Eggplant Man

by Margo De Leaver

  Ruby rinsed the night from her face, slipped on her now dry panties, her torn baggy khakis and a white tee from her collection of them, all from the mission. She kept the tee shirts on top of the rickety desk, neatly folded in a stack, in one of the cardboard boxes that served as her makeshift dresser. All of the shirts were white and plain, without any message or writing on them. She did not want to give people reason to look at her. Ruby unplaited her rope thick, shoulder length braids, ritually applied coconut oil to both her hair and scalp, brushed her hair 113 strokes and re-plaited her braids into two symmetrical, gleaming rows.

  Ma’ Dear’s voice echoed in her head. “A woman’s hair is her crown an’ glory, baby, you gotta’ make it pretty every day…100 brushes and coconut oil. Men loves a woman with pretty hair.” “Yes, Ma’Dear,” Ruby said aloud in the moment. Today, Ruby wanted her hair to be extra pretty. She added 13 extra strokes, since it was the 13th of August.

  She took one of her shower stream refilled bottles of water, climbed onto the desk, slipped through the metal flap covering the window-space and headed out, acting as if she had no plans.

  Her not so hidden agenda was to mosey on over to 125th Street. She wanted to catch a casual glimpse of Eggplant Man in front of Bubba’s.

  This thought had not fully reached her consciousness, but the warm syrup feeling began to rise again in her chest. It had begun to drizzle downward to her abdomen.

  Ruby was thirsty this morning and quickly finished the water she was carrying. She never littered the street. Dutifully, she dropped her empty water bottle in a nearby empty trash can, remembering her mother’s words:

  “Baby, ain’t no maids here, put it where it’s ‘s’posed to go.”

  “Yes, Ma ’Dear.”

  It was now 10 blocks to her destination and Ruby felt as if she were moving in slow motion. People seemed to be constantly in her way, annoying her. Her choppy walking style sometimes caused people momentarily to stop in their tracks, hesitating about which way to go. Ruby hated those dancing encounters, a brief forced intimate moment with a stranger, interrupting her flow. As she finally rounded the corner of 125th and Amsterdam, her heart momentarily stopped, skipping a beat and causing a swirl in her head. There he was, back erect, as if he were again holding up the wall to the parlor.

  At 10 in the morning, the sun was already hot. Its rays, streaming down, seemed to spotlight him, his four inch “crown” and his smooth dark-purple glowing skin. As he strummed on his banjo with those long calloused fingers, Ruby thought about the rough fingertip that had coursed the length of her scar the day before. The sticky river descended further down her abdomen. She could barely breathe. Was she still walking or standing still? She did not know.

  CHAPTER 11

  Something’s coming, something good

  Eggplant Man had risen early that morning: about 6:30 AM. He had slept surprisingly well. He knew Ruby was usually out early making her garbage can rounds. Not wanting to miss her, he quickly rinsed his face with water from an alley faucet and performed his sparse version of a wash-up. He had a routine of morning cat stretches that helped eliminate his lower back pain. The discomfort was a consequence of too many years of sleeping on cement, in doorways and on cots at the mission.

  Adjusting the strings on his banjo, he checked his sock for his $18 and 25 cents, and headed for his spot in front of Bubba’s. He arrived there so quickly he could not even recall the six-block walk. Casually, Eggplant Man began surveying the people traffic on Amsterdam Avenue. There were very few pedestrians on the street that morning. He could tell already, it was going to be another hot and humid August day.

  For months, he had seen Ruby from a distance, a female entity, routinely searching and collecting garbage three times each week. Eggplant Man did not pay much attention to her. She was just a part of the city’s daily humdrum. However, yesterday was a completely different story. It had been up close, personal and spellbinding. As soon as he’d seen her face, those hypnotic eyes and the indelible C-shaped scar, he’d remembered her story and her name as if it had just happened.

