Melissa Currie-White

Hello, everyone. Here is the first two chapters of the upcoming autobiographical novel book, "Confessions from a Body Bag: The Memoirs". Please keep checking for updates on the release date. It should be coming soon sometime this summer. Thank you and enjoy.

Chapter 1

My memories go way back. I remember sitting on the front stoop of the house where I was raised, in the summer time every afternoon and saying hi to the neighbors, who past by. I remember going to school with at least three different kids, who also lived on my block. I always loved talking to them, and I guess I kind of saw them as a make-up to not being able to live with any of my actual siblings. I remember being a picky eater, yet having an extreme love for junk foods like Jamaican beef patties with cocoa bread, cola champagne soda, Nathan’s hot dogs, Roy Roger’s cheeseburgers, and the most delicious Chinese food that probably ever existed, including Roast pork fried rice, Beef with broccoli, and BBQ beef tips with fried green or yellow plantain. I was so happy and social around most others. I was living up my childhood. I had a very wide imagination and I was always a dreamer in regard to my future-success. The house I grew up in has been in the family for generations. That's where our family’s roots are. Practically everyone in the family grew up in it. My grandmother and all of her siblings were raised in that house by their parents. We all come from an old-fashioned and extremely strict family. As a child, my grandmother and her eight siblings were beaten with a tree branch for discipline when they were misbehaving. My form of discipline was getting the hard plastic bottom of a household slipper thrown at my legs or getting lashed on the legs, arms or butt with a waist belt. I was born and raised in the ghetto parts of Brooklyn. I was conceived by two African-American individuals. I was the second child born from my mother. As soon as I was ready to go home from the hospital, my grandmother, Barbara took me in and she raised me ever since. My grandmother felt that my mother and father were too young to raise me by themselves. I probably wouldn't have survived if my parents tried to. My older sister didn't survive. My grandmother didn't like my father at all. As far as she was concerned, he was too much of a trouble maker and seemed to have not wanted to take action for his responsibility of raising me, not that my grandmother would have let him, anyway. My grandmother loved me very much. She'd die for me a thousand times.

My grandmother often told me that she took me in (for one of many reasons) because she didn't want to have another deceased grand baby. My older sister, Emily, died of sudden infant death syndrome a.k.a. “crib death“. At least that’s what my mother says. My opposing grandmother, Barbara says, “Emily died of Pneumonia“. Who do you think I'm personally going to believe? I love my grandmother and I believe she is no liar. My own mother, on the other hand, was a little harder to trust. Barbara and Jean had so many arguments. My grandmother one time even said during a really bad argument (not sure what about), Jean took a knife and threatened my grandmother with it. I asked my mother about that incident, and she said, "It wasn't a knife. It was a fork held upside down". Now, I was thinking to myself, “Knife or Fork, Why would anyone do that“? My mother didn't have a clear way of thinking back then. She couldn't take very good care of herself. At a very young age, she had epilepsy due to a "spilt milk" accident. In elementary school, she accidentally spilt a small drop of milk on a fellow classmate/bully at lunch-time. So he waited until playground recess to get a little “revenge“. The Bully saw little Jean, yelled her last name to get her attention, and then pushed her to the ground with her head hitting the concrete severely. Jean says she had developed epilepsy from this incident, and has had it ever since (and she suffered it through all of her pregnancies).

When Jean was in her late teens and after I was born, she had already been kicked out of the house for getting pregnant and she ended up dropping out of school. Plus, the arguments between her and Barbara were too life-threatening. My grandmother wanted me to have a good life, but wanted that for me without my mother being any part of my life. When my mother was kicked out of the house, my grandmother could only assume that she went away with her boyfriend and slept in the subway station (again). That's where (I’d been told by my grandmother) the cops found her after she ran away from home once before. This was right after she gave birth to her first child. My grandmother claims Emily “got Pneumonia from being too cold in the subway station“. Plus, Emily was “malnourished“. According to Barbara, while my parents were sleeping in the subway terminal every night, “the baby was fed a bottle full of rice water“. My aunt, Antoinette (who was also living with us), was currently working and paying all of our household bills. She helped out in a massive way. She even took part in raising me. As long as Antoinette was taking care of everything, my grandmother never had to work. Antoinette and Barbara were the best of sisters. They seemed to be the two closest of the nine siblings from their mother, Cassandra. Almost half of their siblings were already deceased at this time.

