Читать книгу God Still Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 20

By the time I’d reached my teens, I was so used to Mr. Boatwright clambering into my bed, it seemed like second nature. Besides, by that time I had other things to be happy about. An old, white retired judge that Muh’Dear had worked for let us move into one of the many nice houses he owned on Reed Street, located in one of the nicest neighborhoods in town. Every well-kept yard had either a buckeye, willow, or fruit tree. There were no old, beaten-down cars littering the driveways. Just shiny Cadillacs and other impressive cars. The old judge even changed his will so that the house would go to Muh’Dear when he died.

Jerry “Pee Wee” Davis and Rhoda Nelson, kids my age, lived on the same street. Jerry’s daddy was a barber and Rhoda’s daddy was the only Black undertaker Richland had at the time. Pee Wee was homely and unpopular, but Rhoda was the most beautiful Black girl I had ever seen. She had more confidence than Miss America and was as fearless as a bounty hunter. Rhoda was dark like me and had long, blue-black hair that reached halfway down her back. She had green eyes, but behind them lurked something even darker than our complexions. However, I didn’t see it as something evil at the time. There were too many other things obscuring my vision.

Even though Pee Wee and I became quite close, I never confided in him the way I did with Rhoda. When she was a child she had witnessed a policeman shoot and kill her eldest brother, David, so she was particularly sensitive when it came to traumatic situations. She was appalled when I told her about Mr. Boatwright. On a regular basis, she tried to make me expose him. But that old sucker’s threats carried far more weight than Rhoda’s anger.

“I’ve had it with you and that nasty old man. If you don’t hurry up and do somethin’ about him, I will,” Rhoda told me after she had helped me abort the baby that Mr. Boatwright had impregnated me with. I ended up in the hospital. Instead of telling Muh’Dear the truth then, I let her think that some boy I refused to name had seduced me. The pain that that episode caused my mother almost destroyed me. But I loved her too much to burden her with the truth.

“Mr. Boatwright’s old and always sick,” I reminded Rhoda. “God’ll take care of him soon. He won’t live too much longer,” I insisted.

I was right; Mr. Boatwright died a few months before Rhoda and I graduated from high school. But it wasn’t God that took him out, it was Rhoda. One night while Muh’Dear was still at work, Rhoda slipped into Mr. Boatwright’s bedroom and held a pillow on his face until he stopped breathing. It was the same year that we also lost Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

“Buttwright’s in good company,” Rhoda told me as I stood behind her in her pink-and-white bathroom waiting for her to finish her egg facial. It wasn’t enough that Rhoda’s family pampered her; she treated herself like a princess. Maintaining beauty was a full-time job for Rhoda. She spent more on beauty products than I spent on clothes.

“Yeah, he sure is,” I mumbled. “It’s just a shame that after all he went through when he was a little boy, he had to turn out so bad. Look where it got him.”

After Mr. Boatwright’s funeral, when Rhoda had helped me pack up his things for Muh’Dear to donate to the Salvation Army, she and I had come across some old, faded, dog-eared newspaper clippings from a southern newspaper. We had read about how Mr. Boatwright had been abandoned as a child and shuffled from one bad environment to another. He had also suffered abuse so severe it had cost him a leg.

Rhoda gasped and whirled around so fast to face me, her egg facial cracked before it was supposed to.

“Millions of people get abused when they are little! They don’t go around rapin’ people! Don’t you be standin’ up in here feelin’ sorry for that old goat!” Rhoda roared. She sucked in her breath and lowered her voice. “Get me a towel.” Rhoda’s family had moved to Ohio from Alabama a few years after we’d moved from Florida. While I had worked hard to rid myself of my southern accent by imitating white girls on television so that I would seem less “country,” Rhoda spoke with a definite drawl. But it sounded cute coming from her. In fact, the accent made her even more charming to me. She sighed. “Great balls of fire.”

“You’re right,” I muttered, holding her in place by her shoulder while I wiped her face with a fluffy white towel that I had snatched from the back of the bathroom door.

