Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070030
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The audience at the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority's first creative-writing contest ceremony wasn't having any better luck. As Word's voice shook with the reading, video cameras stopped whirring.
Camera flashes stopped. Kleenexes were handed down rows.
One-hundred throat lumps could not dam the tears, nor the suffering behind the story of 8-year-old LaFawn Johnson, titled ``My Daddy.''
People replayed LaFawn's story in their own minds - the girl and her daddy running down the big hill at the park, falling when they got to the bottom. They imagined the father and his little girl feeding ducks with the bread they brought from home.
Late at night, my dad would fix something real good to eat, and we would watch t.v. and eat all kinds of junk food. That was fun. He always tried to make me happy.
He told her he would buy her a car for high-school graduation - if she did well in school. Once he took her alone to the store, leaving the other three kids at home, and they raced to the corner.
I won, but I knew my daddy let me. We talked and talked like we never talked before. He told me that he really loved me and I felt it deep in my heart. As we were going home we had one more race and it felt like we were running down that big hill. ...
April Drummond kept her eye on LaFawn as the speaker read her daughter's essay. She remembered clearly and intensely the scene LaFawn described next.
``I was supposed to tell her, but I couldn't,'' April remembered. ``I knew how close she was to her daddy.
``So I watched out the car window at my mom telling her. And she put LaFawn's head in her hands and bent down real close ... and I just cried and cried.''
When I was at school, my grandma came to get me and my sister Farrah. She had a strange look on her face. She told me and my sister that my daddy died. It felt like someone had hit me with a big rock in my face.
As soon as she joined her mom in the car, LaFawn's memories came flooding out. She told her mom about the trip she'd planned with her dad to return to the park with the hill. She told her mom about her dad's wish that she help her mom more.
This made me strong, and I had to be strong for my mom. ... My plans are to make sure I'm a good person and help my family and others who need help, then one day when God comes back, he'll take me where my daddy is.
``She's a big girl,'' April Drummond says. ``She's lived up to her word. She's just like a little mom.''
LaFawn has missed school just once, when she had chicken pox. She attends Fairview Elementary, where she makes the third-grade honor roll. At home, she helps wash dishes, helps her little sister with homework, never misses a Girl Scout meeting, takes out the trash and reminds her sister every morning before school: ``Did you remember your glasses?''
She even lectures other kids about the dangers of drugs. Her father, Steven Johnson, was stabbed to death two years ago by a man who'd chain-smoked 30 rocks of crack cocaine.
LaFawn was 6 at the time.
``When this happened, I thought her grades would drop because she was really close to her dad,'' April recalls. ``But she has continued to make the A-B honor roll. ... She wants her daddy to be proud of her even now.''
A dry eye could not be found in the auditorium full of people who stood to applaud LaFawn Johnson as she walked up to receive her award. The youngest entrant in the contest, she stood barely 4-feet tall, almost eclipsed by her shiny giant trophy.
She is young enough to wear a ponytail, a lace-collared floral dress and black shoes with bows.
She is old enough to have seen so much.
She is wise enough not to close her award-winning essay with the words, ``The End.'' Instead, LaFawn wrote:
The Beginning. . .
by CNB