Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

  “What’s the situation with your daughters?”

  “They may have begun to forgive me, to some degree.”

  “So, Blake, I’m beginning to understand our connection better. My past is full of things I can’t take back. When something’s done, you can’t undo it, even if you’re sorry.”

  “Right. You can’t unring a bell. So here we are.”

  “One of the AA promises is, ‘We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’ Can you imagine thinking like that?”

  “That’s crap.”

  “It’s not crap, but as long as we’re telling each other our secrets, here’s another piece of my mine. My brain doesn’t work quite right. When I was about five years sober, I began to see imaginary kids following me around. Three or four of them at first. Then half a dozen. A lot of therapy later, I began to understand that pieces of my psyche had split off and were confronting me. I’m lucky I wasn’t hospitalized, but it wasn’t schizophrenia. It was just vivid and scary as hell.”

  He looked relieved that I had changed the subject instead of trying to find a way to offer him comfort. “What made it stop? Has it stopped?”

  “The kids told me a bunch of stuff I didn’t want to know, and then faded out. But every once in a while, one of them pops back up. What I mean is, my wiring’s not right, and whatever was funky got exacerbated by all the drugs I took.”

  “Psychedelics?”

  “I was a garbage head. If a drug or a drink would make you feel different, I wanted it. Except for heroin. Those scare-kids-straight movies in high school worked for me. But another thing that stays weird for me is metaphors. Metaphors become like real passageways in my head. I mean, metaphors can just be plain old metaphors, or they can make me feel as if I’ve stuck my arm in too deep and pulled out a living fish.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “That is an example.”

  “Another example?”

  “Okay, when I take off my mother’s makeup at night, I use these little Q-tips to remove her eye shadow, but if I look too long at her eyelashes they can start looking like a burned forest, or they can turn green and become a sugarcane field. I can smell it, but I’m still sitting there taking off her eye shadow. Later, when I’m by myself, I can go back into the cane field because I like it there a lot.”

  “Is it always a cane field?”

  “No, of course not, the cane field is an example. Cane fields aren’t good places for walking.”

  “I guess I really don’t understand.”

  To temper my snippy reaction, I said, “Be grateful about that. But I suspect that a lot of people’s minds work like mine. They get it trained out of them or forced out of them, and then sometimes they go crazy. If I’m really tired, the physical world can turn translucent. A gauzy curtain I can see through. Am I scaring you yet?”

  “Maybe. What do you see?”

  “A reddish gold landscape. Sandstone. Big rectangular stones on the horizon. I don’t know. Words that describe it slip around.”

  “It sounds a lot like New Mexico.”

  “I hope it’s not New Mexico.”

  “Maybe I understand better now why you’re so afraid of your brother.”

  “I may be eccentric, Blake, but I’m not morally deranged, and I manage to stay in the real world most of the time. I don’t think Royce was ever in the real world again once those snakes crawled up his legs. Me, I only have to stay sober in AA and try to get regular sleep. As you can imagine, I saw a lot of doctors when the imaginary kids started showing up. The medical conclusion was that I have a sleep disorder. I think that’s pretty funny too, because what the fuck is sleep? We spend a third of our lives doing something we can’t even remember. The truth is, I wouldn’t trade anything for the way my mind works. Royce’s problems are very different. And, yes, I suppose my deepest fear is that I’m like him. What if one day diamond snakes start crawling up my legs?”

  We were sitting in the near dark; it had been afternoon when we’d emerged. Only the frame of the porch was visible against the star-scattered horizon.

  “You’re not crazy, Ellen. You’re just very intense.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that before, but only as a criticism.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt as connected to anyone as I do to you.”

  I stood up, wanting to leave, but he did too and moved to stand very close to me. I could smell him and feel him, but I understood now that we were only looking for redemption, and my distance from him held steady.

  17

  Santane’s face had aged, and her hands shook as she handed me another manila envelope. She had withheld these pages before, but she now thought that had been a mistake.

  I sat in the same chair I had last time, and again she served me tea with a teabag. Dust lay like powder across every surface, and what looked like Japanese landscape prints hung haphazardly on the wall.

  I described for her Lucia’s burial and gave her several pictures Claudia had taken, including a close-up of Lucia’s body in her coffin. Santane hardly glanced at the photos, and she seemed to know nothing about the controversy in Charleston. “I don’t understand why you didn’t give me all of Royce’s papers before. Am I in for more surprises from these?”

  “We had a plan,” she said. “You should probably know that we had a plan. Ruby wanted to leave Lightman but she could not accomplish that easily and still take River with her, because River was a Nogalu, and he was being monitored so closely.”

  “You had your own plan to get Ruby free of her marriage? Please tell me why you have withheld these papers.”

  “Ruby remains a child in many ways. She’s so …”

  “I know. Something’s off, and it’s not just a matter of maturity.”

  “After a while, the Nogalu women lessened their surveillance. When River began to walk, Ruby came here twice with Lightman and the children. Lightman seemed satisfied and must have spoken to his mother, because after that Ruby could take the children off the reservation, although she had to let Lightman or his mother know whenever she did. We knew that if Ruby simply came to us with the children, Lightman would reclaim River instantly, whether legally or illegally. Our plan was to send them to San Francisco, where Giang and I have many friends. Over several months, Ruby brought to me the possessions she could not leave behind. Her father’s undershirt. Some jewelry. A few clothes and toys.”

