Maybe she'll sing her way out of the neighborhood
11:51 AM 4/19/04
Andy Hall and Dean Mosiman Wisconsin State Journal

Terria Tiner hugs the 2-year-old boy in the clean but spare second-floor apartment overlooking an open air drug market on Allied Drive. <

"I love you. I love you. I love you," she softly sings to little Damaryie in a honey-sweet voice, her partner and the boy's mother, Tomeka Lewis, in another room. "I love the Lord today because he cares for me." <

Like many living in the Allied Drive neighborhood, Tiner gets food from the Joining Forces for Families office nearby. She waits for the bus on the unpredictable street. She passes hustlers pushing drugs - the way she once pushed in Chicago. <

And she is pursuing dreams of making it as singer. <

On another night, Tiner, 31, sits alone on a chair, eyes closed in prayer backstage at Club Majestic on King Street. <

The swank bar is pulsing with partyers sipping martinis amid the strobe lights, crystal balls and thumping music. <

As the house music wanes, Tiner, wearing a white skullcap and sunglasses, takes the microphone as "Unique" to front her band, Vibe Syndicate. <

"How y'all doin' tonight?" she asks, confident and sassy. "I can't hear you! How y'all doin't tonight?" <

She belts like Aretha Franklin and raps with authority. She's funny. She talks to the audience between songs: "Sometimes you go through things where you feel you're not gonna make it." She's a hit. <

After midnight, Tiner returns to Lewis, 21, and Damaryie in the Allied Drive apartment, a refuge between a hard past and a better future. On the bare wall hangs a hand-made symbol Tiner made: "A Valentine to my love, Terria-n-Tomeka." <

It's so different from her childhood, where she could sleep on an outside porch, one of five children raised by the Rev. Charles Tiner, pastor of the Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, which he founded in Springfield, Ill. <

Allied Drive more resembles the haunts of her young adult life in Chicago, where she says she sold marijuana, crack cocaine and heroin. Where she saw bullets fly. Where she refused to sell drugs to a pregnant woman and 12-year-old boy. <

Where she began performing. <

Where she talked to God and abandoned the drug trade. <

"I am blessed that I am not 6 feet under," she says. <

After her epiphany, Tiner moved from Chicago to Minnesota to St. Louis to New York and back to Chicago, where she met Lewis at church. <

Tiner, Lewis and Damaryie eventually lived together in Chicago - until a little girl was shot in their neighborhood on Easter Sunday 2002. <

They took a Greyhound bus to Madison, arriving homeless and staying at the Salvation Army and the YWCA. <

"Wherever we go we are a family," Lewis says. <

They were warned about Allied Drive. And like others desperate for cheap housing, they ended up there, finding a two-bedroom apartment for $525 a month. <

They haven't had problems. "We mind our business," Tiner says. <

Although Tiner makes some money with the band and cleans her building hallways to cut rent, she and Lewis rely on public assistance. <

But Tiner, a songwriter with a voice forged at her father's church and honed in Chicago clubs, believes she'll have a music career. <

She began here performing solo at local nightspots before hooking up with Vibe Syndicate, and now gets gigs around the city. On Sundays, she helps the choir and plays piano and drums at Second Baptist Church. <

Music is the right way to provide a better life for her family, she says. "All money is not good. God will give it when it's time." <