Читать книгу God Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 13

The next couple of days, I walked around the house in a trance. Mr. Boatwright acted like he normally did, whistling and yipping his spirituals, quoting Scripture from the Bible and cooking up a storm. During my next Bible lesson, he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth, forcing my lips open with his tongue and patting my crotch at the same time.

“Stop,” I whimpered, wiped my lips, leaned back in my chair, and squeezed my thighs together, forcing him to remove his hand.

“What? You done already forgot what I just told you about what happened to Lot’s wife in Sodom and Gomorrah?”

I sat in silence, with my eyes glued to the floor.

“Huh? You think it’s fun’s turnin’ into a pillar of salt, girl?”

“No sir…” I mumbled.

He finished my Bible lesson, we ate dinner, then he sent me to bed. This was one of Mama’s late nights. I was not surprised when he steamrolled into my room just minutes after I had turned in for the night. Without a word he wrestled my flannel gown and panties off me. I stared in horror and disbelief as he removed his clothes.

This was the second time, and it was worse than the first. I say that because the first time I was a virgin and I didn’t know what was coming. He talked during the whole rape. Two hellish minutes. And to my seven-year-old body, two minutes was a very long time.

“You clumsy heifer!” He was mad because my legs were all over the bed. But I could not help it; the pain was unbearable. I could not understand how anything that felt so bad to me, felt so good to him. “Tetch me. That’s the least you can do.” He guided my hand to his crotch and forced me to squeeze.

“Ow, ow, ow,” I sobbed. Suddenly, I froze, and that made him even angrier.

“Use your imagine now, girl. Don’t just lay there like a rug and let me do all the work! All this trouble for a little poontang,” he complained between gasps. His foul breath and slimy sweat on my face made the nightmare even worse.

To me the man was unspeakable, but Mama and everybody else held him in the highest regard. Miss Nipp and Reverend Snipes considered him a blessing. On the streets, high-class white people who didn’t even know him greeted him with a smile and called him uncle. He even had the nerve to get his picture on the front page of our newspaper, the Richland Review, with our white mayor. This was after he had written a long, convoluted letter to the city newspaper editor praising the mayor for supporting some welfare program to build more low-income houses. I promised myself that when and if I reached adulthood, I would never involve myself with men. I would surround myself with women and pets.

I couldn’t believe that this man was on top of me. “Yes sir,” I managed, lying under his flabby body, stiff as a plank. I didn’t know what to do with my legs, arms, or any other part of my body. And he didn’t bother to tell me. “I don’t like this,” I told him. “It feels bad.”

“It bees that way sometime,” he said seriously. He paused and moaned with his head thrown back and his eyes closed. I couldn’t believe that there was a smile on his face. He shuddered and opened his eyes and gave me a hard look. “Let’s get this thing over with lickety-split. Lassie is fixin’ to come on the TV.”

“Yes…sir, Mr. Boatwright.” I barely recognized my own voice.

It was raining and thundering and lightning like mad. We usually had a lot of snow this time of year, but not this time. It had snowed a little, but then it quickly turned to slush. Now it was hail. I just lay there crying and listening to the hailstones tapping against my bedroom windows, all the while hating that sweaty, evil man on top of me talking and grunting like a hog. “Rar back,” he instructed.

“Yes, sir,” I managed. Confusion and disgust consumed me. I had to hold my breath to keep from vomiting.

“How that feel?” he asked.

“Bad, I told you,” I said, sobbing.

“Oh don’t you worry about a thing, possum. After we done, go set in a tub of hot water yonder in that bathroom. You can use some of my bubbly bath and sleep under my eiderdown quilt again. And you better not pee on it this time.”

“I did all that the other time, and I still hurt,” I reminded.

“Hush up. At least there ain’t no messy blood this time. Eh?” he said casually.

After he was done with me and I had put my clothes back on, he paid me a nickel and made me promise not to ever tell anybody. He threatened that if I ever told anybody, I would suffer.

“Why you doing this to me?” I wanted to know. “You know I don’t like it,” I sobbed. We were sitting on the side of my bed. He had put his shirt back on, but his pants were still at the foot of my bed.

He patted his wooden leg, then shrugged and looked away from me. After he thought about it for a few moments he turned back to me and shook his head like he really was sorry. But then he suddenly turned mean again. “Don’t you be questionin’ grown folks, Jezebel!”

“Mr. Boatwright, I don’t like what we do,” I whimpered after our latest encounter. He cussed and stopped long enough to chew two Anacin tablets. He swallowed the pills off and on all day, every day, for one thing or another whether he was sick or not. He was nervous because we didn’t know what time Mama was coming home. His clumsy, fake leg had slipped and ended up turned halfway around.

He had greasy, foul-smelling pomade on his hair that had dripped on my face. I helped him adjust his leg straps without him telling me to. I continued talking with my face turned away from his. “I don’t like this, Mr. Boatwright.”

“You ain’t supposed to, possum. Women have too much fun as it is. Shoppin’ all the time. Gossipin’. Cookin’ up some scheme to get one of us to marry y’all.”

“I don’t do none of that,” I informed him. “I don’t like the way this feels.”

“Don’t be such a crybaby. Folks do this all the time, and it ain’t supposed to feel good to no gal. God cursed y’all so it wouldn’t feel good on account of Eve bitin’ a plug out that apple in the Garden of Eden. If you gals was meant to have a good time, God would have gave y’all dicks, too. Shit.”

“God didn’t—” I cried. He interrupted me with a ferocious outburst.

“GOD INVENTED CURSES!” His face became an ugly black mask. He gasped, then he reared back and roared, “That’s why they made him God!”

He stood up from my bed, yawning and stretching his arms high above his head. “Well now. I guess that’ll have to do…” he sighed. He reached over and patted the top of my head. Then he slid into his pants. “Why you so quiet?” he asked casually, hands on his hips. I turned to look at his face, not knowing what I was to say, but he spoke before I could. “You made me do this,” he informed me.

“What?” I gasped. My mouth remained open, and I rubbed my ears. “How did I make you do this, Mr. Boatwright?”

“I seen you struttin’ around in here naked like a peacock one night. Tryin’ to be cute. Showin’ off.”

“How do you know I was in here naked?” I yelled. I attempted to stand, but the glare on his face scared me enough to make me sit back on the bed and lower my voice. “My door was closed.”

Incredibly he said, “What you think they make keyholes for, girl?”