The Upper Room

by Mary Monroe

  “Mama Ruby, come on. Let’s get out of here,” Maureen pleaded, tugging at Ruby’s dress.

  Ruby held out her hand to Maureen and they left. Old Maureen, sobbing softly, watched from a back window as Ruby and Maureen disappeared into the bayou behind the brothel.

  The old woman was still in the window when Bonnie and Rosalie returned more than a half hour later.

  “Ruby and Baby Mo’reen get away?” Bonnie asked with concern. She stood behind Old Maureen with her hands on the old woman’s shoulders.

  Old Maureen reached back and touched Bonnie’s hand affectionately.

  “Yeah. They got away . . . this time,” the madam sighed.

  32

  Cousin Hattie had just turned in for the night, but before she could get comfortable someone knocked hard on her front door.

  “Now who in the world is that?!” Hattie asked, hurrying through her dark little congested house on Market Street in Baton Rouge. She held a coal-oil lamp in one hand and a rolling pin in the other. “Who is that knockin on my door this time of night?” Hattie shouted toward the door.

  Hattie led a regulated life. She restricted herself to a handful of friends and rarely had unexpected visitors.

  “OPEN THIS DOOR BEFORE I COME THROUGH IT!” Ruby shouted from outside.

  Hattie dropped her rolling pin and snatched open the door. She was not prepared for what she saw. Ruby stood before her cradling Maureen, who was asleep in her arms. Both were stained with mud and sand. Leeches had attached themselves to Ruby’s legs. Her torn dress had blood on it and both she and Maureen had lost a shoe along the way.

  Hattie gasped and held her lamp up to Ruby’s face and saw that her eyes were bloodshot and had deep dark circles that were so distinct they looked as if they had been drawn on. Hattie let out a scream.

  “I got a mess on my hands!” Ruby said, talking in a low voice, glancing nervously over her shoulder. A light went on in the house next door and there was the sound of a noisy window going up.

  “Come on in the house,” Hattie whispered, grabbing Ruby’s arm and pulling her in. Ruby hurried in, carried Maureen to the sofa and put her down, then ran back to the porch to get the shopping bag she had left sitting outside.

  “What done happened this time?!” Hattie demanded, locking her door. “Tell me, Cousin Ruby, what you done done now?”

  Ruby made sure Maureen was comfortable; then she sat down on the sofa herself and started to fan her face with her hand.

  “Cousin Hattie, I ain’t shook the devil loose yet,” Ruby gasped, almost losing her teeth.

  Hattie listened with interest as Ruby told her what had happened in New Orleans, revising the story to suit her needs.

  “A Klansman tried to rape you, huh?” Hattie said. “That bastard! Killin was too good for him. You done the right thing, Cousin Ruby.”

  “Me and Mo’reen come through the woods till the coast was clear. Then we flagged down a preacher comin this way . . . and here we is,” Ruby sighed, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.

  “I declare, Cousin Ruby. You have more run-ins than the man in the moon. The devil been had it in for you all your life, huh?”

  “Sho nuff. He done stole my boy and now this. Got me on the run like a regular criminal. Cousin Hattie, please tell me you got a friend with a car or a truck what can carry me and my baby back to Florida. We ain’t got no money and even if we did have some, we can’t take no chance on the bus or nothin. Can you get us a ride back to Florida?” Ruby pleaded.

  “I got friends with cars and trucks, but I don’t know how eager one of em’ll be to drive all the way to Florida,” Hattie admitted. She moved across the floor to a stand next to the sofa. “I’ll start makin calls right now.”

  “See if you can get em to come over here; don’t tell em what for. When they get here, let me ax em. Ain’t too many people can say no to me to my face.” Ruby nodded as she finished speaking.

  PART THREE

  33

  Maureen spent her eighteenth birthday picking string beans in one of the many fields owned by the directors of the Gressenger Brothers migrant camp. Her occasional boyfriend, Willie Boatwright’s eighteen-year-old son Bobby, a tall, rust-colored boy with thick brown hair, wicked black eyes, and a seductive grin, squatted between the two rows to her left. Catty and Yellow Jack were to her right, sharing a row. Catty and Yellow Jack had been lovers for the past three years and spent little time apart.

  “Mo’reen, I want to carry you to the movies tonight for your birthday,” Bobby hollered without looking up.

