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Jashae Johnson
“Shae, are you seeing this shit right now? Look to the left of you,” my best friend, Mahogany, of twenty-five years, said to me.
With the nachos and cheese that I had resting in my lap and my bottled water on the right of me, I quickly turned my head to see what Mahogany was talking about. When I saw what she was dying for me to look at, all I could do was shake my head. It was Friday night, and Mahogany and I were sitting up in the bleachers with the rest of the hundreds of people who were there watching a game of basketball that felt like the game of the century.
My baby was out there playing. My seventeen-year-old baby was out there on the court doing his thing, making everyone in the crowd feel like he was ready to play in the NBA. The girls loved my son Giovonte. In fact, these young, high school ass girls probably thought that they loved him more than I did.
To the right of me, which was where Mahogany had forced me to look, a group of at least twenty girls all had some sort of shirt or jersey made with my baby’s name and number on it. They were damn near screaming louder than me whenever he made a basket, or anytime the ball was in his hands for that matter. These girls went all out for Giovonte. I’m talking shirts that had his picture on it, and some even went as far as using the school colors to put his jersey number, which was number 3, on their faces with paint.
I looked out at my son on the court, and he was eating all of that attention up, with his handsome self. My son was every bit of his father, loving the attention, especially when it came from a woman. The other team, St Thomas, which was the school that Giovonte’s team was playing, had called a time out, so that left Giovonte enough time to look into the crowd.
After hearing all the cheers, he showed those perfect set of teeth that I had helped out with due to him having braces for two years. He also showed those deep dimples that could win any woman in there over. My son had a light brown skin complexion, just like his father, Giovonni. My baby was so tall, standing 6’4”, towering over me. No tattoos on his body, so the sleeveless jersey that he wore showed off that golden brown skin that God had blessed him with, which was free of any ink.
His eighteenth birthday was coming up in a few months, and he swore up and down that he was going to the tattoo shop to get a sleeve tattoo, but I told him that it wasn’t happening. Even with my son almost eighteen, I was still having a problem as a mother with accepting the fact that he wasn’t a baby anymore.
My biggest challenge was the hoochies that my son attracted. Even right now, having to sit in stands filled with people and watching all of these fast ass girls lust after my baby boy, it just did something to me. I hated it, actually. They saw the offers that he was getting from just about every university worldwide, so they knew what his skills would one day bring; fame and money! Dollar signs were what majority of these fast ass girls saw, but my son was stubborn like his father, so he would rather fuck up before he listened to the advice that anyone gave him until it was too late to right his wrong.
With all the noise that was going on in the gym from the music playing, the cheerleaders on the side cheering, mixed with the fans in the crowd, Giovonte’s eyes still managed to fall on mine. When they did, he mouthed the words, I love you.
My heart melted when he did that. I mouthed it back to him, letting him know that I loved him more, and right after, the game was back on. On a Friday night, I was still in my work clothes. I came to see my son play straight from work, not even having enough time to go home and change.
Giovonte swore up and down that I was his good luck charm. He made it clear that whenever I didn’t make a game, he didn’t play as well. As tired as I was from the forty plus hours that I put in this week at work, I still managed to get there and watch my son. I took on several roles in Giovonte’s life. I was both mother and father along with doctor, provider, therapist, but the mother and father are what I took on the most.
Giovonte’s father, Giovonni, who we call Trip since he was Giovonni the III was a part of our son’s life, but he was incarcerated while he did his parenting. He would forever be incarcerated, and that was because when our baby was seven-year-old, Trip was charged with the murder of a ten-year-old little girl.
I hated to tell this story because I hated thinking back to that day. Ten years had passed since that happened, and I still felt that it was fresh. Trip was part of a gang called the Miami Boyz. That was a gang that he would sell his soul to if he had to, a gang that he was willing to die about if forced to do so. It was no secret that they were beefing with their rivals who were called Broward Bangs.
To this day, I didn’t know the whole story because Trip didn’t usually include me in his dirty work. All I knew was that one of the men from Broward Bangs raped a girlfriend of the men in Miami Boyz, so that started a war. I believe Trip told me that the dude who raped the woman, his name was Lemont or something like that. Either way, Trip and one of his close friends at the time, Gerome, had pulled up to Lemont’s house at maybe 10:00 P.M. and they shot through the house.
