Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

At Exousia International's Palm Sunday service, April Drummond's brother, the Rev. Jay White (with microphone), moves parishioners to their feet. "April's not afraid to sacrifice, and that's how you become great," White said of April (standing, left).

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

April Marcell Drummond leads daughters (from left) La'Fawn and Farrah Johnson and singer Alicia Scott as part of Exousia International's praise and worship team while April's mother, Barbara White (holding April's grandson, Elias Fau) watches. April has never strayed from her church roots and still describes herself as an "old-school Christian."

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

April Marcell Drummond, who uses her middle name professionally, edits her film about domestic violence, "When Life Knocks You Down," at Hollins University. "She knows how to gather people around her who care about what she's doing," said film professor Amy Gerber-Stroh. "You can't help but be inspired by her imagination and courage."

It's fitting, with a person this unusual, to get the facts out of the way early, give the story some room to breathe:

At 43, April Marcell Drummond is a senior at Hollins University, a playwright and director already sought by professional theater companies, a filmmaker already connected -- somehow, some way -- to folks in Hollywood and New York.

Now cue the back story, which is where the heart of this would-be TV miniseries rests: A single mom from Roanoke's Rugby neighborhood, she has seven kids, a leaky roof and a stack of overdue bills.

She's the type of student most professors stumble upon just once in a career, the kind who pulls all-nighters editing film in an arts center named after a dead industrialist, with her little kids wrapped in blankets by her feet.

Some say she's destined to win a Pulitzer.

Maybe it'll be for one of her Mother Straitway stories -- a recurring character based on her grandma Gaga. Willie Mae Reddicks could recite the Yellow Cab phone number from memory, drank instant coffee out of an old Maxwell House jar and called April every morning at 6 to say, "Hey Apa, you up?"

Maybe she'll make a movie about how she spent Christmas of her senior year as a Hollins student: with her seven kids and two grandbabies in a cramped Melrose Avenue motel.

What she won't win a thing for, everyone agrees, is pretending: aiming for Tyler Perry when the vision of April Marcell Films is uniquely her own.

Unapologetically Christian and as street-smart as a Waffle House waitress (which, until recently, she was), she is the chronicler of her community, the narrator of a little-known enclave of ranch houses in Northwest Roanoke.

The storyteller of Leon Street.

Opening doors

White Roanoke's introduction to her talent was a four-page short story, a fictional account of Roanoke's pioneering black filmmaker. In 2006, Oscar Micheaux changed everything.

What if she hadn't been listening to WTOY on the radio at work? What if she'd never heard of the writing contest to honor Micheaux?

April had written plenty of plays for her charismatic Roanoke church, with her kids in the starring roles.

A few had even gotten her in hot water with church elders because they tackled issues of poverty and alcoholism -- things that were "of the devil," some complained.

She'd never written a short story before, never heard of Micheaux. An "old-school Christian," as she puts it, April doesn't wear pants or drink, and she wants nothing to do with reincarnation or past-life stuff.

But something happened in the library that morning. As April typed, she felt like she was channeling the fearless filmmaker, who tackled race and scrambled door-to-door selling his films. "Making red velvet cake out of some flour and a potato," as April put it.

Her raw talent jumped out at contest judge Dan Smith "like Michael Jordan at a junior high basketball camp," the Roanoke writer recalled. He talked a friend into donating a used computer, then referred April to the Horizon program for nontraditional students at Hollins. There she met director Celia McCormick, who helped her scare up scholarships, grants and loans.

That, too, was huge.

Her freshman year, April went to school full time and worked full time, sometimes running three laps a day between Hollins and the appointments desk she manned for Vistar Eye Center. She earned a 4.0, majored in theater and, by her own admission, nearly fell apart.

There were days when she napped in the Hollins parking lot, days when she sat in her car and cried out of exhaustion and guilt. Her parents helped, but she worried about her kids, especially her oldest, 24-year-old La'Fawn Johnson, who bore the brunt of mothering her younger siblings.

La'Fawn worked the graveyard shift at Wachovia's operations center on Plantation Road. When her car wouldn't start, she walked the six miles home more than once -- in the pre-dawn. When friends complained about having to eat macaroni and cheese for supper, she remembers rolling her eyes. In her house, they sometimes went without water or heat.

