by Cynthia Bond
HER NAILS were bright pink and long like possum claws so Ruby hung back. When she smiled it frightened her more. Ruby could not stop staring at her teeth. It looked like a rat had gnawed at their dark edges.
“Gawd don’t like a scaredy-cat.” Her voice was high and sweet like they were old friends. Then she winked at Ruby and held out her hand again. Since there was no place else to hold on to Ruby gave her two fingers and Miss Barbara pulled her into the building. The room was a cloud of smoke, as if the chimney flue had been closed. Then there was the stink of it. It smelled just like a well that a water moccasin had died in, with something sticky sweet sprayed over it. The ashtrays were full of butts and empty Coca-Cola bottles sat beside them. The lights buzzed and flicked over her head and a gray sofa sat in the middle of the floor like a cat with crumbs on its whiskers. Magazines were spread out on the coffee table, Life, Look, Movie Time. A half-eaten sandwich let Ruby remember that she was hungry. Ruby didn’t know for sure but it seemed to be some kind of a waiting room, but Miss Barbara kept walking through into a long dark hallway. Ruby felt her chest moving fast as she followed. She felt like she was getting smaller the farther she went into the hall. The smell got stronger. The floor was sticky and black under her feet. There were doors on either side, most closed. The first open one Ruby walked by she saw a little White girl’s legs dangling from the edge of a bed. Ruby peeked around and saw her face. She looked like a baby doll Ruby had seen in the window of the Newton five-and-dime, same blue eyes and long blond hair except the girl’s was tangled high and wild. She looked bored until she noticed Ruby and stuck out her tongue.
Miss Barbara patted Ruby’s back to hurry her along. There were sounds coming from behind the closed doors. Cottony voices that made Ruby’s throat close tight. Miss Barbara led her to a little room then spoke to the smoke rising up from her hands.
“This here’s your room sweetheart. Bathroom’s down the hall but seeing how you’re Colored you’ll have to use the one outside. Mighty inconvenient if you ask me, but thems the rules, you just got to ask permission first. And don’t go touching this here lamp, it lets folks know what’s what, all right? I’m gonna call you Bunny. You got any questions just ask for me, Miss Barbara.”
She gave Ruby a good long look then she walked away. Ruby was alone in the tiny room. Something about the alone took all the air out of her so she fell down to her hands and knees, gulping in and out. She got light-headed until her gut told her to slow her heart. Ruby put her hands over her chest and pushed in there, stroking like she would a cat and after a time her heart slowed itself to normal. She kept doing this as she took in the room. It was almost empty save a strange bunk bed with its top half sawed away. That is when Ruby decided she was having a dream. Then the nightstand was a dream nightstand. With a dream ugly lamp without a shade. A dream empty candy dish beside it too. The dream walls were tall and dark yellow with paper bubbling all the way up to the ceiling.
After a while Ruby grew tired of standing and started biting her mouth. She’d discovered it was a way to pass the time while she sat in church, nibbling at the soft inside of her mouth. She placed her crooked finger on the outside and pushed the soft inside into her teeth. Then she stopped because she could feel it, and in a dream you can’t feel anything. Her tummy grumbled a make-believe dreamy rumble, then started flipping and her legs got tired so she sat in the only place there was to sit. Climbing up onto the bed and letting her legs hang over the edge, her shoes thumping lightly on the wooden frame. When the door creaked. Ruby’s heart pushed up into her mouth.
A tan mulatto girl was standing in her door, no more than seven. She slipped in and stood eyeing Ruby, then looked in the candy dish. Her hair was reddish like Ruby’s mama’s but with sparks of blond. Her eyes were light gray and she had a dimple under her left cheek.
“Ain’t you had no friends yet?”
Ruby looked back in answer.
“You get to keep your change. Don’t let nobody tell you different. Tried to take mine ’til I learned better.”
They stared at each other for a long stretch.
Then the girl said, “Don’t never tell them your name.”
Ruby didn’t understand but something inside her felt like she’d just heard gospel.
Ruby nodded back as Miss Barbara stepped in the door with a lampshade. Her face tight she said, “Tanny now get back in your own room.” Tanny ducked under her arm and made a funny face, which smoothed out the terror rising like water. Then she ducked out of the door.
