Jamie's Story

About a girl....

When I was 14 years old I was close friends with a black Cuban girl named Jamie, we were the same age and attended the same school. During this time in my life I lived with my sister in a very rough area, some people would refer to it as “The Projects”. It was a very dangerous place to be for young teenage girls, especially if they were walking around alone which was why me and Jamie always had each other’s back, we walked everywhere together; to the store, to the bus stop, to another friend’s house, etc. While we walked together in our area it was the norm to be followed around by strange older men, laughed at by corner prostitutes or harassed by crack addicts; one time a crack addicted pregnant woman chased after us when we refused to let her sale our shoes for a “quick buck”. We hated our living situation, but we were poor so there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go so we would just share stories about our hopes to get out of the projects when we become adults. Jamie always talked about being a brain surgeon but always said she was “too stupid” to ever have such a great career. I never understood why Jamie thought she wasn’t smart because I thought she was one of the smartest girls I knew around our age. She was great at math, and would often tutor me in the subject since I sucked at it. I later found out that it was Jamie’s mother who always told her she was “stupid” and would never amount to anything. Jamie told me that when she told her mother about her dreams of being a brain surgeon she laughed at her, “You? A brain surgeon? F**k outta here, you aint s**t and you and your worthless a*s brother don’t do s**t but eat up all my food and waste up my f****n electricity bill. You’ll be just like me, cleaning after messy motherfuckas at a motel 6”. She later shared the idea with her father, who didn’t care and had asked her multiple times not call his phone unless it was an emergency. “I already pay child support for you, that should be enough for you”, he would say.

            Jamie was a very beautiful girl. She was about 5’2, had a mocha complexion and hazel eyes, her hair was always in shoulder-length box braids and she had a very curvy body, a body that grown men always felt entitled to touch whenever we were out walking together. She lived with her verbally abusive mother and had an 8 year old brother. Her father wasn’t in the picture. Her father was a married man and had another set of children by his wife. He paid child support and always talked about how happy he would be when Jamie turns 18 so he could be “set free”. Jamie’s family was very poor and she didn’t have many outfits which was why I would always lend her some of my clothes so the girls at school wouldn’t pick on her for wearing the same outfit all week. 

            One day while we were waiting for our bus to pick us up and drop us off to school, she told me she had ran away and don’t ever plan on going back home. She was crying and looked so depressed and miserable. “All she does is makes me feel worthless and I’ve had enough, I’m done”, she said. I didn’t know the right words to say or what to do so all I did was hug my friend and cried with her. It’s an awful feeling when someone you love is going through something so rough. Jamie said she hated her mother, and I hated her too for putting her through this. My friend was a good kid and didn’t deserve the hate she was getting from her own mother.

            Since Jamie had ran away she had no place to go. Some days I’d see her around and some days I wouldn’t, and whenever I didn’t see her it felt like torture because I didn’t know whether she was safe. We lived in a dangerous neighborhood and it wasn’t safe for people to be roaming the streets at night, especially young teenage girls. I begged Jamie to stay with me and my sister but she was too worried that my sister would return her back to her mother for more abuse, no matter how many times my sister told her she wouldn’t do such a thing she didn’t believe her. At one point it had been an entire month since I’d seen her and all of a sudden she popped up at school. She had a new outfit, her hair was re-braided beautifully and she looked happy. I was very upset with her because I was worried sick and she didn’t call me to let me know she was okay but when I saw her I was no longer upset anymore because I was just so glad to finally see her. She told me she was living with a friend who took her in off the street. She said that this friend had fed her, bought her some new clothes and had given her a few dollars and a ride to school. Amazed, I asked for the name of this kind-hearted new friend. “Tamyra”, she said. This shocked me. Tamyra was a well-known stripper and prostitute from our area, she lived in a house with several other girls that people called a “hoe house” that was ran by their pimp Rico, who everyone said had loads of money and lived in a nice condo out of the area and drove expensive cars. Not only was he a pimp but a well-paid drug dealer and owned several businesses around the area. He was what people would consider “hood rich”.

