God Don’t Like Ugly (4 page)

W
e didn’t spend much time in our first house in Ohio, just four months. It was this lopsided pile of bricks on a dark rural road. Behind it were some train tracks and in front across the road was a cemetery. Every time a train roared by, the house shook. On both sides were deserted, boarded-up houses with
CONDEMNED
signs all over the place. Tramps that traveled on the passing freight trains hopped off now and then to sleep in one of the deserted houses and peep in our windows and go through our garbage cans. We had these great big rats that were so brazen they marched across the room right in front of us. They would even climb all over our bed with us in it. We never went into the kitchen without a baseball bat. That was the rats’ favorite room.

The house was falling apart, too. One night while Mama was sleeping, some plaster fell off the ceiling and almost crippled her. Another time, she slid through a hole in the kitchen floor that had been hidden under a thin rug. She was lucky she didn’t break both legs. The landlord was too cheap to repair anything. Lucky for us, most of the people Mama worked for, especially the men, wanted her there days and some nights. We became live-in help. I slept in so many basements, I developed a phobia, and to this day, I won’t enter one unless I’m good and drunk. One employer let us occupy his garage, where Mama slept in a big old easy chair with me on her lap. Our toilet was a big rusty bucket with no handle. We used old newspaper and brown paper bags for toilet paper. We bathed at the Rescue Mission facilities every other day.

At one house, when the weather was warm, Mama’s boss let me sleep in a large doghouse with some puppies. When the weather changed, I was transferred to his basement. I don’t know where Mama slept. But one night I slipped into the main house and headed for the kitchen. While I was standing there with my head in the refrigerator, I heard Mama’s voice coming from a back room. She said, “Hurry up, Mr. Cursey. My jaws is gettin’ tired.”

I followed her voice, which led me to the man’s bedroom. Mama was on her knees with her head between Mr. Cursey’s legs. He was butt naked. “Shet up, woman. You know you need this job, and you and your monkey need a place to stay,” he told her. I didn’t know what I was seeing, so I never told Mama.

A few days later, Mama made me pack again. Scary Mary was out of jail and we were moving in with her. She was now running a cheap boardinghouse for cheap women, and Mama was going to cook and clean for her.

I was told that I would be sharing a bedroom with Scary Mary’s daughter, Mott. I was happy about that until I saw Mott. She was fifteen and severely retarded. Though she looked normal, she had the mind of a three-year-old. At four, I was baby-sitting a teenage idiot who called everybody Mama, including me and the many men who came to the house, most of them white.

My life was far from normal. I was so unhappy it showed. Mama promised me that when the time was right, she would find us a decent home of our own, and I’d be able to be just like other little kids. Mama’s promise was the only thing that kept me from going off the deep end.

I liked Scary Mary. She was nice and generous, but she bullied people, so like everybody else I was afraid of her. The way she looked was enough to frighten anybody. She was so tall she towered over most people. Her voice was deep and throaty, almost a growl. She was a grim woman, aged hard in every way. Her brutal face was round and heavily lined with wrinkles and a continent of black freckles sprinkled all over her honey-colored nose. She wore a matted red wig and a lot of makeup. She was real heavy-handed with her lipstick; some days she spread on so much some of it ended up on her teeth. The wig didn’t cover her Elvis-like sideburns, but she did dye them so that they matched the wig.

One day, marching like a soldier, she entered her cluttered kitchen, where Mama and I were sitting at the table eating greens and corn bread. “Gussie Mae, get up off your rump and come he’p us out. Lorene got the cramps, and everybody else tied up,” she barked.

Mama gave me a strange look. Scary Mary looked from Mama to me, then back to Mama. It seemed like they were talking without using words.

I had no idea what was going on until years later. Mama’s friend was running a whorehouse, and she often pressured Mama to work for her. “Annette, you go round up Mott and y’all go to the store to get me some chawin’ tobacco and a jar of Noxzema face cream. Take your time,” Scary Mary told me, caressing her chin.

“Can I get me some candy?” I asked with a pleading look.

“You can get you
one
jaw breaker. One,” Scary Mary croaked. She slapped a five-dollar bill into my palm. I stood there looking at the money in my sweaty hand. “One more thing, you can keep the change. Just take your time gettin’ back…”

I took my time getting back from the store, but it wasn’t enough time away for me to miss what Mama was up to. I was sitting in the living room, gnawing on candy bars with Mott, when Mama stumbled from upstairs with two fat white men. Both of them were hugging her. She looked at me, then looked away real quick.

“I thought you was at the store, girl.” She shooed the men toward a back room and rushed up to me. “There is things here you don’t need to see!”