Inside the house was Lemont’s girlfriend and their ten-year-old daughter, Bria. I remember that little girl’s name to this day. How the hell could I have forgotten that? I swear it still haunts me. Trip had some fucked-up ways about him, but I promise you that he was a good person. When it made the news about the shooting and Bria dying, Trip was depressed about it for two days straight. It wasn’t long before the cops came and picked him and Lemont up.
At the time, I wanted Trip to lie. I wanted him to say that he didn’t do it, but he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he admitted to his weapon being the gun that was used to kill Bria, and he’d been taken out of my life ever since. I knew why he confessed. We had a seven-year-old baby boy at the time, so he had to have been thinking about Giovonte in a situation like this.
Trip and I go way back. I’m talking elementary school days. He and I attended the same elementary school, middle school, and high school, although he was two years older than I was. By the time I was eleven, Trip and I were in a full-blown relationship. I swear I loved that boy. At eleven, what little girl even knows what love is?
You couldn’t tell me shit when it came to Trip! My hot ass used to be outside with the rest of the kids, playing, doing jump rope and whatever else us kids did, but reall
y, I would just be ready to go outside so that I could be up under my man.
My daddy and my grandmother raised me. I never even got the chance to meet my mother because she died giving birth to me. I had seen pictures of her over the years, and all I could say was Beauty should have been her name because my mother was beautiful. My dad and I lived with my grandmother growing up, and like I said, they were the ones who raised me.
I was a daddy’s girl with my daddy wrapped around my little finger. I wouldn’t say that my daddy allowed me to do whatever I wanted, but he didn’t restrict me from a lot of things either. It was more so my grandmother who would get on my case every time she could. To this day, I wondered if they didn’t get on me enough because the summer of my eighth-grade year, when I was preparing to go into high school, and at just thirteen years of age, I found out that I was pregnant.
I was raised by one of those old school grandmothers. You know, the kind that woke up early in the morning and made all types of homemade dishes for breakfast. The kind that got you up every Sunday morning, so that you could take your ass to church. Still to this day, as a thirty-year-old woman, I remember the fear that I had when I had to tell my grandmother and my daddy that I thought I was pregnant. I was a baby at the time, so I really didn’t know. All I knew was that my body felt different. My appetite was different. My clothes were fitting me differently.
The moment I told my grandmother that I was pregnant, I swear she didn’t even let me finish. She just went into her bedroom, grabbed a belt, and beat the shit out of me with it. Prior to that day, my grandmother had never in her life raised a finger to me. She may have tapped me on my behind if I did something bad, but that was as far as it went. I promise you that beating went on for at least ten minutes, and my daddy just stood there doing nothing.
I don’t even think he knows that when he stopped talking to me, that hurt far worse than any beating that I could ever get. When the beating was over, I remember my grandma leaving the house, and she came back like ten minutes later with a pregnancy test. She made me take all three of them that had come inside the box, and sure enough, my young, thirteen-year-old ass was pregnant.
I remember my daddy running out of the house to where Trip was playing basketball outside with the other boys in the neighborhood. My daddy beat the shit out of Trip. Trip stayed like five houses down from us, so one of the kids must have run to his house and told his mother that my daddy was beating on Trip, so Trip’s mother, Juanita, came outside ready to fight my daddy. Once she found out why my daddy was beating Trip’s ass, she ended up beating on him too.
I sat in that bathroom and cried for hours. I think I was crying so much because I was scared. I knew that I didn’t know the first thing about being a good mother. I could barely wake up and make my bed, so how the hell would I be able to be somebody’s mother? At the same time, I didn’t want to kill my baby. I didn’t want to live, knowing that I had killed a child when I should have been protecting myself, so that this would have never happened.
I remember my grandmother basically standing over me and telling me how my life was ruined, and how I would never have a childhood, and stuff like that. She was only telling me these things from experience. She had my mother at fourteen, and my mother had me at sixteen. All I was really doing was continuing the cycle, and she was pissed at me for that.
