God Don’t Like Ugly (14 page)

After I had worked on the house, I went to my room and stood in my front window watching Rhoda’s house, waiting for her to walk out her front door. I waited for more than an hour. Uncle Johnny and Mr. Antonosanti climbed into Mr. Antonosanti’s car, a shiny blue Buick, and sped off. Mrs. Nelson came out to sprinkle water on her rosebushes. I got misty-eyed when Mr. Nelson came out and kissed Mrs. Nelson before roaring off in his car. Finally, Rhoda appeared. She kissed her mother, then skipped across the street. I ran downstairs to make sure I got to her before Mr. Boatwright and Muh’Dear did.
Ed Sullivan
had them mesmerized. They didn’t even look up when I ran across the living-room floor to open the door for Rhoda.

“Sorry I’m late. My facial took longer than I expected,” she apologized, looking around the room, wiggling her nose. Muh’Dear and Mr. Boatwright turned at the same time to stare at Rhoda.

“Y’all shet that door before them mosquitoes come in here and eat us alive!” Mr. Boatwright ordered, stomping his foot.

Muh’Dear’s eyes rested on Rhoda’s expensive black-leather boots. Mr. Boatwright leaped up and put his hands on his hips. “Is that your real hair, girl?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes it is.” Rhoda smiled, shaking that gorgeous mane of hers.

“It look like a wig hat,” he added, turning to Muh’Dear. “Don’t it, Sister Goode?”

Muh’Dear rose and stumbled over to Rhoda and tugged on her hair. “It’s real all right. I bet Miss Rachel charge you double to straighten this horse’s tail,” Muh’Dear mouthed. I was glad she had on a nice dress, a green shirtwaist she often wore to church.

Rhoda turned to me with her mouth hanging open. I cleared my throat and introduced her. Mr. Boatwright took a few steps back, fanning his face with his hand like he had just had a hot flash.

“Um…Annette tells me how she helps you with your peg leg. I help my daddy prep the dead folks,” Rhoda said casually. She walked over and shook Mr. Boatwright’s hand. He looked at her like he didn’t know what he was looking at and shook his head.

“Girl, young as you is, ain’t you scared to be ’round all that…death?” he asked, screwing up his tortured face like somebody was pinching him. “Oooooh!”

Rhoda shook her head, and said seriously, “Dead people don’t faze me.” The room got uncomfortably quiet. Mr. Boatwright and Muh’ Dear were staring at Rhoda like she was a circus freak. I could see that this was making Rhoda nervous. I was trying to think of what to say next to get the conversation going again, but Rhoda beat me to it. “Mr. Boatwright, you look a little wobbly standin’ there. Here, let me help you to a seat.” He seemed surprised that she was so gracious.

Muh’Dear gasped and smiled.

I stood back and watched as Rhoda helped Mr. Boatwright back to the couch, holding on to him by his arm. Part of the reason he was wobbly was because he had been drinking.

“Is this real leather?” Muh’Dear asked when Rhoda handed her her jacket to hang up. “Yes it is,” Rhoda said proudly.

“Did you buy it new?” Mr. Boatwright wanted to know. Like me and Muh’Dear, most of the things he wore came from secondhand stores.

“Yes sir.” Rhoda nodded, giving him an incredulous look.

“How much you pay for a
new
leather jacket like this?” Rhoda didn’t answer him right away. She sighed, pressed her lips together, and scratched her head. Mr. Boatwright looked around, impatiently waiting for her to answer.

“I wouldn’t know. My mama picked it up for me when my daddy took her to New York to shop last month.”

“They went all the way to New York just to go shoppin’?” Muh’Dear wailed, then covered her mouth and shook her head in disbelief.

“Yes. We do it all the time.” Rhoda was not revealing this information to be bragging. This was the life her family lived.

