Southern Ruby

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘If you must do a thing, then do it graciously,’ I parroted, then returned to the parlour to find Aunt Elva talking to Maman about the beaus who were courting Eugenie.

  ‘That charming Leboeuf boy lights up whenever he’s around Eugenie,’ she was saying. ‘When I saw him talking to her at the Rombeaus’ annual garden party, he looked positively smitten. Then there’s Harvey Boiselle, a good catch indeed . . .’

  I glanced at Maman. She used to be good friends with Lisette Rombeau; they’d grown up together. We hadn’t been invited to the garden party this year and that was a snub if ever there was one. However, although Aunt Elva was doing her best to make a point of our fall in status, Maman took it all in serenely, firm in her belief that one day I would meet the right man and fall in love with him and all our misfortunes would be swept away.

  I wished I could lose my worries about the future in romantic delusions. It would sure beat the humiliation I felt whenever Mae and I had to take something else to Mr Joseph’s pawn shop.

  Later in the afternoon, while Maman was taking her ‘lady’s nap’, I wandered around the apartment, trying to think clearly. Everything was going to pieces. What were we going to do? The de Villerays were one of the oldest Creole families. We could trace our ancestry to a naval officer who had accompanied Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to found the city of New Orleans, and whose descendants had become wealthy plantation owners on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The apartment we now lived in had once been part of one of the many townhouses our family had owned, but lavish living by my forebears had gradually eroded the family’s fortune. My great-grandfather had been famous for his duelling, but had gotten himself killed at sixty years of age by a younger man’s bullet on account of some scandal over a woman’s honour. My grandfather’s reckless disregard for money and expenditure had left the family with nothing but debts. I only had a few recollections of my own father, also a gambler and womaniser, because he was often away somewhere involved in some swashbuckling scheme to regain the family’s fortune. His last attempt was in Brazil, where he was convinced he’d make his millions rediscovering an old gold mine that had been abandoned by the British. The only thing he achieved was to contract malaria, and he died ten days later on my twelfth birthday.

  I could hear Mae in the bathroom, washing our clothes with a scrubbing board. Why did she stay with us? Other maids had modern appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines to help them with their work, while she had developed painful fluid on the knee from polishing floors. I couldn’t stand it any more. After picking up my hat and gloves from the stand, I walked out the front door and quietly closed it behind me.

  Often when I felt sad and frustrated, I would ride on one of the streetcar routes until I felt better. That day I decided to go to Audubon Park, but when I reached Uptown, instead of heading to the park as usual I walked onto Tulane’s campus and sat under a large oak tree watching students hurry to and from classes. Each year there were more girls coming here. I studied them with curiosity. They looked so confident in their Peter Pan–collared sweaters and circle skirts.

  ‘What are you studying?’ I asked one dark-haired girl. She wore light pink lipstick and her hair was cut fetchingly short.

  ‘Architecture,’ she answered and then smiled apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop to talk. I’m late for class.’

  She’s going to design buildings, I thought as she hurried away. How wonderful would that be?

  I crossed over St Charles Avenue into Audubon Park as if in a dream. What was this strange curtain that separated me from those confident, self-determined girls? I knew the answer: they were middle class and as such were free to develop their minds and use their bodies any way they pleased. They didn’t carry the weight of the Creole aristocracy on their shoulders. I was sure they hadn’t been taught from nursery age to recite their entire family tree.

  I sat on a park bench and watched the ducks swimming on the pond. There had been some Creole women who’d run their own plantations and left them to their daughters, but the fortunes of the women of the de Villeray family had always been tied to their menfolk. And the men had squandered those fortunes and left us struggling to make ends meet. Well, except for prudent Uncle Rex; but he was twenty years older than Aunt Elva, and I was very aware that Maman, Mae and I would be out on the street the moment he drew his last breath.

  Why is it this way? I asked myself, gazing at the trees. Did I really have no choice but to watch our family slowly sink into destitution in the same way some geologists declared that New Orleans was gradually sinking into the ocean?