Miss Barbara’s eyes stabbed into Ruby. “Mind you keep that one out of your room. She’s a bad influence.”
Then Miss Barbara let a smile land upon her face as she fitted the shade over the lamp and quickly disappeared. A man with a big square head came in—the top and the bottom of it almost had corners. He was paste white with red-water eyes. He smelled sour like the rye Papa Bell kept for Sundays. His necktie was loose. Ruby thought about how it looked like a scarf her Auntie Girdie used to wear before she moved to Kansas to marry that porter and how dreams made you think of all kinds of funny things from all kinds of places. Like how real-life men didn’t walk around with tiny little bodies or with square heads. The man nodded that he wanted to sit beside Ruby so she let go of the scarf and Auntie Girdie and scooted over. Her heart was beating behind her eyes so hard she was sure she would wake up. And then she wanted, needed to wake up, because something in the quiet man beside her was more terrible than any monster she had ever imagined, and so she started pinching her arm. She started pinching it harder and harder but still he kept sitting, hands pressed together between his legs, head down. Ruby pinched again and again, her eyes watching his fingers, his square thumbs, the brown stains along the inside of them. Ruby wiped away the little welts of blood as they popped through her skin and kept pinching as they sat and sat and sat. She stopped when she saw his body begin to shake, saw his hands fly up to his face as if to stop a running pump. He was bawling, snot and tears running through his fingers, down his arms. Loud like a little baby. Singy song cries and big gulps of air. Ruby thought it would stop, but it got worse until he crumbled up on himself, clutched at his belly like someone had punched him, and hid his face from the lamplight. He cried like the whole wide world had split in two, cried like he had lost his first child and his mama and his best friend. Ruby had never seen a body that sad, not even Great-Uncle Tippy after he lost his dog Pete after sixteen years. Or even Papa Bell when he talked about Neva. The square-head man’s sorrow broke through her. Ruby breathed in the sweet and the sour of him, so that it filled her lungs and pushed tears from her own eyes. Until she felt so sorry for him that she made the mistake of reaching out to help him, and he turned on her.
The things he did to her hurt worse than anything she knew, than any way she imagined she could be hurt. But the things he called her hurt worse, words she didn’t know the meaning of but felt slugging through her, moving into her like poison. Slut, and cock-tease and whore. His stained fingers grabbing, opening, licking all the while, moving his hand inside of her pants, then pushing her down, hands like lobster claws. Anger sweating from his body, entering hers, his words spoken to the center of her own skull. Horny bitch. Fucking slut.
Then … then Ruby searched the dark of her own body and found a hiding place, thick in the branches of the chinaberry. It held her safe. The leaves full, always green. The sky all stars and crickets. There were sounds above her, horrible sounds, so she pulled herself closer and prayed to the tree. The tree answered, and she saw her hand turn to bark, broken mahogany ridges, her fingers tiny living twigs, with golden beads dangling from them. Her torso melted into the trunk and her toes lay safe underground. The sky shook over her head but Ruby was now the tree. She stood there safe and waited for the storm to pass.
But the girl still on the bed, trapped under the weight of a giant, had no such refuge. The thick tide of his hate poured over her, filled every inch until she had no choice but to swallow it down.
You nigger
cunt. You little Black whore.
And so that is what Ruby became.
A firefly inside of that girl fought it. Then as if he knew, felt it, he slapped her like a father disciplining a child. Just hard enough to set off a lightning of fear that nearly lifted her off the bed, until she shattered, pieces flying like glass and landing all across her body. Each holding a fractured picture of the moment. The ceiling, his red eye; the wallpaper, his mouth stretching open; the lampshade, and the firefly. That last piece sank deep within her flesh, deeper than she could know, and lay dormant for the many years that followed.
Ruby did not unfold from her hiding place until the man was weeping beside her again. Holding her to his wet face, fumbling to put her clothes back on, crying so hard and so long that when he asked if she thought he was a bad man, Ruby knew to answer no. As he was leaving he smiled like a boy who had broken his mama’s lamp. He reached in his pocket and put two bits into the candy dish—a quarter. Her first tip from her first Friend.
