God Still Don’t Like Ugly Read online

  “I’ll just be a phone call away, Daddy,” I said, drinking ice-cold water from a huge plastic glass.

  Our food was delivered a few minutes later. I wasn’t that hungry but I managed to eat most of the rib sandwich that I had ordered. For Doug’s to be as popular as Daddy claimed it was, I was surprised to see that we were the only patrons.

  Daddy sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a good thing we got here early. You can’t get in this place after six o’clock. You want a plate to carry with you on the plane?” Daddy asked, grinning with greasy sauce shining on his lips like lip gloss. The barbecue sauce was so spicy and hot, it made our eyes water.

  “They’ll feed me on the plane, Daddy,” I said, sniffling and cracking a thin smile at the same time. Daddy leaned across the table and wiped my eyes with his napkin. It wasn’t just the barbecue sauce that had me shedding tears. It saddened me to know that I would soon leave my daddy. All of the pain that he had caused me didn’t matter anymore.

  Before we finished our dinner, Daddy called every employee in the place over to our table to meet me. Four grinning men, shiny with sweat, black rubber aprons covering their big bellies, lined up in front of our booth and inspected me like I was a hog on an auction block. “This is my girl by my first wife. Ain’t she fine?” Daddy patted the top of my head and beamed like a lighthouse.

  It annoyed me when the elderly cook tried to flirt with me and it must have annoyed Daddy, too, because he gave the man a threatening look. “Old nigger, you lay a hand on my child and I will beat your brains out,” Daddy snarled. He looked at me and winked. “I’ll kill any nigger that try to take advantage of you, girl. I ain’t gwine to let nobody damage you.”

  I wanted to tell Daddy that he was too late. After being raped by Mr. Boatwright for ten years, I was way past being just damaged. But I had survived that ordeal. Just like I had survived the ordeal of confronting my daddy. Now that I finally felt at peace, I was more than ready to go back to Ohio.

  I wish now that I had refused Lillimae’s offer to take me back to the airport the next morning. We had to stop twice on the way at gas stations for Daddy to use the bathroom. Each time, he made it by the skin of his teeth. Another stop and I would have missed my flight back to Ohio.

  My suitcase was several pounds heavier than when I’d arrived in Miami. A hefty skycap had to use two hands to wrestle it from the trunk of Lillimae’s car.

  “Annette, I slid some smoked hamhocks and some smoked ham steaks into your suitcase that I fished out the freezer. Ain’t no use in me lyin’—that freezer got way too much meat in it for just me and Daddy,” Lillimae volunteered between sobs, offering a long hug and wetting my shoulder with fresh tears and my cheek with sloppy kisses. The well-worn beach sandals she had on kept sliding back and forth on her feet. One slipped completely off as she and I embraced. People stared at us as I leaned down to retrieve my sister’s shoe and return it to her foot. In my mind, I imagined that the looky-loos assumed I was Lillimae’s maid, even though I had on a sharp white blouse and new-looking slacks and she had on a faded, voluminous muumuu and a scarf carelessly looped around her damp blond hair. I was sick and tired of caring about what other people thought. I hauled off and kissed Lillimae on her cheek.

  Standing next to Lillimae on the sidewalk in front of the airport wearing a shirt so freshly starched it looked like his suspenders were glued to it, Daddy blinked hard to hold back his own tears. But I had already heard him sniffling in the backseat of Lillimae’s car throughout the ride to the airport. He’d blamed his discomfort on his mandatory, frequent visits to bathrooms, but I knew better. “Uh…I hope I see you again real soon, Annette,” Daddy managed, mopping his face with a large white handkerchief. He blinked some more and cleared his throat so hard he started coughing, using the same handkerchief to swipe his mouth.

  “You will, Daddy. I’ll make sure of that,” I said, fanning my face.

  I was not going to miss that blazing Florida sun. Putting on makeup that morning had been a waste of time. Mixed with my sweat, it was now sliding down my cheeks like butter. Lillimae dabbed my wet lips with her thick finger. There was still a great heaviness in my heart, but I felt better than I’d felt in more than thirty years. I didn’t know what to expect before I got back to Florida, especially since I had left Ohio with so many mixed emotions. My anger had dissipated, but I had to wonder how my recycled feelings were going to affect my mother.

