Finding Voice in the Pain of a Family and Its Fall

The Fords are the pre-eminent black political family of Tennessee. Victoria’s uncle Harold E. Ford Sr. was the first African-American from the state elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Her cousin Harold Jr. succeeded his father as a congressman and in 2006 made a highly publicized (though unsuccessful) run for the Senate. An aunt, along with seven uncles and cousins, have held local office. Her father, John Ford, was a state senator for 30 years.

But in 2005, when Victoria was still in elementary school, the family cracked apart. Her father was arrested and later convicted of taking a $55,000 bribe. An F.B.I. undercover video posted online shows him stuffing money into his suit coat and pants. As Victoria, now 18, wrote in one of her award-winning essays, “The Internet knows more about you than your own daughter.”

Victoria’s mother, an alcoholic, was convicted of drunken driving three times and imprisoned. In an essay titled “To a Restless Little Brother Calling for Mama in His Sleep,” Victoria wrote: “Promise me you’ll forget the last night we saw Mama. In the living room, when she was throwing pens, the holiday pictures, her dinner plate, the knife on the counter, anything she could get her hands on. Remember? I took you in my arms. Up the flight of stairs and called the police.”

On April 28, 2008, her father reported to the federal prison in Pollock, La. Her mother was five months into a yearlong prison sentence; their home was about to be foreclosed on; and a social worker told Victoria, her two brothers and sister that if they did not find somewhere to live soon, they would be placed in foster care.

Some children are destroyed by life’s savagery, while others — Frank McCourt in “Angela’s Ashes,” Jeannette Walls in “The Glass Castle” and, now, Victoria Ford in Greenville, S.C. — find inspiration from it.

It took Mr. McCourt decades before he discovered the voice to tell the story of his brutal childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Victoria found hers as a high school senior.

On Tuesday, at a ceremony in Manhattan, she will be presented with a $10,000 scholarship and a Scholastic Art and Writing Award, an honor previously won by Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates and Sylvia Plath. In the fall, she will enter the University of Pennsylvania.

Victoria herself cannot fully explain her unsinkable nature. “I had no choice,” she said. “I’d wake up in the morning, go to school, do well and then the same thing the next day.” Her lowest grade was 92 in Algebra II.

Her people pluck out their eyelashes, burn color pencils for eyeliner, search the bushes for cigarette butts.

The writer Melissa Fay Greene, a Scholastic Award judge, observed, “Unlike others here who recorded rough childhoods and tragic experiences without distance, perspective or insight, this writer emerges from abuse and tragedy with a lucid vision, a clear and original voice.”

The four children got help along the way. The congregation at Collins Chapel, a Christian Methodist Episcopal church in Memphis, sent a bus for them on Sundays. “So we wouldn’t be sitting around, they got us out of the house,” said Victoria, who sang in the choir and served as an acolyte.

Her aunt Megan Mitchell-Hoefer, an elementary school principal here in Greenville, saved them from foster care.

“I called Aunt Megan one night from my room,” Victoria said. “I told her there’s no time, and I don’t know what to do. I hung up and a few days went by.”

Ms. Mitchell-Hoefer did not want to be another person making flimsy promises. “I wanted to drop everything,” she said. “But I just had a child. I needed to speak to my husband.”

He said of course. Ms. Mitchell-Hoefer brought along their 4-month-old on the 10-hour drive to Memphis. “I called from the car,” the aunt said. “I told her I’m on the way.”

That was four years ago. Victoria and her siblings have lived with their hero aunt’s family since.

She had the good fortune of being accepted to the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a selective public boarding school here that serves 200 11th and 12th graders from across the state.

Each year about 70 students apply for 12 spots in the writing program. Victoria sent eight poems she had written on the school bus.

At first, Victoria did not stand out. “She was not among the top writers,” said Scott Gould, who teaches nonfiction. “She found her voice senior year.” The teenager straining to hold her family together became the writer who knew all her subjects’ flaws, but still felt affection for them. She wrote, she said, to heal herself and her family.

The essays surprise. In one about who is ghetto and who is not, she describes “the scariest black girl I’ve ever met. Teardrop tattoos on her face in honor of her gang affiliation, cubic zirconium rings on every finger to serve as knockoff versions of brass knuckles, and she needed a tutor in Honors Spanish II.”

She has sent her father a few pieces, though not the most hurtful. He was convicted at two federal trials and sentenced to 19 years. Last month, one conviction was overturned on jurisdictional grounds, and Victoria was hoping he would be released in time for the Scholastic ceremony. He was not.

In “Letter to My Father,” she describes one of the last times she saw him. “The pastor bellowed at the congregation to accept the invitation of Christ,” she wrote, adding, “In front of everyone, you apologized. It was vague, no explanations. You just said sorry for not being there in the past and for having to go away so soon because of your mistakes.”

Lately, she said, she has been talking more to her mother.

Victoria is one of seven nationwide to win Scholastic’s writing award. Another is her friend Luke Hodges, who also attends the governor’s school. Luke said he never knew about Victoria’s background until his father, Jim Hodges, a former governor of South Carolina, came for a visit. “Are you related to the Fords of Tennessee?” he asked.

In Memphis, during the bad times, Victoria sometimes hid in the house, running upstairs to her bedroom and closing the door to avoid television news crews. On Tuesday, at 7 p.m. in Carnegie Hall, she will stand center stage for all the world to see.