  She paused, but I knew not to speak. She now told me a story that was at least thirdhand, so I didn’t know whether to believe it. She said that Lightman had stayed home from work one day and insisted on taking Ruby to the Catholic mission on the reservation. Maybe he had found out she’d been going to Mass or taking the accounting class. The mission was old and disintegrating. The steps were gone, and the door hung loose on its hinges. It was dark inside, but a cross still hung above the altar and the confession boxes were still there. Someone had painted enormous, brilliantly colored pictures of the Nogalu ceremonial costumes on the walls, including the gigantic snake that had frightened Ruby so badly. Lightman told her that when the men donned these costumes, they transformed into the actual figures. He said he was telling her something sacred, and that someday he would change like this before her eyes.

  “Ruby believes in magic. Or in something like magic,” Santane said. “You know what she’s like, this Jeremiah thing. I have no idea what she was actually doing for the two years she says she was kidnapped. But she believed what Lightman told her, and she was afraid of what would happen to River as he grew up. What she says about Lightman’s mouth being burned in some ceremony, maybe that isn’t true either. But I do believe Lightman took her to the old mission to threaten her. He said that if she ever tried to leave him, she would die.”

  I could see dust in the air, fine dustlike motes of light. I put my cup on the table and moved my finger through the dust settling there, tracing a cross and a snake with my finger, not yet looking at her.

  “Okay,” she fina
lly said. “I did not give you these papers before because I could not bear to read them. Whenever I tried, over the years, I could not. But now I have. At Nod, they were going to sterilize Ruby.”

  18

  Jurisdiction over Ruby’s crime had been ambiguous. El Morro National Monument was on federal land, but the pockets of private property inside were technically New Mexico and therefore existed in legal limbo. The FBI took this opportunity to bow out of Ruby’s case with the understanding that her lawyer would negotiate a plea with the state for life imprisonment. This was what Ruby said she wanted. The process was ongoing, but the deal was basically done.

  The state prison for women where Ruby was now incarcerated was surprisingly humane. It had air conditioning, for one thing, a privilege that had recently been taken away from the women’s prison in South Carolina because, as their warden said, “It’s not like these women are on vacation.”

  The New Mexico warden, Janine Pitts, turned out to be well-known in prison circles. Foreign visitors often toured her facility, trying to identify the elements that made it run so smoothly. Each day the warden walked through the prison, making herself visible and available. She had a broad, inquisitive face, a thick New York accent, gray hair that stood out in several directions, and a hitching gait. In our first conversation, she sized me up favorably and within a few minutes called Sister Irene into her office. Sister Irene wore the dowdy blue suit and white blouse that would later become so familiar to me.

  Janine Pitts said they were considering moving Ruby Redstone into the general population, but there were two major concerns: first, would Ruby be safe from the other inmates, and second, would she be safe from herself? Maybe I could help them with the second question. The prison psychiatrist had said yes, Ruby was ready, but Janine Pitts wanted my personal opinion. She said that all that seemed to agitate Ruby now were Sister Irene’s attempts to talk to her.

  I found Sister Irene’s gaze unnerving myself, and I had begun dreading seeing Ruby again. My anger and judgment had stiffened. I wanted to leave Ruby behind now. Her grief had been real enough, but stubborn dishonesties and fantasies remained in what she had chosen to tell me. I believed that Claude Dabley was a real person because he had given her the rattles (now in my possession), and the rattles had convinced her that Royce was alive, but how had her lies about the kidnappers originated? The fake kidnapping plan seemed too stupid for someone as elegantly minded as my brother. Yet Ruby’s story remained as vivid as watching a film, and the duct tape bindings and fractured skull she claimed to have accomplished by herself remained troubling.

  Janine Pitts said that Ruby’s treatment now involved a number of medications, and they had found a cocktail that seemed to calm her without knocking her out. Ruby had begun confiding in one of the guards, and she was speaking fairly often to an inmate near her in suicide watch. They were hoping she would soon begin to “debrief” with Sister Irene. Since the solitary confinement of suicide watch could make anyone psychotic, integration into the population was always the goal.

  According to Janine (she asked me to call her Janine), the prison systems were now dealing with an increasing number of mentally ill inmates. “Guards don’t carry guns in here. Many people don’t realize that. A lot of what makes a prison work is cooperation,” and the presence of so many schizophrenics and manic-depressives was straining the system severely. “Here’s something most people don’t know. State prisons can swap inmates like baseball cards. Holly Bright, that school teacher in Alabama who convinced her student to murder her husband, was in prison down there, but their exercise yard was too close to the highway, so somebody took a shot at her. I traded two schizophrenics for Holly Bright, but another mentally ill inmate here beat her up. Holly’s jaw was wired shut for almost a month, but mostly she was afraid I’d send her back to Alabama.”

