“You black bitch!”
Aimee breathes out hard and looks back at her daughters with a Can you believe this? face. She turns the key, but the Land Rover won’t start. She yells and presses her head against the steering wheel. Gailya takes the girls out of the vehicle and waits with them on the sidewalk for the police to come.
Aimee is taken away, so Gailya waits at the house with the girls until Paul shows up. He asks her to stay, but she does only until a friend of their family arrives. She puts on the maid uniform she still has from the hotel that is in her car trunk. Then she leaves her work outfits in the washroom, tells the girls bye—Charlie acts like she doesn’t care, but Molly cuts up crying—and writes a note telling the McAdams she hopes they have a nice life.
At 11 p.m., Gailya goes to pick up her bus. Someone she knows has a party bus and asked her to run groups around the city. She’s been doing this on weekends. At 2:20 a.m., Gailya picks up about fifteen people at a karaoke bar in the French Quarter. A couple are Black, but the group is mostly white. She flips on the strobe lights, cranks up the bounce music, and drives the long, wide vehicle around downtown, the cabin rocking like a ship. Some of the white girls try to twerk. As they pass the Superdome for the second time, a white boy with bright teeth leans next to her, his hand on the back of the driver’s seat, and yells over the music.
“Hey, no offense,” he says. “Can I ask why you’re dressed that way?”
Gailya glances down at herself. She hadn’t even realized that she was still wearing the maid uniform. Gailya laughs. “I’m a maid.”
The white boy throws his arms up like he won something. “I love this town,” he yells. “Wooo!”
After a couple hours of sleep, Gailya gets up at 6 a.m. She opens her ride-sharing app and drives a few people back to their hotels from the French Quarter. Around 9 a.m., she goes to the office of that lawyer whose name she can’t remember. She walks up the steps to the back of the house where the office entrance is located, but the door is locked. She peers through the glass and the house is empty. She places her hands on her knees and breathes in but doesn’t exhale.
That evening, Gailya wakes up to the sound of a knock on the door. She folds her housecoat over her body and pats her hair. When she opens the door, a half dozen white people are on her porch. She doesn’t say a word, but stares for a moment. It’s the most white people she’s seen in one place at one time on her block since the summer after the storm. Back then, passenger vans were spitting clumps of white teenagers all over the city—church volunteers from the Midwest and Lord knows where else, come to gut houses and help rebuild. It strikes her that these people could be some of the same kids just grown up.
“Are y’all Methodists?” Gailya says. The group looks at each other. A tall brown-haired man talks first.
“No,” he says. “I’m Tucker. I live over there in the peach-colored one.” He points across the street, the house that had been John Jackets’s house.
“And we’re the Smarts,” the chubby, dark-haired girl says. “Patty and John. We moved in next door last month.” Mr. Dexter’s house. “And that’s Willem and Ellen.”
“We have the one on the corner,” the woman in pink tights says. Retired Principal Holmes’s family house.
“Is there a problem?” Gailya says.
“No problem at all,” the tall brown-haired man says. “But we noticed you hadn’t responded to our flyers.” Gailya saw some flyers over the past few weeks and tossed them in the trash.
“And who are y’all again?” Gailya says.
“We’re the neighborhood association,” the tall brown-haired man says.
“Since when?” There was already an association, although Gailya realized that most of the active members were no longer around. “Are y’all the ones trying to buy this house?”
“No,” the girl with the cheeks says. “We thought it’s good to be engaged together.”
“So we just wanted to invite you to our meeting. It starts in fifteen minutes at the coffee shop.” Gailya didn’t know any of these people. They’d just told her their names, and she’d already forgot them. But if they are trying to do things, she needs to know.
“What coffee shop?” Gailya says.
The chubby woman points away from Gailya. “On Villere around the corner there.” The woman says Vil-leer like some kind of robot instead of the proper Vil-er-ry. The coffee shop had been the po’boy shop. She went there one day weeks ago, and it was closed. The po’boy shop sold phone cards, lottery tickets, and po’boys. They took ’lectric light bill payments and wired money places. Things people needed. Now, there’s a drawing of a po’boy, like a science man might make, with details of where to insert the fried shrimps, where to put the mayonnaise.
