SILVER SPRING -- On the second floor of a drab red-brick building just outside Washington, spiritual guru Iyanla Vanzant is the picture of serene success.
Vanzant's office at the Inner Visions Spiritual Maintenance Center is swathed in soothing purples. Music inspired by the I Ching thrums from a bookshelf stereo. And Vanzant's warming herself with a cup of herbal tea.
She seems perfectly at peace, and why not? She's a regular on TV's "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Hallmark has turned her daily affirmations into a line of greeting cards, and her string of best sellers includes "Acts of Faith," a book many loyal readers call the black woman's bible.
Vanzant, who lives in a half-million-dollar house at Davidsonville, embarks on a 20-city speaking tour this month, which includes next weekend's appearance at the Whole Life Expo at the Baltimore Convention Center. And on Tuesday Simon & Schuster will publish her latest book, "Yesterday I Cried," part of a $1.1 million, three-book deal. In the next few months, she'll open a children's school at the Inner Visions center.
Her smile and almond-shaped eyes show no trace of Rhonda Harris, the frightened survivor of a childhood rape, the teen-age parent, battered spouse and welfare mother who once tried to take her own life.
Now, there's only this bubbly 45-year-old grandmother with the melodic mouthful of a name (it's pronounced E-yon-la), and a nagging question: How did she wind up here?
To get a read on the curious arc of Vanzant's life, try following the advice that has become her mantra for the masses: "You must begin within."
"Unfortunately in this society we're trained to do everything outside of ourselves," says Vanzant. "But we have to live within ourselves, to just be. We have to be in love with ourselves. At peace with ourselves."
Of course, "finding inner peace" is a New Age-y cliche, as Vanzant will admit. What's new about her message is not what Vanzant is saying, but who's listening.
Vanzant -- whose first name means great mother in the ancient Nigerian culture known as Yoruba -- has become an icon for black women who say she has validated their experiences and given them a road map out of spiritual despair.
"This society wrote me off. I was a black female, uneducated, on welfare in the projects with no man. I was nothing," Vanzant says, her voice going from a raspy whisper to cocky, sista-girl slang that betrays her Brooklyn-born roots. "I think people are responding to my work because I look and sound like them."
With 10 books to her credit, including "Faith in the Valley," "One Day My Soul Just Opened Up" and "In the Meantime," Vanzant has touched millions of readers who are responding to her plain-spoken lessons of hope and healing.
After self-publishing her first book in 1991, Vanzant was "discovered" by Oprah last April and now is a motivational speaker who commands $12,500 for appearances.
Vanzant is trying to broaden her audience. She has written "The Soul of a Man," a how-to book on the male perspective. The words "for black women," which had appeared in earlier titles, won't be used in future books, and future cover designs will be culturally neutral. Vanzant says that doesn't mean she's selling out.
"I've grown," Vanzant says. "I used to say I was just a black woman. Now I'm a child of God. White folks were reading [my books] anyway, so why would I want to make them feel excluded? This is not about me, this message is about God."
Since her childhood, Vanzant says she has been visited by apparitions -- male and female -- whom she interpreted as God speaking to her directly.
In her ministry, she espouses a heady potluck of religious disciplines and denominations, blended into her own stripped-down, unified theory of spiritual well-being. She has a law degree, and she's ordained as a priestess in Yoruba culture, a belief system that recognizes a single creator and hundreds of lesser deities.
Hanging on the walls of her office is an Indian wish catcher, representing the Native American influences of her paternal grandmother, who helped raise her, and a yin-yang symbol denoting the eternal opposites of Taoism. She wears a cloth bracelet bearing the letters WWJD, an acronym for "What Would Jesus Do?" a catch phrase popularized by young Christians.
Vanzant was born in 1953 in the back of a New York taxi. Her mother died two years later, and during Vanzant's unsettled childhood, she and her older brother, Ray, lived with relatives and a family friends, including a man who raped her when she was 9.
Her son, Damon, was born when Vanzant was 16. She was married briefly at 19, and had her first daughter, Gemmia. In 1977 she remarried, this time to Charles Vanzant, father of her daughter Nisa, and a man who beat her so badly she was hospitalized, Vanzant writes. At one point, she swallowed a potentially fatal overdose of painkillers. Despite it all, she managed to earn a college degree while working as a drug and alcohol counselor.
One night, as her abuser slept, Vanzant heard a disembodied female voice telling her to "get up and get out of here." She quietly gathered her children and left.
With the support of friends and student loans, Vanzant later earned a law degree in New York, then moved to Philadelphia, where she worked in the public defender's office. Two years later, the voice again told her to leave. Again she heeded it.
Struggling to feed her children, Vanzant got a job counseling women on welfare. To prepare for weekly seminars with welfare clients, she compiled tidbits of spiritual, legal and practical advice. In 1991, they became a 70-page book, "Tapping the Power Within." She made the first copies at Kinko's, and peddled them from her car trunk.
Her work caught the attention of Glen Thompson of Writers and Readers, a small, black-owned publishing house in New York. The paperback sold out the first 15,000 copies in two months.
"She was dealing with issues like domestic violence and rape before most other authors were," Thompson said.
Still financially strapped, Vanzant agreed to write an autobiography for Thompson's company, but after submitting "Interiors," she had a change of heart and asked him not to publish it. Thompson, who had already paid her an advance, refused.
The book includes little-known details about her early life told in a wrenching narrative.
"The things I wrote about in that book were not healed, and I couldn't defend this book," says Vanzant. "I gave him his money back, and he still slapped my picture on the cover and put it out on the market because he was trying to save his company. But he had no right to sell my soul in the street like that."
Thompson declined to discuss the dispute, saying he expects a settlement to be announced soon. However, "Interiors" raises other questions -- about Vanzant's credibility.
Among the childhood stories she recounts is a claim that her father, Horace, was a soldier during the Korean War who was imprisoned for selling bootleg cigarettes. To win an early release, Vanzant says, he volunteered for a secret mission behind enemy lines. He survived and, according to Vanzant, the episode was turned into a book and 1968 motion picture called "The Dirty Dozen."
"That's absurd, there was no such thing," said E. M. Nathanson, author of the World War II novel on which the movie was based. "I think he made it up to impress his daughter, and she swallowed it whole."
Vanzant sticks by the story. "My father lived it, and I know what my daddy told me," she says.
Vanzant's father did more than tell war stories. He convinced her, as a child, that she was "ugly and stupid," a debilitating stigma she carried for many years. When he died, Vanzant says, she forgave him, and she's still learning to accept mistakes she made with her own children.
Around the time "Acts of Faith" was published, her son Damon was arrested for stealing cars and selling drugs in Virginia. Vanzant is raising the son of her youngest daughter, Nisa, who got pregnant, dropped out of school and has spent several years "trying to find herself."
"Did I feel like a hypocrite when my son got locked up and youngest daughter got pregnant? Absolutely," Vanzant says. "I had to realize it wasn't about me, it was about them, and their choices. And their wounds. And their need for healing. I just had to support them and love them through the process."
Vanzant's two oldest children work with her in the building she bought two years ago to house her spiritual headquarters, as does husband Adeyemi Bandeli, former director of a black history museum in Atlanta.
Vanzant says she's contemplating offers that could make her a household name. Could she out-Oprah, Oprah?
"People are coming at me with book and movie deals and wanting to put me on TV, but I'm not a talking head. So you won't see me sitting on a couch talking to celebrities about their weddings and their makeup," she says. "I'll know when God tells me, and he hasn't told me yet."
Pub Date: 03/14/99