to deal with to get what I needed. And right now, I needed to be with Rhoda. “I just don’t want to be alone tonight,” I whined, blinking like an owl.
“And you won’t have to be alone,” Rhoda assured me.
Being that I was such a big ox and Rhoda was so dainty and petite, it seemed like I should have been the motherly one in our relationship. Rhoda couldn’t even get her arms all the way around me whenever she wanted to give me a hug. Instead of hugs, she usually just rubbed the side of my arm, like she was doing now. She opened her mouth to speak again but Jade cut her off.
“Spend the night with us, Auntie. Nobody will bother you in our house. Will they, Mama?” Jade asked. “And I can tell Uncle Bully that you have the cramps, or you’re going through menopause or some other female thing, so he’ll leave you alone.”
There was a smug look on Jade’s face. One of the few things that I didn’t like about this child that I loved so much was the fact that she never let me forget what I was: an obese, middle-aged Black woman who had nothing that anybody would be jealous of. Well, I had something at least one person was jealous of. So much that she took the time to type up a note and send it to me through the mail, call me up and talk crazy, and send me a blacksnake!
“Whoever it is that’s giving you a hard time won’t bother you while you are in our house. Huh, Mama?” Jade asked, anger flashing in her eyes. She shifted her weight to one slim leg and pressed her lips close together.
I didn’t like for Jade to be caught up in this mess that somebody had dragged me into, but she and Rhoda were like a package deal. A lot of the things that I shared with Rhoda, she shared with Jade. I had never had such a close relationship with my mother, which had a lot to do with me getting raped for ten years by one of her best male friends. But I did have a close relationship with my own daughter, even though she was only nine years old. As soon as she had learned how to talk and walk, I’d made it perfectly clear to her that she could come to me with any problem, no matter what or who it was.
“No, they damn sure won’t bother you as long as you’re in my house,” Rhoda sniffed. She lifted her chin and let out a loud breath. Then she spoke so calmly you would have thought she was ordering a pizza. “Jade, sugar, I want you to run into the house and put your bags away. Give yourself that egg facial you wanted to rush home for. Then I want you to go down to the basement and get one of your daddy’s guns. Load it up, and bring it to me.”
CHAPTER 9
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.
CHAPTER 10
As soon as I entered Rhoda’s beautifully decorated living room, I felt sick. Or sicker, I should say. My stomach had been in knots and my head pounding like a drum ever since I’d left my house. The way I was feeling, I was in no mood to deal with Rhoda’s husband and their houseguest. For all I knew it could have been one of them who had called me up! I once knew a man, when I’d worked for the telephone company, who could disguise his voice to sound like a woman. So that was not so far-fetched. But I was fairly certain that that was not the case.
I couldn’t believe how paranoid I had become.
“Uncle Bully’s depressed, too. Maybe you and him can cheer each other up, see which one is the most depressed,” Jade said with a gleam in her eye. Jade was so young. She had so much to learn about life.
The man that they affectionately called Bully had been Otis’s best friend since grade school. It was hard for me to believe that this same man had seduced Rhoda and was now drinking and grinning in her husband’s face!
According to Jade and Rhoda, Bully’s British wife