Free God Still Don't Like Ugly by Mary Monroe Page A

She was appalled when I told her about Mr. Boatwright. On a regular basis, she tried to make me expose him. But that old sucker’s threats carried far more weight than Rhoda’s anger.
    “I’ve had it with you and that nasty old man. If you don’t hurry up and do somethin’ about him, I will,” Rhoda told me after she had helped me abort the baby that Mr. Boatwright had impregnated me with. I ended up in the hospital. Instead of telling Muh’Dear the truth then, I let her think that some boy I refused to name had se-duced me. The pain that that episode caused my mother almost destroyed me. But I loved her too much to burden her with the truth.
    “Mr. Boatwright’s old and always sick,” I reminded Rhoda. “God’ll take care of him soon. He won’t live too much longer,” I insisted.
    I was right; Mr. Boatwright died a few months before Rhoda and I graduated from high school. But it wasn’t God that took him out, it was Rhoda. One night while Muh’Dear was still at work, Rhoda slipped into Mr. Boatwright’s bedroom and held a pillow on his face until he stopped breathing. It was the same year that we also lost Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
    “Buttwright’s in good company,” Rhoda told me as I stood behind her in her pink-and-white bathroom waiting for her to finish her egg facial. It wasn’t enough that Rhoda’s family pampered her; she treated herself like a princess. Maintaining beauty was a full-time job for Rhoda. She spent more on beauty products than I spent on clothes.
    “Yeah, he sure is,” I mumbled. “It’s just a shame that after all he went through when he was a little boy, he had to turn out so bad.
    Look where it got him.”
    After Mr. Boatwright’s funeral, when Rhoda had helped me pack up his things for Muh’Dear to donate to the Salvation Army, she and I had come across some old, faded, dog-eared newspaper clippings from a southern newspaper. We had read about how Mr. Boatwright had been abandoned as a child and shuffled from one bad environment to another. He had also suffered abuse so severe it had cost him a leg.
    Rhoda gasped and whirled around so fast to face me, her egg facial cracked before it was supposed to.
    “Millions of people get abused when they are little! They don’t go 58
    Mar y Monroe
    around rapin’ people! Don’t you be standin’ up in here feelin’ sorry for that old goat!” Rhoda roared. She sucked in her breath and lowered her voice. “Get me a towel.” Rhoda’s family had moved to Ohio from Alabama a few years after we’d moved from Florida. While I had worked hard to rid myself of my southern accent by imitating white girls on television so that I would seem less “country,” Rhoda spoke with a definite drawl. But it sounded cute coming from her. In fact, the accent made her even more charming to me. She sighed. “Great balls of fire.”
    “You’re right,” I muttered, holding her in place by her shoulder while I wiped her face with a fluffy white towel that I had snatched from the back of the bathroom door.
    “You are finally free,” Rhoda reminded, patting her face then inspecting it in the mirror above the sink.
    I declined her offer to give me a facial. I always did. I knew that there was only so much I could do to improve my face. Since I cried so often, I had started wearing a lot of makeup to hide the dark circles around my eyes and the puffiness underneath. I left Rhoda’s house and went home to cry some more.
    I had to agree with what she had just said about Mr. Boatwright, but I still didn’t feel right about how he died and I knew then that I never would.
    Right after graduation, with Mr. Boatwright’s blood still fresh on her hands, Rhoda married a handsome Jamaican and moved to Florida to help him run his family’s orange groves. Pee Wee joined the army a few weeks later. At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Since Mr. Boatwright was no longer standing in my way, I decided that it was time for me to