God Don’t Like Ugly

by Mary Monroe

  “Did you mean what you just said about not hatin’ him?”

  I nodded. “I only hated what he was doing to me.”

  A sad look appeared on Rhoda’s face. “I see,” she mumbled.

  “Mr. Boatwright was real good to my mama at all times,” I admitted.

  “Uh-huh. But he treated you like hell.”

  “Not all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When he first moved in he was a good man to have around. One time I was sick in bed with the flu, he came to my room and I pretended to be asleep. He patted my forehead and pulled the covers up around my neck.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “I don’t think so. Another time he came all the way to the school to bring my snow shoes. His leg bothered him so much from that long walk in the snow he had to stay in the bed for a week.”

  “Well, he was goin’ to die soon anyway. Just like Granny Goose. The doctor said she could go any day. Fallin’ down the steps just took her out of her misery that much sooner,” Rhoda insisted. I think she was trying to convince herself more than she was me.

  “I won’t ever tell what really happened, Rhoda. But you’ll know what you did.”

  “I know,” she responded dryly. Rhoda got real quiet, then gave me this funny look. “I want to say somethin…”

  “What?”

  “Annette, I never saw Buttwright molest you. I never heard him threaten you. All I heard was your side of the story. How do I know you didn’t make all this up to get attention?”

  “You don’t,” I told her.

  “Then it is all true?”

  I gave her an incredulous look and gasped, “Well, it’s a little late for you to be asking questions now, don’t you think. You already killed the man. Everything I ever told you about Mr. Boatwright and me is the absolute truth. Who would want attention this bad?”

  Rhoda sighed and nodded. “Oh well.” She shrugged. “The thing is, nobody knows I killed Mr. Buttwright but you and me.” She looked in my eyes for a long time.

  “And God,” I reminded her in a whisper.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was Rhoda’s idea for me to go make some tea. I left her in Mr. Boatwright’s room alone. There was some already made so all I had to do was reheat it. I guess I finished faster than she expected. When I returned to the bedroom I saw her on her knees with her head bowed, her hands cupped. She was praying! Nothing Rhoda did surprised me anymore. She had crossed a line, and I had crossed it with her. We could never turn back now. I admitted that I was feeling guilty about Mr. Boatwright’s murder, even though I had not actually done it myself or even been present when she did it. I was scared to death that we would either get caught or that Mr. Boatwright’s ghost would come back and haunt me. I had been sleeping with my lights on and my Bible under my pillow since his funeral.

  I gasped and moved back to the steps and returned to the kitchen. I waited a few minutes, then went stomping back up the stairs making as much noise as I could. Rhoda was snatching stuff from the closet when I returned to the room.

  We drank the tea in silence. All I could hear were our spoons clicking against our cups.

  “You can go when you finish your tea,” I told her.

  “I’ll stay until we finish,” she replied. “I have something to show you.” She removed a box from the closet with a brown folder. I opened it and saw a stack of newspaper clippings that were so old they had turned brown. “I’ve only read two of them. They are from some unheard-of Mississippi publication,” Rhoda told me. “I thought you should be here to read the others with me.” Just then the door slammed shut. We both whirled around at the same time. “What was that?” Rhoda asked.

  “The wind?” I said, shaking.

  “There was no wind,” Rhoda insisted.

  I got up to open the door and looked out in the hallway. “See. Nobody’s out here. It had to be just the wind.”

  “Yeah. It was the wind,” Rhoda agreed weakly.

  I returned to the bed. I couldn’t tell which of us was shaking the hardest.

  “Our minds are playing tricks on us, but we can’t freak out now,” I told her. “We’re in this thing too deep.”

  “Yeah. Let’s read,” Rhoda said in a hollow voice. Her mood had softened considerably.

  We put the clippings in chronological order, then we sat on the bed and began to read them one by one. After the first few sentences I forgot about the mysterious way the door slammed shut.

  BATTERED COLORED CHILD FOUND

  An unidentified colored male, approximately three years old, was found unconscious by a state trooper in an abandoned shack on Dabney Road last night.

  The boy had been sexually assaulted and savagely beaten. A white mule doctor, who asked that his name not be revealed, amputated the boy’s left leg this morning.

  The boy was unable to identify his assailant or the weapon used to damage his leg beyond repair.

  The boy is currently in the care of the Reverend Buck Poole, also colored. Police are investigating the matter.

  On the back of the first item was a girdle ad that took up more space. We read on.

  CRAZED COLORED WOMAN SLAIN BY POLICE

  A wild-eyed colored woman, wielding a butcher knife, entered the home of the Reverend Buck Poole last night through a window and forcibly removed a child she claimed was hers. The boy was also colored.

  This boy, possibly retarded, was found abandoned, abused and unconscious last week.

  Four hours after the boy was taken by the woman, police scanned the immediate area. The woman was tracked to Howard’s sawmill by the police hounds. The boy had been slashed over ten times about his tail and stomach area.

  Officer Jackson Cramer, white, was forced to shoot the woman five times after she jumped from a tree, made threats against his life, sassed him using foul language, then went after him with the bloody knife.

