Free God Don’t Like Ugly by Mary Monroe Page A

backyards connected. She had a cherry tree, an apple tree, and a buckeye tree in her part of the yard. From my back bedroom window, I counted dozens of grinning, well-dressed (most of them white) men in and out of her back door. Just like when we lived with her.
    Our new house had four bedrooms. Mama took the largest one, which was the one downstairs. Mr. Boatwright took the one upstairs across from mine. And the fourth bedroom, right at the end of a long hallway, was to be used to store things, Mama said, like the brand-new sewing machine Judge Lawson had ordered from Sears and Roebuck. I felt warm and secure in my new room even though all I had in it was my lumpy bed, a big old, chipped chifforobe, and a nightstand with a goosenecked lamp on it leaning over my bed like a sentinel.
    I livened up my room with colored pictures of stars from my movie magazines and dandelions I picked from our front yard.
    It didn’t take me long to get used to our new neighborhood. It was cleaner, quieter, and safer than the one we had just moved from. For weeks, Mr. Boatwright didn’t bother me for sex. I thought that he had gotten tired of me or, because of his age, his sex drive had run its course. I was wrong.
    For the upcoming Fourth of July, we planned a trip to a slaughterhouse to get some ribs, pork links, and chicken parts for him to barbecue. Before going to the meat market, he took me to the Mt. Pilot movie theater to see a new Steve McQueen movie. After the movie, we ate at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.
    “Hurry up and finish eatin’ so we can get to the market and back home before Perry Mason come on the TV,” Mr. Boatwright urged, chewing so hard he bit his tongue. There was grease on his lips and chin, and bits of chicken were lodged between his front teeth.
    “OK. After we watch Perry Mason , I’ll help you marinate the ribs,” I told him. I was halfway through my second three-piece dinner meal. Every time I put on a pound, I recalled Mama’s prediction when I was four about how God was going to curse me with a body the size of a moose. At 210 pounds I didn’t have too far to go. Though he seemed to enjoy it, Mr. Boatwright told me all the time how much he hated my bloated body. I made myself believe that eventually I’d be so fat he wouldn’t touch me anymore. “Mr. Boatwright, can I get some more chicken?”
    The slaughterhouse was a big brooding gray building across the road from a truck stop. On a normal day it was a madhouse. With a holiday coming up, one that was close to the first part of the month when all the low-income people got their checks and still had money to spend on meat, the place resembled a crime scene. A mob of boisterous people wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals, who had already completed their shopping, stood in front of the market waiting for a bus to take them back home. The parking lot was completely full, and some of the vehicles belonged to the police.
    The men who worked inside were running around with bloodstains on their white smocks. Sweaty, impatient customers were standing at the counters five deep trying to bargain, trying to get credit, or trying to get an extra pound of something for free.
    Because of all the chaos and the fact that it took Mr. Boatwright so long to walk from one counter to another, (he had to lean against the wall and rest for ten minutes between each counter we went to) it took us longer than we expected to get our orders filled. By the time we walked out of the market, there were so many people ahead of us boarding the departing bus we had to wait for the next one. It took us another hour to get back to where we had to transfer to the bus that would take us back to our neighborhood. By then it was too late. The last bus for the day on that route had come and gone.
    “I guess we’ll have to take a cab from here,” Mr. Boatwright said angrily.
    “Let’s walk the rest of the way home,” I suggested. Our house was fifteen blocks away, but I didn’t