A Long Way ‘From the Mississippi Delta’ : Theater: Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s play is the story of her triumph over prostitution, poverty and prejudice.

She went from prostitute to professor to playwright. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, whose autobiographical play, “From the Mississippi Delta” opens at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage today, is proof that some spirits cannot be broken.

To look at this large, lovely woman with her warm, penetrating eyes is to be amazed not just by what she has survived, but by the way she has survived rape, prostitution and poverty as well as her mother’s murder. She is without bitterness or rancor.

“Transformation is what my play is about,” Holland said in an interview in her San Diego hotel room last week. “You have to keep going no matter how rough it seems. My mama used to say, ‘Don’t let nobody stop you, stand in your way,’ and that’s my motto to this day. I don’t let nothing stop me.”

“From the Mississippi Delta,” which concluded a successful six-month Off-Broadway run this year, uses three actresses in 11 anecdotal scenes to relate the story of Holland’s impoverished upbringing in segregated Greenwood, Miss. It is also a story of success against all odds as she tells of her struggle to earn a doctorate and become a playwright.

Holland’s life is dramatic--which is why Simon & Schuster just agreed to publish her autobiography and Universal Pictures is negotiating for the rights to adapt her play into a movie. Although this is her sixth play, “From the Mississippi Delta” is the first of her works to gain international acclaim. She says it is the first of a trilogy.

Holland, 48, was born into a black family with the worst reputation in town. For a time, her mother rented out a bed in a wooden shack where prostitutes would meet their tricks. Her sister and brothers were the town drunks. At 11, while she was baby-sitting a white child, she was raped by the toddler’s grandfather. By 12, she was a prostitute, charging white men $10, black men $5. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade. At 16, she was pregnant and a habitual thief. She also began to be booked regularly at the county jail.

Then, at 17, she had trailed a black man from out of town, hoping to turn a trick with him. Instead, he recruited her to work for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee on a voter registration drive in Greenwood.

Meeting the educated blacks in the civil rights movement proved a revelation. They taught her to fight for her rights and encouraged her to go back to school. Holland gives credit to the movement for changing her life. But she also gives credit to her mother and her friends for what she has accomplished.

Holland’s mother taught her by example that people can change: When Holland was still a child, her mother stopped renting to prostitutes and became a midwife, delivering the black babies that the white doctors wouldn’t.

But Holland’s mother also paid dearly for her daughter’s transformation. When Holland was 20, her mother, who was wheelchair-bound, was killed when hooded men firebombed her house. Holland believes the fire was set by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for her activism. It was not until last year, when Holland was welcomed home as a celebrity in the city that had locked her up so many times that the incident was officially called “a suspicious fire” by the governor of Mississippi.

“I still remember when they pulled Mama out,” Holland said, still registering the pain.

Holland believes the fire was meant to frighten her. Instead, it fueled her determination to leave Mississippi for Minneapolis, where she pursued her bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota--which took her 13 years of working, borrowing and begging to get the money for books and tuition. Her doctorate in American studies (focused on theater arts) took seven years to complete.

Holland’s first play, “The Second Doctor Lady,” which she wrote in a college playwriting class, was about her mother. It won the National Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award and inspired her to continue writing. Holland’s mother figures prominently in “From the Mississippi Delta” as well. She is referred to as “Ain’t Baby,” because when her younger sister was born, people told her she wasn’t the baby anymore.

Holland also expresses gratitude to her girlfriends and to the prostitutes and junkies who have helped her. At 11, after the rape, it eased the pain to confide in her girlfriends, most of whom, it turned out, had also been raped by white men at a young age. (She never told her mother.)

She is also grateful that when she turned to prostitution, her mother, although disappointed, never rejected her.

“ ‘Ida Mae, girl,’ ” she remembers her mother telling her, “ ‘I always wanted you to be a schoolteacher.’ But I knew we had to pay the rent; we had to eat. I couldn’t pick enough cotton. I couldn’t stand the sun.”

Although Holland had long before stopped turning tricks and stealing, she stayed in touch with prostitutes and junkies in Minneapolis. They were her friends and they helped support her, taking comfort in her successes. They were the ones who woke her up in the morning, pushed her out the door, gave her whatever they could to help her through.

One woman gave Holland her shoes to wear. Another woman, a junkie, bought her the book “From Slavery to Freedom,” saying, “I’m going to forgo my fix this morning because you need this for school.”

And if she still didn’t have enough from her earnings as a check-out clerk in department stores, she was not too proud to beg: “I’d get a quarter from everybody walking in the street till I paid my tuition,” she said.

Today, Holland sees her mission as helping people as she was helped.

A friend gave her the Swahili name Endesha, which means driver, because she drives herself and others.

Writing is one way she drives people; teaching is another. Holland is an associate professor in the American Studies department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “I used to be a prostitute and a thief,” she told the new students in her biography and autobiography class last week.

It’s her way of opening them up--and it also increases the size of her class.

Holland’s life may prove that anything is possible, but not everyone can or will change. One of her brothers is still Greenwood’s town drunk. Her other brother is immobile with a hereditary degenerative neurological disorder that Holland also has.

Her sister, an evangelist living in Minnesota, is ashamed of the stories Holland tells, Holland says, and does not want anyone to know that they are related.

Holland takes pride in her son, Cedric, 30, the product of the first of three marriages, all of which ended in divorce.

Still, her greatest debt is to her mother.

“She never left the Mississippi Delta,” Holland said. Her voice cracked, and her eyes moistened. “But now people all over the world know Ain’t Baby, the Second Doctor Lady.

“One night, I went blind during a performance and I could feel her presence. Oprah (Winfrey, who co-produced the Off-Broadway production) said to me, ‘The reason this play is enjoying such success is that it’s your mama that’s doing this.’ That was the sweetest thing anyone could say to me.”

* Performances of “From the Mississippi Delta” are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday with Sunday matinees at 2 through Oct. 25. Tickets are $21.50-$30. At the Old Globe Theatre Cassius Carter Centre Stage in Balboa Park, (619) 239-2255.