A man with bullet in neck is grateful for it
He was accidentally shot by a friend
Abullet in Sherman Brown's neck should have stopped his heart. Instead, it helped him to find it. ❚ “Feel it,” he says, as he presses a reporter's hand to the mass of skin and tissue in his neck that cushions the bullet that almost killed him in 1993. He was retracing his steps at the South Memphis apartment complex where it happened. ❚ “So, I got shot, and we were walking here, down the side of the steps, and he (Brown's friend) was like, ‘Aww, I made a mistake,'” said Brown, now 44.
“He put me in the car, and we were driving, I want to say, an '83 Monte Carlo…we were going down this road, Alcy Road, about 90 to 100 miles per hour…
“As we were driving, I'm spitting out blood and a piece of my tongue ...”
Brown's friend drove him to the nearby fire station. They didn't call the ambulance because those workers would call the police, who would arrest his friend for shooting Brown.
But that night, while laid up in the hospital with a bullet in his jaw, and his teeth and a piece of his tongue missing, Brown decided to rid himself of the thing that landed him there: A lifestyle that could lead to death.
“I sold drugs a bit, but I was a shaky gangster,” Brown said. “I had some drugs on me at the time, so I didn't want to go to the hospital, and they find the drugs on me and handcuff me, so I gave them to my dad (to get rid of) …
"I started talking to God, and I was telling God, 'God, it's not my fault that my mom and dad are on drugs. It's not my fault that my grandma has 15 kids … I just want to be better …"
So, when Brown was released from the hospital with the bullet still in his neck — the physician couldn't remove it because it was too close to an artery — he got himself a job. Then he got other jobs. Then he ultimately started his own business, a roofing company.
And that's when Brown learned he not only had a heart and head for business, but a heart for wanting the best for others. Lately, he's been trying to do his best for others by telling his story in his book, “The Bullet in Me: Turning Pain Into Power.”
The book — Brown also has a workbook edition for youths — lays out the events that led to his accidental shooting, his recovery from it, and his spiritual and social transformation. He frequently speaks to youths about the dangers of playing with guns and how close he came to his life being over before he had a chance to live it.
“When kids play around with guns, they don't think about the outcome, or the future, or how it can end their lives, or get stuck like that,” Brown said.
“I think about what would have happened if I had jumped in the air, how the bullet could have hit me in the neck, or if he had pulled the trigger when I was running (in the apartment), I could have gotten shot in the back of the head.”
That's how it all started.
Twenty-six years ago, Brown, who was 18 at the time, and his friend visited a woman who asked him to put together a gun that was taken apart. Once it was reassembled, Brown's friend, who assumed the gun had no bullets in it, pointed it at various objects in the woman's apartment, pretending to shoot at them, before pointing it at Brown as he came out of the bathroom.
“… Before I could set foot in the narrow hallway, I was smacked in the mouth with a hot ass piece of lead that ripped through my tongue slamming into the right side of my jaw,” one passage in the book reads.
“… I turned to face the large mirror above the double vanity in the beautifully decorated bathroom. I could see that my face was literally smoking …”
Brown forgave his friend long ago, and they remain close to this day. But the bullet, which used to cause him to feel coldness when winter would chill the metal, wouldn't let him forget.
So, he used it as a guide to find his heart.
First, Brown found his heart for business — legal business — by starting a food service company. He came up with that idea while working at a local warehouse and observing workers rushing to get meals from the local fast-food places within the 30 minutes they had for lunch.
“At the 30-minute break I'm seeing all these employees running out, driving fast and trying to come back in time to grab a smoke and play dominoes,” Brown said. “So, I'm thinking: ‘Hmm, there's a need right there.'”
Brown and his brother started a lunch delivery service, where they prepared meals and took orders from employees at local businesses. They cooked mostly soul food, prepared fliers, and eventually started a restaurant, Soul Food Express.
The restaurant eventually closed because of management problems, but that failure didn't still Brown's heart and ambition. So Brown, who dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, said he managed to enroll at Lemoyne-owen College through the help of a friend of a friend who worked in the registrar's office.
“I didn't finish high school because I was wearing the same clothes over and over again,” Brown said. “I couldn't get my hair cut. I was one of those kids who wanted to be seen, but who really didn't want to be seen, because when I would go back home, there was a possibility that our lights wouldn't be on.”
When Brown's illegitimate enrollment was discovered, he said college officials admired his tenacity and offered to help him find a way to stay. But instead, he decided to leave and enroll in a real estate course.
That opened many doors for Brown. He became a successful mortgage broker. But that business foundered during the real estate market crash in 2008, he said.
“When the market crashed in 2008, I lost everything I had," Brown said.
But in 2013, after Brown's heart was marred by divorce, his heart for entrepreneurship led him to start BSU Roofing & Construction. That company is now a prosperous one that employs ex-felons and others who struggle to find work.
And that year was also when Brown, who kept a journal in the years that he was shot, decided it was time to write a book, and to begin telling his story to others.
Originally, Brown said, he wanted to title the book, “Lord, Thanks for the Gunshot.” But he ultimately wound up with, “The Bullet In Me,” because the bullet is a constant reminder of his life's journey, and how he turned tragedy into triumph.
However, Brown said, he doesn't want other youths to have to get shot while playing with or mishandling guns to realize their worth.
That's important — considering the fact that Memphis is tops among the nation's largest cities when it comes to accidental shootings among youths and young adults. Earlier this month, for example, a 20year-old man accidentally shot his 4-year-old nephew while unloading a gun.
Said Brown: “I think about those who are playing with guns, and I tell them: What are the chances that you are going to survive a gunshot? What if I would have run? What if I would have jumped? I could have gotten shot in the eye … I could have died."
Brown lived to tell the tale, though, and he's telling a poignant one: Of how poverty and drug dealing led him to his near-fatal encounter with an instrument of death that too many young Memphians handle casually and not cautiously. Of how young, poor Memphians can find ways to tap into their talents and not succumb to crime and hopelessness.
Of how the grace of God, and the bullet in his neck, keeps guiding him back to his heart.
“I have a heart to give, maybe God knows that,” Brown said. “I have a heart to help, maybe God knows that. I have a heart of wanting everyone to be great, maybe God knows that.”
And while the pain from the bullet has long since subsided, Brown, who has since remarried and is the father of a 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter from his first marriage, said that its presence continues to keep him grounded.
“It moves at times, but also, that bullet is my thorn,” he said. “Whenever I feel down about anything, I think of that bullet. It makes me happy every day …
“No matter what I'm going through, I think of it, and I'm back happy. Every day is not perfect, but I'm happy.”
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Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw