to be rightcheer with you,” he confessed.
Now I was truly confused. He had passed up a movie star for me. Was I that special? Things were happening too fast. To baffle me further, he leaned over my bed and squeezed one of my thighs. Then, he grabbed my other thigh and gently pulled both of them open. Since I was totally clueless as far as sex was concerned and had only seen dogs in action, I had no idea what he was up to. I just did what he told me to do.
“Take off all them clothes,” he ordered.
“For what? Am I about to get a bath?” A bath was the only thing I had ever undressed for—but never in front of anybody other than Mama. I started unbuttoning my blouse. “What—why come you feeling me all up and down like that?”
“I’m fixin’ to turn you into a woman.” He slid my panties off and dropped them on the floor, grinning all the while.
“Huh? What?” I gasped. I had no idea why he was unzipping his pants.
“Raise your rump. Like I said, you want this as bad as I do, and you know it.” He slapped my naked behind and made smacking noises with his tongue and lips.
“Want what—?” I didn’t like what he was doing. Mama was the only person in the whole world who had ever seen or touched my private parts.
“Shet up,” he snapped. Then, without another word, he pushed me down on the bed on my back and climbed on top of me. That was the beginning of a decade of horrors for me.
After he was done with me, I just remained on my back stunned, naked, and sore. I didn’t sit up until after he left my room. And when I did, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I almost fell when I stood up. I managed to locate my robe at the foot of my bed. As soon as I had it on, I ran to the bathroom.
Blood was dripping from between my thighs. Mr. Boatwright was coming out of the bathroom, smiling and humming.
“I’m bleeding,” I gasped. He led me to the bathroom and stuck a wad of toilet paper between my thighs, then he ran me a tub of bathwater.
CHAPTER 6
The next couple of days, I walked around the house in a trance. Mr. Boatwright acted like he normally did, whistling and yipping his spirituals, quoting Scripture from the Bible and cooking up a storm. During my next Bible lesson, he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth, forcing my lips open with his tongue and patting my crotch at the same time.
“Stop,” I whimpered, wiped my lips, leaned back in my chair, and squeezed my thighs together, forcing him to remove his hand.
“What? You done already forgot what I just told you about what happened to Lot’s wife in Sodom and Gomorrah?”
I sat in silence, with my eyes glued to the floor.
“Huh? You think it’s fun’s turnin’ into a pillar of salt, girl?”
“No sir…” I mumbled.
He finished my Bible lesson, we ate dinner, then he sent me to bed. This was one of Mama’s late nights. I was not surprised when he steamrolled into my room just minutes after I had turned in for the night. Without a word he wrestled my flannel gown and panties off me. I stared in horror and disbelief as he removed his clothes.
This was the second time, and it was worse than the first. I say that because the first time I was a virgin and I didn’t know what was coming. He talked during the whole rape. Two hellish minutes. And to my seven-year-old body, two minutes was a very long time.
“You clumsy heifer!” He was mad because my legs were all over the bed. But I could not help it; the pain was unbearable. I could not understand how anything that felt so bad to me, felt so good to him. “Tetch me. That’s the least you can do.” He guided my hand to his crotch and forced me to squeeze.
“Ow, ow, ow,” I sobbed. Suddenly, I froze, and that made him even angrier.
“Use your imagine now, girl. Don’t just lay there like a rug and let me do all the work! All this trouble for a little poontang,” he complained between gasps. His foul breath and slimy sweat on my face made the nightmare even worse.
To me the man was unspeakable, but Mama and everybody else held him