"Before Hollins, I used to feel like my mom was this superhero movie star only nobody else knew about her," said La'Fawn. "Then it was like she finally got discovered.

"I never doubted her, but I definitely grew up quicker than most kids my age."

At Hollins, April didn't bother trying to fake the "pearl girl" stereotype. She wrote, acted and filmed what she knew.

For a sociology paper, she recalled the indignities of applying for food stamps and Medicaid, of being turned down for emergency heating assistance -- because she owed the gas company too much.

She was the only student portraying one of the low-wage Merry Maids in the college production of "Nickel and Dimed" who had more real-life experience than her character in the play.

"She came to class one day with her Waffle House uniform on," recalled theater professor Ernie Zulia, who would go on to cast her in several leading roles. "With April, there's just no ego involved."

In her first theater class, she fell back on habits honed behind the church altar -- singing beautifully and acting from the heart. "But she choreographed her work within an inch of its life," Zulia said.

Loosen up, he coached, until she sponged every morsel of stagecraft the college offered, attending regional theater conferences and eventually getting paid to direct out-of-town plays.

"She always seems to find herself on the other side of the doorway and not always certain how she'll handle it," Zulia said. "But what sets her apart is, she goes through the doorway first. Then she figures out the next step."

Gaga smiling down

For beginning filmmakers, professor Amy Gerber-Stroh starts her students off with simple camera-operating exercises. "The first films they make, most students are doing little videos about squirrels on campus," she said.

But April's foray into digital video was to document the final days of her brother, Todd "Bitty" White, a former drug addict who'd gotten clean, only to be felled by stomach and lung cancer in 2009 at the age of 39.

April filmed his story, a testimony of regret and redemption. She captured the day he left his parents' house for the last time on an ambulance stretcher.

She pulled back-to-back all-nighters editing the 12-minute production, not knowing the impact it would have on her until she watched it with her classmates on the big screen. Tears poured down her face.

She knew now what she wanted to do with her life. So began the start of April Marcell Films. (Separated from her second husband for many years, she uses Marcell, her middle name, professionally.)

Gerber-Stroh asked her students to make a second film and submit it to a juried festival. Which is how April came to ride an airplane in 2010 for the second time in her life, en route to the San Diego Black Film Festival, where she would find herself on the other side of a new doorway, mingling with professional actors and directors.

To stretch her money, she took a city bus from the airport, imagining her thrifty Gaga smiling down. She found her way to the hotel on foot, sweating in her winter coat and boots because she hadn't figured on 65-degree weather in January.

When New York-based actor Jarrett Alexander (whose screen credits include guest roles on "Body of Proof" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent") saw her standing alone in the crowd, he introduced himself.

He hadn't yet seen "Black Cathy," the winning autobiographical short she'd filmed based on her fourth-grade girl exploits. Cathy was the new girl on the elementary-school bus, shunned by the lighter-skinned blacks on April's block of Leon Street for her dark skin and kinky hair:

"They say the church can't even help her! They say she have Lazarus hair: It's dead and won't come back 'til Jesus come."

Starring April's 14-year-old daughter, Autumn Drummond, the film is a funny, poignant look at skin-color hierarchy. "My mom and sisters had nice Pocahontas hair, but I identified with Cathy because I knew what it felt like to be set aside because you didn't have what somebody else had," April said.

The girl with the cheap shoes from Pickway? That was her. The man scorned by kids for picking through Dumpsters, digging up aluminum he could parlay into groceries? That was her daddy.

When April filled Alexander in on her next project, he offered to play one of the leads, an abuser based loosely on the life of April's first husband, Steven Johnson, who was stabbed to death by a chain-smoking crack user in 1993. That film, "When Life Knocks You Down," was screened to an enthusiastic full house at Hollins last month.

Asked recently by a reporter if he knew how April had scraped together his discounted $500 fee -- and paid to fly in a Hollywood videographer as her director of photography -- he didn't.

She hustled it up the same way her daddy put food on the table: She sold T-shirts to folks at Hollins and made rice pudding to sell to people in her church.

The rest of the talent, set and props were donated, borrowed or "ghetto rigged," as April calls it -- including the jailhouse jumpsuit Alexander wore in his final scene, which was sewn by a lady from church.