  I looked about me and saw a young woman selling watermelon slices from a vending cart. People came to the cart, she gave them a slice of melon and they handed her some money. I kept staring at those coins. It seemed to me that she wasn’t doing so badly with nothing more than watermelons to sell. I noticed how she spoke cheerfully to people as they purchased their fruit and that seemed to encourage them to buy more. Her stock moved quickly and she was done by the early afternoon.

  How hard can it be? I wondered. I’d been brought up to believe that women couldn’t manage money, but that young woman seemed to be managing it very well.

  On my trip home, it was as if my eyes had been opened: I noticed all the women vendors who worked in the French Quarter selling everything from alligator pears to jewellery to yo-yos. There were women working in beauty parlours, and demonstrating kitchen devices in department stores, and even female artists selling their paintings in Jackson Square. Who said women couldn’t handle money?

  By the time I reached our apartment, I’d made a decision. It wasn’t marriage that was going to save us. It was money — and I had to learn how to make some. I, Vivienne ‘Ruby’ de Villeray, was going to do what no woman in my family had ever done before me. I was going to get a job.

  ‘No good can come of this, Miss Ruby!’ Mae warned as she helped me to dress. ‘Not for a young lady in your position. Those women you saw the other day don’t come from the same folk you do. God gave us all a place and we should be satisfied with it. Once you start questioning one part of your life, you start questioning everything.’

  ‘Listen, Mae,’ I said, fixing my hair in the mirror, ‘God gave me two arms, two legs and a head and I intend to use them to get us out of this fix. Didn’t you always teach me that God helps those who help themselves?’

  Mae shook her head. ‘Small people shouldn’t get ideas above their station and grand people shouldn’t get ones below theirs — that’s what my grandmama used to say.’

  ‘I’ve got to try something different from what we’ve been doing. Otherwise what will we do when there’s nothing left to sell? Now you keep Maman occupied until I get home. Tell her I’m taking piano and singing lessons in exchange for keeping Adalie de Pauger company. She’ll be pleased by that. You know that old widow is a recluse and doesn’t see anybody except young people she thinks have exceptional talent.’

  I’d found a job at Avery’s Ice Cream Parlor down the South Rampart end of Canal Street, near where the new Civic Center was to be built. There was a lot of development going on around that part of town and the manager, an Italian man named Mr Silvetti, was happy to hire me on the spot without asking about my experience. The parlour was a cheerful place with black and white tiles on the floor and a long counter with chrome stools upholstered in pink and green vinyl. As well as ice cream it served vanilla shakes, root-beer floats and hot fudge sundaes. A jukebox in the corner played music by people I’d never heard of, like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, but the tunes made me tap my feet in time to the beat.

  I had never waitressed before and I didn’t know anyone who had, so as I put on my pink uniform and white apron the first day I kept reassuring myself, How hard can it be? As it turned out, taking the customers’ orders and serving their food wasn’t any more difficult than hosting a morning tea and looking after your guests. The hard part was not being able to sit down. At the end of the day,
my legs throbbed as if I’d been riding a horse up a mountain, and Mae, despite her disapproval of what I was doing, massaged them with castor oil.

  ‘You’re going to ruin those nice pins of yours, Miss Ruby,’ she warned. ‘You’ll end up bow-legged and bent over like me.’

  ‘Shh!’ I told her. ‘This isn’t forever. Just till we can figure out something else to bring in money.’

  ‘What’s going to bring in money is you being pretty and finding yourself a nice husband.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother me about husbands, Mae. We’re in this mess because of all the de Villeray husbands.’

  It wasn’t the standing that was the most disheartening part of the job, but how little money I earned for being in the parlour most of the day. I was pleased that we had some extra so we could buy better food and put colour in our cheeks again, but every penny was hard earned and there was no money left over for anything nice like lace or scented soap. And then there was the mopping.

