Читать книгу God Don't Play - Mary Monroe - Страница 14

Pee Wee, whose real name was Jerry Davis, Rhoda, and I had been friends since junior high school. We had gone through most of the usual things that kids had to go through during the sixties. But Rhoda and I had experienced some things that set us apart from a lot of the kids we knew when we were growing up.

Rhoda had grown up in a privileged environment, and she had enjoyed being the beautiful and pampered only daughter of a charismatic funeral director. She had lived in the lap of luxury in a big house with an extended family that adored her. If all of that wasn’t enough, she was at that time, and to this day, the most beautiful woman in Richland, Ohio.

I had not been as fortunate as Rhoda. I had not even come close.

My father had deserted my mother for another woman when I was three, and had left us in a shack in Florida to fend for ourselves. But being a typical Black woman, my mother did what she had to do so we could survive.

We left Florida and moved to Richland, a small, blue-collar city near Cleveland. My mother did domestic work and that kept us from living on the streets. But when she took in an elderly boarder named Mr. Boatwright, our lives changed for the better, and for the worse. Mr. Boatwright had lost a leg, so he received a nice disability check every month. In addition to paying his rent on time every month, he helped us pay our bills.

And since he didn’t have to work a regular job, he was eager to babysit me, keep our house clean, hop around town to shop for groceries, and cook while my mother went to babysit, clean, and cook for lazy, rich White women.

Mr. Boatwright—“Buttwright,” as Rhoda called him behind his back—was very prominent in our church so he got a lot of pleasure out of giving me my Bible lessons. He liked to take credit for the times that I stood up to testify in church. And he took a lot of his time teaching me how to be nice and polite to people. But all of that had come at a high price: me. A few months after he’d moved in with us, he started doing whatever he wanted to do to me when I was alone with him.

By that time, he had already broken my spirit by constantly criticizing the way I looked. “Girl, can’t nothin’ help you! You fat, you Black, you ugly!”

I heard comments like that from Mr. Boatwright so many times that I began to hear them in my sleep.

I had only known Rhoda for a few months when I got up enough nerve to tell her that Mr. Boatwright had been abusing me since I was seven. Rhoda wasn’t like any of the other girls I knew at the time, but nothing about her shocked me more than her reaction to my situation. She was horrified and developed a level of contempt for Mr. Boatwright that scared me. She vowed that one day she would make him pay for what he did to me. One thing I could say about Rhoda even back then was, she always did what she said she was going to do. Knowing that made it easier for me to keep my legs open long enough for Mr. Boatwright to have his way with me.

The same week of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rhoda put a pillow over Mr. Boatwright’s face while he slept. She held it there until he was dead. Rhoda and I were seniors in high school at the time.

I didn’t witness, encourage, or participate in Mr. Boatwright’s murder, but I felt that I was just as responsible as Rhoda. And to this day, I still consider myself her accomplice.

Everybody thought that Mr. Boatwright had died of natural causes and since Rhoda had made me promise not to tell what really happened, nobody questioned Mr. Boatwright’s death.

Rhoda and I finished school and went our separate ways. She married Otis O’Toole and moved to Florida. I drifted around like a rootless gypsy in Erie, Pennsylvania, for a while, before I ended up back in Richland.

People were really not that surprised when my parents got back together after a thirty-year separation. But a lot of people were surprised when Pee Wee and I got married and had a child. My looks had not changed that much over the years. Except the older I got, the plainer and bigger I got. Pee Wee went from being a puny, effeminate busybody to a handsome, strapping man who could have married just about any woman he wanted. And that woman turned out to be me. For years some people walked around scratching their heads over that one. And I was one of those people.

Pee Wee and I had a lovely home and a lot of good friends. We had worked hard for everything we had acquired, including our love for each other. I had a good job that I enjoyed and people who cared about me. As far as life was concerned, I had had a good thing going.

Until now.