“I didn’t see anything, Mama,” I told her. Even if I had seen “something,” I would not have known what I was seeing.

It wasn’t long before Scary Mary ended up in trouble with the police again. Something about her batting a man’s head with a frying pan over some money he owed her. “A slight misunderstandin’. Them kissy-poo po’lice ain’t goin’ to hold Scary Mary for too long,” Mama insisted with a shrug.

We packed again and left Scary Mary’s house the next day. A family from our church took Mott in, and Mama and I moved in with one of the nervous white men I’d seen at Scary Mary’s house. I dreaded the thought of another basement, but there I was once again, sleeping on a pallet between a furnace and a washing machine.

Mama was always tired at the end of her workdays, but she always had time for me. She would read the Bible to me or sit around with her friends and brag about me. “My girl, she so smart. She read books and can speak proper as any white girl. Oh, she goin’ to go real far. She goin’ to be a big success. Just like me.”

I was smart. Smart enough to know that I was not about to be somebody’s slavish maid like my mama. I didn’t have to be. I wasn’t going to work myself into premature old age or an early grave like Mama seemed to be doing. At least not cleaning up behind a bunch of lazy white folks.

One evening, when we were in the kitchen of the next house we lived in preparing dinner, Mama said tiredly, “I want you to stay like you are forever; smart and good. It’ll keep you on the right track, and you’ll always be happy.”

Her voice seemed so weak and sad, I wanted to cry. It hurt me deeply to see her suffer so much just so we could continue living in such an ugly world. But what choice did we have?

“Yes, Ma’am.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mama staring at me with pity.

“I pray no man don’t make a fool out of you.” It saddened me further when she shook her head.

She started washing collard greens in the sink. I was standing next to her, picking bugs off the greens.

“When I get grown we won’t have to eat greens every day. I’m going to get a good job
in an office
making lots of money,” I chirped. We had some type of greens almost every day. Greens and some creature like a coon or a rabbit that some man from our church had caught.

“Office job? You? Go read your Bible,” Mama ordered. Her threatening look told me I had a whupping on the way. She moved from the sink to the counter, where she started to cut up a yam to lay on the pan around the coon she was going to bake.

I was still standing at the sink rolling my eyes at that dead coon that still had his head on in a roasting pan on the counter.

“You know how many little colored girls would love to be in your shoes?”

“No, Ma’am,” I muttered.

“I slave every day so we don’t have to go on welfare. I’m realistic. We colored. I know ain’t nothin’ else I can do but cook and clean and raise white women’s kids. I don’t like it. It ain’t somethin’ I dreamed about doin’ when I was a young’n. All I ever really wanted was my own restaurant, where I would be the head cook. The kind of dream you talkin’ about—you might as well be talkin’ about gettin’ elected president of the U.S.A. It ain’t goin’ to happen. Except in your dreams. You ain’t got the moxy Scary Mary got. She didn’t get where she at that easy.”

“They put her in the jail—again,” I gasped.

Mama mauled the side of my head with her fist.

“Fix your lips! Anyway, you got to be…a certain type to get one of them uptown office jobs. Folks runnin’ offices, they don’t set
girls like you
at no desk to answer phones and greet folks. You…”

“I know I’m ugly, Mama,” I said seriously. “I hear people saying so all the time. And, I’m fat.” Somehow I managed a smile. “I see ugly people all the time, and they get good jobs. Like Miss Garra, that dog-face lady you worked for. You told me she work with the mayor now in his office.”

“She white.”

“Well, Reverend Snipes say beauty only skin-deep. Real beauty come from the inside.”

Mama chuckled and shook her head. Then she moved across the floor and snatched a bowl from the table and started mixing some corn bread on the counter. “Oh, child, that’s just somethin’ plain people say to make them feel better.” She sighed, waving the bowl at me. “There ain’t a handsome person alive would trade places with no ugly person.”

“You think I’m ugly, too, Mama? People say…God don’t like ugly.” I left the sink and slid into a chair at the table and folded my arms.

Mama stirred the corn-bread mix with a long-handled spoon so hard she started sweating. She glanced at me for a moment with an exasperated look on her face. “You beautiful inside and out to me. It’s ugly
ways
God don’t like. Worry ’bout bein’ good, not ugly.” She paused long enough to pour the corn-bread mix into a greased skillet and slid it into the oven. “If you goin’ to fantasize, fantasize about somethin’ practical. A husband with a good job, good friends, a nice home full of young’ns that mind you and know the Lord.” Mama’s voice got real low, and she kept her eyes on the floor while she talked. “I only got one fantasy,” she revealed. “And it’s as big a fantasy as yours about workin’ in a big fancy office. It’ll never come true. At least not for me…”

“What is it?” I left the table and went to stand in front of Mama next to the hot stove. She sighed, then went to the sink and started cutting up the greens.

