Sister 2 Sister Magazine Tribute (Natina Interview) (2002)

We spoke with Natina Reed, who is a member of Blaque, one of LeftEye's groups she worked with. Natina, with new baby in hand (rapper Kurupt's fifth child), and other members of Blaque did take the time to speak with the press before Lisa's services started. Lisa was the godmother of Natina's baby boy. Natina lived with Lisa even when Lisa was working with Suge Knight.

niki: How did you first meet Lisa?

Natina: How I first met Lisa was me and her brother Ronald were like brother and sister. We were very, very close You know how you're so close to somebody that you're basically like in the

family? You go over and you eat, you're a part of the family but you're just not actually blood.

niki: Was this in Philly?

Natina: No, this was in Atlanta about 11 years ago. After that, me and Lisa started realizing how much alike we were. She was the only person that I ever knew that was like me and I really looked up to her. She was older than me so things I didn't understand she could put me up on game. Things I hadn't been through, she could say look, I've been through this; don't go this route. So in a way we were so similar, yet she had a lot she could teach me at the same time. And you know, sometimes you can learn from younger people. So I also had a lot to teach her as well.

niki: When was the last time you had seen Lisa?

Natina: We lived together in California since December.

niki: Did Blaque ever travel to Honduras with Lisa? Because I know her other group, Egypt, was with her on this last trip.

Natina: You wanna hear something crazy? When we were staying in Cali, Lisa was taking care of me while I was pregnant. And she was like, "I gotta get you a passport." And was like, "For what?" And she was like, "'Cause We gotta go to Honduras." I said, "I don't know where my birth certificate is." And she was like, "Okay, we gotta work on that." And I was like, "Cool." The only reason why me and Lisa came back to Atlanta was because I wanted to have the baby in Atlanta. The night before I was supposed to have the baby was my shower. She's my baby's godmother. She was telling me, "We're still going to Honduras, right?" And I was like, "'Yeah, I found my birth certificate." And she was like, "Okay, cool." And I got this weird feeling about the

trip and it was just weird that the baby came like a couple of hours after we talked about it. Then right after that I was like, "Okay, I might go just for a second." Then Blaque got this call saying "We need you to work on this record in California." Well, we never ended up going, but the crazy thing was, we said "If we don't go to California, we'll meet you in Honduras.`

niki: What's happening with Blaque right now? Do you all have a new record deal?

Natina: Yeah, we're actually in the process of re-signing 

niki: Tell me about some of the good times you shared with Lisa.

Natina: Man, I can think of a million and one times. At the end of Lisa's life...it was weird. I watched her go through all of her phases. I watched what made her miserable, what made her happy, the people in her life that were starting to come back in her life, the people that she wanted to come back in her life, the people she didn't care for anymore...and it was just crazy. I saw her go through that metamorphosis and I felt bad because it was nothing I could do about it. I loved her so much and I felt like she was a person who gave herself to millions of people and they never gave in return. There were so many times when I would ask Lisa, "Why are you letting this person live with you? Why are you doing this? Why are you talking to that person? You know he's gonna hurt you." And all Lisa wanted was love. That's what she was searching for, to be honest with you. She had everything else that she wanted. What was gonna make Lisa happy next was love. Of course everybody thought that she was gonna link up with Death Row and become a different person, but Lisa also wanted to break away from just what TLC wanted her to be. She wanted to be her own individual for a second. She wanted to step outside of her skin. She felt like she had a lot of lyrics inside of her that she wasn't able to express. And she felt like going to another label might give her that freedom. She loved Pac so much and 1 think that she felt that maybe it would be cool to be a female Pac for a second-to spread some kind of energy to people like he did. There's so much to say about Lisa and I want to keep her life on a positive note. I want her to be remembered as a person that made an impression on the world-a good one. Lisa was just a very spiritual and interesting person. I think I'm the only one that knows everything that she went through. She loved her fans I can tell you that. She would get on the Internet every single night talking to her fans.

niki: Through her website?

Natina: Yeah, we would come in from the club at like 4:00 in the morning and we used to go straight to her website. She knew those people by name, by picture identification. Like if they had a Tupac picture, she knew, okay, Joshua's got a Tupac picture. If so-and-so had an Aaliyah picture [it was], "Oh, this is fam." She knew everybody. And she would sit up there and laugh. When she did "106 and Park" and everybody was talking about the new N.I.N.A. thing and they were saying how they didn't like her bandana or they didn't like this about her, she just sat up there and she would crack up. You know, she never got offended about things like that. That didn't bother her. She'd just say, "I'm gonna use this to motivate me even more and next time I'm gonna definitely have wardrobe. And won't sit there and make my outfit." But she never got upset at things like that. She was a very sweet person.

niki: Is there anything funny about her that you remember?

Natina: I know one of the things that made me laugh was that she didn't know how to burp the baby. She was like, "Who taught you how to burp a baby?" I said, "What do you mean?" She said, ""Okay, hold his head while I hold his legs." I was sitting there looking at her and I'm like, "Lisa, all you gotta do is hold him and pat his back." She was struggling so much with holding the baby and trying to burp him. I thought that was hilarious.

niki: Snow's mom told me about how much Lisa adored Snow, so I can imagine she must've been the same way with your son.

Natina: Yeah, she did adore Snow. Like I said, Lisa would always take people in and Lisa just found something so special in Snow. She was kinda like one of them kids that didn't want to do good in school. She was all over the place mentally and she was too brilliant just to be sitting in a classroom with a whole bunch of kids while they're painting. Snow would get on a computer and straight up show us what to do. It took Lisa to say, "Okay, since y'all don't know what to do with her, let me take her for a couple minutes." She wanted to always take Snow to Honduras. That was her last conversation with [Snow's mother] Trenae. If nobody was going to concentrate on getting Snow's life together, she would. I kinda think that's what Lisa needed, but in a way since Lisa always wanted to have kids, she never wanted to have kids without being married. That was something she really, really stressed. I think it's a good thing - to be honest with you - that she didn't. Think about it, if the world and people like me, her play sister, are grieving over her, think about how her kids and her husband would've been. She made an impact on our lives and it would've been hell for them

niki: I'm glad that you were able to talk to us.

Natina: Everybody that used to be affiliated with LeftEye Productions, I'm gonna put everybody together and we're gonna do a song on her. And we`re gonna do something in honor of her in Atlanta like a big, huge celebrity party. Anything that people can donate is going to go straight to building a school in Honduras, which is something that she really wanted. She also had a clothing line that she wanted out called M.O.B., so the money from it will go to her clothing line as well. We were still trying to figure out what we wanted [M.O.B.] to stand for. We were thinking of "Money Over...you know what," and then "Minority Owned Business." We were still playing around with it, so I'm just gonna leave it because I don't remember if she came up with a decision and I don't think she did, So I'm just gonna leave it at M.O.B.