A woman who couldn’t catch a break 28 years ago is still on the rise

When I first introduced you to Sylvia Johnson, some doubted that she was real.

How do I know?

Several of you wrote or called to say “She ain’t real.”

For one thing, I admitted to using a pseudonym to spare her embarrassment.

For another, her story was so unfair that many couldn’t conceive that a real human being was going through what she did.

If you thought it was unbelievable then, wait’ll you get a load of what has transpired in her life since then.

Johnson-Nutall, 66, is the woman who, in tears, called me 28 years ago lamenting that even though she was doing everything right — okay, now! — she couldn’t seem to catch a break.

She had spent 10 years in prison for various drug-related offenses. That was back before the government for some reason decided “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t criminalize addiction, but treat it as a medical issue instead.”

Instead of allowing the time behind bars to do her, though, Johnson did the time. She earned two college degrees and emerged drug-free, ready to take on the world.

Only thing was, the world wasn’t ready to take her on. Job interview after job interview ended with her being escorted to the exit and told “Sorry: No ex-cons allowed.”

Hence, the tearful, last-gasp phone call to her favorite columnist. (OK, I just made that part up.)

That story ran in the newspaper on a Thursday. I know because I woke up cussing thinking “Who da’ %$#& is calling me at 7 a.m. on a Thursday?”

Caller: This is Trooper Goodlaw (not his actual name). Please hold for the Governor.

A minute later I heard on the other end of the phone the distinctive voice of Gov. Jim Hunt. “I read yo’ column this morning,” he said. “You have that woman call me and I’m gon’ get her a job.”

I passed along to Johnson-Nutall his Bat-phone number and by the middle of the next week she was a state employee.

“I was placed in a position at Dorothea Dix,” she told me recently. “I was administrative assistant to Director of Admissions Evelyn Sanders.”

She stayed five years, she said, before leaving to work various jobs that included selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

She got married, she said, and moved to Florida where she got a job teaching at a private school. The school axed her, she said, when it was threatened with having state funding revoked because of her criminal record.

“I told my husband ‘If I’m going to starve, I’d rather do it in North Carolina,’” she recalled.

...So they loaded up the truck and moved back to Raleigh...

Only, she didn’t starve. She subsequently worked as an intake coordinator for Southeastern Healthcare and received her MBA and master’s degree with a concentration in healthcare management.

The best part of doing what she does, she said, is connecting with other hundreds of other Sylvias. She tells them her story every chance she gets, she said.

“They’re more willing to listen to me because of what I’ve been through,” she said. “It gives me a sense of giving back to the community.”

In the original story, I noted that Johnson-Nutall received her degree in behavioral sciences from Shaw University within a month of her daughter graduating from high school in Oxford. Tonita Johnson, her only child, died of heart disease in 2017.

Four months after her daughter died, Johnson-Nutall’s husband Donnell Nutall died as well. He had suffered a debilitating heart attack in 2012.

She now spends as much time as possible helping raise her two granddaughters. “They’re 11 and 12 and think they’re my grandmother,” she laughed.

Much of her time, though, is spent trying to help others avoid the perils and destruction of the drug abuse that nearly consumed her. “That takes a lot of my time,” she said. “I can’t stop working.”

With help from a sympathetic governor — and a judge who sentenced her to 45 hours of community service instead of tossing her back into the slammer when she screwed up again — Sylvia Johnson-Nutall managed to climb out of her seemingly hopeless situation.

Make no mistake, though, life for her (to quote the Langston Hughes) “ain’t been no crystal stair.”

But — and this is the remarkable part — she’s still climbing whatever steps are in her path.