2000 Nashvillian of the Year

My name is Magdalene

I’m a sweet soft sister of sin

Men pay me silver dollars

To touch my golden skin....

I’ve had them all, I don’t recall a solitary hero.

—from “Solitary Hero,” by Carol Elliot and Alice Randall

There are rarely any heroes in a prostitute’s life. There are pimps and tricks, drug dealers, rapists, robbers, abusers, arresting officers, prosecuting attorneys, judges, and jailers. The law-abiding, upstanding citizens who travel Dickerson Road and Murfreesboro Pike, catching a fleeting glimpse of these women as they step out of the shadows to look for a date, simply shudder with revulsion and disgust, then drive on.

There’s nothing pretty about their lives. These women walk utterly alone and unprotected, up and down the gritty, neon-lit thoroughfares of the city’s underbelly, through the rain and the cold and the darkest, loneliest hours of night. At the muttered request of a stranger, they get into a beat-up car, climb up into the cab of an 18-wheeler, or walk behind a pawn shop, where they get down on their knees on a gravel alley littered with broken glass. Or maybe they lie down on a dirty bed in a dingy, cheap motel room, hoping to complete their transaction without being robbed or beaten or murdered. When they’ve collected enough money, they purchase their drug of choice—though there’s little choice in the matter—and get high. They sleep, when they sleep, two and three to a motel room or on the floor of a crack house. Once the high wears off and their addiction gnaws anew, they drag their weary, worn-out bodies out of bed or off the floor and head back to the streets to begin again.

The Metro Police Department estimates that there are approximately 300 prostitutes working Nashville streets; each averages seven sexual acts a day. A survey conducted by the Mayor’s Task Force on Prostitution five years ago found that all 30 women involved in the study were addicted to drugs. Seventy percent reported having been sexually molested as children, with their first sexual encounter coming between the ages of 7 and 11, and 40 percent tested HIV-positive. The typical prostitute is arrested seven times a year and serves an average of three months in jail. Sometimes, while incarcerated, she obtains her GED or enrolls in a program designed to help her get clean and overcome her addiction.

Yet when these women are released, the great majority have no home, no family, no money, and no job. They go from jail directly back to the streets, the only life they know. Some might go to a halfway house, where they get a bed in a room, which they must pay for, with little help finding work or managing money. The halfway house is often just that—-halfway between jail and a return to the streets, prostitution, and addiction. Many prostitutes believe there are only two ways off the streets: jail or dying.

Rev. Becca Stevens believes differently. As director of the Magdalene project, which works to get these women off the street and back into society, she knows for a fact that there are other options. And she knows that prostitutes should be viewed not with contempt or condemnation, but with compassion. “I don’t believe anymore that prostitution is a sin,” she says. “I believe that what drives women to the streets, to be addicted to drugs, to sell their own bodies for nothing, is hell itself. Magdalene started as a testimony to the truth that love and grace are more powerful and deeper than hell.”

As the senior voted Most Likely to Succeed by her graduating class at Overton High, as a Phi Beta Kappa math major and Homecoming Queen at University of the South, as the wife of songwriter Marcus Hummon and the mother of three young boys, Rev. Becca Stevens would seem to know little about street prostitutes, much less have such deep empathy for them. She thinks not. “There is a fine line between being a priest and being a prostitute,” she says with little irony. “In the church, there is Mary the Virgin and Mary Magdalene the prostitute. What holds us together as women, our humanity, is much stronger than our separateness. One of the lessons of Magdalene is that this is not completely foreign to us as women. We all share this. All women, no matter who we are, have had to use our sexuality, and sold a part of ourselves, to get something we need, or to be where we have to be.”

The chaplain of St. Augustine’s Chapel on the Vanderbilt campus and a devoted community activist, Stevens knows something about Magdalene’s place in biblical history, about hell and redemption, love and grace. She has seen women hit bottom, climb their way out of despair, and tumble back down again. She has seen women who used to sell their bodies for money emerge from the struggle with a drive to give something much, much greater of themselves.