  ABANDONED COLORED BOY ABANDONED AGAIN

  A routine patrol possibly saved the life of a six-year-old colored boy. The boy, who gave his name as Doolittle Boatwright, has known nothing but a life of despair since the day he was born.

  The boy first made the news about three years ago when patrolers found him naked and near death.

  In this incident, the elderly colored preacher who had taken the boy in dropped dead after being kicked in the head area by a frisky rogue mule.

  The boy is currently being held in the town jailhouse while police investigate rumors of an illegal still on the property of the only colored orphanage in the county.

  Police encourage members from any colored church to offer their services regarding this boy.

  We skipped over a few of the clippings that seemed to be repeating some of the incidents.

  “Let’s read this one. This is many years later,” Rhoda said. Her voice cracked, but I pretended not to notice.

  COLORED SPORTING HOUSE RAIDED

  Local police raided a house on Jersey Street being used for fornication by a woman who is well-known by the law. A Miss Lucille Boggs, an ex-convict, refused to give her age, and had several young colored girls in her company as well as ten colored prostitutes between the ages of eighteen and fifty.

  A colored boy, Doolittle Boatwright, age fifteen, tipped off the police after the Boggs woman evicted him from a room he had been living in since age eight. One-legged, the boy has never attended school, and learned to read on his own and is unusually smart for a colored boy.

  The boy retaliated after the Boggs woman beat him in front of her guests and turned her dogs loose on him.

  According to eyewitnesses, all colored, Boggs removed the boy’s makeshift peg leg and struck him with it about his head area.

  Everybody involved in this mayhem was colored. Except the police.

  If the articles weren’t depressing enough, the unsophisticated journalism made them seem worse. “Those old time Southern redneck reporters sure have a shabby way with words,” I told Rhoda.

  “Damn crack
ers. Probably some of my Caucasian relatives,” she spat.

  “I can’t read any more,” I mumbled. I felt so bad for the way life had started out treating Mr. Boatwright. No matter what he had done to me, he was still a human being, and that made him one of God’s children. Just like me and Rhoda.

  She skipped ahead anyway.

  “Let’s read this last one. This one is dated only about twenty years ago from today.”

  “OK, but after this one let’s burn them. We have enough to worry about,” I said, trying to sound firm.

  “Yeah. Let’s put all this behind us,” Rhoda said seriously. “All this mess…”

  We sighed and unfolded the last one we were going to read.

  ONE-LEGGED COLORED MAN ATTEMPTS SUICIDE FOR THE THIRD TIME

  Bad luck and misfortune continue in the life of Doolittle Boatwright, age unknown.

  The one-legged man is well-known in the area by the police. He has been convicted for robbery, vagrancy, disturbing the peace, battery, attempted rape, vandalism, and breaking and entering.

  After being evicted from a colored mission house for disorderly conduct, Boatwright jumped off the Lexington Bridge, where he hit a rock and landed on the riverbank.

  Two weeks earlier, Boatwright jumped in front of a truck that ran out of gas before it reached him.

  Police subdued Boatwright with a hose and the dogs. Boatwright was later escorted to the county mental facility in a straitjacket. Authorities summoned a specialist from the county seat to examine the man. It was determined that he suffers from a variety of mental disorders. The man was released into the custody of Ike Townes, a colored man known for taking in hopeless cases. Ike Townes, twenty years on the chain gang and a respectable fortune-teller, has had some luck with redeeming hopeless Negroes. Townes predicted that Boatwright would one day find a woman and live a normal life.

  “I would say that the woman the fortune-teller predicted was your mama.” Rhoda put the last clipping we read back into the folder and slapped it shut.

  “What a bum deal,” I sobbed, wiping my eyes and nose with the back of my hand.

  “Too late to be cryin’ for him now, Annette.” Rhoda stood up and looked away, but not before I saw tears in her eyes. “I’ll get the rest of the stuff from the closet.” She went to the closet and pulled out the fake brown leg and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 39

  Three days went by and I didn’t hear from Rhoda and I didn’t call her. I had almost stopped calling up Florence. She was out with her boyfriend most of the time when I did.

  “Things just ain’t the same since Brother Boatwright left us,” Muh’Dear said at breakfast one morning. He had been dead two weeks. Ironically, now that he was gone, she had cut her hours, and I saw more of her than I had in over ten years even though it meant she brought home less money. But there was still some of the insurance money from Mr. Boatwright’s policy that helped us a lot (as did Judge Lawson’s mysterious generosity). “We done lost us a good man.”

  “I miss his cooking,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else good to say about Mr. Boatwright. He was a good cook, and once upon a time he was a good man. “Muh’Dear, how much did you know about him?”

  Muh’Dear gave me a sad, thoughtful look, then she smiled. “I knew he was the kind of man I wish I had met when I was a young girl. Except for that missin’ leg, the man was flawless, irreplaceable.”

  “I mean about where he came from. Do you know anything about his background?” I held my breath and blinked hard, trying to figure out why Muh’Dear kept looking away.