She shrugged. “Oh…it ain’t nothin’. Just a pipe dream that ain’t got no chance of comin’ true. I don’t care about no minks and furs and mansions like all them white folks I work for got. Compared to the white folks, I want so little out of life and seem like it’s goin’ to take me my whole life to get it, if at all. Just a whiff of luxury. Luxury all the white folks I work for knowed all their born days. Me, I’d be happy livin’ just two or three days of the good life, praise the Lord.”

Mama left the room and returned moments later with her hands full of travel brochures. Very shyly and without looking in my eyes, she said, “Other than runnin’ my own restaurant, the only other thing in life I want is to see the Bahamas before I die.”

“The Bahamas?”

“All them white women I worked for in Florida went there all the time. And for days after they got home, that’s all they talked about. Remember?”

“I remember that time Mrs. Jacobs brought me some seashells back from the Bahamas,” I replied.

“It ain’t just the money. I know I could scrape up enough to go…if I let a few bills slide for a few months or…uh…be nice to Scary Mary and do her a few favors. It’s just that I can’t afford to take the time off from work. White folks is so fickle and helpless. I was to leave for a day or two, and I’m liable not to have no job to return to. I can’t take that chance.”

“But, Mama, you can always find maid work. And even the meanest white folks would probably let you take a few days off if you asked.” Mama went to work even when she was sick. Sunday was the only day she had off, and she sometimes worked up to twelve hours a day. “Just wait until I get a good job. You won’t have to work so much. You can spend as much time in the Bahamas as you want, stretched out on a beach with somebody fanning you for a change.” Mama smiled and hugged me so hard it hurt.

A
fter two years, I still didn’t like Ohio, but I liked Franklin Elementary School. There were a lot of other kids in my first grade class who had come from down South. Because of our Southern accents, almost every time one of us spoke, the Ohio kids made fun of us. My accent was not nearly as thick as some of the other kids because right after moving north, I had started imitating the way the Northern kids pronounced certain words.

I had a nice teacher, who encouraged me to learn as much as I could. “Education is the key to success,” Miss Nipp told me. Mama worked for her three days a week, so Miss Nipp was nicer to me than to the other kids. Sometimes she gave me a ride home in her shiny blue Buick.

We were living in a gloomy, three-bedroom house on Mahoning Street in a run-down part of Richland, the neighborhood where most of the people on welfare and the criminals lived, when Mr. Boatwright moved in. Right across from us was the city dump. Day and night you could smell fried food and marijuana fumes coming from the houses and foul odors from the dump.

One evening when Miss Nipp drove me home, she stopped at a hot dog stand and bought me a foot-long hot dog. “I hope you have a pleasant evening, Annette,” she said when the car stopped in front of our house. The people in our neighborhood were not used to seeing fancy cars driven by white women on our street. I frowned at the nosy faces staring out of the windows in the house next door.

“I will, Miss Nipp,” I said, smacking on the last piece of the hot dog. She was a small gray-haired woman so dainty, the smell of my neighborhood overwhelmed her. She patted my forehead and coughed. “It doesn’t smell bad around here all the time,” I lied, opening the car door.

“I’m sure it doesn’t, Annette. Now you be sure and tell your mother I said hello and that I appreciate her handling my dinner party last night.” Miss Nipp smiled. She had given Mama the day off, which meant Mama had some unexpected time to spend with me.

I hated coming home to an empty house and having to wait so late to eat dinner. Knowing that Mama was home and dinner was ready or close to it, I ran up on our porch with eager anticipation until I entered our living room and saw that strange old man unpacking his things.

I didn’t sleep much that first night with Mr. Boatwright in our house. When I woke up the next morning I thought I had dreamed him. But within seconds I knew he was real. Before I could get my clothes on, I heard his voice downstairs. “Sister Goode, what kind of greens you want me to cook today, collards, mustards, or turnips?” he asked. I cussed out loud to myself, so I didn’t even hear Mama’s response.

By the time I got downstairs to the kitchen, Mama had her coat on and was about to leave for work. “Annette, you come straight home from school to start gettin’ acquainted with Brother Boatwright.” She smiled, smoothing my hair down.

I glared at him. “Yes…Ma’am,” I mumbled, hardly moving my lips.

“And you better mind him,” Mama added.

“Oh, me and Annette gwine to get along real good in no time,” he said, hands on his hips, smile on his face. He had on a gray-flannel housecoat that touched the floor.