She stayed for dinner and even helped us prepare it. She made Mr. Boatwright nervous. He kept rolling his eyes at her and dropping things. Rhoda was such a distraction he removed the skillet with the corn bread out of the oven without using a potholder and burned his hand. He squealed like a stuck pig and started hopping like he had to pee. Rhoda applied butter to his burn.

During the conversation at the dinner table, Muh’Dear and Mr. Boatwright asked Rhoda a lot of nosy questions. All of them about her family, like how much money her daddy was worth, her family’s relationship with the Antonosanti family, and how much her daddy spent on his white relatives. Rhoda answered every question, giving answers so vague she confused Muh’Dear and Mr. Boatwright so much I think they got mad.
“Lassie
fixin’ to come on,” Mr. Boatwright said, looking from our wall clock to Muh’Dear. They both sighed, with relief I assumed, when I told them Rhoda and I would stay behind to do the dishes.

She didn’t stay long after helping me clean up the kitchen, and, under the circumstances, she had stayed longer than I expected her to. She excused herself just as
Bonanza
was coming on. Muh’Dear smelled Rhoda’s leather jacket before handing it to her. “It even smell new,” she commented, inspecting it like she was searching for a flaw.

“This evenin’ was…um…interestin’,” Rhoda whispered when I walked her out to the porch.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were going to jump all over you like that. They had no business asking some of the questions they asked you,” I told Rhoda. She made a dismissal gesture with her hand, chuckled, then trotted off our porch. I waited until she went inside her house.

“She sure is grown for fourteen,” Muh’Dear remarked, after I closed the door and sat down in the living room across from her and Mr. Boatwright. “You need to be more like her, Annette. I bet she don’t squall like a panda about house-cleanin’. And she eat like a bird. Why she barely touched all that good food Brother Boatwright put on her plate.”

“I wonder why,” I mumbled under my breath low enough so they couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t imagine a girl as pampered and sophisticated as Rhoda gnawing and smacking on neckbones like we had. I was surprised that she had eaten the corn bread and turnip greens.

“I heard she threatened to cut a white teacher’s throat last year,” Mr. Boatwright said quickly, nodding and fanning his face with a newspaper. “She’ll wind up in either a room in the state penitentiary or a room at Scary Mary’s place one of these days and start takin’ advantage of men. No wonder Scary Mary like her so much. You seen the way that little hussy was swingin’ them little narrow hips of hers, Sister Goode?”

“Just beggin’ to get herself raped.” Muh’Dear sighed and shook her head.

“What were you doing looking at her hips, Mr. Boatwright?” I asked under my breath.

“What you say?” he grunted, then belched.

“Nothing,” I whimpered. I couldn’t get to my room fast enough.

A
bout two weeks after Rhoda’s first visit to my house I accompanied her to her house, where we had planned to study.

She left me in the living room going through her records while she went to the kitchen to get me some of the peanut candy she had made the night before.

“You heard the new Beatles song?” It was Jock talking. I whirled around to see him walking into the room smiling. Fresh scabs ran the length of his face on both sides. There was a Band-Aid on his chin. I knew he got into a lot of fights so the scabs and the Band-Aid did not surprise me.

I looked at him, stabbing myself in the chest with my finger. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, his smile gone. “Rhoda told me you’re a big Beatles fan, too.”

“I am. Do you like them?”

“They’re all right.” He let out a short chuckle and waved his hand. “I think they’re more for girls though. And white kids. I’m into Motown.” He turned on the stereo and put on an album. “Where’s Rhoda?” he asked, looking around the room, snapping his fingers to Marvin Gaye’s latest.

“She went to get some of that candy she made,” I told him. I was nervous. I kept looking toward the door, praying that Rhoda would return before I started sweating through my cheap blouse.

Just then an elderly, heavyset white woman in a plaid nightgown entered the room, walking with a cane.

“Jock, did you—” She stopped and looked at me leaning over the stereo with an album in my hand.
“Whose little nigger is this?”

