Free God Still Don't Like Ugly by Mary Monroe

money.
    Some days by the time I finished my last chore, I was just as tired as those prostitutes who had been humping men back-to-back for hours.
    Some of the prostitutes had babies that I had to keep from disrupting business by guarding Scary Mary’s basement, serenading them with some of the same lullabies my daddy used to sing to me. It was the closest I could get to my daddy. It made Muh’Dear furious when I brought up his name, so I rarely did.
    Muh’Dear cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children of some of the well-to-do white families in Richland. She hated leaving me alone with Scary Mary and all those prostitutes but it was a real treat for me. Especially since I didn’t have any friends my own age yet.
    “I just worry about you so much,” Muh’Dear told me when she retrieved me from Scary Mary’s house one day. We had just moved into our own house a few days earlier. “Scary Mary is a good woman and a godsend to us, but her line of business ain’t healthy for you to be around too much. I’m goin’ to see if Reverend Snipes can’t advise us.” My mother was such a pretty woman. She was fairly petite with light brown skin, delicate features, and dark hair so thick and beautiful people thought it was a wig. I didn’t like the sadness on her lovely face when she worried about me.
    To keep my mother happy, one of the prostitutes regularly washed and straightened my hair, while another one held me down as I yipped and bucked like a nanny goat about to be slaughtered. With a Camel cigarette dangling from her thick lips, my hairdresser blew strong smoke in my face and yelled, “Annette, you better get use to fixin’ yourself up. How you expect to get a man with your hair lookin’
    like a sheep’s ass, girl?” It was a little too soon for me to be getting that kind of advice, even from a prostitute.
    My mother’s concern for my virtue intensified. At Reverend Snipe’s insistence, she moved Mr. Boatwright in with us so he could baby-sit me while she worked as well as to help us with our bills. All the immoral things that I had witnessed in Scary Mary’s house didn’t GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY
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    come close to corrupting me as much as Mr. Boatwright did by raping me.
    It was the second time in my life that a man had betrayed me.
    Now that I had my peace with Daddy, I had to work on getting Mr.
    Boatwright’s legacy out of my system.
    CHAPTER 15
    By the time I’d reached my teens, I was so used to Mr. Boatwright clambering into my bed, it seemed like second nature. Besides, by that time I had other things to be happy about. An old, white retired judge that Muh’Dear had worked for let us move into one of the many nice houses he owned on Reed Street, located in one of the nicest neighborhoods in town. Every well-kept yard had either a buckeye, willow, or fruit tree. There were no old, beaten-down cars littering the driveways. Just shiny Cadillacs and other impressive cars. The old judge even changed his will so that the house would go to Muh’Dear when he died.
    Jerry “Pee Wee” Davis and Rhoda Nelson, kids my age, lived on the same street. Jerry’s daddy was a barber and Rhoda’s daddy was the only Black undertaker Richland had at the time. Pee Wee was homely and unpopular, but Rhoda was the most beautiful Black girl I had ever seen. She had more confidence than Miss America and was as fearless as a bounty hunter. Rhoda was dark like me and had long, blue-black hair that reached halfway down her back. She had green eyes, but behind them lurked something even darker than our complexions.
    However, I didn’t see it as something evil at the time. There were too many other things obscuring my vision.
    Even though Pee Wee and I became quite close, I never confided in him the way I did with Rhoda. When she was a child she had wit-GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY
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    nessed a policeman shoot and kill her eldest brother, David, so she was particularly sensitive when it came to traumatic situations.