Willie Myrick was nine years old and standing in the driveway of his home in southwest Atlanta, Georgia, when a man grabbed him and forced him into a car. It was April 2014.
He did not scream. He did not kick. He did not try to open the door while the car was moving.
He started singing.
He sang Every Praise, a gospel song he had learned in Sunday school. And when he finished, he sang it again. And again. And again, for nearly three hours, while the man drove around the outskirts of the city and yelled at him to be quiet.
“He told me to stop singing or he was going to do something to me”, Willie later recounted. He kept singing.
A nine-year-old boy does not have the strength to fight an adult. He is not old enough to negotiate. He has no way to escape from a moving car. Willie had only a melody learned in church, and he clung to it like someone clings to the only thing they have left.
After those three hours, in East Point, on the outskirts of Atlanta, the man stopped the car and let him go. Willie returned to his godmother, Codetta Bateman, who had raised him since he was three years old.
No one can fully explain what happened inside that mind during that journey. But the boy who had nothing found the only thing he carried within him. And that, that time, was enough.