I could hear Jock snicker. I gasped and dropped the record. Lucky for me, Rhoda returned a few seconds later.

“Granny, now you know you ain’t supposed to get out that bed. You could fall down the steps and break your hip again,” Jock said, shaking his head, facing the old woman with his arms folded.

“Granny Goose, this is my friend Annette from across the street,” Rhoda told the old woman, then turned to me. “This is our grandmother. The doctor told us to make her stay in bed as much as we can, but as you can see, she sneaks out.” Rhoda laughed nervously.

The woman looked me up and down, frowning. Her hair was as white as snow, and her pale face was heavily lined and dotted with moles and age spots. It was hard to tell if she had ever been attractive. Her nose seemed too big for her face, and her green eyes were too far apart. She had almost no lips. “You leave them albums and that stereo just like you found ’em,” she barked at me, waving her cane threateningly. For a brief moment I had a flashback. She looked like mean old Mrs. Jacobs, the woman who had whacked Muh’Dear with her cane. I had to close my eyes and count numbers in my head to keep from losing my cookies.

“Sit down, Granny Goose.” Jock attempted to lead the old woman to the couch, but she raised her cane and swung at him, missing only because he ducked. Rhoda tried not to, but she laughed.

“Get your black hands off me!” the woman cried.

Uncle Johnny came running into the room. “Mother, don’t get excited. Come on with me now so you can take a pill and get some rest. You ain’t got no business gettin’ out of bed after what Dr. Thompson told you. You ain’t well, sugar.” He had on a pair of plain black pants and a leather apron with a bib over a white shirt. I had a feeling he had been in the room helping Rhoda’s daddy prepare some deceased person for burial. He smiled and nodded at me. “How you doin’, Annette?” Before I could answer he turned to Jock, “Boy, get back yonder where your daddy’s waitin’ on you!” The old woman ranted and raved and swung her cane as Uncle Johnny steered her out of the room. Over his shoulder he yelled, “Jock, get a move on!” I looked at Jock, hoping he would leave the room immediately so that my heart could stop jumping around in my chest. The boy just stood there like he had not even heard a word his uncle said. Then he picked up another stack of records and sat down on the floor.

“That’s daddy’s and Uncle Johhny’s mama,” Rhoda explained.

“I thought so.” I nodded. I eased down on the floor and crossed my legs at the ankles.

“None of her other kids will have much to do with her,” Jock added, looking at me. “Just Daddy, the only Black one and the only one she rejected.”

“Didn’t she raise him?” I asked. Like Mr. Boatwright there was a lot about Rhoda’s family I didn’t know.

“His daddy’s mama raised him. Once Daddy got back from the army and the Antonosanti family put up the money for his trainin’ and to get him started, his white relatives had a sudden change of heart.” Jock shrugged. “None of them had a pot to piss in and didn’t know where the next meal was comin’ from. Right away Daddy started helpin’ out his poor white relatives. To make a long story short, Granny Goose got to be too much of a problem for the rest of her kids. They wanted to put her in the state old folks’ home. We were all up here by then. About eight years ago Daddy left the house one mornin’ while we were all still asleep and when he came back two days later Granny Goose and Uncle Johnny were with him. She’s been here ever since, and so has Uncle Johnny off and on.”

“What does Uncle Johnny do for a living?” I asked. I had heard a lot about Rhoda’s favorite uncle, but nobody had ever mentioned his line of work.

“That’s a good question,” Rhoda said seriously. “He works as a dishwasher at Antonosanti’s, off and on, and of course he helps Daddy out, off and on.” Rhoda nodded. “He’s been tryin’ to preach the gospel for years, but he keeps backslidin’.”

“I’m glad he’s here. With Muh’Dear bein so sickly, Uncle Johnny takes a big load off her helpin’ with Granny Goose.” Jock shrugged. I looked toward the door, praying he would leave.

“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.

“W
hat’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
Butt
wright.”

“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 was 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…”