Chapter 4: Remembering, Part 1

Juicy had liked Mr. Benson, but Momma didn't lie; she left him for someone that had a nice car. But this new man did not make her laugh nearly as much as Charlie Benson had.

There were times in Juicy's life when her Momma was both her biggest love and her biggest fear. She wasn't afraid of her directly. She was afraid of what her Momma could do.

White people couldn't be trusted, they were devils, they would stab you in the back. Juicy had grown up with these words all of her life. White people weren't too bad in her opinion. Her teachers were nice, the doctor gave her a sucker, the butcher winked at her and smiled.

But Momma always had something bad to say about them and every time they drove through the white neighborhoods, Momma would throw her trash out the window.

"Momma, that's littering! You shouldn't do that!"

"Girl, I know it's wrong to litter!" She would snap while smoking her cigarette and looking mean. "But they dump they trash in our neighborhood and no one cleans it up. If I dump my trash in their neighborhood then I bet you they gonna come clean it up or have someone else do it for them!"

"Probably another black person." Juicy had mumbled. Momma didn't have a response for that. But nothing could change her mind.

One time she had driven out of the bank going through the entrance instead of the exit. The traffic had been backed up and so she had created a shortcut. An old white woman had rolled down her window and told Momma that she was going the wrong way.

She had become enraged. Momma had actually stopped her car in order to cuss out the older woman, proclaiming that she wasn't stupid, she could read, that the woman wasn't the exit police…Juicy had just watched from her passenger seat in wide-eyed disbelief that her Mother had reacted so strongly. Once they had sped off, Momma had mumbled to herself that white people always thought blacks were stupid.

Worse is when her Momma had to come to the school. All of the teachers in elementary and middle school knew about her mother and took all the steps necessary to keep her from having to show her face there. There was no shortage of exploits involving Juicy's Momma busting into classrooms and threatening the teacher, or roaming down the halls with a heated look and a cigarette in her mouth while she searched for the right conference room. Open house was a nightmare of accusations and confrontations.

There was a long list of things that Juicy didn't like Momma to do, getting pulled over by a white policeman, having the bagger at the grocery store over-fill the bags or smash the bread, having a white person point out that she had come in through the exit and gone out through the entrance…and god forbid if a white man flirted with her!

Juicy didn't have to ask what white people had ever done to Momma. She knew the story as well as she knew how to spell her name. Momma used to working in housekeeping at the hospital and had made good money doing it. Sometimes she would know more than the dumb nurses about the patients. Even though it wasn't her job, she would bring the patients water, pillows, or just shoot the bull with them as she dumped their trash and swept their floors. Sometimes they would complain about this or that with her and Jassmina began to learn when they had too much or too little medication and sometimes even the wrong medicine. There wasn't much she could do about it other than to advice her patients to use certain keywords with their doctor to help them not so sound as if they were just bullshitting.

One day Jassmina was accused of stealing patient's medication. After a short investigation she was fired. Of course she had talked calmly to the administration, of course she had asked for these patients to vouch for her, but in the end she was the one escorted from the premises of the hospital and not the scrawny white nurse that had the track marks up and down her arms.

"If I could go back in time I would cut those white devils. I would do everything different…everything!" Her mother would say bitterly whenever times got rough, whenever money was short or whenever a white person would do something nice for her.

Juicy and her Momma lived in the Cincinnati projects. Her daddy had died when she was still too young to remember him. Juicy figured that her Momma hadn't been angry back in those days before he died and when she had a good paying job at the hospital. Juicy would look at the photographs that showed her dimpled grin, and her Daddy with his arms wrapped around the both of them as if he would keep the outside world from touching them. Sometimes she would cry from wishing so hard for a Daddy to protect them.

But he had died and the reality is that a single woman can't make a car note, pay rent and utilities, AND daycare on little more than a minimum wage job. Initially money in their house was tight, but as Juicy got older their income was supplemented by what she brought in from doing hair. Momma worked at a soul food restaurant and so didn't have to spend much for groceries. Their meals consisted almost entirely of the leftovers that Momma brought home from work, which meant that Juicy's diet was made up mainly of fatty pork ribs, deep fried fish and fries, peach cobbler, butter cakes etc. The two lived in a one-bedroom apartment and Juicy's bedroom was the couch that was sorely inadequate for a girl of her height and weight.

She had very few friends to speak of, which meant the majority of her free time was spent in front of the TV set or reading. She hated school because the kids made fun of her. Juicy wasn't dumb but she failed enough times that she didn't graduate until the age of twenty. Had it not been for the promise that she had made to her Momma, Juicy would have dropped out long before.

To Juicy, friends were people that you sat next to in school. But you didn't actually call them on the telephone or hang out with them; at least Juicy didn't. She didn't really know what it was to have a real friend until Felix. He lived in her apartment complex and people made fun of him because they said he had too much 'sugar in his tank.' Sometimes the boys used to chase him and if they caught him they would beat him up or make him pull down his pants and show the girls what he had. She remembered watching Felix from the stoop and how he always had quick come-backs to insults, and also how fast he could run when someone threatened to whup his ass. He could outrun anyone in the neighborhood. It was funny how sometimes talent was derived from necessity. Without the ability to do hair, Juicy would never have had the money to make herself look nice, and Felix was the fastest runner in the neighborhood because he had to be.

One day she was sitting on her stoop playing with her Barbie dolls and he sat down next to her. His eyes were glued to the Barbies. She handed him one and he grinned happily. But then he looked around and told her that they would have to play up on the roof. Shrugging she followed him up there, away from prying eyes and from that day on there was never a day that the two didn't hang out with each other; either on the roof, in one of their apartments or at school.

Felix was like a girl, though she would never say that to his face, even though she always got caught saying, 'Girl, let me tell you!' But he seemed to love it when she did that, so it was never a big deal. He liked to dress up in their mother's clothes—mostly her mother's clothes because he said her Momma was hip and his Momma was a thrift store Queen. He liked Barbies and having tea parties. But he also knew how to fight and he taught her how to kick, to punch and to stomp the shit out of someone...but mostly he liked acting like a girl. Felix's passion was fashion and make-up, and as they grew older his love of fashion spread to her, pushing her to be his model. Felix went a long way in convincing Juicy that just because she was big didn't mean she couldn't be beautiful.

As a result, she and Felix dressed better than anybody else in the entire school and she made sure that her hair was more stylish then any of the other girls. Sometimes he would steal outfits for her and sometimes she'd take them both shopping with money she made from doing hair. She learned everything that she knew about fashion from her homosexual best friend.

When someone would make disparaging remarks about how she looked, Felix would be at his most violent. He fought for her more then he fought for himself. She had spent her life watching Momma fight, and now she was watching Felix do it and that seemed to squash the fight right out of her. She wouldn't let anyone put their hands on her, but insults were things that she pretended not to hear. Juicy just held it all in until she felt like her heart would explode out of her chest in rage.

She could have learned from Felix, who never let anyone get the last word, even if the end result was that he would still get beat up. He would always say, 'They just jealous of you, Juicy. That's why they talk about you. You look good and they wish they could look this hot. Vogue, girl!' And then they would prance around like models in a Madonna video; laughing all the while.

One day Juicy sat on the stairs behind the school where people sometimes went at lunch when the weather was nice. She grabbed the stairs before anyone else could and waited for Felix. He sat down slowly, his elbows resting on his knees. He stared at the ground and mumbled a half-hearted greeting.