  He recalled how he’d felt when he read the story in the Metairie news and saw her pitiful face staring back from the front page. He knew she would be ostracized, as only a small town could do. She was young, not 18 years old, and had no close relatives except her father, who had abandoned the family years before this incident. Her father returned home after hearing of the death of his wife and son. He did not know what to do with his 17-year-old. She had been staying with disgruntled relatives. So, he married the teenager off, to Harold, a man twice her age. The hope was that Harold would take care of Ruby, ending his own responsibility as her father.

  Ruby’s husband turned out to be an abusive alcoholic, like her own father. Several months after the tragic murder event occurred, gossip had it that Ruby had moved north to stay with a distant aunt. Her father had died two years after her marriage to Harold.

  Ruby was now on her own. The trial was quick and the verdict, mercifully, was self-defense. But the town was not empathetic and vicious whispers followed Ruby wherever she went, even to church. Church was normally the one place people in the South could always go for solace and support. Eggplant Man wondered, at that time, what a young girl in her position would do.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Gift of Music

  Eggplant Man knew the South and its rules very well. He was born in New Orleans, Lower Ninth Ward. His family was very poor. In September 1955, A horrific hurricane struck New Orleans with a vengeance. The storm took a total of eighty-one lives. Eighty percent of the Lower Ninth Ward district was under water, including his already dilapidated abode. Following the storm, people walked through water that for some was above their waists, holding children in their arms, to escape the flood. Eggplant Man was one of those children. Shortly after saving his son’s life, the boy’s father fell ill and died from pneumonia.

  Eggplant Man’s family moved to Mississippi to live with relatives for five years. His mother remarried and returned to Metairie, where he lived until he was seventeen.

  What he remembered most about his father was his love of music. A lot happened in the South, in the mid-1900s, to any Black man trying to survive. No matter what transpired, his father played his ‘gitar’ every day.

  “Boy, music can save yo’ life. The power is in them strings.” Then he would laugh, a deep dark reverberating guffaw, and tell the story of Samson and Delilah.

  “Don’t never let nobody clip yo’ strings. You hear me, boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Lil’ Roy, as he was called at that time.

  Eggplant Man started playing his father’s guitar when he was two years old. His father was called Big Roy. He had taught his son how to play. The guitar came naturally to L’il Roy. People said “he had the gift.” It always seemed to calm him down. Besides music, L’il Roy had no other passion. His temperament was pensive, quiet and a bit melancholic…a born observer. His mother was like that. Her advice to him, on more than one occasion: “Don’t speak ‘less ya’ spoken to, boy, don’t ya’ say nothin’ ‘less it make a difference o’ save yo’ life. Amen, son?” His mother always punctuated her sentences with ‘Amen or God-willin’. “Amen, Ma’am,” was his usual reply of accord.

  CHAPTER 13

  Love is a Strange Thing

  Eggplant Man could recall feeling this way only once before, some 30 years ago, before his incarceration. He was sitting at the bar, between sets at the famous Tricou House Jazz Club on Bourbon Street, New Orleans.

  It was the summer of 1970. The Tricou Club was smoky and humid, its legendary blue light casting a soft hazy aura around everyone there. Legend also has it, this Jazz Club was haunted as well, by the Tricou family, the eccentric original owners of the house. In the midst of the haze, he found himself entranced by a curvaceous, sultry “mucho choco-latte” high-heeled lady in a fitted red dress.

  Eggp
lant Man very easily recalled that scarlet garb. It was clinging for life to every curve God had so graciously given the woman. Instead of walking, she sauntered into the club. That lady was swaying those talking hips and bouncing her bouncy butt at the same time. It was art in motion. The beginning of a lifetime haunting memory had begun.

  The Cheshire grin plastered on his face must have been what led her straight over to his bar stool. Enticed, she asked him to dance. It was one of those slow and easy, up close and personal, bluesy grinds. By the time the dance was over he was lost in her perfume, his sweat, the blue haze, the red dress. He missed his next set and spent the next three nights wrapped in her chocolate and her black satin sheets. He cried out for Mercy! God granted him none. They remained lovers and became great friends.