Miss Barbara stepped back into the room, removed the shade and handed Ruby a damp towel and a blue dress. “Clean yourself up now Bunny, we got another friend coming for a visit in about ten minutes.”
So that is where Ruby waited each night for the next two whole weeks with grown White men entering the small of her room. As they left, they clinked a quarter, sometimes more, into the empty candy dish. She learned how some mothers and grandmothers brought change purses for their girls. On her fifth night there, one man, who Miss Barbara said had paid extra, told Ruby she was her own change purse, pushing the quarter into her and whispering, “Ching, ching.”
Ruby had wished the visitors would give them sweets instead of tips. How in the entire building there didn’t seem to be a sliver of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum or Pixy Stix or Chunky Bars to unwrap themselves into the hands of a little girl. “But plenty of jawbreakers,” she’d heard Miss Barbara joke.
Tanny and Ruby were the only Colored girls with Miss Barbara. Miss Barbara once said, “You girls are important here because gentlemen can do things with a Colored girl they simply can’t bring themselves to do with a White girl.” Ruby knew that the White girls were always good girls, even when they were bad, but Negro girls started bad and could be anything after that.
One long night, after Ruby had had more than eight Friends visit her, she had fallen into the twilight of sleep. She was awakened when her door creaked open and the little man with the hat crept in, reached his hand into her candy dish and scooped out $3.25. Without thinking, Ruby sprang from the bed. She was on him, arms and legs flying, speeding through the air like bullets, balled-up little fists pounding hard, fast. He held her at bay laughing, then pushed her to the bed.
“All right, all right, I was only counting it.”
Ruby was out of breath, heaving on the mattress.
He was turning to leave when he said, “Miss Barbara was right. You’re a born whore.”
But he hadn’t needed to tell her. Ruby already knew. Already knew she was a whore. A nigger whore who could make $3.25 in tips in a single night.
RUBY KNEW who she was as she stepped out of the tub of cool water, fingers puckered, body shivering. She realized that she had somehow forgotten that fact, playing house at 275 East Twelfth, looking for a mother who knew well enough to leave trouble early. Ruby wouldn’t forget it again.
She reached into the draining tub and pulled out the coin, then dried herself and climbed into bed. Abby curled at the far end of it. Ruby knew Abby had cried herself to sleep, but Ruby didn’t cry. Evil things seldom do.
One week later, Ruby traded up, almost fucking a dyke of better means on the Page Three dance floor as Abby watched. Abby ran up and slapped Ruby hard. Ruby skidded across the floor into a table leg. Stood up, leaned back on the bar and dabbed the blood from her mouth. She smoked a cigarette without coughing as the two women fought. Hard. As they tumbled out bloody into the street. Outside, Ruby glimpsed a tall redhead walking away from the commotion, a unique grace in her step. Ruby didn’t bother to turn her head.
Chapter 13
Ruby blinked and in an instant the past eleven years washed down her cheeks. Ephram led her back into the house and sat her on the edge of the bed. The day was slipping into evening. She looked at where she had lived for over a decade. Late. When, she wondered, had it become so late? New York, Liberty, the slide into hellfire. All forty-two years broke across her body, knocking her into a waiting chair.
She managed to push words out of her mouth, “What year is this?”
He didn’t skip a beat. “Nineteen seventy-four.”
She had wasted eleven years walking the red roads of Liberty. Without her noticing, age had stolen into her joints, under the ash of her skin. She sat quite bare before Ephram, looking into his soft, sad eyes.
“Nineteen sixty-three …”
Ruby shook her head. She looked down at her hands and barely whispering said: “I ain’t the woman I once was.”
He smiled. “You plenty woman Ruby, don’t you never think different.”
She looked off towards the window.
Ephram took her hand, “But I’ll tell you what. I’m most interested in the woman you have yet to be.”
Gratitude flooded through her limbs. For the first time in eleven years, that future woman held interest for her as well. The room was almost copper in the afternoon sun. Ephram found her hand and held it soft in her lap. Something like a small window opened in her throat and the first tears began to pour down her cheeks.