I didn’t even eat breakfast that morning. I just sat at the kitchen table staring from one wall to the other while he sat in the living room watching TV. I left to go to school without saying a word to him.

Miss Nipp knew something was wrong the minute I entered the classroom ten minutes ahead of all the other kids. “Annette, are you all right? You look rather down this morning. Is there a problem?”

I had to take a deep breath before I could speak. “This old man moved in with us yesterday, and I don’t like him,” I admitted.

“A Mr. Boatwright? Your mother mentioned him to me the other day. And why don’t you like him?” Miss Nipp asked. She put her hand on my shoulder and started rubbing it.

“Uh…I don’t know,” I admitted. “He’s old, and I think he’s going to be…bossy.”

Miss Nipp patted my head and laughed. “Don’t be too hasty with your judgments. Your mother is not a fool. She knows what’s best for you. Give Mr. Boatwright a chance,” she advised.

The first few days living with a man in the same house were rough on me. Miss Nipp came to meet him and liked him, but I resented his presence. Mama made me stop roaming around the house in just my panties, and I couldn’t turn on the TV in the morning until he got up. When he shaved he left nappy gray hair on the bathroom sink and pee all over the toilet seat and floor that he took his time cleaning up. But by the time he got settled in, my feelings started changing. He had brought a smell with him that reminded me of Daddy. A musty, pleasant odor I had only smelled on certain men. Every time he entered the same room I was in, I thought about my daddy, and in some ways it was like I had my daddy back. Mr. Boatwright won me over when he started giving me candy and doing all the housecleaning I should have been doing.

He hugged me a lot and rubbed me in various places on my body, and it felt good. He had the same sadness in his eyes my daddy and I had. Once, after he had given me my Bible lesson, he leaned over and said, “Gimme some sugar!” I closed my eyes and smiled, expecting him to brush his lips across my cheek or forehead. My eyes flew open when I felt his dry lips on mine.

“Will you be my daddy, Mr. Boatwright?” I pleaded, licking my burning lips.

“Girl…I’m gwine to be more than a daddy,” he informed me, kissing me the same way again. He patted my behind, and I laid my head against his lumpy bosom.

Mr. Boatwright quickly made friends with Mama’s friends in the neighborhood, and he joined our church. Reverend Snipes sometimes let him sing a solo on Sunday. “And now Brother Boatwright is gwine to honor us with one of his favorite hymns,” Reverend Snipes announced proudly. Reverend Snipes was a little, reddish brown man around Mr. Boatwright’s age who reminded me of a sad dog. He had a long, narrow face with droopy eyes, a nose that turned up at the end, and shaggy gray hair that stood up around his head like Methuselah’s.

During the church services some people fell asleep, and unruly young kids, myself included, had to be restrained frequently. But when Mr. Boatwright sang, nobody could sleep through it. Some of the rowdy kids were so taken aback that they sat ramrod straight from the time he started until he stopped to keep from laughing. Mr. Boatwright would sweat and rock back and forth and from side to side. I stared and listened in horror and disbelief. Mr. Boatwright’s yip yip sounded like somebody was stepping on a cat’s tail. Every time he sang, I turned around every few seconds to look at the door, expecting a dog to start howling and scratching.

After Mr. Boatwright’s solo, people started shouting and clapping. Weeping sisters ran up to him with wet towels and wiped his face. Then we walked the two blocks back to our house, where he sometimes sang another solo just for me and Mama. Every time he did Mama got so overwhelmed she cried.

On top of being a respected church member, the man cooked like a veteran chef. He made pies and cakes, which I helped him carry to the church for the bake sales, from scratch. For me he baked tea cakes with smiling faces using chocolate drops for eyes and lips.

I didn’t know how much his disability check was each month, but he bought a lot of nice things for the house that Mama had never been able to afford. He even bought us a new television and me a brand-new tricycle.

“Oh, Mr. Boatwright—you just like Santa Claus!” I said, hugging him for buying me the tricycle. “You more than a daddy!”

“See…I told you I would be.” He tickled my armpit and looked at me long and hard with his mouth hanging open. It was a look that made me so uneasy I suddenly had to pee.

