Shaquita Jordan became an orphan at age 7 when her father shot her mother as she tried to retrieve her belongings from the home she had fled just weeks before. He then turned the gun on himself. At the time, Shaquita’s aunt, Denotra Rawls, tried to shield the girl from the most brutal details of her father’s 1993 rampage.
“She didn’t ask a lot of questions at that point,” Rawls said. “She did a lot of crying, but she didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
But as she matured, Shaquita wanted to know how the tragedy could have happened and why. To give her questions — and the emotions they evoked — a concrete form, she began writing verse. As early as 10 years old, she was experimenting with soulful poetry about violence and its effects.
“Everything started hitting me, so I started writing,” said Shaquita, 14, who now lives with her aunt. On Monday, Shaquita will be honored during the 18th Annual Rally Against Handgun Violence when she will be named one of the winners of the student Essay, Poetry and Imagery Contest. Organized by the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, the noon rally at the John C. Kluczynski Federal Plaza is aimed at raising awareness about gun violence.
Shaquita was one of 14 chosen from about 900 students who entered the contest, which asked participants to tell how gun violence affected their lives. Winners are awarded $100 and their schools receive a new computer.
A 9th grader at St. Ignatius College Prep, Shaquita said she hopes the rally will get people to pay more attention to the danger guns pose before violence erupts.
“When it happens to you, that’s when you wake up,” she said.
The death of her mother, Brenda Jackson-Jordan, shocked many because the 34-year-old had tried hard to protect herself from a man she knew was abusive. Jackson-Jordan feared her husband, Alonzo Jordan, and had gone into hiding. She also had secured an order of protection and brought relatives and police to her husband’s home to collect her belongings.
But while officers waited outside and Jackson-Jordan’s siblings began packing, Alonzo Jordan grabbed an automatic rifle and fatally shot his wife and himself. In 1997, the family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the Police Department, which relatives said should have done more to prevent the shooting.
Shaquita was at a relative’s home when the shooting occurred.
Shaquita said that as she grew older, she found she was struggling to talk about her parents’ deaths. “I had to learn to write stuff down, instead of keeping it bottled up,” she said. “I write it down, and I feel better.”
She wrote the poem she submitted to the contest while at St. Angela’s School, where she completed 8th grade last year. Titled “A Mother’s Story,” it is about a woman who watches her son succumb to drugs and violence.
“Look at my little boy, but he’s too far away to see. He crawled into God’s arms and said good-bye to me,” one line reads.
Rawls said Shaquita’s loss has driven her to succeed in school and become an avid reader. She graduated from 8th grade at the top of her class. “All of her energy, she pours it into books,” Rawls said. “She pushes herself.”
Shaquita said she finds non-fiction more inspiring than fiction–she prefers Tina Turner’s autobiography and a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. to Harry Potter books. She said she wants to pursue a career as a pediatrician.
She said she knows Monday’s anti-violence rally will not lead to a broad-sweeping change such as a ban on handguns. She would just like to see guns a bit harder to get a hold of.
“I don’t want to put my expectations that high,” she said. “Just get them off the street.”