  “I can’t go. I got to mop the upper room,” Maureen replied. It was too hot to pay attention to anything other than her job. Picking beans was piecework. At a dollar per peck, Maureen found it worth her while to try for twenty pecks a day.

  She had graduated from school with a C average and she was now a young woman, the most beautiful woman in Goons. Her figure was slim and well proportioned. Long, straight black hair framed her high cheekbones, large eyes, and full lips. She was the image of Othella.

  “Girl, you just mopped the upper room yestiddy. And anyway, wood floors don’t even need no moppin!” Bobby shouted angrily. He stood up and faced Maureen with his arms folded. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and wiped perspiration from his face with his arm. “Is you messin with some fancy man or somethin?”

  “I ain’t got me no fancy man, Bobby Boatwright!” Maureen retorted. “You keep accusin me of havin a fancy man, I’m liable to get me one.”

  “You do and I’ll . . . I’ll—”

  “You mess with Mo’reen and Mama Ruby’ll cut your head off,” Catty warned seriously. “And don’t think she won’t do it. I seen her do it. . . .”

  There was silence for a full minute as they looked at Catty. She had stopped growing at four feet eleven. Her thick wavy black hair was in two braids. She grabbed a handful of sand and tossed it at Maureen.

  “What you do that for?” Maureen asked, brushing sand from her hair.

  “I’m tryin to get your mind off Bobby Boatwright. Don’t you go to no movies with him. Me and you got somethin to do tonight. Remember?”

  “Oh.” Maureen gave Bobby a dry look.

  “Go on off with Catty. See if I care. Me and Yellow Jack goin night fishin in the Blue Lake anyway. Ain’t we, Yellow Jack?” Bobby said.

  “Sho nuff is. We done already dug the bait. A couple of white boys goin with us,” Yellow Jack responded.

  “Yall shet up and get back to work! Stop disturbin the rest of the bean pickers!” Willie Boatwright ordered. He squatted over the row on the other side of Catty and Yellow Jack. “Yellow Jack, you and Catty ain’t filled but three pecks today. With all that stoppin to smooch and carry on. And you, Bobby, you better not bring your nasty tail home this evenin with less than twenty dollars. You do and I’ll bust your head wide open.”

  “OK, Daddy,” Bobby mumbled, returning to his work.

  “Oh, you shet up, Boatwright. You can’t boss me and Mo’reen and Yellow Jack around no more. We all eighteen now,” Catty reminded Boatwright.

  “Girl, don’t you be sassin my daddy!” Bobby warned, tossing a handful of sand at Catty.

  “OK, the party is over!” Loomis said, walking up. “Yall teenagers better behave, lest you want me to put the Gressengers on you. They done told me to tell em which ones act a fool and they wouldn’t pay em. Yellow Jack, you know I’ll slap you up side the head in a minute and make Fast Black do the same thing after I’m through with you.”

  “I know,” Yellow Jack muttered.

  “And you, Catty, I’ll beat the shit out of you—”

  “You low-down, funky black dog! You tetch me and I’ll get one of my fancy men from Boca Raton to come out here and do a Mama Ruby on you!” Catty threatened. This outburst caused everyone within hearing distance to laugh long and loud.

  “What fancy men from Boca Raton?” Yellow Jack asked. He was the only one not laughing.

  “She ain’t got no fancy men from Boca
Raton, Yellow Jack,” Maureen said low enough for only Yellow Jack to hear. He smiled when she winked at him.

  Loomis lowered his eyes and returned to his row. He had recently left Zeus’ house and moved into one of the newly vacated houses near the camps. No Talk lived with Fast Black now, sharing her bedroom. With Loomis gone, Yellow Jack had his old room back and was glad to be sleeping in a bed again, rather than in a living room chair.

  Yellow Jack had skipped a grade and graduated a year ahead of Maureen and the others. He had been working in the fields full time for a year and doing other odd jobs in Miami. With his first month’s pay, he had purchased a car, a five-year-old Cadillac convertible, which was one of the reasons Catty’s parents agreed to let her get engaged to him. Yellow Jack had bought the car from an aging Miami pimp, so it had low mileage and was in pretty good shape. The same day he bought it, Bobby played with the convertible activator so much that he had broken it, so Yellow Jack could never put the top up again. Then a week later Fast Black borrowed it to drag race with Bobby. Mr. Boatwright had bought Bobby a rusty old Mustang to compete with the overly proud Yellow Jack. During the race, Fast Black had slammed into a chinaberry tree and damaged the left headlight. From that day on, Yellow Jack’s topless Cadillac had only one headlight.

