CHAPTER 2
The breath caught in Juicy's chest. It was like she had clawed her way up from a drowning lake.
With a choked sob she tried to sit up. A hand was pressing her back down and Juicy felt the fight come back into her. With a scream she began pummeling the person that was desperately trying to hold her wrists down at her side.
"Stop it stop it STOP IT!" Someone was screaming almost as loud as she was. After a moment Juicy focused on the words and the person screaming them. She blinked her swelling eyes. There was one man; one lone man gripping her wrists.
The three young men were nowhere in sight...just this one man. She watched him in terror. Then in slow recognition she realized who it was.
Mr. Cracker...only Mr. Cracker looked like someone had done to him what it felt like had been done to her! His lip was busted and bleeding and his eye was purple and swelling more and more by the second. He watched her just as warily as she watched him.
"Please..." She cried. "Please don't…"
Mr. Cracker slowly released his grip on her wrist. Immediately Juicy tried to rise, to run away screaming, to crawl away if she had to—instead the world turned black.
Something smelled so bad that it cut through Juicy's unconsciousness. Her head moved slowly from side to side. The pain in the back of her head was magnificent! She sucked in a breath before remembering that the smell was also magnificent. She tried to bring her hand up to her nose and that hurt so much that she let it fall back to the ground.
No...not ground. She was lying on layers of something. What? She wasn't sure but it wasn't the cement ground of the alley. Juicy's eyes widened. Where was she and how had she gotten here?!
"You're not going to scream anymore, are you?"
The voice was mumbled and low. Juicy couldn't see Mr. Cracker. She wasn't in the alley but inside now. It was dark, but not completely. There were candles lit.
Juicy's stomach suddenly flipped and she was able to turn her head and vomit. Ahhh. And that was the source of the smell. It wasn't the first time she'd been sick.
She moaned. "W-where am I?"
Mr. Cracker slowly unfolded his squatting form from the shadows of the semi dark room.
"My home." He mumbled.
Juicy hurt so bad that she could barely focus on him. Had they...raped her? And what about him? What had he done to her?
"I need—an ambulance."
Mr. Cracker didn't speak but he did come slowly to his feet. His home was a room in an abandoned building. The windows were boarded up but through the cracks she could tell that it was full dark outside now. Juicy lay on a pallet of newspaper and blankets. Instead of furniture there were wooden crates and cardboard boxes. Some of them held possessions or what appeared to be trash...only it wasn't trash. It was Mr. Cracker's belongings.
Mr. Cracker rummaged through a cardboard box until he came up with an old t-shirt, faded and worn.
"It's not dirty." He tossed it to her from a distance. Juicy looked down. She was semi covered by a jacket and beneath that she wasn't wearing anything but her bra. Her panties, her skirt, her nylons and her blouse were all gone.
"God..." she sobbed.”Mister I'm hurt. I need an ambulance." She couldn't even raise her head from the filthy pallet.
Mr. Cracker's lip twitched and then he picked up an invisible phone and began dialing.
"Hello 911? Yes, could you please send an ambulance? Yes, I'm located in the alley. Okay, see you then." Mr. Cracker hung up the invisible phone while Juicy watched him incredulously.
"They’re on their way."
She couldn't even form words. This man was crazy...
Juicy's eyes hadn't closed but her awareness began to fade away. When it returned she blinked quickly. Her head pounded like spikes had been driven into her skull. That was twice that she had passed out. It wasn't normal. She needed a Doctor, a hospital before she died in this filthy abandoned building.
Juicy inhaled deeply. "Mister?" She murmured, fighting to keep from blacking out again.
There wasn't any response. He was gone. The room was empty. Juicy thought hard. Her hand was most likely broken, some of her ribs had definitely been cracked, her back hurt, but it was her head that was the biggest cause for concern.
Using her good hand she reached up and touched the back of her head. Her hand came away bloody. Her scalp was split, possibly her skull.
Dear god...this was bad. Real bad...Juicy didn't have anything else to vomit or she probably would have.
She had to get out of here. She remembered the shirt and picked it up. It took her perhaps ten minutes to pull it on, but there was still the problem of her lower half. She still wasn't wearing any bottoms. She would need to wrap up in one of the blankets.
She noted that Mr. Cracker had evidently cleaned up the vomit although traces of it still remained in her hair and on her body. Juicy pushed away the jacket and covered herself with the cleaner of the two blankets.
Who was she fooling? If she couldn't even sit up, she wasn't going to be able to stand up.
Baring her teeth, she dug down deep, and finding some shreds of strength she half scooted half pulled her way across the filthy floor. She ignored the rat droppings, dead and living cock roach carcasses and nameless other things that she didn't want to try to figure out.
As she fought her way across the room, reality and the past began to meld. Sometimes it seemed that she was trying to get to Momma, and at other times she was in school being ignored or tortured. She began to remember things that she had long ago put out of her memory...
~Pt. 1~
Momma had a date with Mr. Benson and she wanted Juicy to put spirals in her hair. She had such beautiful hair. Juicy had always wished that she looked like her Momma. Momma was milk chocolate with long, thick hair that touched her shoulders. Juicy in comparison was ashy black with hair like a kinky cap. She pressed and oiled and brushed what she had until it shown...still it would never be like Momma's.
Juicy's home life wasn't good but it was all she knew. Most people thought that her Mom was nuts. Her personality was fierce with a temper that lashed out at everyone with the exception of her daughter. And Juicy, in turn, was as docile as her Mom was chaotic.
‘Babygirl, that looks so good.’ Momma carefully pulled a curl, released it and then watched it bounce back into position. Juicy had wanted to say that it was easy with hair like that. It bent to her will with no effort. Instead she made small talk like people expect hairdressers to do; even if the hairdresser is just ten years old.
‘You’ve been out with Mr. Benson a lot.’
Jasmina Robinson stood then moved closer to the mirror. She studied her makeup and then lit a cigarette.
‘Yeah, but Charlie is as broke as me. I ain’t trying to waste my time with a broke-ass niggah.’
Juicy followed Momma into the living room and watched her sit on the couch and slip on heels. One day she’d be doing that; sitting on the couch putting on fancy shoes so that she could go out with her man.
‘You laugh when you’re with him. So he must make you happy.’ What could be better then someone that makes you happy?
Her Mom scowled. ‘Juicy, laughter don’t pay my bills.’ She gave the little girl a pointed look. ‘You can fall for a man that got a little bit of money just as good as you can fall for a broke niggah. Charlie is fun, but Charlie can never be my man.’
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 lean 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 tell the patients to tell their doctors certain key words and then the doctor would know that they weren’t 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 when you have 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.