Mama stopped dancing her jig, and a strange, faraway look appeared on her face. “God told him to do it I bet.” She sighed. “It ain’t no wonder with the way we all been prayin’.”
Mr. Boatwright and I agreed with her, but I knew there was more to it than that. I’d seen Judge Lawson look at Mama the same way Mr. Boatwright often looked at me, like he’d just bought me by the pound.
In June of that year, 1963, we moved across town to the house on Reed Street. It was a bigger place and much nicer than any we had ever lived in. The front porch had a glider that came with the house. Not only was there a big buckeye tree in the spacious front yard, but there was also a gigantic weeping willow directly across the cobblestone walkway opposite the buckeye tree. I felt like we’d just moved to Norman Rockwell’s neighborhood. The floors in our new house had nice dark brown shaggy carpets. In the bright yellow kitchen there was a stove we could turn on without using pliers like we had to do with our old one, a refrigerator that defrosted itself, and linoleum that shone like new money on the floor. Our old neighborhood had lots of bars, and I saw drunk people staggering about and peeing on the ground in broad daylight. Our new neighborhood had only one bar, and my new school was only a ten-minute walk from our house.
Scary Mary’s house was right behind ours on the next street over. Our 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