A former gang leader from Chicago’s Southside, Ardest said, “My heart was so hardened, I sat in jail and rolled marijuana joints with pages of a Bible. As a gangster, you can’t trust anyone. Metro Hope staff members were the first trustworthy people in my life. They trusted me as a food service manager. I used to have a shoot-from-the-hip, hording mentality. Now I’m purposeful, even praying for the men I supervise.”

Ardest Marshall’s life has been torn between the contrasting influences of his two grandmas — saintly Pearl who prayed and longed for Ardest to lead a holy life, and Grandma Hattie who slept with a gun under her pillow and modeled toughness in their South Chicago neighborhood.

Grandma Pearl saw glimmers of leadership in Ardest who co-owned a catering business, received college scholarships, and wrote successful grants to raise $4 million for a medical clinic in his Chicago neighborhood.

But the Gangster Disciples also saw his talent, appointing him “governor” over a region from Indiana to Minnesota. And it was Grandma Hattie who held sway over his childhood with a single word.

“She called me ‘Slugger,’” said Ardest. “For 40 years I tried to be tough enough to live up to that name. I had an anger and resentment problem, a me-against-the-world attitude. I thought only the strong survive.”

In many ways only the strong DID survive in Altgeld Gardens, among the first African-American housing projects in America, unashamedly surrounded by toxic landfills, where Chicago steel mill waste was dumped, and where sewage treatment plants are located.

“It’s 2012 and they still ain’t cleaned it up,” said Ardest, outraged. “The Environmental Protection Agency has protested these cancer-causing conditions, and the government compensates us for it, but how can you compensate people who’ve gone sick and died?

Kids growing up here had an equal disregard for life, said Ardest. They knew only poverty, and the struggle to survive. “My father said, ‘Go out and get it, Ardest, anyway and anyhow.’ That meant stealing, robbing, or killing. For me it meant leading a gang, with 80 percent of my earnings going to drugs.

A gang shooting finally earned Ardest a 25-year prison sentence. He remembers long, angry days, biding his time and rolling marijuana joints with the pages of a Bible. “My heart was that hardened by my lifestyle,” he said.

That could have been the fateful end of the story on several fronts for Slugger, as a sweeping SWAT team crack down locked up 280 Gangster Disciples in 1994, the same year his father died, and that his son Ardest William Marshall was born without him.

It could have meant the perpetuation of poverty and fatherless criminality for another generation of Marshalls, said Ardest, the family line of Grandma Hattie that had lived by the sword and died by the sword.

But at age 40, with his life lost and his reputation muddied, Ardest had a heart attack, and something changed in him. Then the courts gave him a second chance, allowing him to rehab from his drug and alcohol addiction at Metro Hope Ministries in South Minneapolis.

“But the real wake up call,” he said, “was when Grandma Pearl died in 2005.”

“That was the turning point in my life,” said Ardest. “I felt so sorry that I hadn’t been living the life Grandma Pearl pictured and prayed for me. This faith-based rehab program was like a timely passport to a new world,” he said.

Ardest discovered that a major barrier to change in his life was trust.

“As a gang member, I couldn’t ever tell people the truth or accept what people said without suspecting ulterior motives,” he said. “But here I met trustworthy people, from Roy to Bill and Dan to Mary. This is where I learned how to interact with people honestly without manipulating or deceiving them.”

But the real surprise was his growing relationship with Metro Hope’s former Executive Director Dan Ward, he said. “Being an African-American, I never thought I’d be able to trust or receive so much from a Caucasian.”

Racial Reconciliation. At first Dan’s Bible studies about restoring relationships with God and others were puzzling, said Ardest. But gradually Ardest saw that Dan’s messages were non-manipulative, calculated purely for his good, and one-on-one mentoring confirmed that.

“Dan was expressin’ honest care for me. He cared about me more than my own father did. The way he approached me wasn’t calloused. It was thought-provoking. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

Wanting the peace he saw embodied in his grandmother’s life, Ardest became a Christian in February of 2006.

After graduation from the New Hope program, Dan invited Ardest to become Metro Hope’s food service manager. Despite his talent, Ardest lacked confidence, he said.

“I interviewed and was hired,” he said, “but didn’t know if I could do it. My biggest challenge was letting go of the past, and forgiving myself. I didn’t know how to be a man.”

At first he would force his ideas on the Metro Hope men he supervises, but he has learned not to micromanage. “I have to be positive and upbeat, trusting that God is at work in the details of their lives as he was in mine.”

Working in a drug and alcohol rehab center certainly has its days, said Ardest who has had to learn to be strong for others. “I used to shoot-from-the-hip with a hording mentality, thinking only of myself,” he said. “Now I’m organized, purposeful, and thoughtful, praying for the men I supervise. Acting, not reacting.”

Previously he would have been tempted to give up or quit, he said, “But now I’m living for more than me and my feelings. It’s about what God is doing in the lives of these men, and I’m blessed to be a part of that.”

“My whole life I’ve run away from things. Now I’m staying where I belong, where Pearl wanted me, where there is peace.”

We’ve all heard of jail-house conversions and many people are understandably skeptical about them. But the second wind in Ardest’s life, as he’s both stayed clean and held the same job for seven years, has been so remarkable that it has given hope to and lured 25 more of his friends and relatives from Chicago to Minneapolis, many who have become Christian leaders.

“They said, ‘If it can happen to Ardest, it can happen to me,’” he reports, attributing the turnaround to Grandma Pearl’s prayers.

“She never judged even Grandma Hattie,” said Ardest. “She just said God was going to grow us all into a community that follows Him. She even believed a church would come out of it, and sure enough, Look Up and Live Church in Chicago is alive and well today.”

One of the bright lights in the new Marshall family is Ardest William Marshall III who graduated from Southwest Minneapolis High School in May of 2012 and received a two-year college scholarship.

With plenty of Marshall role models today, including a cousin who is a noted author and President of Northern Trust Bank, and including a loving father whom he lives with, Ardest Jr. is reversing generations of despair, and perpetuating the power of a grandma’s love and prayers for overcoming poverty.

© 2012 Todd Svanoe. Unauthorized reproduction of this copyrighted material is prohibited.

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