  “Mo’reen, can you go to the movie with me tomorrow night then?” Bobby begged.

  Maureen pursed her lips and looked at him with annoyance, recognizing a familiar gleam in his dark eyes, a gleam she had noticed many times before. A year earlier, she had succumbed to that gleam and allowed Bobby to talk her into surrendering her virginity on the bank of the Blue Lake one hot evening in June.

  “I declare, I can’t do what you axin me to do, Bobby Boatwright,” she had said. “I done told you a thousand times, Mama Ruby say I got to live by the Bible.” She glanced over Bobby’s shoulder at Catty and Yellow Jack rolling about frantically on the ground, half-naked and oblivious.

  “Catty let Yellow Jack do it to her,” Bobby pouted.

  “Yeah, but they engaged.”

  “Mo’reen, you say Mama Ruby told you if what you wanted to do wasn’t in the Bible, don’t do it, right?”

  Maureen nodded, looking at Bobby with a puzzled expression on her face.

  “Remember how Reverend Tiggs told us about how in the Bible Adam ‘knowed’ his wife? And all them other mens in the Bible ‘knowed’ they wives. Remember all that? We had to learn it all in Sunday school.”

  “Yeah. And they all begat a bunch of kids.”

  “Well, to ‘begat’ all them kids, them men had to ‘know’ them women in the Bible,” Bobby explained. He paused and slid his hand under Maureen’s skirt. “ ‘Know’ is just another word for ‘fuck’,” he informed her.

  “I don’t want to begat no kids till I get married.”

  “Girl, I ain’t about to get you pregnant. I just want to have a good time.”

  Maureen grabbed Bobby’s hand and held it while she considered his comment.

  “I declare,” she said with a soft chuckle, looking at Catty and Yellow Jack again.

  “You won’t tell nobody, so it’ll get back to Mama Ruby. If I was to do it?”

  “I swear to God I won’t,” Bobby promised. He crossed his heart with his finger. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” He kissed her cheek.

  “. . . Well,” Maureen said with hesitation, toying with Bobby’s fingernails.

  “Come on, girl. Just this one time and I won’t pester you no more.”

  “. . . OK,” Maureen giggled.

  But the one time was not enough. She and Bobby became lovers and surrendered to passion regularly, in the backseat of Bobby’s Mustang, on the bank of the Blue Lake, and in Bobby’s bedroom when Willie was away.

  “Wake up over there, Mo’reen! Quit dreamin and answer me,” Bobby ordered. He tossed a fistful of sand at her.

  “Later on tonight, come set on the porch with us and we’ll talk and eat ribs, Bobby Boatwright,” she smiled.

  34

  Bobby arrived just before midnight. Catty and Yellow Jack were already on the porch with coal-oil lamps at their feet and barbecued ribs on their laps. Ruby, who usually stood in the doorway whenever Maureen sat on the porch in the dark with Bobby, so she could make sure the devil didn’t show up and “make something happen,” was standing in the doorway now.

  “Mo’reen . . . what’s that yall eatin out there?” Ruby asked softly. Yellow Jack had smuggled the ribs to the house without telling Ruby, knowing her appetite. Ruby’s obesity was a major concern among her friends. But rather than discourage her gluttony, they appeased her with beer and rich food. Ruby was now close to fifty and in some ways disabled. Her huge, flat feet troubled her constantly. The flab between her thighs caused painful friction when she walked. And her neck, which had always been short, seemed to have disappeared into her shoulders.

  “I axed what yall had out there. I hear wax paper rattlin,” Ruby said, her voice loud.

  “Some ribs,” Maureen answered. The others groaned.

  It was hot that night. Ruby came out on the porch wearing only her slip. She snatched some ribs off Yellow Jack’s lap and started to devour them.

  “I knowed I smelled somethin good out here,” Ruby said between swallows. “Catty . . . let me . . . have . . . one of yours too.”

  Annoyed, the boys went home earlier than they had intended, leaving Maureen and Catty with a pile of bones and empty pop bottles. Seeing that Maureen was in no more danger of being molested, Ruby excused herself and turned in for the night.

