Book excerpt: Little Girl in a Messed Up World By: Tonya Parker Tonya Parker was born on February 20, 1963, in Richmond, Virginia. That day her mother was informed that she was born with a veil on her face. She was born with a special gift; this was an old folks’ saying. She had the gift of insight, and she carries her gift until this day. She was raised in her native town of Wakefield and Pocohontas, Virginia, where she grew to know that she was very special. Tonya was blessed to be a part of two great generations. The Robinson family, where her great-great-grandmother, Sarah Robinson, who was a Black Native American. Then, Sarah met her great-great-grandfather, Charlie Parker, who was a Black Native American who was a shoemaker. The two were raised and groomed by old family traditions that were passed on from generation to generation. But this child was gifted with many talents, and the family did know this. Tonya Parker would always see and say the strangest things as a child. She would have the people in town listening to her little made-up stories. She would even have everybody believing some of her stories. And through this talent she created, they were to endure the pain and the struggle that makes her stories real and heartbreaking. She lived through being molested as a child. So she wrote the diary that she calls Little Girl in a Messed Up World. This she shares with the world. While coming out and enduring other sexual abuses to finding the Lord, she wrote, He Touched Me. And now coming out of that to being abused as a wife and a mother, she wrote Markese Strong: A Miracle, and some poems to go along with this.