by Mary Monroe
“Nobody else in her family would take her in,” Rhoda said. “Uncle Johnny wanted to, but he was always in jail or somethin’.”
“Granny Goose left her husband for Daddy’s father,” Jock revealed. “She said that’s why her family is so mean to her now.”
“Where is he now? Your father’s father?” I asked. Rhoda motioned for me to join her on the black-leather couch.
She and Jock looked at one another, giving each other pained looks. Then, suddenly, Rhoda looked down at the floor. Jock took a deep breath and tilted his head.
“When we were still little, he disappeared one evenin’ on his way home from the sawmill where he worked,” Jock told me in a voice so low I could barely hear him.
“They don’t know what happened to him?” I gasped.
“Nope,” Jock said with his jaw twitching.
“The Klan had been sendin’ threats, then they stopped. I guess they did that so Grandpa would let his guard down. Even though it was years after the threats when he disappeared, we all knew that the Klan had done somethin’ to him. We just didn’t know what, and we couldn’t prove anythin’,” Rhoda told me, her words cracking.
“The sheriff, that pot-bellied, rednecked motherfucker had the nerve to say Grandpa probably got sick of the way thin’s were and went off to another city or state to start a new life like some people do. Bullshit!” Jock shouted, his hands balled into trembling fists.
I nodded sadly. “The Klan used to come after my daddy so much in Florida, we had to move every few weeks,” I told them.
“Well…we got somethin’ in common after all.” Jock winked on his way out the door.
CHAPTER 21
“What’s it like?” Rhoda asked me.
“What?”
“Doin’ it.”
“Doing what?”
“Um…sex. I think I should learn all I can now.”
“Sex?”
Rhoda nodded and looked me over thoughtfully. “Sex,” she replied.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “All I know is sex is the biggest joke God ever came up with. It’s the nastiest, most ridiculous-looking…” My voice trailed off. The sex act was so unbelievable I couldn’t come up with a good enough description.
“But you do it with Buttwright.”
“He has sex. I just lie there making faces.”
“Oh. Well can’t you at least tell me what it feels like?”
It was the middle of May. It had taken me all these months to talk Muh’Dear into letting me spend the night at the Nelsons’ house. I was convinced she had said yes only because Jock was spending the night in Cleveland with Uncle Johnny visiting one of Uncle Johnny’s friends. Mr. Boatwright had her believing that Jock was waiting to pounce on me.
“Like a tampon that moves.” I shrugged. That was the best description I could come up with. “The first few times you feel crampy and sore. You bleed—just that first time though. And to be honest with you, it looks right ridiculous while you’re doing it. I don’t know what God was thinking when he came up with sex! He should have stopped with hugging and kissing.”
Rhoda frowned. “If it’s that bad, I’m goin’ to ration it to my husband. What about you?”
We were lying across her bed in our nightgowns. She had on something pink and frilly that tied with a sash around her waist. I had on a baggy, blue-flannel thing with a collar up to my chins and sleeves with buttons. I looked at the floor. “I’m never getting married,” I said levelly.
“Why?” Rhoda gasped. “My God, girl. Don’t you want to have kids?” Rhoda asked, a surprised look on her face.
“Yeah. It’s just…I don’t like boys. I’ve told you that already.” I don’t remember, but somewhere along the way, the last few months, my crush on Rhoda had disappeared. I still adored her, but in a different way, a way I couldn’t explain, but a way that I guessed people considered normal. Now I was really confused as to whether or not I was funny. Even though I was not head-over-heels in love with Rhoda anymore, I still didn’t like boys in a romantic way. Now they just scared me. After Mr. Boatwright, I would have to be paid to get involved with another male.
“What about Pee Wee?”
“What about him?”
“He’s a boy. At least by nature. You like him.”
I let out a deep breath. “He’s safe. He can’t hurt me.”
Rhoda touched my shoulder. “All males are not like Buttwright. Look at my daddy. Look at my uncle Carmine. They are not out to hurt women.”
“Look at your uncle Johnny. Look at your mean brother Jock,” I said, hand on my hip, head tilted.
