Antoinette Tuff was just a child when she confronted death. It came in the shape of a rattlesnake, crawling along a hot patch of South Carolina dirt. What happened next in her grandmother’s garden would prepare Tuff for another encounter, years later, when death reared its head in a DeKalb elementary school.
“No, baby, don’t run away,” her grandmother said. “You don’t let that snake scare you.”
Grandma stamped the ground. The snake got the message.
So did young Antoinette. You cannot let fear be your master.
That lesson came back to Tuff last Aug. 20 when a man dressed in black, carrying a semi-automatic rifle, entered the office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Center in DeKalb County. Officials identified him as Michael Brandon Hill, 20, of Decatur. They’d later characterize him as “a young man with a long history of mental health issues.”
What happened next is the stuff of headlines,and the answer to every parent's prayer. In contrast to the shootings of innocents at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook, no one was killed at McNair. All the students, faculty – yes, even the gunman – came away alive. Tuff is the reason.
That tense encounter forms the nucleus of “Prepared For A Purpose,” Tuff’s account of how she dealt with a suicidal gunman. The 151-page volume, which touches on other events in Tuff’s life, places the reader in a school office where a bookkeeper unschooled in the art of negotiations averted a tragedy.
The book, co-written with New York author Alex Tresniowski, debuted earlier this month. Tuff, 47, is on a six-city promotion that began in New York and ends in Los Angeles. She was was in Atlanta Monday.
Is she a heroine? Tuff, preparing for a live television interview, shrugged. She’s fielded that question before.
‘I think God prepared me for all this,” said Tuff, who has taken advantage of her celebrity to found Kids on the Move for Success. The nonprofit organization provides underprivileged children with educational opportunities.
It’s an issue that strikes home. As she recounts in her book, Tuff grew up hard, grew up hurting. Her father abandoned Tuff’s mother and other children when she was 2. Only years later would she reconnect with her dad. Even then, it was a rocky re-introduction.
She and her mom became homeless. When she was 13, she met the guy she thought would be her life mate forever. She dropped out of high school. They had a daughter, married, then had a son. The son was born with an array of disabilities and is in a wheelchair.
And, through all this, said Tuff, she kept her faith, a belief that the Almighty would help her through life’s cruelties. And life served a big helping of cruelty. As she recounts in her book, she learned that her fiance – later her husband – was engaged to another woman.
“That was a sign, wasn’t it?” asked Tuff, who sighed. “I got lots of signs.”
Later, her husband left her on her own. And nowhere was she more on her own than Aug. 20. In a series of recollections sprinkled throughout the book, Tuff details the uncertain moments when mayhem hovered in the air.
It began when the gunman came into the office.
“This is not a joke!” Tuff writes, quoting the gunman. “I need you to understand this is not a joke. I am here. This is real.
“We are all going to die today,” he told her.
“He was pacing fast, like he couldn’t control his energy, like he wanted to scream and bust out of his skin,” Tuff writes. “Instead, he raised his rifle to eye level and made a move for the side door.
“The side door,” she continues, “is the door that leads to the classrooms where the kids are.”
He never reached the classrooms. Instead, he stayed with Tuff, who carefully brought a young man back from the brink, even after he wounded himself with the rifle.
At the end, with police ringing the school, Tuff writes that the gunman was ready to surrender. “You can tell them (police) to come in now,” he said. “I need to go to the hospital.”
That’s a memory that won’t fade. “I didn’t think God was going to put an AK-47 in my face that day,” Tuff said.
In her book’s introduction, Tuff recalls that the day began with prayer. “The Lord is my shepherd,” she prayed, reciting the 23rd Psalm, one of the Bible’s most revered passages.
And, a few lines later, she prayed: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
The shadow of death. It passed by a little girl in a South Carolina vegetable patch, only to return, years later. By then, the girl was grown, and prepared.
For that we can all say a prayer of thanks.
About the Author