“You want me to run to the store to get you some more Anacin or a bottle of pop or something, Mr. Boatwright?
What you want me to do for you?
”

“Uh…just gimme another hug for now,” he said, almost out of breath. He leaned down and I hugged him around his neck as hard as I could. He slapped my butt, then squeezed it. That’s when I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

He was fifty-three when the nightmare started. I had just turned seven. One evening in August, while Mama was still at work, he ambushed me in my room. I was shocked at the way he kicked open my door and just stood there in the doorway with his hands on his hips staring at me like I was something good to eat. I was lying across my bed minding my own business with a coloring book and some crayons I had found among a box of goodies donated by a woman Mama worked for. A mountain of candy bar wrappers lay next to me. I had stolen the candy from Mr. Boatwright’s room, and I assumed that was why he had entered my room like a bat out of hell—either to scold me for stealing the candy or to give me the rest of it.

“Uh…what’s the matter? Did I strap your leg on too tight?” I asked, smiling. He had never told me why his left leg was fake, but I thought it was one of the most fascinating things about him. I overheard him one day tell our preacher something about losing the leg in a world war. “What’s the matter?” I asked again. Even though he was a grown man, I could talk to him like he was my own age. He had taken me trick-or-treating the year before, and we had collected two big bags of candy that he let me eat all by myself. I liked helping him remove his fake leg and strapping it back on. It didn’t look like a leg. It just looked like a piece of brown wood. It was darker than the rest of him and thicker than his real one. It looked like wood but felt like plastic. I could tell that it was old because there was a lot of dents and scratches on it at the knee, where he strapped it on.

I didn’t have the time or interest in playing with the other kids in our neighborhood anymore. They couldn’t compete with this old man. Mr. Boatwright had become my best friend.

“Mr. Boatwright, why come you looking at me like that?”

“I seen the way you been lookin’ at me,” he growled. “In India, a girl get married by the time she your age. To men like me.” There was a look on his face I could not comprehend. Spit appeared in one corner of his mouth. I was scared and amused at the same time. I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh.

“Huh?” was all I could say at the time. Right after I said that, I giggled.

“Don’t you laugh at me, girl.” Dragging his fake leg, he started to move toward me, taking short, quick steps. There was now a glazed expression on his face. “Let’s make out like we in India.”

“What in the world—” I sat up so fast that my coloring book and the candy-bar wrappers fell to the floor.

“You want it bad as I do,” he told me. “It’s written all over your face. You been beggin’ for it,
Buckwheat
.”

Everybody I knew felt that Buckwheat was the ugliest black child on TV. Being called that truly hurt my feelings but I refused to show it.

“Want what?” I said levelly, tempted to roll my eyes.

He was now standing over my bed with his shirt unbuttoned and this suspicious grin on his face. There were beads of sweat on his hairy chest. His nipples reminded me of raisins, and his hands looked like paws. “You want it,” he insisted. “You want it more than I do. Oo weee.”

“I—what?” I was horrified. I looked in his dark, bitter eyes, and he looked in mine. His did not blink as he seemed to look straight through me. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “What are you talking about?” Grown folks never ceased to amaze me. If they were not drinking or starting a world war, they were talking a bunch of gobbledygook.

“I could hop on the Greyhound bus tonight to Hollywood and be with Marilyn Monroe, but I choose to be rightcheer with you,” he confessed.

Now I was truly confused. He had passed up a movie star for me. Was I that special? Things were happening too fast. To baffle me further, he leaned over my bed and squeezed one of my thighs. Then, he grabbed my other thigh and gently pulled both of them open. Since I was totally clueless as far as sex was concerned and had only seen dogs in action, I had no idea what he was up to. I just did what he told me to do.

“Take off all them clothes,” he ordered.

“For what? Am I about to get a bath?” A bath was the only thing I had ever undressed for—but never in front of anybody other than Mama. I started unbuttoning my blouse. “What—why come you feeling me all up and down like that?”

“I’m fixin’ to turn you into a woman.” He slid my panties off and dropped them on the floor, grinning all the while.

“Huh? What?” I gasped. I had no idea why he was unzipping his pants.

“Raise your rump. Like I said, you want this as bad as I do, and you know it.” He slapped my naked behind and made smacking noises with his tongue and lips.

“Want what—?” I didn’t like what he was doing. Mama was the only person in the whole world who had ever seen or touched my private parts.

“Shet up,” he snapped. Then, without another word, he pushed me down on the bed on my back and climbed on top of me. That was the beginning of a decade of horrors for me.

After he was done with me, I just remained on my back stunned, naked, and sore. I didn’t sit up until after he left my room. And when I did, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I almost fell when I stood up. I managed to locate my robe at the foot of my bed. As soon as I had it on, I ran to the bathroom.

Blood was dripping from between my thighs. Mr. Boatwright was coming out of the bathroom, smiling and humming.

“I’m bleeding,” I gasped. He led me to the bathroom and stuck a wad of toilet paper between my thighs, then he ran me a tub of bathwater.