Rhoda laughed. “Well, yeah, but you don’t have to get involved with men like them.”
I removed my hand from my hip and went to the window and looked across the street at my house. Our living-room curtains were open, and I could see Mr. Boatwright stretched out on the couch like he didn’t have a care in the world. In a lot of ways I guess he didn’t. He had a fairly nice place to live, all he could eat and drink, friends, an open invitation to Judge Lawson’s poker parties, and free pussy. I felt such a sharp pain in my side I returned to the bed and sat down so hard, Rhoda almost rolled off. “Mr. Boatwright said if I ever look at another man besides him, he’d kill me. Pee Wee is the only boy I’m allowed to socialize with.”
We didn’t talk for a moment. I could hear Rhoda breathing through her mouth as we lay sprawled across her bed with leftover snacks, including a large pepperoni pizza and half a dozen teen magazines. The TV was on, but neither of us was paying any attention to The Donna Reed Show.
Then she started talking. “I knew this girl down South. She belonged to our church. She was real cute, had a real big butt. One day she went to this house down the road, and one of the sons just home from the military raped her. His name was Ernest. A woman came to our house, and said, ‘Y’all, Louise done finally got herself raped!’”
“Did they catch him? Did he go to jail?” I asked, reaching for the last piece of pizza. Out of ten slices, Rhoda had eaten only two—I’d eaten the rest.
“The girl got a whuppin’ from her daddy for goin’ around the boy.”
“What about the boy? Didn’t he get punished?” I sat up fast.
“As far as everybody was concerned, he hadn’t done anythin’ wrong. I kept hearin’ people say, ‘boys will be boys.’ Everybody was goin’ around makin’ excuses for him. Me, I wanted to castrate the son of a bitch.” Rhoda stopped and shook her head with disgust.
It really bothered me when Rhoda talked about doing violent things. I think one reason is the fact that I knew she was not just talking. I’d seen the devil on her face more than once, and somehow I knew I would see it again.
“Go on about that girl down South,” I told her.
“They kept sayin’ the girl was askin’ for trouble. Just because she was pretty and had such a big butt. That’s what puzzled the hell out of me. They say she was askin’ for it ’cause she looked so nice. But what about ugly girls that nasty men and boys rape?”
“Like me?”
Rhoda either didn’t hear my comment or didn’t know how to respond.
“People started rollin’ their eyes at her when she came around. Grown women threatened to beat her up if she tempted their husbands,” she continued.
“What do we have to do to keep from being raped? We can’t be pretty. We can’t wear short dresses and low-cut blouses. What are we supposed to do with ourselves in this world?” I asked. Rhoda still liked to watch me eat. Her eyes were on the lower part of my face as I chewed.
“I don’t know, girl.” She shook her head and sighed. “I remember overhearin’ some of the ladies down the road from where we lived talkin’ about havin’ Louise arrested for prostitution! I got so mad! Guess what I did?”
I looked in Rhoda’s eyes. There was a sparkle of mischief there. “What?”
“I set Ernest’s house on fire with him in it! I lit a rag and threw it in a basket of clothes in their kitchen. He wa
s the only one home.” My mouth fell open as I stared at her. “Oh, don’t worry. He didn’t die. He was able to put the fire out. But his hands got burned real bad.”
“Rhoda, you could have killed that boy,” I said nervously.
“I know I could have. And I would have if I had wanted to.” I looked away from her as she continued talking. “That girl down South, the only thing she had done wrong was be born a girl.”
“None of it makes any sense.”
“Now, back home when a white girl got raped, everybody and his brother started runnin’ around lookin’ for a rope to lynch somebody with. If they couldn’t find the guilty one, they got the first man that looked like he had lust on his mind. Anybody, as long as he was Black.”
“You mean to tell me they would hang the wrong man and know it?”
“Oh, girl. Where have you been? A Black boy was lynched for just whistlin’ at a white woman a few years ago. It was all over the news.”
“I remember that. I read about it in Jet magazine,” I told her, swallowing the last of the pizza.