  After I got settled on the plane, I tried to read a few chapters from Roots, a book I had already read twice. But my mind kept wandering to other things. Like my own roots. My reunion with Daddy had given me a certain level of peace but there was still a lot to my own past that I had to sort out. I needed to recall as much as I could so that I could prepare myself for my uncertain future.

  Flying first class was a new experience for me. I would have taken a train to Florida, but it was Daddy who had insisted on paying for my first-class accommodations. That hadn’t impressed Muh’Dear at all. “Whatever that mangy dog payin’ for them first-class tickets ain’t puttin’ a dent in all the back child support he owe!” she had snapped when I told her. In the long run I was glad to be traveling in style. There was a lot more room and other advantages that allowed me to relax. I deserved and needed the huge glass of wine a flight attendant handed to me. As soon as the buzz kicked in, my thoughts wandered back in time.

  To when my real pain started.

  CHAPTER 14

  I

  never found out the real name of the woman who had helped Muh’Dear and me after we moved to Ohio. But everybody called her Scary Mary. That name fit her because she was a tall, hard-drinking, tough, wig-wearing woman that just about everybody was afraid of. Even the police.

  In addition to bootlegging alcohol, Scary Mary made a good living supplying women to lonely men. She had a lot of powerful friends so the law looked the other way as she managed several prostitutes that she had wooed off the streets.

  Scary Mary looked at every man as a golden-egg-laying goose. She had had several prosperous husbands. The men that didn’t divorce her up and died. She often bragged about the numerous divorce settlements and life insurance benefits that she had collected.

  We had lived in the same house with Scary Mary and her girls our first few months in Ohio. I was amused as I watched all the men parade in and out of that big house, leaving with empty wallets. Especially since some of those prostitutes were homely and mean. One of the regular tricks was married to a woman who had once won a beauty contest. What confused me was the fact that my own daddy had traded my beautiful mother for a less attractive woman. Since Scary Mary seemed to know so much about men and their habits, I approached her with my concerns.

  Scary Mary was a woman with plain but rough looks, bronze skin, and a scar on her face that she had sustained in a barroom fight. In a voice that sounded like it belonged to a man, the old madam told me, “Annette, it ain’t the beauty, it’s the booty. Especially when that other booty is white. Your daddy ain’t no worse than no other man. They all weak. We women got all the strength. Long as I’m alive, you and your mama ain’t got nothin’ to worry about.” Those words appeased me to some degree and for the first time since Daddy left, I felt safe. But then I hadn’t met Mr. Boatwright yet.

  Richland, Ohio, was a typical small northern city. We had a town square that contained a sorry wishing well full of coins and rocks, some cheap benches, shit-dropping pigeons that drove everybody crazy, and a sturdy statue of a bronze horse with a bronze man straddling the horse’s back. By the looks of the man’s features, he was white. However, there was a mural on the side of the viaduct that connected the southern part of the city to the northern part that made up for that white bronze man on the horse. On the mural was the likeness of a handsome Black man in overalls and a hard hat, swinging a sledgehammer. Next to him was a heavyset, sturdy-looking Black woman with a grimace on her face, a plaid scarf knotted around her head, on her knees scrubbing a floor. That wall represented a
lot to me. It was a reminder that Black people would do whatever was necessary to survive.

  Richland had a few Black professionals. And on the outskirts of town were several steel mills and brickyards that kept most of the blue-collar men employed. Nearby farming communities like Marlboro and Hartville wrapped around the outskirts of Richland like a low-slung belt. A lot of the people I knew made money working on the farms.

  In addition to looking after Mott, Scary Mary’s adult, severely retarded daughter, I made money doing chores for the prostitutes who worked for Scary Mary. Those women were some of the nicest people I knew and some of the most peculiar. In addition to sleeping with men for money, they had other strange habits. One dipped snuff and another chewed tobacco. One even practiced voodoo and 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

  B

  y 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 unde
rneath. 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.