God Don’t Like Ugly by Mary Monroe Page A

face, and my ears, and shook his head with pity.
    “What?” I groaned.
    “According to the Scriptures—oh never mind.” I thought he was done talking, so I started to walk away. “Makeup, earbobs, and all them hair frills. Don’t you know by now, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, let alone the whole sow. I don’t know what I see in you.” He sighed. “You look so much better without that makeup and them ribbons,” he said seriously.
    “You think so?” I said sadly, crushed and confused.
    “I know so. You go to that schoolhouse tryin’ to be somethin’ you ain’t, them kids really goin’ to let you have it. You follow the Scriptures, you’ll be all right. You know the Bible almost well as I do by now, so I know you ain’t forgot that lesson on Lot’s wife.” He gave me an affectionate pat on my head and turned and walked away.
    I dragged myself back to my room and snatched the ribbons from my hair and kicked them halfway across the room. Before I could remove the makeup, Mr. Boatwright was in my room with a familiar look on his face.
    “That’s much better.” He grinned, as he unzipped his pants.
    “Mr. Boatwright, I’m on my period,” I lied.
    He rushed out of the room, cussing under his breath.
    It took me a while to get my hair under control again. Rhoda was long gone by then, and it ruined my day. I was late for class and had to do detention after school. When I got home, Mr. Boatwright gave me a whupping for getting detention.
    Once my whupping wore off, I went to sit on the front porch. Rhoda was on hers reading. She looked up and waved, then returned her attention to her reading material. Pee Wee had told me that she was one of the smartest girls in the whole school. She had taught herself how to speak Spanish. She played the piano and knew a lot of grown-up card games that her aunt Lola had taught her. Pee Wee told me that a lot of the kids were afraid of Rhoda, as petite as she was. There were several reasons. She had a ferocious big brother named Jock, who was the leader of a street gang. Terrorizing other kids was a way of life for him. He had even beaten up Pee Wee a few times.
    Another reason a lot of kids feared Rhoda was because she had a crazy grandmother living in the house. A white woman. I hadn’t seen her yet, but I had heard that she chased cars up and down the street and threw rocks at people and called Black folks niggers. Still another reason kids were afraid of Rhoda was, a policeman had shot and killed her other brother while Rhoda was in his bedroom one night when she was six, and she had never gotten over it. Everybody said it made her act crazy sometimes. And finally, her daddy was an undertaker. To a lot of kids, undertakers and boogiemen were interchangeable. Nobody wanted the boogieman’s daughter as a friend.

CHAPTER 10
    H istory was my worst subject. But it was the only class I had with Rhoda, so I didn’t mind going to it. Since she was everything I wanted to be and more, I even looked forward to it each day. I flunked most of the tests and arrived late two or three times a week because this was my first class after lunch. I was always one of the last ones to leave the cafeteria because I usually went back in line to get additional helpings of whatever was on the menu.
    I had been in the new school for several days before I got up enough nerve to approach Rhoda without her inviting me. The cafeteria was crowded for lunch that day. Sadly, it was divided by race. Our local news covered all the racial problems Black people were having down South, especially the violence. There was an occasional fight in our school between somebody Black and somebody white. Sometimes it was over something as innocent as a comment made about somebody’s mother. The words “nigger” and “honky” eventually came up during the confrontation, and that made it a race incident. I think all that had a lot to do with people making such a big deal out of somebody’s