Neither she nor Ephram heard the first knock on the door, nor the second. When the windows started rattling and a shrill voice started calling, “Yooo-hooo. Yooooo-hoooo … anybody home?” Ruby and Ephram broke out of the spell that had surrounded them. She heard a small crash and a yelp.
Ruby found the weight of her legs, got up, opened her door and stepped out onto the porch, coming face-to-face with Supra Rankin, Righteous Polk, Moss Renfolk’s wife, Tressie, and Supra’s daughter, Verde, pulling herself out of the vines, sputtering, “Damn steps.” Ruby fell back and inadvertently closed the door behind her. They seemed to loom over her, bearing deluxe Tupperware containers of potato salad, blackberry cobbler, cod peas and smothered chicken, a look of grim determination on each of their faces.
Supra was a wide, square woman with a matching wide, square bosom. She wore a simple green dress. Her hair, silver with generous streaks of taupe, was pulled so tight it lifted the corners of her eyes. She stood a half-inch above five feet, which caused folks to joke that if they didn’t know any better, they’d doubt that she was the Rankin boys’ mama. Her comfortable brown shoes were covered in dust.
The women descended upon Ruby like chicks on a handful of corn.
Ruby turned and ran into the closed door. She felt as if the house had punched her. The women spun her about.
Ephram called from behind the closed door, “Ruby? You all right?”
“Child, how you keeping yourself?” Supra started, her hands petting Ruby along her shoulders until Ruby felt a snarl at the base of her gut.
“Yes, how you been making out?” Righteous twilled in a remarkably high voice.
Ephram tried the door but the women pressed against it.
Tressie Renfolk, a girl-faced matron, kept her lips in a tight line and awkwardly handed the potato salad to Ruby. “We brung this from the Women’s Auxiliary.”
Righteous gentled the thing. “Was already cookin’ aplenty what with Junie Rankin’s wake tonight, so we figured we bring some on over to you.”
Verde Rankin added, “This too.” She thrust a worn Bible into Ruby’s hands.
Righteous produced her Bible from her purse. “Figured we might do a little study while we’re here, if that’s all right with you.”
Ephram pushed against the door until they all peeled away. He took Ruby’s hand: “What y’all want here?”
All four women, as if on cue, slit their eyes at the sight of him. Supra put her arm around Ruby and stepped pa
st Ephram as if he were not there. These four women had petted and praised Ephram since he was a child. He had stood, in his forty-five years, as a perfect example of Christian manhood. Ephram felt their cold shoulder like ice cream on a cavity.
As the women crossed the threshold, they stopped and took in the state of the house. A broom lay by a bucket, black with God knew what. Scraps of filth still affixed themselves to the floors. Rags lay used, every inch the color of tar.
Righteous let out a “Lord have mercy!” Verde pulled out her handkerchief and held it tight to her nose and mouth.
Supra mumbled a prayer against the demon filth. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
She looked at Ruby, distracted, the Bible and salad tilting in her bone arms. “Child, we been meaning to come out, check to see how you doing. See you surely in need of ministering.”
Righteous fell in step on Ruby’s left flank. “Yes we sho’ been meaning to do that. How are you doing girl?”
Verde looked about the house. “I see you been doing some cleaning.”
Ruby’s lip was twitching, her eyes full and wild. Her body began to shake then, began to topple. Supra caught her before she slipped to the ground.
Ephram took Ruby’s elbow, eased her away from Supra and said, “I’d like to thank you ladies for stoppin’ by today to visit with Ruby but as y’all can see she awfully busy—”
Supra shot back under her breath, “You already done enough busy-making last night, ain’t you?”
Tressie pelted him with disgust. “We’ll take it from here, Ephram.”
Righteous spit out softly, “Ain’t you got a home to go to?”
The shame caught Ephram by surprise and made his tongue grow thick in his throat.
Then Supra set Ruby’s potato salad down on the sideboard. The other women followed suit. She took Ruby’s hands in her own and started, “Ruby, I knew your mama and I called your grandmama my friend so I hope you know I’m speaking from my heart when I say this. The Devil got ahold of you and he’s just like a tar baby, anyplace you touch him he stick, and if you tries to unloose him with your own hand you just gonna get more twisted and stuck.”