“Finish telling me about that girl.” I sighed. The story was making me sick, but I wanted to know it all.
“Well, as soon as the motherfucker’s hands healed, he raped her again. Him and two of his friends. Her daddy beat the livin’ daylights out of her again right in front of a bunch of us kids. My mama called the sheriff. He came to our house and cussed her out when he found out what she had called him for. He was truly mad that he had left a baseball game on the TV for some ‘raped colored gal.’ Oh God, I was so confused. Just three days earlier a white prostitute had cried rape. The sheriff, his deputies, everybody but the FBI, they searched the woods with hounds and everything lookin’ for a man that had escaped from the chain gang and alleged rapist. I was playin’ with these kids whose daddy was a bootlegger. The white woman was in his house talkin’ about the rape. She admitted she hadn’t been raped. I heard her say so. The escaped convict had just gotten him a little bit and refused to pay her. They never found him, but two other Black men were found hangin’ from trees that same week. Back to the girl from our church. After the boys finished with her, she was all bloody and her clothes were all torn up and everythin’. Again, she was the only one that got a whuppin.’”
“What happened to the girl after that?”
“She walked into Mobile Bay.”
“And?”
“She never came out. She left a suicide note sayin’ that she didn’t want to live in a world that treated its Black women the way she had been treated.”
“Every now and then I feel the same way, suicidal,” I said sadly. “But I don’t have the kind of nerve that must take,” I admitted. “And I don’t think I could do that to my mama.”
Rhoda gave me a hard look, as if she was trying to imagine my pain. “Is gettin’ raped really that bad?” Rhoda gasped.
“It is to me. I used to trust people. I used to like everybody. I don’t anymore. One time this boy, a boy three grades behind me and half my size, felt on my butt when the cafeteria was crowded. I peed on myself when I should have kicked his ass,” I growled. Rhoda was stunned. She had never seen me this angry before.
“A boy did that to me one day at the movies,” Rhoda told me, with an evil look on her face I’d seen before.
“What did you do?”
“Jock was with me. I didn’t have to do anything. It took four people to get Jock off that boy. That was two years ago, and he’s still walkin’ with a limp.”
“Mr. Boatwright is real old, and he can’t have that many years left. All those pills can’t keep him going forever. He could die tomorrow,” I said seriously.
Rhoda nodded, and told me in a strange and hollow voice, “He sure could…”
CHAPTER 22
It was our first day as sophomores at Richland High, the town’s only high school, when we saw Otis O’Toole for the first time. Pee Wee, Rhoda, and I were sitting on the big gray school’s front lawn comparing our schedules when this tall dark boy wearing white pants and a black shirt strutted by. “Haylo!” He had the cutest accent and was attractive, with a headful of the blackest, curliest hair I’d ever seen on a Black person. He was about the same shade of dark brown as Rhoda and me, and he was muscle-bound like Jock. He had a narrow face and slanted, jet-black eyes, almost like an Oriental.
“Did y’all see that?” Rhoda gasped. She stood up and shaded her eyes to see him better. The boy glanced over his shoulder at Rhoda and smiled, but he kept strutting and bobbing his head. When he nodded at me, still smiling, I gave him a blank stare and was tempted to give him the finger.
“What? That old boy with that long mule face?” I said nastily. I hated for Rhoda to pay attention to boys. Unless it was some boy on television or in one of our movie magazines. Her words hurt me like a knife. I actually felt a sharp pain in the middle of my chest. I couldn’t wait to get home to my bedroom, where I could have myself a good cry.
“That was not just a boy! That’s a walkin’ dream! He ought to be served on a platter!” Rhoda exclaimed.
She belonged to me. I had never seen her behave this way over a boy before, and I sure as hell didn’t like it. My heart started beating real fast. The last thing I wanted to share her with was some funky-tail boy. Where would that leave me? I was horrified when she threw the strange boy a kiss. The only reason I didn’t say what was on my mind was because Pee Wee was with us. It hurt, but I had to keep my feelings and thoughts to myself.
“Isn’t he cute?” Rhoda squealed, looking at me and grinning like a fool.
