“God didn’t—” I cried. He interrupted me with a ferocious outburst.
“GOD INVENTED CURSES!” His face became an ugly black mask. He gasped, then he reared back and roared, “That’s why they made him God!”
He stood up from my bed, yawning and stretching his arms high above his head. “Well now. I guess that’ll have to do…” he sighed. He reached over and patted the top of my head. Then he slid into his pants. “Why you so quiet?” he asked casually, hands on his hips. I turned to look at his face, not knowing what I was to say, but he spoke before I could. “You made me do this,” he informed me.
“What?” I gasped. My mouth remained open, and I rubbed my ears. “How did I make you do this, Mr. Boatwright?”
“I seen you struttin’ around in here naked like a peacock one night. Tryin’ to be cute. Showin’ off.”
“How do you know I was in here naked?” I yelled. I attempted to stand, but the glare on his face scared me enough to make me sit back on the bed and lower my voice. “My door was closed.”
Incredibly he said, “What you think they make keyholes for, girl?”
CHAPTER 7
I was now thirteen, and the only person I had ever had any sexual contact with was Mr. Boatwright. Things had not changed much since our first encounter. Every now and then I got up enough nerve to threaten to tell Mama, and he’d usually say something like, “Ahhhh…and who do you think would believe you with your ugly self? What do you think your mama will say when I tell her how you throwed yourself at me for a nickel?”
One night, a week before I turned twelve, I threatened to tell Mama again. I held my breath as he hobbled out of my room and returned within minutes, waving a gun I had never seen before. “See this here?” He walked right up to me and placed the barrel against my forehead. “Bang.”
My heart was beating so hard I could barely breathe. I was too scared to move. He smiled and took a few steps back. “Don’t think I won’t use it.”
Richland’s population remained around thirty-two thousand with approximately a twenty percent Black population. There were two steel mills, a brickyard, and a few other factories that provided decent employment for a lot of the Black men who couldn’t get good-paying jobs anyplace else in town. There were a lot of farms on the outskirts of town where migrant workers from Florida and the Carolinas worked picking mostly beans, strawberries, apples, potatoes and peaches, from May to November. A lot of the local people, mostly Black, worked on those farms, too.
Downtown Richland was nothing to write home about. There were two five-and-dime stores, Pluto’s and Bailey’s, where most of the Black folks did their shopping. There were a few clothing stores, one wig and hat shop, two furniture stores, two shoe stores, a few businesses, and the police station. The more upscale stores were located in Sheldon Village, a large shopping center right off the freeway.
There was only one Black doctor in town and one Black undertaker. Other than Black churches, the only thing there was an abundance of for Black folks were bars. Mama called bars beer gardens. “Them beer gardens cultivate a alcoholic quicker than fertilizer,” she warned me one day when we passed the Red Rose Tavern on the way home from church.
“Amen.” Mr. Boatwright nodded. I figured he had forgotten about the time he had left me standing outside for twenty minutes while he ran into the Red Rose for a highball one afternoon on the way home from the market.
The people with money lived on the south side of town, near a set of railroad tracks. Most of the low-income people lived in the northern part of Richland. The people with money bought their groceries at Kroger’s and the A&P. We bought ours at a shabby disorganized discount market called the Food Bucket, where the quality of almost everything they sold was enough to make you sick. A few times they had even tried to sell me and Mr. Boatwright spoiled meat. I hated when Mama sent me and Mr. Boatwright there to get groceries. Some of the clerks were rude and no matter which checkout line you got in, most of the people in front of you had welfare orders, coupons, and checks that needed to be verified. It