Juicy Read Free Page A

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