“You are finally free,” Rhoda reminded, patting her face then inspecting it in the mirror above the sink.

I declined her offer to give me a facial. I always did. I knew that there was only so much I could do to improve my face. Since I cried so often, I had started wearing a lot of makeup to hide the dark circles around my eyes and the puffiness underneath. I left Rhoda’s house and went home to cry some more.

I had to agree with what she had just said about Mr. Boatwright, but I still didn’t feel right about how he died and I knew then that I never would.

Right after graduation, with Mr. Boatwright’s blood still fresh on her hands, Rhoda married a handsome Jamaican and moved to Florida to help him run his family’s orange groves. Pee Wee joined the army a few weeks later. At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Since Mr. Boatwright was no longer standing in my way, I decided that it was time for me to move on, too.

Rhoda called me up a lot, regaling me with details of her new life and how happy she was with her first child on the way. She ended each phone call by telling me, “Put all of that Buttwright mess out of your mind and get on with your life, girl.” Knowing that I was the only person who knew about her killing Mr. Boatwright, I now felt like I was in a different type of bondage and Rhoda was calling all the shots.

Desperate to move out on my own so that Muh’Dear would never know just how miserable I was, I took advantage of my relationship with Scary Mary. For a few weeks I stole a few of her customers to raise the money I needed to leave home with. As much as I hated what I had become, a prostitute, my biggest fear was somebody finding out and telling my mother. I knew that my own mother had done “what she had to do” with a few of Scary Mary’s customers during some trying times to keep us off the streets. But I didn’t want her to know that I, too, had stooped that low. However, I didn’t think about all that until after I had turned my first trick.

“Ooh, girl. You such a nice, juicy, young thing.” The trick paused long enough to lick his lips. “I wouldn’t mind seein’ you again,” he added with a wink. I cringed and couldn’t wait to get away from the man who had just paid for my body. He was one of the most disgusting men I submitted to. His vile body had slid on me, in me, and off of me, all within a matter of minutes. One date with the same man was all I would allow myself. Giving up my body in hellish places like cheap motels, up against brick walls in dim alleys next to garbage bins, and on the backseats of cars was bad enough. But one time I even went to one man’s job with him and allowed him to fuck me from behind while I leaned over his desk. He was a short, squat man with light skin and moles all over his chin. He worked as a night watchman at a downtown office building, but he claimed to have all kinds of money in the bank from selling some property somewhere.

Afterward, while he was peeing in an empty Styrofoam coffee cup, he asked, “You would do anything for money, huh?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, rearranging my clothes. He had ripped my panties to shreds trying to remove them so fast. It didn’t make any sense for me to put them back on. I slid the panties into my purse along with the fifty dollars he had just handed me.

The trick slapped his hairy hands on his hips and gave me a critical look, screwing up his face like he didn’t like what he saw. “I can’t get none of them other gals to come to me, I have to go to them. And they particular about what motels I carry them to. I got a heap of money in the bank and a wife that won’t let me touch her with a stick. I thought I was gwine to have to beat my meat. I guess you’ll have to do for tonight. You just don’t care about nothin’,” he remarked. Waving his hand dramatically, he looked me up and down with a fierce scowl on his plain face. “No shame, no rules, no nothin’ long as you get paid. Like a Gypsy. I guess you ain’t got them highfalutin standards, huh?”

“I guess not,” I said sadly. I promised myself right then and there that he would be the last one. I couldn’t stand to degrade myself any longer for any amount of money. It was already difficult for me to look at myself in the mirror; this had just made it that much harder. Especially after the verbal beating I had just received.

With the money I had saved from a brief job working as a switchboard operator for the telephone company and the money from the men, I made plans to relocate to Erie, Pennsylvania. I had never been to Erie and I didn’t know anybody there, but Pee Wee was from Erie. He had me convinced that it was a small city filled with “good peoples.”

It sounded like the perfect place to start a new life.