  Sister Irene said, “They can earn their GEDs here. We have college courses and a nursery. What’s hardest for all the mothers are holidays, because they can’t be with their children. But we do have a taping program. They make audio tapes for their kids, and on Christmas Eve, a group of local volunteers hand-deliver them all over New Mexico.”

  “So you have a nursery?”

  “Yes, and women who arrive pregnant can keep their children with them until the age of eighteen months. Work in the nursery is considered a great privilege. Inmates prize working in the nursery.”

  “This doesn’t sound much like prison,” I said. “Or maybe I’ve just spent too much time in South Carolina.”

  Sister Irene laughed, a low barking sound, and I examined her more closely. Her light blue eyes were unsettling, but there was something engaging in her toothy smile. “It’s prison, all right,” she said. “They’re locked up, locked down, they can’t leave. You wouldn’t like it, I wouldn’t like it, and they don’t like it either. They hate it. But for some of them, prison is the first place they’ve ever felt safe.”

  “That’s a terrible thought.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  When I knew Sister Irene better, when I began to stay sometimes in the apartment above her garage, she told me a long story about an inmate who had become her good friend. “Lila Ames came up to New York from Georgia in 1931. She was nineteen years old. Her parents were sharecroppers, and her grandfather had been a slave. She’d saved up a little money and come to New York on the train. She lived at a rooming house up in Harlem, got a job, made a few friends, bought herself a sky-blue dress. You should have heard how she would say the words sky blue. Soon she had a boyfriend who took her to nightclubs and she bought other dresses, but the blue one stayed her favorite. It had rhinestones that looked like little diamonds. So one night they were out in his car. He had a car, which she thought was wonderful. A light yellow convertible. She should have known that he was big trouble, but she was nineteen years old from Georgia and living her dream in New York City. So one night her boyfriend goes into a small grocery and Lila stays outside in the passenger seat with the top down, and he kills the owner. She hears shots, realizes what happened, and jumps out of the car running. They both got caught, both got the death penalty. The boyfriend was executed, but Lila’s sentence was reduced to life. Back then you couldn’t sentence someone to life without the possibility of parole, so after twenty years of pristine behavior she became eligible, applied, and got released. But soon she realized that she had no people up here or anyone back in Georgia who could help her. She didn’t know why the cars looked so different or how anything worked. The subways. The stores. Imagine. Somehow, she got herself settled back in Harlem but couldn’t handle it. She wanted to go back to prison. So she goes down to the local police station and asks them to send her back, but they tell her they can’t because she’s on parole. She goes outside, gets a rock, and throws it through the station window. She gets arrested, her parole is revoked, and then she’s back here, where she feels safe. I met her many years after all that happened. The parole system is based on the idea that prisoners will always apply for it, because who wouldn’t want to be paroled? But Lila just refuses to apply, and they have to keep her here. Janine thinks the situation is amusing. If she’s had a drink or two—Janine can really drink—she thinks the situation is a hilarious joke on the system. We both like this inmate very much, and every other Friday I bring her a crab cake sandwich because she said that going crabbing was all she missed about Georgia. We have lunch together in the common room or in the chapel. I used to take her for rides through the countryside, because everyone knew she was no risk of escape, and Janine got it arranged.”

  “What was her name again?”

  “Lila. Lila Ames. She’s almost ninety years old now. She can hardly walk, and she’s nearly blind. It’s just too hard to get her into the car anymore.”

  19

  Ruby sat quietly on her cot, a Bible open on her lap. Her uniform now was made of blue cloth, probably polyester, and no video cameras peered down at her. A cotton sheet covered the thin mattress. She had a pillow a
nd a blanket, arranged neatly. I stared at her through the bars, and at first she did not even look up. “Hello, Ruby.”

  Her eyes studied me quietly. The guard standing beside me grunted and unlocked her cage.

  Before I even stepped in, I said, “I buried your daughter.”

  Her eyes did not change. “Thank you.”

  The guard locked the door behind me, and I was trapped with her. There was no chair, nowhere to sit except the toilet or the bed, and I did not wish to sit beside her again. “I put Lucia in the ground next to your father.”

  She stayed still. “That’s not my father. Can you be hanged in New Mexico?”

  “No, Ruby, you cannot be hanged in New Mexico. They prefer killing people with drugs.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “You’re not going to be executed. I hate it now, the fact that we look alike. That we’re in the same family.”

  Her eyes smiled faintly. “I understand.”

  “Ruby, please help me comprehend it. How could you do that to any child, much less your own?”

  “I don’t remember some of it,” she said, “and what I remember seems like it happened to someone else. I think I did it because I love them. Lucia and River are safe with God.”

  “You think Lucia and River are up in the sky now wearing their halos?” I thrust the picture of Lucia lying in her coffin in front of Ruby’s face. “I thought you might want this.”

  She took the picture, laid it against the open Bible, and gazed at her daughter’s image, framed by the text of Corinthians. “Her hair looks nice that way. Was that your idea?”

  “Do you understand yet what you did?”

  She said simply, “Yes, I put my children inside a refrigerator where they smothered, and I am responsible for their deaths.”

  I sat down beside her and held my hands over my face. “But why, Ruby? Help me understand.”

  “I never knew I had an aunt. I thought it would keep them perfect.”