Rick also lived with us. He's my uncle. He loved Jamaican music. It was very much an obsession with him. He also never liked to work. He wanted everything for free. Above all, if he really had the desire to go places with his massive intelligence, he could get practically any job he wanted. My grandmother agrees with that theory. He got in trouble a lot with the law. He was in and out of jail and prison like a yo-yo. He smoked a lot. Cigarettes, marijuana and only God knows what else. My grandmother always described Rick's behavior to be "sometimey". That term means that he would be laughing, talking and smiling one minute, then a second later, he turns on you like a pit bull. Rick has also threatened his own mother both physically and verbally. He would tell his mother things like, "Rot in hell!" and "Don't come to me for support when you're on your death bed! “. Sometimes the arguments at home were so bad, it would end with the cops taking him away. He was a person who came across as very intimidating. Rick molested me a few times. Most of the time (out of fear), I let him get away with it. Since most of the time I never cried rape, and there was a small part of me that (for some weird reason) enjoyed the experience, I felt the feeling of our going forth with it was some-what mutual.

One morning, I woke up and I found him in the bedroom my grandmother and I usually slept in the same bed together, but she wasn’t in bed with me when I woke up. I think she was at work or something. It felt like Rick was touching my back, and when I woke up, he was sitting on the bed staring at me in a weird sexual type of way. He stopped touching me, got up from sitting and walked away and out of the room. I told my grandmother about it and she confronted him in a non-threatening and polite manner. She asked him if he did it. He said, "No" and got all pissed with me for days afterwards. My grandmother was aware of how he was behaving, yet we just tried to ignore it and considered Rick to being his usual self. Rick would sometimes go into Barbara’s bedroom and take some of her money from her belongings. It was usually a few dollars to go to the store for something. Probably to buy cigarettes or God knows what else. Rick was probably feeling unloved from his mother. It probably even crossed his mind that his mother loved me more than him. It was kind of like the world revolved only around me or something. Barbara did love him in her own way, but the aggravation from him was just too much. My grandmother told me that she had decades of aggravation between the both of her children. Barbara bailed Rick out of jail plenty of times and made sure he had clothes on his back and a bar of soap to wash with. He asked for all of that stuff in a letter he sent from jail a few times and his mother, Barbara, would provide that stuff for him out of his own belongings at home. Sometimes, my uncle would threaten my grandmother by saying he'll “do voodoo” on her, but it wasn't always abuse in the verbal form. Other times, it got a little too physical as well. I remember once, he put my grandmother in a head lock. It was really scary for me, especially being there to see it. The only reason Barbara didn't kick him out of her house was because he had no job, and she never wanted him to be homeless. About her knowing or learning that we have a homeless family member would always touch her vulnerable side. If she could, I’m sure she would do anything to prevent homelessness with any family member. Unfortunately, she couldn't prevent or save her nephew, Michael, from being homeless, so she must have felt she could prevent it from happening to her own son.

As a child, I was deeply frightened by Rick. I remember waking up from my sleep on countless nights, while having some sort of night terror, where I would mostly sleep-walk. My grandmother would intervene and trying to stop me, as she detected I was in one of my trances. She held my hand tightly to keep me in bed, and I would scream my lungs out. I didn’t like feeling restraint. Even though I was sitting up and appeared awake, I was still sleeping. I remember my heart pounding so hard with fear, I felt like I was having a heart attack. I suffered sleep-walking through my entire childhood. I also suffered from reoccurring nightmares of Rick. In the dreams, he would usually be running back and forth in some sort of temper tantrum and he would always be running after me, in effort to physically attack me. It was a very traumatizing dream for me and I couldn’t help getting that dream. No matter what I did, it was a guarantee that I would get those dreams every so often. It was almost as if I was suffering from some sort of post traumatic stress disorder, or something. I had never gone to the doctor in regard to these dreams. They just stood lingering, while trying to be ignored.

Chapter 2

Well, what’s my name, you ask? Well, I was Melissa Currie, back then. As a child, I was very curious, innocently interrogative of other‘s expanded knowledge of the world, overly affectionate, overly friendly and very playful. I was also occasionally playfully sarcastic. I was also considered by others as very attractive and I looked much older than my actual age. I was a little taller than the average girl’s height. At twelve years old, most people assumed I was eighteen. At fifteen years old, some people assumed that was as old as twenty-five. Plus, my very mature mentality and etiquette was one of the causes to throw many people off. I always had an obsession with being older and independent. I also started regularly wearing hot red lipstick and makeup at twelve years old. Even as a child, much older men flirted with me. It happened ever since elementary school. It's quite disgusting, actually. One day around this era, I met my oldest cousin Billy's brother, Robby. They both came over to visit me and my grandmother. Billy came over with his wife too. They all had to be in their thirties at the time. When it was time for them to leave and everyone hugged one another, Robby kissed my ear. I was shocked because no one has ever done that to me before. The kiss seemed a lot on the sexual side of nature and definitely shouldn't have been coming from a cousin, especially a grown man of a cousin. He seemed to have some type of crush on me and the feeling wasn‘t mutual. I told my grandmother and she told me to be careful to not let that happen again. Of course, she'll be keeping an eye out for that type of stuff in the future as well.

