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.
CHAPTER 15
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