Trying times

Last fall April steeled herself to deliver the news to McCormick, her Horizon mentor. She was quitting Hollins. She was in the throes of putting on "God's Eye," her senior thesis play, a 20-plus-member musical that she wrote, directed and performed.

But here's the dirty little secret known by few in the cast: She didn't have a car. Her heat and water had been cut off, forcing her to move her five youngest kids into a motel.

She'd been working at Waffle House but had to stop when rehearsals began, and her campus work-study job didn't cover her past-due utility bills. On top of that, daughter La'Fawn was about to give birth the night of the dress rehearsal. "Here she is, homeless, and she's putting on this huge production, and simultaneously her daughter's in labor," recalled Zulia, her adviser.

"It was amazing to watch her navigate that and stay focused, even though clearly her heart was elsewhere. The bottom line was always, 'God'll get me there.' "

McCormick's secretary, Joanna Schroeder, still tears up talking about that time. When April first arrived on campus, Schroeder remembers how awestruck she was, marveling at her professors and routinely saying "Really?!" out loud in class.

A Roanoke Times story about April's first year unearthed an anonymous donor who bought her books and sent a Target gift card every Christmas. That card bought her kids' presents last year, even if April did have to have them turn their heads as she wrapped them in their room at the Embassy Inn.

Nonetheless, April told McCormick, the stress of putting on the play and worrying about family was taking a toll. Children shouldn't have to eat Christmas dinner from a Crock-Pot.

But quitting one semester shy of graduation?

McCormick's stare said it all: Have you lost your mind? April left her office, stunned but determined to keep going -- or die trying.

She opened her laptop and went back to work. That semester, she earned her one and only B.

Militantly saved

To understand why April is so uncompromising about the religious nature of her work, it's helpful to witness Minister April, as she's known at church. With 600 members on the roll, Exousia International is led by a 34-year-old former crack dealer named Jay White, who is April's baby brother.

White started the church seven years ago as an offshoot from the Glorious Church of God in Christ. Once a student in the city schools' PLATO program for gifted kids, he had strayed hard in his teens -- selling drugs, smoking weed, breaking his parents' hearts.

Not long after her husband's death, April was so convinced that the Lord had something special planned for her brother that she locked herself and several friends in the church. For three days, they prayed and fasted, sleeping at the altar. Daring God to intervene.

"I was militant!" April recalled.

The next Sunday, White finally came to church. With gold in his mouth and the smell of weed on his breath, he asked God to save him. It was 1995, and he was 18 years old.

Last Sunday, he recounted the story in a three-hour service that had people dancing in the aisles. Women clutched babies in one arm and waved funeral-home fans with the other.

"Don't patty-cake me, y'all," he said, hammering his points in a performance that was as aerobic as it was impassioned. "This ain't one of these churches where everybody had it together. Here we know can't nobody bring your crazy tail off the street corner but God."

With a lilting alto that has brought down many a theater house, April led her oldest daughters in song, backed by a window-rattling R&B gospel band. She sang through the altar call, too, pausing only to comfort people who were moved to spiritual rapture, catching some as they slumped, trancelike, to the floor.

The next day she was back in her Hollins editing studio, scoring the music for "The Way to a Man's Heart," her senior thesis film short. It's a knee-slapper, about a pair of Lincoln Terrace women fighting for the affections of their mailman from dueling front porches. ("I'm fixing macaroni and cheese that'll make that man say my name backwards!")

A few weeks ago, she previewed it for campus supporters and friends, an admiring mix of church folk and Leon Street neighbors -- and one of the most diverse crowds ever assembled at Babcock Auditorium.

Zulia marveled as April worked the crowd, clad in an elegant red-silk dress. She leaned casually on the lectern as she thanked her actors, cracked jokes and praised God "because without him, my children would be bringing flowers to my grave instead of to this stage."

How far will she go?

After graduation next month, she's going first to Norfolk, where a professional gospel-theater company has hired her to produce "God's Eye" this summer, the musical she pulled off, somehow, from that Melrose Avenue motel.

She's even offered professor Zulia a job -- directing her show.

April Marcell Drummond's senior thesis film, "The Way to a Man's Heart," will premiere in the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center auditorium at 6 p.m. Wednesday.