Mama, I'm In Love...with a gangsta

(paperback)

1893196674

$14.95

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Mama, I'm In Love...with a gangsta a novel by JOY, includes two fast paced, powerful novellas about real ghetto love. In the first story, "Behind Every Bad Boy", you can take the girl out of the streets, but you can't leave her mean street ways behind her. With a good head on her shoulders and a forgiving heart, some things in life still must be accounted for. Harlem Lee Jones may have allowed her heart to find its way to God, but the devil is surely lurking close behind. Just when Harlem thought the black cloud that had once followed her through life had turned to sunshine, her rainbow soon begins to fade. A crucial, life-altering act from her past begins to unravel and resurface. Holdin' it down for her man, trying to keep him honest and legit, Harlem wouldn't dare drag him into the messy bed she's made. But trying to stay on the straight and narrow himself, unbeknownst to Harlem, perhaps the hole securing Jazzy's dirt is dug even deeper than her's. Can Harlem and Jazzy continue to ignore the whisper of the ghetto or will they be pulled back into a life they each tried so hard to leave behind? In the second story, "Baby Girl McCoy" just goes to show you that you can take the girl away from the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto away from the girl. She'll always manage to find her way back. Baby Girl McCoy was given the government name Baby Girl by her mother, a woman who hated her so much that she couldn't even bare to give her a name in the hospital after giving birth to her. Born to a single teenage mother and a product of rape, Baby never knows her father. In this urban dilemma, Baby gets caught up in the quest for Daddy, that male figure who she thinks can give her what she lacked from a man growing up. She never imagined in a million years that she would find it in the man that she did. Searching for that knight on shining rims, Baby gets caught up in a situation like lots of young girls often do. Overnight, it seems, she goes from a sweet sixteen-year-old who's never been kissed to a young woman, struggling to survive.


Excerpt:

"Behind Every Bad Boy": I'm sure most people figured me as that ghetto ass girl who wouldn't amount to shit in life. I didn't finish high school. Couldn't read when my ass was going to school. My mother chose crack over me at a time in my life when a girl really needs her mother. My fuckin' granny, one I had no relationship with as a little girl, had to teach me how to plug my pussy up when it was that time of the month. I laugh at the shit now, but it really ain't funny at all. Hurts like a muthafuck. But I guess I laugh to keep from crying. I spent most of my life holdin' back tears. Not even at my own daddy's funeral, the man I thought was my daddy anyway, did I cry. He died while he was in the prison system doing time for the death of my baby brother; the one I never got to see grow up. The one who never got to grow up. I was only eleven-years-old when he was born, and at no time at all he was tryin' to cling to my titty more so than our own mother's. There were times when I'd walk in the door from school and find my mother fucking and sucking for the pipe and on the pipe right there on the living room floor. With her daughter standing there in the doorway lookin' dead at her, she would never even budge; never even try to hide what she was doing. There was no shame in her eyes or in her heart. I'd try to hide from what was going on in the living room by escaping to my bedroom, but there was usually some other crack head using my bed to pay for her habit with her pussy. Our apartment was the official Taj Mahal for smokin' crack and fuckin' for crack. My resting spot became the one and only bathroom in our apartment. I'd hide out in the bathroom, putting my pillow in the tub, locking the door behind me, turning off the lights and going to sleep with my eyes open. "Baby Girl McCoy": I was out living on my own by the time I was seventeen. My mama couldn't handle the fact that her baby girl was in love with a gangsta. So, she'd rather see me gone than under her roof head over heels for some nigga who she thought wasn't shit, that and the fact that one minute I was sweet sixteen and never been fucked, and the next minute I was going on seventeen and pregnant. She put me out before I even started showing. I think all of my life my mother had been looking for a reason to rid herself of me, her only daughter, her only child. I don't know why she had me in the first goddamn place. If I had been her, I wouldn't have had me. What woman keeps a baby that's the product of a rape, a rape from her own mother's boyfriend nonetheless? I hate to say it, but thank God for a woman's right to an abortion. Not saying that abortion is right for everybody, but in situations like that, a bitch would have been the first one in line exercising my right to choose. Any other seventeen-year-old girl probably would have been scared to death if they had been thrown out on the streets pregnant with no job. Lucky for me, though, I had a man like Duke in my life. Contrary to my mother's opinion, he wasn't some nigga who wasn't shit. He was a good man. He was my king. Duke was more of a man than any one I've ever known, and probably ever will know. I had never had a father figure in my life so that's probably what attracted me to him in the first place. I was only going on seventeen and he was thirty. He was more like thirty going on forty. Duke had lived a hard knock life, forced to be a man before ever knowing what the life of a little boy was supposed to be like. I was drawn to the nurturing maturity about him. To me, he was just like a Daddy, until I turned eighteen of course, then he became my lover. The king of the castle, he crowned me his princess.

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