In a warm, dimly lit room sits a woman in an overstuffed chair. Though dressed in simple denim, she wears a scarf wrapped around her head like a sultan. Queen Hayes, who’s 38, has taken years to acquire this sense of peace and dignity.
The fifth of eight children, Hayes says her mother played favorites. She was constantly berated while her older sister was praised. But seeking her mother’s approval only opened her up to further ridicule. She began to look outside her family for a better life. “I needed a knight in shining armor to rescue me from my mom,” Hayes says. “It got to the point where she had won my dad over. When I’d walk in the house and she’d make jokes, he’d laugh and that would hurt me. He was the only one I had in my corner.” She says she now understands her father may have feared for his own security. “Sometimes when you’re of no use to people, they have no time for you.”
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She took comfort in this line from the 23rd Psalm: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”
Her parents allowed her to store some things in their basement, and she lived for a short time on the couch of a man who worked as a psychic. She remembers people paying him to “see into the other world.” On August 12, 1996, she moved into an abandoned building, where she began to jot down her thoughts, finding strength in words. “It just came to me to do it,” she says. “I had been there for so long with nobody. Hearing noises, frightened. When I left in December, all I could see was darkness.”
Hayes says she hopes her words will help others as much as they’ve helped her. “What I would really like to do is catch teenagers before they make a drastic turn that changes their lives,” she says. “The drugs, alcohol, becoming a mother. If I can say something that will spark them to change their minds about sleeping with that boy, about taking a hit off that pipe, then my life is worth living.”