  ‘Dio buono!’ said Mr Silvetti the first time he saw me take a mop and bucket to the floor. ‘It’s just as well you’re pretty, Ruby, otherwise I’d have to fire you. You’ve got water and muck all over the place. Have you never mopped a floor before?’

  The truth was I hadn’t, but I didn’t tell him that. At least he’d recognised that my good looks were an asset. He kept commenting that he’d never had so many young men coming to the parlour until I started working there.

  ‘Where do you live, Ruby? Will your father let me take you out?’ the young men asked me.

  They were nice enough boys with their crew cuts and plaid shirts, but not the sort I was used to. Young Creole men were more aloof and didn’t act so eager. Besides, their mothers were always hovering to vet their choice of female companions. I couldn’t tell the boys in the ice cream parlour that I was from an aristocratic Creole family, lived in a crumbling apartment in the Quarter and that my father had perished in Brazil. Instead, to deflect all the questions, I decided to invent a new life for myself. It wasn’t hard: each day as I walked to work, I felt that I was leaving behind Vivienne de Villeray and becoming someone else.

  ‘I live with my parents and younger brother in Lakeview,’ I told the boys when they pestered me. ‘On one of the new estates there.’ So convincing did I make my fictional life that I could see every detail myself as I related it: the sliding glass doors and patio of our modern home; my father leaving for his job at the telephone company every morning; my mother baking oatmeal cookies; our dog, Spud, playing in the garden. ‘I’m saving up for college,’ I even added boldly.

  It was a good, simple and happy life that I invented and it made me feel better. My mother wasn’t dying of diabetes, and I had a bright future and could marry freely for love, without obligation to traditions, fortunes and a family name. Pretending to be a carefree seventeen year old made me a carefree seventeen year old, for a few hours a day at least. It wasn’t until I’d changed out of my uniform and was heading back towards Royal Street that the weight of the world bore down on me again.

  Then one day something happened at the ice cream parlour to challenge my invented happiness.

  As well as the counter that faced the milk bar, there were tables that ran the length of the tall windows. Customers could look out at the street and watch the passing parade of people and streetcars. But the section reserved for coloured folks wasn’t so appealing: just four tables tucked away in the back corner. They couldn’t even use the front entrance, but had to come in through a side door that opened onto a dingy laneway. The parlour had a restroom but it was for ‘Whites Only’. The coloured customers had to go find a public restroom elsewhere on Canal Street or wait until they got home.

  I’d lived in a segregated society all my life and had never questioned it. It was the way things were — white and coloured lived ‘separate but equal’ lives according to the law. White people had their restrooms, and coloured people had theirs. It was the same with drinking fountains, seats on the streetcars, lines in banks and vending machines. Once, as a child, I’d asked my mother why our servants — three then, including Mae — ate in the kitchen and not with us. ‘Darling Ruby,’ Maman had replied, stroking my hair, ‘coloured folk are much more comfortable in their place. They don’t want to mix with us either. It’s how it is.’ But for some reason, things started to bother me in the ice cream parlour. Perhaps it was because the place was so pretty for whites and so drab for the coloured people. How could that be separate but equal? Or perhaps it was because, as Mae had warned me, now that I was questioning one aspect of my life, I was starting to question everything.

  We’d just finished the lunchtime rush and Betty, another waitress, and I were wiping down the counters and tables. A group of young men and women office workers from the Louisiana Life Insurance Company were the only customers left. They were celebrating somebody’s birthday, loudly joking and laughing with each other. Then the front door opened and in walked three coloured men.

  Betty was rinsing glasses and didn’t notice, but I was surprised to see them coming in the ‘Whites Only’ entrance. All of them were tall and smartly dressed: they wore cinnamon suits with two-toned embroidered shirts and silk ties that complemented their coffee-toned skin. The oldest of them, who I guessed to be twenty-five, nodded to me and said, ‘Good afternoon, miss.’ The men didn’t take a table in the coloured section but sat at one facing the window. I considered that they might be from the North, where segregation wasn’t mandated. But whether they were from the North or not, as long as they could read English they must have been aware of what they were doing. They’d selected a table right under the gigantic Whites Only sign.

