by Mary Monroe
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.
CHAPTER 6
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 abo
ut 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?”
CHAPTER 7
I was now thirteen, and the only person I had ever had any sexual contact with was Mr. Boatwright. Things had not changed much since our first encounter. Every now and then I got up enough nerve to threaten to tell Mama, and he’d usually say something like, “Ahhhh…and who do you think would believe you with your ugly self? What do you think your mama will say when I tell her how you throwed yourself at me for a nickel?”
One night, a week before I turned twelve, I threatened to tell Mama again. I held my breath as he hobbled out of my room and returned within minutes, waving a gun I had never seen before. “See this here?” He walked right up to me and placed the barrel against my forehead. “Bang.”
My heart was beating so hard I could barely breathe. I was too scared to move. He smiled and took a few steps back. “Don’t think I won’t use it.”
Richland’s population remained around thirty-two thousand with approximately a twenty percent Black population. There were two steel mills, a brickyard, and a few other factories that provided decent employment for a lot of the Black men who couldn’t get good-paying jobs anyplace else in town. There were a lot of farms on the outskirts of town where migrant workers from Florida and the Carolinas worked picking mostly beans, strawberries, apples, potatoes and peaches, from May to November. A lot of the local people, mostly Black, worked on those farms, too.
Downtown Richland was nothing to write home about. There were two five-and-dime stores, Pluto’s and Bailey’s, where most of the Black folks did their shopping. There were a few clothing stores, one wig and hat shop, two furniture stores, two shoe stores, a few businesses, and the police station. The more upscale stores were located in Sheldon Village, a large shopping center right off the freeway.
There was only one Black doctor in town and one Black undertaker. Other than Black churches, the only thing there was an abundance of for Black folks were bars. Mama called bars beer gardens. “Them beer gardens cultivate a alcoholic quicker than fertilizer,” she warned me one day when we passed the Red Rose Tavern on the way home from church.
“Amen.” Mr. Boatwright nodded. I figured he had forgotten about the time he had left me standing outside for twenty minutes while he ran into the Red Rose for a highball one afternoon on the way home from the market.
The people with money lived on the south side of town, near a set of railroad tracks. Most of the low-income people lived in the northern part of Richland. The people with money bought their groceries at Kroger’s and the A&P. We bought ours at a shabby disorganized discount market called the Food Bucket, where the quality of almost everything they sold was enough to make you sick. A few times they had even tried to sell me and Mr. Boatwright spoiled meat. I hated when Mama sent me and Mr. Boatwright there to get groceries. Some of the clerks were rude and no matter which checkout line you got in, most of the people in front of you had welfare orders, coupons, and checks that needed to be verified. It took longer to check out than it took to collect a cartful of groceries.
In addition to the Sampson River there were several lakes in the Richland area where people went to fish and swim. The rich people went swimming at a fancy pool called Sun Tan Acres, with all kinds of concession stands and other services and lifeguards who looked like Troy Donahue and Elvis. The Black folks and the other poor people went to the lakes and Sampson River to swim or to Jason Pool about a mile from the city dump. At Jason Pool they even let dogs jump in the water. The two dumpy lifeguards were not handsome, but they were nice and really looked out for all the swimmers.
