Former drug addict, prostitute finds rebirth of her own

It always nagged at Katrina Robertson, kept her from truly enjoying getting high — knowing that she had everything she'd ever wanted sitting in a house on the other side of Nashville.

Three meals a day. A warm bed. The smart, quiet little daughter she'd stayed sober long enough to bear and then abandoned two weeks later for Grandma to raise.

But she just couldn't bring herself to go there.

Instead, Robertson woke every morning not knowing what she'd have to do to get another rock to smoke and another roof over her head that night. Her neck oozed under soaked bandages — her lymph nodes so infected they'd actually pushed through her skin, the weirdest, ugliest side effect of tuberculosis she'd ever experience.

That woman still lives on paper, a string of Davidson County drug, prostitution and theft arrests spanning 13 years. Robertson will tell you all about her, candidly and stoically. She's told her story hundreds of times, standing behind church pulpits and in fellowship halls and college dorms across America.

She'll tell you something else: Love heals.

A group of other former addicts and prostitutes, an Episcopal priest and a host of volunteers working with a Nashville recovery program loved her when she couldn't love herself. And while completing the program that changed her, Robertson became national sales director for its nonprofit manufacturing wing, Thistle Farms, which will sell about $1 million worth of bath and body products this year.

Love gave her a brand-new house in West Nashville, a husband who dotes on her and, after two decades mostly spent apart, a relationship with that once-estranged daughter.

It's the only thing that allowed her to speak aloud the reason for her downward spiral and her climb out, ultimately helping other women to do the same.

So today, Robertson and her family will get up early and go see her nephew's Easter play at Fifteenth Avenue Baptist, a morning spent in church so like what millions of other Christians will do but so different from her Easters of a decade ago.

A born entrepreneur

Thistle Farms provides job training and helps fund Magdalene House, a 17-year-old, one-of-a-kind program that nonprofits from across the country travel to Nashville to see. The creation of Episcopal priest Becca Stevens, it gives women on the street a place to kick addictions, learn job skills and clean up their criminal records and credit.

It requires a two-year commitment, during which 30 women at a time are asked to stay and focus on their recovery. It's not for everyone. About a quarter quit the program or relapse.

But for Robertson, Magdalene House was the only way back to that home across town.

The change began when she ran into an old drug buddy, who was sober and healthy, promising to get Robertson into the same program that helped her. Robertson assured her that treatment didn't work — she'd been to six or seven of them already, 30 days at a time, only to smoke crack sometimes within a couple of days after leaving.

"She got in her car and pulled off, and I was like, 'Whew! That's over!' " Robertson said. "But she came back. She ... came ... back. And she said, 'They've got a bed for you.' I wasn't going to commit for two years. But she went and got my mom, who said I should give it one more try.

"I felt like I was going to die on the streets. I lived wherever I could. I lived in abandoned houses. I'd give sex to men to let me stay a couple nights or to bathe and eat."

For two weeks after she entered Magdalene House in 2005, she slept.

She became reacquainted with daily showers and regular meals. She cruised by support-group sessions without stopping, assuring herself she'd never tell the truth about what put her on the path to drugs and prostitution: Her stepfather molested her when she was 11, and he said no one would ever believe her if she told, because she was a bad little girl.

Eventually, she did tell. She started therapy. Parenting classes. Recovery meetings. Teeth repair and treatment for her HIV. At first, all she had to do was work on herself and experience the love and support of a community willing to believe in her and put their hard work and — in the case of Thistle Farms customers and donors — money behind that belief.

After a few months, she got a job labeling candles at Thistle Farms. She did a little work for the sales department, too. When the sales trainer suddenly left the program, Robertson started doing that job. And then Stevens gave a lecture and casually introduced Robertson to the audience as Thistle Farms' national sales director. It was the first time Robertson heard of her own promotion.

For Stevens, Magdalene House's founder, running Thistle Farms isn't about succession plans and growth charts. Her ideas are a little more organic than that.

"Katrina is a born entrepreneur with a great big heart," Stevens said simply. "She is part of the story of how love heals."

And together, she said, the two of them and countless others are changing a culture that buys and sells women as commodities.

Robertson mentors Thistle Farms sales team member Shana Goodwin, 39, who arrived in 2011 after decades of sex trafficking — the last years of it with a pimp who kept a bail bondsman on retainer for her.

"No little girl dreams of growing up and becoming a prostitute," Goodwin said. "Katrina believed in me. She told me I was smart when I'd been told I was stupid my whole life."

Invaluable gifts

Magdalene House gave Robertson the gift of sobriety during her mother's decline and death, the ability to care for her mother the way her mother had cared for Robertson's daughter, Ebony Davidson, now 24.

When she was using, Robertson never moved beyond the periphery of her daughter's life, around for days or months at a time but mostly gone. There's a picture of the two of them on the first day of kindergarten, Robertson looking happy because she's sober and participating in a special day, Davidson looking scared because being dropped off by Mom could mean they'd be separated again for weeks or months.

Today, they couldn't be closer. Davidson has a dual degree in communications and psychology from Tennessee State University and works side by side with her mother at Thistle Farms, visiting Whole Foods stores and other locations across the Southeast that carry their products.

"The best thing is, I get to look to my left every day and see her," Davidson said.

Among Robertson's other gifts is the house she thought she'd never own, the result of clearing up all her debts, winning grants and Stevens going to bat for her with a bank that initially couldn't reconcile the woman they saw on paper — a criminal record, no credit history — with the one in front of them.

Her husband supports her recovery because he's living it himself. Barry Robertson remembers weeks spent running into her without saying a word, his admiration growing.

"She was independent, she was proud, confident," he said. "I got the nerve up and asked her if I could take her out for a coffee. She snapped at me, 'I ain't with no mess! You can go on if you're a player.' I was like, 'I just want to get to know you.' "

Stevens married them on July 25, 2009, in St. Augustine's Episcopal Chapel at Vanderbilt University, everyone crying so much they could barely make it through the ceremony.

Her personal life stable like never before, Katrina Robertson increasingly turns her attention outward. She thinks about the women sewing containers for Thistle Farms in Kenya and flowers in Rwanda — international partners in the fight for women's safety. She wonders how many more women in how many more countries might be helped.

Because if she can be reborn with a little love, anyone can.

Reach Heidi Hall at 615-726-5977 and on Twitter @HeidiHallTN.

Learn more

To purchase Thistle Farms products, host a party or just donate, visit www.thistlefarms.org or call 615-298-1140. Supporters also can stop at Thistle Stop Cafe for breakfast, lunch or coffee at 5128 Charlotte Ave. Visit www.thistlestopcafe.org or call 615-953-6440.