Danita Davis gives voice to those silenced by abuse

DURHAM -- Danita Davis knows the burden of a secret.

During a decade of abuse, she hid a slashed finger, a fractured pelvic bone, cigarette burns on her forearm -- injuries unleashed by a man she had once loved enough to marry. It was a nurse at a hospital emergency room who detected Davis' secret and insisted she flee her abusive marriage.

That was nearly 20 years ago, the span of her youngest daughter's life. Since then, Davis, 44, has been shouting her long-kept secret from stages and lecterns in hopes of helping other battered partners.

"I hear the voices of domestic violence victims, and they need to be heard by others," Davis says. "God saved me for this reason."

Davis, a Durham native, dropped out of college in Maryland when her parents died in a car crash. She became a guardian to her brothers, the youngest still in diapers. She settled down, married her high school sweetheart and started a new family of her own.

At 23, she was a mother to three girls, surrogate to a brother and walking on eggshells through the home they all shared.

Her marriage and her eventual desperate escape shapes most everything in Davis' life. It colored her prayers, crippled her nursing career and inspired her new career helping victims of domestic violence.

In 2003, Davis transformed the years she spent beaten and terrified into powerful performances that have inspired other battered partners to gather the courage to leave. "Storms of Life" is a raw collection of poetry, songs and dialogue so disturbing and realistic that some domestic violence victims can't sit through the entire show.

Davis had never written a poem before; she felt something bigger than she moving the pen the day she began writing "Storms of Life." For inspiration, she turned to a volume of journals she began keeping after she left her husband

On Oct. 25, Davis will introduce her newest project at a vigil at the Durham Farmers Market dedicated to the victims who died in combat with those they once loved. "Hear Them" captures the turmoil other victims have shared with Davis through her advocacy work against domestic violence.

Two different Danitas

It's hard to picture Davis fearing anyone. She's a straight-talking grandmother who insists visitors leave their shoes on a mat by the door. Instead of a handshake, she greets with a full-body hug. She named her Chihuahua "Killer." Her smile is wide and warm.

But as a young bride, Davis locked herself in bathrooms, her pregnant belly aching from strikes with a two by four. She jumped through a bedroom window, fleeing the gun her husband had pointed at her. And after she had the courage to leave, her estranged husband kidnapped her family, holding a gun to her young brother's head, threatening to kill him and their daughters as Davis looked on. Afterward, Davis says, her husband was committed to a psychiatric hospital but is now free. Davis said she no longer fears him and has found a way to forgive him.

That graciousness, advocates say, is part of what makes her testimony so startling and powerful.

"Her journey is so spiritual and it involved forgiveness," said Marie Brodie, an advocate who met Davis when she worked at the N.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "She never dictates that to other survivors, but she lets them know it's possible."

Davis admits that forgiveness took time. Her marriage cost her much, including a long-coveted career in nursing. Davis' former husband went to UNC Hospitals, gun in hand, to stalk her one day. She lost her job when supervisors decided her estranged husband could endanger patients. With that, she lost a scholarship to study nursing at the university.