I’ve heard awful stories about Rico, one of them being of how he tried to find out who was sniffing the cocaine he was trying to sale. Every once in a while I would see this older white lady walking around the area, she was overweight, toothless and barely had a nose. I asked my sister about this woman, “what happened to her nose?” and that’s when she told me about how Rico was living in this house full of prostitutes that he was pimping and wanted to know who kept finding his drugs and getting high off of them so he came up with a plan, he put some type of poison or acid in to the substance, and the next day one of the prostitutes were hurting really badly, her nose was bloody and the skin looked like it was coming off. Whatever substance Rico placed inside of the cocaine was what was causing this reaction, this was the way he found out who was stealing from him. Instead of taking the girl to the hospital he had beaten her really badly, so badly that she looked unrecognizable. This supposedly happened years ago, probably before I was born, but I still see this woman walking in circles in the streets, begging for change, talking to herself, her nose no longer there.

Jamie told me that for the past few weeks she’d been living with Tamyra, and she’s been a great friend to her and had been financially supporting her. I did not know how to take this news. I was happy that Jamie had food in her stomach, a roof over her head and new clothes on her back but I was worried that she was getting this from the wrong person. Jamie started telling me how she felt loved for the first time in her life, she even told me that she asked Tamyra could she call her “mother”. “And what did she say?” I asked. “She said no, but she does love me like I was her own. She said she’s only 36 and don’t want people thinking she has a child”. All day she would talk about Tamyra, what Tamyra did, a funny joke Tamyra told her, a story about Tamyra’s childhood. It’s like Tamyra was all she cared about.

Jamie had skipped school so many times until she just stopped coming to school altogether. We kept in contact with each other by phone or she would just pop up at my sister’s house while she was at work and we’d have movie night. Jamie had started smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor, which was the stuff that she had gotten from the prostitutes at Rico’s “hoe house”, she had also started cussing way more than she used to, and had become very short tempered. I saw something different about my friend, and I wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt like she was a different girl from before, a girl that was no longer an innocent 14 year old. Soon Jamie started stealing for Tamyra to support Tamyra’s drug habit. “I like when she’s high, she gets all goofy and we do a lot of fun things together like she would teach me how to cook, she does my make-up and she teaches me the latest dance moves”. She got on the floor and shown me a dance move that Tamyra taught her, which was a dance move that look like she was dry humping the floor. She’d tell me about all the different people that came in and out of the “hoe house” that Tamyra lived in, and how she witnessed one of Tamyra’s customers, a drug addicted guy named Lace, peel the skin from his legs with a knife because he thought he was an orange.

Since Tamyra’s house was in our area, I passed by there a lot, mostly on the way to the bus stop on the way to school. It was an orange and purple rectangular shaped house, it was very long and there were always homely looking people loitering around it. By looking at it, you just knew it wasn’t a good place to be.

One day, Jamie actually came to school for the first time in a while. We sat together at lunch and I asked her why she looked so sad because she wasn’t acting like her usual cheerful self. “Tamyra told me that Rico found out about me staying there and that he said he don’t want any b***h staying at his hoe-house if she aint a hoe. She told me paying for my clothes and s**t cost money and I need to start making my own or leave. I told her I thought she loved me, she told me that the only thing that matter in this world was money not love, and you know what? Maybe she’s right.” I looked at Jamie’s face, she looked so defeated, she really wanted love from this woman and all she was trying to do all along was recruit her to her pimp. I knew the time would come that she would hurt my friend. Jamie finished, “When I told her I couldn’t do it, that I’m a virgin and that I don’t want to have sex cause I heard it hurts, she told me that I need to grow up and pay her back the money she spent on me, and hoeing is the only way”. Jamie started to tear up and I took her hand. I begged Jamie not to listen to her, to come stay with me and my sister. “But she’s my friend. I don’t have a mom, she’s like a mama to me, the closest thing I will ever have”, she said.