  Well, what of it? I thought. There’s plenty of room now lunchtime is over. Why shouldn’t they have a view of the street? I picked up my order pad.

  The man who’d spoken watched my approach, looking me directly in the eyes. I always appreciated an interesting face. Despite his young age, this man was dignified, with broad cheekbones and a strong chin. His eyes seemed ancient.

  ‘What would you gentlemen like?’ I asked, directing my question to him and speaking in a low voice.

  The other two men glanced at me briefly, surprised that I hadn’t challenged them, while the first man held my gaze as if sizing me up.

  I glanced back at the group of office workers. It was their presence that was making me nervous rather than the three coloured men sitting in the wrong place. I longed for more people to arrive and distract attention away from the threesome. But my discretion was of no use. Mr Silvetti walked in from the back room and called out, ‘Coloureds in the rear! You can’t sit there!’ He didn’t say it in a malicious way, rather out of habit, in the tone one might use to instruct a dog to heel or to sit. But he’d drawn the attention of the office workers, who turned around to see what was happening.

  I sucked in a breath, sensing trouble.

  The coloured men didn’t get up and move as they were told. Rather the dignified man turned to Mr Silvetti and answered in a calm voice, ‘No, thank you, sir. We’d like to sit here.’

  You could have heard a pin drop in the room.

  One of the office workers, a man with a skinny neck and freckles, frowned. ‘Hey, nigger, the man told you to move!’

  ‘No, thank you, sir,’ the coloured man repeated. ‘We’d like to sit here.’

  His composure was chilling. Coloured men didn’t speak back to white men. They didn’t look them in the eyes and address them as equals. They didn’t stand their ground when told to move. If you were coloured and a white man approached you on the banquette, you’d better lower your eyes and step out of his way or you’d be ganged up on and beaten.

  ‘You’ve been told to move, boy,’ said one of the women in the group. ‘Have you been up North, boy? You got Yankee ideas about your place now, boy? Those ideas mean nothing here!’

  The coloured men ignored her and picked up the menus.

  Now a Southern woman’s honour had to be defended and the white
men sprang into action. They rushed towards the rebellious threesome with their fists raised, but when they reached them they seemed less certain of what to do. A white man could beat a coloured man to death with no fear of the law, but something about these men, apart from their superior size, was unnerving. They seemed to possess an inner power.

  Frustrated, one of the office workers picked up a melted marshmallow sundae from a table I hadn’t cleared yet and poured it over the first man’s head. Inspired, the others began throwing napkin holders and forks at them, screaming, ‘Get lost, you dirty niggers! You’ll be sorry when there’s a noose around your necks!’

  Still the coloured men didn’t react, until the troublemaking woman walked over and put her lighted cigarette onto the back of the hand of one of the men. He flinched, but I imagined the pain would have caused a bigger reaction in a lesser man.

  As the threats escalated, the three men finally stood up, still with solemn dignity. I looked at the first man, his beautiful suit ruined by the sundae. I grabbed a napkin and wanted to hand it to him so he could clean himself up, but my limbs wouldn’t move. Fear of being labelled a ‘nigger lover’ kept me rooted to the spot.

  The inflamed group of office workers shoved the coloured men out of the parlour, ironically through the ‘Whites Only’ door. The whole episode couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes but my world had changed forever. I looked at the napkin in my hand. In not helping the man, even in a small way, I’d let some significant part of myself down.

  I promised myself that if ever I was in a similar situation and another human being needed my help and sympathy, I wouldn’t stand by silently.

  FOUR

  Ruby

  A part from the incident with the coloured men, working at Avery’s Ice Cream Parlor was pleasant enough but I was worried about the low pay despite the tips I earned. Maman’s physician, Doctor Monfort, was an old family friend who treated her for free, but the medicines he prescribed were expensive. I had to find a better-paid job, but what?