Gailya shows up thirty minutes later, after she gets dressed, and buys something called pierogi. She finds a two-top table with silver chairs off to the side. While she eats it, she plays like she’s on her phone to avoid the ones trying to chat. Gailya’s new neighbors talk among themselves for a few minutes. Their little meeting is at a big wooden table, at the center of the shop. She sits off to the side and eats. She likes the pierogi. They remind her of the dumplings they sell at the Vietnamese place near the bridge.
The tall man with the brown hair is talking. “Karen and I will be doing a trash pick-up this weekend starting at eight a.m. As you know, we’ve got a wee bit of a problem with people discarding packaging on the ground. But we think that if we consistently engage, it may encourage others to be more mindful of our shared environment.”
Gailya absentmindedly notices that she’s nodding. Trifling folks have been junking up the blocks for so long. It’s about time someone is doing something about it.
“There are other matters, but I think we should skip to the one that’s been on all our minds. Ellen, you have some information.”
The one in the pink tights stands. “Thanks, Tucker. I called and spoke to the quality-of-life officer at the police district. He said that if they get enough calls then maybe they can do something.”
“That’s great news,” the chubby-cheeked girl says. Gailya looks back and forth and Pink Tights notices.
“Oh, dearie,” Pink Tights says. “Sorry. Noise pollution. There’s a man who plays his trumpet from the steps of his house. He’s one street over from you and me. But Samantha says she can hear it several streets away.”
Gailya looks at the faces of her new neighbors, most of whom look like people she’s worked for at one point or another. She knows that if any of her old neighbors were here, they would make them understand. But she realizes it falls on her. It always fell on her, and that if she were gone, nobody would ever come to understand anything at all.
“Did y’all try talking to him?”
“Pardon?” the brown-haired man says.
“He’s a music teacher, and his playing ain’t no trouble.” Gailya stands. “Those chirren from those schools down the block used to live all over the neighborhood. You couldn’t walk without seeing somebody chirren practicing on they trombone or snare drum. I miss those noisy chirren. Now, that was noise. I bet you could’ve heard them all the way by Lake Pontchartrain.” Gailya is shaking her head and smiling to herself, but realizing she’s not making her point.
“What was your name?” she asks the brown-haired one.
“Tucker,” he says.
“Where you come from?”
“Portland, Oregon.”
“I don’t know that place, but you moved here. You know we got Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest and all those things. How you think all those musicians learn how to play? It’s cause they always playing. Day and night. Hurricane or shine. This is New Orleans.” A young woman wiping a table across the room smiles at Gailya.
“We’ll take that under consideration,” Tucker says.
The next morning, Gailya is brushing he
r teeth when the music stops. She walks out of her back door, toothpaste foam on her mouth. From her back porch, she sees her rude neighbor who plays the music talking to three policemen, trumpet dangling from his hand. She realizes she hasn’t seen him in years—he’s gone bald—but he’s still the same gangly brother in camo shorts. She closes the door and rinses her mouth in the bathroom sink.
Gailya hears something at the front door. There are shadows on the frosted windowpane that suggest moving bodies and, from the distance coming closer, a jazz beat from bass and snares. When Lea heard that music, she would run to the window and watch the brass band pass. But Gailya wants more. Gailya will be in the crush of bodies when it turns the corner to the next block, thousands of arms, legs, and eyes reaching for a bell of brass.
For Tanzanika and the children of New Orleans
Acknowledgments
Writing these stories was a journey that spanned more than a decade of my life. I thank everyone who helped make this book possible. Special thank-you to my agent, PJ Mark; my editor at One World, Nicole Counts; and Victory Matsui, who acquired this work, and to the cover designer, Michael Morris. Thank you also to my writing group, the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance, and the editorial board at the Peauxdunque Review. And to my family—Tanzanika, Ma, and all y’all—thank you for your constant support.
Further thanks to the institutions and organizations that supported this work: the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop, the University of Mississippi John and Renée Grisham Writers in Residence program, Louisiana State University Department of English, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Randolph College MFA, the Center for Fine Arts (Brussels), Tulane University Department of English, Susquehanna University Department of English and Creative Writing, Maine Media, The Iowa Review, Duotrope, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society.
BY MAURICE CARLOS RUFFIN
The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You
We Cast a Shadow
About the Author
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and International Dublin Literary Award. A recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction, he has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. A native of New Orleans, he is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.
Twitter: @MauriceRuffin
Instagram: @mauriceruffin
facebook.com/mauricecarlosruffin
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The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You Page 13