Several weeks had passed before I heard from Jamie again. She had called my house from a pay phone and the moment I heard her voice I knew something was very wrong. She said that she had agreed to prostitution because she loved Tamyra and wanted to make her happy, and also because she wanted a place to stay and the only way she could stay at Rico’s place and repay Tamyra her money was if she prostituted herself. She said she and Tamyra were out on the street while Tamyra was showing her how the prostitution industry worked, she was showing her how to pick up a John when she got in the car with a few younger men and ever since then Jamie hadn’t seen her again. She found out weeks later that she had been gang raped and murdered, rumor was going around that Rico paid the men to murder her. Jamie also talked about how she was living on the street during the weeks Tamyra had been missing and had been robbed at gun point and another time had almost gotten raped by an old man. She told me that she had been sleeping in parks and eating out of dumpsters. After a while of me begging her on the phone she finally agreed to allow my sister to take her in and care for her. She lived with me and my sister for a while until she just decided to go back to her mother. “She’s my mom, I know she hates me, but I miss my mom”, she told us. My sister drove her to her mother’s house and before she got out of the car we prayed to God that everything worked out fine. She got out of the car and me and my sister watch her mother open the door, rub her eyes, blink twice with a shocked expression on her face, step aside to let her daughter in and then looked around to see who dropped her off before shutting the door.

The next day after school I had went straight to Jamie’s house. I found her in her room packing her clothes and shoes in a suitcase. She told me that her mother had sent for her aunt Daina to pick her up and live with her because she was a “problem child” and that she could no longer control her. Daina was her grandmother’s sister, which not only made her Jamie’s aunt but also her mother’s aunt. Jamie whipped out her mother’s lap top and showed me her aunt’s Myspace page, she was a butch woman who had a very pretty girlfriend, she lived all the way in Tennessee, she worked as a cop and lived in a nice town house and had dogs who she shared pictures of all over her Myspace page. All of this took me by surprise, I wasn’t expecting Jamie to leave. “I want to leave anyways, there’s nothing here for me, my aunt is a nice lady, I’m looking forward to being with her. The only person I’m gonna miss is you and your sister, wish I could take you both with me.” This time I was the one who teared up and it was Jamie who comforted me.

When Jamie left, we stayed in contact over social media and phone. We are both adults now and even though we don’t keep in touch as much as we used to, we still talk from time to time on Facebook and whenever she’s in town she lets me know and we hang out together and catch up on things.

My friend was a vulnerable young girl who had almost been a victim of sex trafficking. God rest her soul but I believed that Tamyra saw a homeless, naïve, immature young girl who craved maternal love and used those weaknesses to her advantage. She knew Jamie was homeless with no money so she bought her things, she knew Jamie felt worthless so she made her feel special, she knew Jamie had mother issues so she had shown her maternal love, she knew Jamie didn’t have a place to stay so she allowed her to live with her but after a while she made Jamie feel like she owed her for doing these things for her. Making her feel like she owed her for her kind deeds was her way of trying to get her in to prostitution. I believe she was trying to recruit her so she could work alongside her prostituting for Rico. Jamie, not wanting to lose Tamyra’s maternal love and also feeling like she owed her, decided to go along with the prostitution idea but when Tamyra was murdered she decided that it wasn’t the life for her. A lot of young girls on the street are always approached by pimps but people rarely talk about how the prostitutes try to recruit vulnerable young girls and women and often times they use the same exact tactics as pimps. A lot of prostitutes may try to recruit girls to their pimp to get a reward from the pimp or maybe because the pimp had threaten them to do so, and a lot of girls they recruit are girls who are homeless, scared, hungry and want to feel loved, just like Jamie. These girls want a warm place to stay, food to eat and a loving family and if they think a pimp or a prostitute could give them that then they would do anything that the pimp or prostitute wants. Jamie could have easily became a sex trafficking victim but I’m glad it didn’t happen, but not a lot of girls were able to get away from it like Jamie did, for a lot of girls it’s too late and they had already gotten sucked in to prostitution and are now into sex trafficking and are having a hard time getting out.

Reviews

[Carol Cashes]

This is a crushing narrative about the vicious cycle facing too many of our young women of color. Kudos for keeping the "tale" in the young girl's POV, and I look forward to reading more of your work.

[Madame Murrell]

Thank you so much for your awesome feedback!!