Making Room

Chasity Phillips

Growing up eleven years behind her big sister Tonya on a mountain in rural Northwest Alabama, Chasity Phillips spent her childhood living in the wake of someone larger than life. Tonya was the kind of woman who fought a claw machine to win a stuffed bear for her baby sister in a hospital room, who let a seven-year-old ride shotgun in her Ford Ranger through the Alabama evenings, and who stayed up through the long, dark nights so a grieving child could finally sleep. She was fierce, funny, and stubbornly alive — and to Chasity, she was the safest place in the world. But life on the mountain was never without its storms. Tonya's teenage pregnancy brought fear and anger crashing through the family in the summer of 1996, followed by a dangerously complicated birth that left her newborn son Ronnie fighting through withdrawals in the dead of winter. Through it all, the family bent but never broke, planting roots deeper into the same hillside soil — two siblings building side-by-side homes on land their father secured for them, raising a wild, beloved army of cousins, answering fire calls for their neighbors, and holding each other through the losses that came without warning. As the years passed, the bond between the sisters only deepened. Chasity grew from the little girl hiding behind Tonya's shirt into a young woman who still reached instinctively for her sister whenever the ground shifted. Through car wrecks, grief, and the ordinary beautiful chaos of mountain life, Tonya remained the constant — the one who always showed up, always made room, and always kept the light on. Then, in October of 2025, the mountain went quiet in a way it never had before. Headlamp in the Dark is Chasity's tribute to the woman who shaped her — a raw, tender memoir about sisterhood, sudden loss, and the impossible work of learning to stand in the open when the person who always sheltered you is gone.