for me. She shared later how disheartening it was to see me so unhappy and disrespectful to people, including her.
It took a long time for me to appreciate what she was telling me and to accept that I really wanted Christ back in the forefront of my life. Little by little, as I began to read the Bible again, I started to see everything differently. This time, the words of the Scriptures really seemed to jump out at me.
Taking a deep breath, I took that step back to church, and from that day on, I embarked on a walk of faith, peace, and kindness that I would do my best to continue daily.
We are all attacked by sin and temptation, but my daily walk in love shows me how to handle those temptations. Prayer is essential in all that I do. My band and I pray before every show. I have made a personal commitment to be a blessing to someone or something every day, even if it is just by brightening that day with a smile, a kind word, or a good deed. My whole family tries to do the same.
My father was raised Catholic and always had a strong faith, so he was very pleased that I had found the Lord. He was even happier that I started to do ministry work and became a “minister of music.” My enthusiasm for Jesus was invigorating—Peter Michael became a minister in another church, as did three of my nephews, which is wonderful; God’s love is reaching the young.
Once Pops, Moms, and Zina moved near me, I decided to attend another church so that we could have fellowship together. We have such an enriched spiritual awareness as a family now. Experiencing the power in speaking to Him personally was such a breakthrough, and doing so as a family is even more powerful. For me, religion is more about following rules and laws. The divine connection is having faith, honoring the Word, and having a spiritual relationship with God.
Faith had always been at the core of my childhood. We went to St. Anthony’s church every Sunday and said our prayers every night. I remember saying my blessings before bed and praying for my family one by one. There was always a Bible in the house, though I don’t recall reading it. When our stomachs were growling and we couldn’t find anything good in our kitchen, we’d knock on our neighbor’s door, enduring the Bible readings in hungry anticipation of the peanut-butter sandwiches they would give us. Most aspects of religious rituals felt like a task, though, and I didn’t feel spiritually connected to them.
I liked when Pops made enough money at a gig for us to have meat on Sundays after church—great big plates of pork chops and applesauce, which was small compensation for being in that drafty old building singing songs that didn’t connect with me at all. When we were younger we didn’t have any choice, but as we got older we still endured it because church meant so much to my parents.
The sanctuary was cold and uninviting. The services were boring, and I couldn’t hear or understand what the priests were saying half the time. It seemed like church was related to guilt. I dreaded the confession booth, racking my brain for “bad” things to confess to the priest, like not listening to my parents or stealing change out of Moms’s drawer to buy candy.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. God, please forgive me,” I would plead. So I talked to God on Sundays, or when I felt I needed forgiveness for some new sin, but I didn’t have a personal relationship with Christ like I do now. At the time, I didn’t even know such a relationship was possible.
My spirituality is personal, but I gladly share it with others. I hope to inspire others to walk with God, but I have no interest in pushing any agenda. I respect the views and opinions of others, whether they are nonbelievers or they’ve embraced another spiritual path. My spirituality works for me. And through it, I have found healing and salvation. I don’t share the fire-and-brimstone, hell-and-sin talk to minister to nonbelievers. My approach to saving a soul is all about love and being the best you can be. It’s not to make other people become Christians.
My belief is that when you find true eternal love, you’ll see God and want more of Him. I look at myself first to see where change is needed before I even think about trying to change anyone else. I don’t feel it’s my job to change anyone anyway. I believe my purpose to make a difference by inspiring others to be the blessing. And when I’m blessing someone, I’m being blessed right back.
I see that there was no choice in my path. If I had kept standing still, nothing would have changed. I needed a major life shift, a spiritual 180. My music is all about change and spontaneity as expressed in my altering the drumbeat. It was time I altered the beat of my own life. My music, like my faith, feeds me. Combining the two made such spiritual sense.
Once I discovered the depth of my faith, everything took on a whole new meaning. Like the stance I usually assume at the end of every intense solo on the timbales: legs firm, right stick pointing straight up. I acknowledge God, from whom my gift comes.
Liza Minnelli was in the audience of a benefit I performed at once and she gave me a great endorsement, telling me she loved that final stance. “It’s powerful,” she said.
Now, in the midst of prayer, I feel the same intensity. My right stick is in the air pointing to the heavens while my feet are firmly planted on the earth. I’m honoring God, because it’s He who lets me do what I do. I’m praising Him. As the audience claps they’re thanking me, and I am in reverence to Him.
Thank you, Jesus. Hallelujah. You are worthy to be praised.
Lynn was so important in showing me how to rediscover and tap into my faith. She was also pivotal in helping me move on to the next important stage of my “recovery” from my previous life. Through “walking the walk” and studying the word of God, I came to realize that I didn’t want to carry my former self around with me anymore. It was time to face and examine what had happened in my childhood.
I felt the need to forgive myself.
In one of our deeper conversations, Lynn revealed to me that she had been molested at twelve years old. I was shocked and saddened for her but so impressed by how she’d been able to forgive her molester and move on. What a revelation!
With her being a true friend and one I could trust, I took a breath and broke my thirty-year silence to tell her what had happened to me. We cried and prayed together, agreeing to turn our terrible experiences into a positive force. After realizing that our artistic experience was an essential part of whatever we did, we decided to start a movement to help abused kids.
After much discussion, we went on to cofound the Lil’ Angel Bunny Foundation (later renamed the Elevate Hope Foundation)—an organization to help abused and abandoned children by promoting self-awareness through music, the arts, and compassion.
We’d hold raffles and auctions after shows, auctioning off some of my equipment to raise money for special programs that cared for disadvantaged youth throughout California. The raffle tickets cost around two dollars each for a chance to win one of my snares or a conga, which were worth $300 to $500. Since we were in small clubs at the time, we’d raise about $200 or so, which we would donate to a pr
eselected facility that helped kids. To raise the stakes, I started auctioning off parts of my drum kit and percussion instruments.
Lynn’s role in becoming such a pivotal force in my life and our foundation stemmed back in part to 1996, when she and I were on tour with the queen of Japanese pop music, a teenage sensation named Namie Amuro. I was the percussionist and Lynn was one of her background singers. Namie’s band was massively successful and played to sold-out stadiums through Japan. At eighteen years old, she was a multiplatinum recording artist selling millions of records.
There were six Christians in the band and crew, and, as Japan practices mainly the Shinto or Buddhist faiths, we had a hard time finding any Christian churches to visit. We needed to keep strong and maintain our armor of love. We were instructed by our pastor to conduct a weekly Bible-study group during the tour and to meet at least once a week. In this time of study and fellowship, we’d rotate on leading Bible study by picking a subject matter of our choice and sharing related Bible verses. Before we’d begin, we’d have praise and worship together by praying and singing inspirational songs.
After a couple of rotations, it was my turn again to lead Bible study. Having already done it once, I didn’t have a clue what to talk about this second time.
Lynn offered some suggestions. “You can talk about God’s love, forgiveness, kindness, or even something that you can relate to in the scriptures you read in your own time.” I told her I still couldn’t think of anything at all.
Gently touching my hand, she added, “If you don’t know what to talk about, then why don’t you share your testimony with everyone?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to talk about my rape—it was too private and too painful to admit. Besides, I didn’t have a clue how to express it.