Читать книгу God Still Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 19

I never found out the real name of the woman who had helped Muh’Dear and me after we moved to Ohio. But everybody called her Scary Mary. That name fit her because she was a tall, hard-drinking, tough, wig-wearing woman that just about everybody was afraid of. Even the police.

In addition to bootlegging alcohol, Scary Mary made a good living supplying women to lonely men. She had a lot of powerful friends so the law looked the other way as she managed several prostitutes that she had wooed off the streets.

Scary Mary looked at every man as a golden-egg-laying goose. She had had several prosperous husbands. The men that didn’t divorce her up and died. She often bragged about the numerous divorce settlements and life insurance benefits that she had collected.

We had lived in the same house with Scary Mary and her girls our first few months in Ohio. I was amused as I watched all the men parade in and out of that big house, leaving with empty wallets. Especially since some of those prostitutes were homely and mean. One of the regular tricks was married to a woman who had once won a beauty contest. What confused me was the fact that my own daddy had traded my beautiful mother for a less attractive woman. Since Scary Mary seemed to know so much about men and their habits, I approached her with my concerns.

Scary Mary was a woman with plain but rough looks, bronze skin, and a scar on her face that she had sustained in a barroom fight. In a voice that sounded like it belonged to a man, the old madam told me, “Annette, it ain’t the beauty, it’s the booty. Especially when that other booty is white. Your daddy ain’t no worse than no other man. They all weak. We women got all the strength. Long as I’m alive, you and your mama ain’t got nothin’ to worry about.” Those words appeased me to some degree and for the first time since Daddy left, I felt safe. But then I hadn’t met Mr. Boatwright yet.

Richland, Ohio, was a typical small northern city. We had a town square that contained a sorry wishing well full of coins and rocks, some cheap benches, shit-dropping pigeons that drove everybody crazy, and a sturdy statue of a bronze horse with a bronze man straddling the horse’s back. By the looks of the man’s features, he was white. However, there was a mural on the side of the viaduct that connected the southern part of the city to the northern part that made up for that white bronze man on the horse. On the mural was the likeness of a handsome Black man in overalls and a hard hat, swinging a sledgehammer. Next to him was a heavyset, sturdy-looking Black woman with a grimace on her face, a plaid scarf knotted around her head, on her knees scrubbing a floor. That wall represented a lot to me. It was a reminder that Black people would do whatever was necessary to survive.

Richland had a few Black professionals. And on the outskirts of town were several steel mills and brickyards that kept most of the blue-collar men employed. Nearby farming communities like Marlboro and Hartville wrapped around the outskirts of Richland like a low-slung belt. A lot of the people I knew made money working on the farms.

In addition to looking after Mott, Scary Mary’s adult, severely retarded daughter, I made money doing chores for the prostitutes who worked for Scary Mary. Those women were some of the nicest people I knew and some of the most peculiar. In addition to sleeping with men for money, they had other strange habits. One dipped snuff and another chewed tobacco. One even practiced voodoo and kept a goat’s skull in a hatbox that she used to threaten me with when I misbehaved. Two of them didn’t believe in wasting money on things like sanitary napkins and tampons when they got their periods. Instead, they plugged themselves up with old rags. My worst chore was hauling buckets of foul-smelling bloody rags and wads of chewed-up tobacco and brown spit to the trash. I worked hard for my money. Some days by the time I finished my last chore, I was just as tired as those prostitutes who had been humping men back-to-back for hours.

Some of the prostitutes had babies that I had to keep from disrupting business by guarding Scary Mary’s basement, serenading them with some of the same lullabies my daddy used to sing to me. It was the closest I could get to my daddy. It made Muh’Dear furious when I brought up his name, so I rarely did.

Muh’Dear cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children of some of the well-to-do white families in Richland. She hated leaving me alone with Scary Mary and all those prostitutes but it was a real treat for me. Especially since I didn’t have any friends my own age yet.

“I just worry about you so much,” Muh’Dear told me when she retrieved me from Scary Mary’s house one day. We had just moved into our own house a few days earlier. “Scary Mary is a good woman and a godsend to us, but her line of business ain’t healthy for you to be around too much. I’m goin’ to see if Reverend Snipes can’t advise us.” My mother was such a pretty woman. She was fairly petite with light brown skin, delicate features, and dark hair so thick and beautiful people thought it was a wig. I didn’t like the sadness on her lovely face when she worried about me.

To keep my mother happy, one of the prostitutes regularly washed and straightened my hair, while another one held me down as I yipped and bucked like a nanny goat about to be slaughtered. With a Camel cigarette dangling from her thick lips, my hairdresser blew strong smoke in my face and yelled, “Annette, you better get use to fixin’ yourself up. How you expect to get a man with your hair lookin’ like a sheep’s ass, girl?” It was a little too soon for me to be getting that kind of advice, even from a prostitute.

My mother’s concern for my virtue intensified. At Reverend Snipe’s insistence, she moved Mr. Boatwright in with us so he could baby-sit me while she worked as well as to help us with our bills. All the immoral things that I had witnessed in Scary Mary’s house didn’t come close to corrupting me as much as Mr. Boatwright did by raping me.

It was the second time in my life that a man had betrayed me.

Now that I had my peace with Daddy, I had to work on getting Mr. Boatwright’s legacy out of my system.