These men didn't know this, but from a child, I seemed to have a high interest in sex and the concept of libido. I was aching to know what it was like. I was even regularly attracted to girls and women while I was still in elementary school. I even sexually experimented with a few girls in school, as I made out with them. I also watched porno movies on cable television when my grandmother was sleeping. Sometimes in bed all alone, I'd pretend a pillow was my Mr. Right and I'd make out with it. My mother didn't really help the situation. She’d always talked to me way too much on an adult level. She told me about her sex life while I was in elementary school. She always used the words "dick" and "chocha" to describe the human anatomy to me. She spoke dirty words to me in English and in Spanish. With her languages, there were no limits. My grandmother didn't like that fact, either. If there was a topic I was very interested in and kept my mind to, I could really suck up all of the information like a vacuum. I remembered a lot of things. I could name just about any actor or actress at a very young age. I was great with remembering names while I was as young as eight years old. My grandmother would usually go to me if she had a problem remembering the name of a famous celebrity. I even had crushes on Tom Hanks and Garry Shandling.

Barbara and I had a mother/daughter relationship. I almost never called her "grandmother" to her face. As far as I was concern, she was my mother. We had a very loving relationship. With her and my aunt taking care of me, it was like I had two mothers. I had felt completely parentally secure. About my school life, well, my grades went up and down a lot. I also tend to change my image a lot. Sometimes it was done to gain attention. During a few school eras, I was known as “the nerd” with “perfect attendance“, yet “a very quiet student who rarely participates in class“. Rarely in other grades, was I the troublemaker, who always gave the teacher and fellow classmates a hard time. Sometimes the most frequent grade on my report card was N for "Needs improvement". Sometimes I even got a couple of U’s for "Unsatisfactory". I got E‘s for "Excellent", but it was very rare. G's for "Good" were a little more common. I had a lot of trouble paying attention in school. School just wasn't interesting to me. It was mostly boring. For things that didn’t interest me, I had a really short attention span (and I still do, actually). My worst subjects were Math and Social Studies. I wasn't bad in every subject, though. I loved Art and Spelling. Someone was always recommending me to be a spelling bee contestant. I never had that chance, though. I knew that I wasn‘t prepared enough to take on such a challenge.

Some grades, I was picked on by several bullies. I even got picked on by a teacher once. It was insane. In Kindergarten, I remember it was after school. I was playing with a childhood friend. We literally grew up together and our guardian's used to talk to each other a lot. His grandmother was taking care of him too. His name’s Damien. Anyway, we were running after each other one day. I was trying to tag him and I fell flat on my face. My entire face was scraped by the concrete. When I went to school that following day, the teacher was asking me tons of questions. I believe she was implying that my grandmother (or someone residing in my household) was currently abusing me. Third Grade, I had a teacher who picked on me. She was a constant nag. She seemed to not like me at all. Maybe she was prejudice of African-Americans or something. Third grade was when my Aunt Antoinette was sick. She had kidney problems, and at the time she was in a coma. I can't remember why exactly she was so sick and hospitalized, but my grandmother and I just prayed for her to get better. One day, I was out with my family and we were visiting my aunt at the hospital one night in April ‘90. We didn’t get back home ‘til about 1 a.m. I woke up the following morning and still had to go to school despite my aunt’s being hospitalized. When I woke up that morning, the first thing I did was regurgitate on an empty and nervous stomach. I went to school later on that morning and during the beginning of the class, I regurgitated again. It happened on the floor right near the teacher's desk. She was yelling at me during my moment of sickness and she was saying if I knew I was sick, I “shouldn’t have come to school". I should have went to the bathroom if I knew I was going to throw up, but I wasn‘t sure if what I was feeling was a pre-regurgitation feeling or not. I guess I wasn’t very much in tune with my bodily reactions. I got sent home sick after that. I stayed home most of the day. My cousin, Billy, his wife and kids happen to be there at my house. About sometime in the afternoon, my grandmother comes home crying. I didn't know this before, but it appeared that she just came from the hospital. I followed her and asked why she was crying. She said “Aunt Antoinette died“. I was devastated, and my grandmother was never the same after Antoinette's death.