“Uh…I guess,” I managed, looking around the schoolyard admiring the nice new outfits some of the other girls had on. I had on a gray-flannel jumper with a black sweater underneath. Rhoda had on a blue-silk dress, and Miss Rachel had permed her hair the Saturday before. As painful as it was to think about, I knew that someday she would go her way, and I would go mine. She wanted to get married and have a family. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life after Mr. Boatwright. When people asked me about my plans for the future I told them I planned to go to Hollywood and become an entertainer. I got a lot of surprised looks and looks of disbelief, but people stopped asking me after a while so I didn’t care.
“That new boy lives in that green house on the corner of Fourth Street across from Antonosanti’s,” Pee Wee informed us. Fourth Street was just a few blocks from our street. The boy’s family had to be well-off to be able to afford that neighborhood. “He just moved here from Florida. His folks come from one of them islands. Like we need more Black folks in America to be gettin’ fucked over. His mama wears tight clothes. I seen his daddy sneakin’ into Scary Mary’s whorehouse already—just last night, and they just been here a week!”
“He’s skinny,” I said harshly. “Like somebody with a disease.”
“I bet it’s syphilis,” Pee Wee said eagerly.
“Or cancer,” I suggested. Rhoda ignored our comments. I was concerned that I was beginning to behave like some of the other gossipmongers we knew.
“Well, I’m goin’ to marry him and have his babies,” she announced. I almost lost the double helping of grits I’d eaten for breakfast.
The very next day while on the bus sitting next to Mr. Boatwright on our way home from the slaughterhouse, I saw Rhoda walking down Young Street with that beast, and I had to admit to myself, they looked like they were made for one another. They made such a striking couple people turned to stare at them. A few days later I was in a stall in the girls’ room and I overheard some jealous girls, ugly ones at that, grumbling about Rhoda and how she had pussy-whipped Otis before any of them had a chance to. I met him the following day. He was also a sophomore so he ate lunch when we did. When I walked into the cafeteria and saw him sitting next to Rhoda, grinning like he’d won a blue ribbon, I wanted to cut his tongue out. As soon as I sat down across from them, I started rolling my eyes at Otis and belching on purpose. I had to admit, he was polite and very friendly, and he was liked by ev
erybody but me.
“What’s he really like?” I asked on the way to school one day, hoping she would tell me Otis was not her type after all. Rhoda had been dating the Jamaican for two weeks. One Saturday I called her house four times and was told that she was out. I found out later that she had spent the entire day with Otis. They had gone swimming at Sun Tan Acres, the Mt. Pilot to see the latest beach party movie, eaten dinner at Antonosanti’s, and, according to Pee Wee, they spent three hours in the Princeton Motel, one block from the church we all attended, doing the unspeakable! Pee Wee told me Caleb told him. A woman Caleb kept company with worked as a maid at the motel, and she had told Caleb. “They got a lot of nerve fuckin’ that close to the church!” Pee Wee said right after he had told me.
“He’s got a few rough edges, but I can smooth them out by the time we’re old enough to get married,” Rhoda said thoughtfully. “And guess what, he’s been to Paris and the Bahamas, too.”
“Who cares!” I snapped.
“You don’t like him, do you?” She sounded sad and serious.
“NO!’
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a boy, and he’s going to ruin everything for me—just like Mr. Boatwright!”
Rhoda sighed and touched my shoulder and shook her head. “No he’s not. I…listen, this thing with Buttwright is destroyin’ you, girl. If you won’t expose him, maybe we should find you a good therapist to see you through it.”
I bristled. “A therapist? Me? I’m not the one that’s crazy. Mr. Boatwright’s the one that needs mental help. I—let’s change the subject. Um…that Jamaican, you’re serious about marrying him?”
Rhoda took her hand off my shoulder and gave me a look of pity. I was spoiled and selfish where she was concerned, but it was her fault. She had me believing I was finally somebody important. The thought of the one thing I feared the most, a male, taking her from me made me crazy. I didn’t want to know what she was really thinking about me now. I couldn’t risk making her mad enough to sever our relationship.