  “His mama died when he was a baby, and he never knew his daddy. His granny raised him. Then she died. He joined the army, where he got his leg blowed off. Then he traveled the world on a merchant ship for many years before he found Jesus, then us.”

  “And you believed everything he told you?” I asked, pushing a piece of sausage around on my plate with my fork.

  “Why wouldn’t I? Brother Boatwright was a righteous man that didn’t believe in lyin’. That man read the Bible every night before he went to bed.”

  “He never married?”

  “He was engaged when he went in the army. When he lost his leg, he lost the girl. He was too shy from then on to approach a woman.” Muh’Dear paused and laughed, then she cried. She stopped after a minute. “I had to approach him.”

  “What do you mean?” My body tensed as I waited for her response. So far I didn’t like much of what I was hearing.

  “I asked him to marry me after you finished school.”

  “What did you say?” I almost choked on a piece of sausage. Muh’Dear reached over and patted me hard on the back.

  “He was goin’ to marry me. Well, you old enough to know now. We was like man and wife anyway. That devil.” She cackled and shook her head. “He used to hop into my room just about every night after he thought you was sleep.”

  “You mean…for sex? With you?”

  Muh’Dear nodded. “He was so hurt when you got yourself in that mess with that boy.”

  “I bet he was.” My body was on fire after hearing Muh’Dear’s confession, and I didn’t want to face her. I was not hungry anymore, and I wanted to leave the room, but my legs felt too heavy for me to move from the table.

  “I wanted to send you to Florida to live with your Aunt Berneice I was so upset over you gettin’ yourself pregnant. The shame was so overwhelmin’. I’d die if the congregation found out. He talked me out of sendin’ you down South. He said wild as you was, you’d be pregnant again within a week down there.”

  “I don’t think so. I was stupid for letting something like that happen to me. I knew better,” I muttered.

  “The way you lit into old lady Jacobs when you was a little girl that time for hittin’ me with her cane, I never woulda thought you’d be the type of girl to let anybody take advantage of you,” Muh’Dear said with her eyes sparkling.

  “I didn’t either.” I shrugged, looking toward the wall.

  CHAPTER 40

  It was not easy, but I put Mr. Boatwright and what had happened to him out of my mind as much as I could. Graduation was a few weeks away, and we all had a lot of studying to do. One thing that was occupying most of the minds of the class of ’68 was the senior prom. Going to the prom was something girls in my position didn’t dare think about. So that’s why when I got asked to go, I almost swallowed the piece of chicken I was eating.

  “What did you just ask me, Pee Wee?” I gasped into the phone. Muh’Dear was at work, of course, and Rhoda was shopping with her mother and Lola.

  “I asked if I could escort you to the senior prom. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, you know,” Pee Wee said.

  “Can I call you back?” I asked, barely able to breathe.

  Pee Wee was silent for a moment.

  “You gotta think about it, or somebody else asked you to go?” he asked.

  “Um…no. I have to make sure it’s OK with my mama.”

  “OK. Well let me know as soon as you can.”

  It took me five minutes to compose myself after I got off the phone. Then I called Judge Lawson’s house to ask Muh’Dear if I could go to the prom.

  “Judge Lawson’s residence,” she announced, answering on the second ring.

  “Muh’Dear, it’s me,” I said with a shaky voice.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. I heard Judge Lawson in the background ask who was on the phone. “It’s Annette,” she told him. This was the first time I’d ever called her at Judge Lawson’s house since she’d started working for him.

  “Can I go to the senior prom?” I said quickly, then held my breath.

  “Can you what?” she choked out.

  “I got asked to the prom. I’ll be out real late, and I’ll need a new dress. I just wanted to make sure it was OK with you before I accepted the invitation.” I couldn’t believe those words were coming out of my mouth.

  “My girl got asked to the prom,” Muh’Dear said, talking to the judge. I
heard him clap his hands and whistle. “Of course you can go, baby,” she said excitedly. There was some muffled sounds on her end for about a minute. “We’ll talk about it when I get home tonight,” she told me.

  I had to compose myself again. I waited another five minutes before I called Pee Wee back. “Yes,” I told him, glad he couldn’t see my face and feel my excitement. I never thought I’d see the day I’d get excited over being asked out by Pee Wee.

  “Cool. I’ll be over later tonight, or I will talk to you in study hall tomorrow,” Pee Wee said eagerly.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Rhoda. I didn’t want to tell her over the phone, so I went to her house with my coat on over my housecoat. Uncle Johnny sent me upstairs to Rhoda’s room, where she was stretched out on her bed.

  “Rhoda, guess what?” I closed the door with my foot and rushed over to her bed. “What’s the matter? You don’t look too good.” I sat down on the side of her bed.

  “I’ll be OK…in about seven months,” she whispered, looking at her stomach.

  My heart sank. She didn’t have to tell me, but I knew she was pregnant. I’d been expecting that to happen. Surprisingly, I was not as disgusted as I thought I would be. “Do you want me to come back later?” I asked.