  When the screen door slammed, Maureen and Catty breathed a sigh of relief as they sat together on the glider.

  “Mama Ruby sho nuff careful not to let nothin bad happen to you, Mo’reen.”

  “I know. It’s a wonder she let me out of her sight with Bobby Boatwright. She say the devil done slid into his pants. . . .”

  “Bobby Boatwright have got too big for his britches since he got him a car, if you ax me. He just a copycat. Cause Yellow Jack got him a car, Bobby Boatwright had to get him one,” Catty complained.

  “You don’t like Bobby Boatwright, do you?”

  “Not really. I know he is your man and all, but he is a little too uptown for me. With creases ironed in his pants legs and wearin cologne like a regular man—how you stand him?”

  “I don’t know,” Maureen admitted. “I guess cause I ain’t got nobody else. Is you jealous cause Yellow Jack ain’t as big a sport as Bobby Boatwright? Bobby Boatwright is a sho-nuff sport, you know. He the first black boy we ever knowed got his toenails clipped in a salon.”

  “I ain’t jealous. I just don’t trust him for some reason. He kind of remind me of Loomis, with his bad self. See, Loomis is what you call a natural born sport. A fancy fancy man. Me, I don’t think I could never love such a man. He got a different woman every week. I suspect Bobby Boatwright is goin to change women like he change socks, new ones every other week.”

  Maureen looked at Catty angrily.

  “How in the world can you set here and talk to me like that about my man. You know somethin, girl, I’m sho nuff sick of you. I’m sick of Bobby Boatwright. I’m sick of Goons. I’m sick of everything!” Maureen cried. “I’m sick of my half-assed job! I’m sick of bein hemmed up in that ole upper room like a convict. Oh—one day I’m goin to haul ass!”

  Catty gasped and looked at Maureen, whose mouth was stretched open, her arms raised high above her head.

  “Mo’reen . . . what done come over you?” Catty asked in a nervous whisper. Catty was alarmed. Such an outburst was unlike Maureen. “Where would you go? You ain’t never lived in no town but Goons! Shoot. You move to a big city, with your dumb self you liable to walk out in front of a bus and get your brains knocked out. Where would you go, if Mama Ruby was to let you leave?”

  “I don’t know! Somewhere far off! I—I—San Francisco! Yeah . . . that’s where I’d go! I’d run off to San Francisco.”

  “Of all the crazy things I ever heard in my
life. Don’t you know that’s the most dangerous city in the world? They got men out there you can’t tell from women. They have earthquakes. They do more cuttin up and shootin up out there in a day than we do in Goons in a year. What would you do in San Francisco, before you get kilt I mean? Lord knows, you wouldn’t live a day. You just wait till I tell Mama Ruby—”

  “Don’t you tell her what I said about runnin off to San Francisco! She already crazy enough. Just make out like I didn’t say what I just said . . . please.”

  “I won’t. I won’t if you promise you won’t bring it up no more.”

  “I won’t. . . .”

  Catty looked in Maureen’s eyes, making Maureen uncomfortable.

  “What’s the matter now?” Maureen asked.

  “Loomis was right about you.”

  “What you mean? When was Loomis talkin about me?”

  “He talk about you all the time.”

  “Why? What he say?”

  “Loomis told me to my face, you didn’t know what to do with yourself. He say you ain’t got no future. You is goin to stay in the upper room till the day you die. He say if you had any brains, you’d have left right out of school and moved to one of the camps and latched onto you a man like him. Loomis say you is Mama Ruby’s puppet and he’d pay a month’s pay in a bet that you ain’t never goin to take a stand against Mama Ruby. She is goin to dangle you on a string till times get better. You ain’t never goin to be like me and Fast Black. We is independent. Don’t nobody boss us. Shoot. My own daddy and mama don’t boss me. I’m grown. You, you will be Mama Ruby’s play pretty forever. I dare you to take a stand against Mama Ruby.”

  Maureen was thankful that there was so little light coming from the lamps. Catty could not see the anger and misery in her eyes.

  “I ain’t got the strength to argue with you, Catty. I’m just that tired. I’m tired of you. Mama Ruby and everything here. I’m just like you and Fast Black. I want the same things, I mean. A husband. Kids. My own house. I don’t want Mama Ruby actin like my shadow for the rest of my life.”