  For six months, it was an easy flowing, sexy relationship, with lots of laughter and good times. Then one day it ended, just as it had started. She put on her red dress and high-heels and sauntered her ‘jiggly’ butt and all that came with it right out the front door. There was no goodbye, no explanation. Her name was Lula Belle Devereaux.

  He had a tight icy hot squeeze in his chest for months. That affair was the last time he truly awakened the dragon. After that affair, staying above his emotions became his ‘modus operandi.’

  After the Lula Belle situation, Eggplant Man decided to head north. He wanted a new start in the big city. He moved around like a nomad all through the south, playing gigs in many jazz clubs and meeting many of the jazz and blues greats. On his route to the Big Apple, Eggplant Man stopped in Selma, and got involved in a brawl that had broken out in a small juke joint. This led to a 15 year detour in a Selma prison, serving hard labor, for a crime he never committed. He and his banjo finally arrived in 1985, in New York City. Despite every-thing that had transpired, he still held hope for a new life.

  Eggplant Man turned his thoughts back into the present moment. He looked at the money bulge in his sock, felt for the vegetable skin still in his jacket pocket and resumed strumming the banjo strings.

  Lay on my soil and enjoy its richness

  Let your roots absorb my moisture

  Dancing on thoughts of yesterday’s dreams

  Free to roam the world touching even the unsuspecting

  Eggplant Man tried to recall other times he had had any deep sentiments for a woman. He remembered Faye, his wife of one year. She had just turned 18 and he was 19. They had spent his junior and senior years of high school together, infatuated with each other. It was puppy love for sure. They knew very little of what it would take to make a marriage work; both were too young and immature. But they got married one week after graduation.

  After high school, Eggplant Man was always on the road, moving from gig to gig. Faye stayed home; young, beautiful, bored and lonely. She eventually ran off with a local and remarried.

  Then, of course, there was Lula Belle Devereaux. There was no forgetting that one. Eggplant Man could not recall the details of his other short lived relationships, a blur of meaningless encounters. Now there was Ruby.

  Eggplant Man decided to get some coffee and biscuits. Feeling totally unprepared and betrayed by his heart, he needed time to think. He thought about how this Ruby encounter was so unexpected.

  CHAPTER 14

  Every Man Needs a Song

  Eggplant Man returned his thoughts to Ruby. According to the clock on the wall in Bubba’s parlor, it was now 8:30 A.M. and there was no sign of her anywhere. Perhaps she was not coming back after yesterday. That thought, created a slight tightening in his throat, which he cleared in an effort to gain some control over the feeling. He started to strum his banjo as a calming device. Just the memory of the previous day’s events reawakened the smell of coconut in his nostrils.

  He tried to avoid looking up the street. He tried to convince himself that he was not anxious. At 9:55, after what seemed like a year’s penance in purgatory, he looked towards Amsterdam and there she stood, not moving. Was she staring at him? He continued to strum his banjo, looking at her, feeling the droplets of sweat accumulate on his brow, his upper lip and in his armpits. He saw her turn abruptly and head in the other direction. His heart began to pound, beating against the eggplant skin in his left upper inside jacket pocket. The skin began to feel weighted against his chest. Had he scared her, by using her name? “Thank you, Ruby,” he had said. He had wanted to explain, but after six years of silence, his words had come slowly, and she’d left so quickly. He sank into thought for a few minutes.

  When he looked up, an attractive brown-skinned lady stood there in her house dress. Her eyes were red and puffy and there were tear stains on her cheeks. Her lower lip was cut and dried blood caked both corners of her mouth. Her hardened expression told him that this woman had been around the block more than a few times. The woman was probably in her mid-thirties, but looked a lot older. Life had been difficult for her. There were signs of ongoing abuse, but she wasn’t leaving her abuser. It was too painful to look her in the eye, so Eggplant Man looked away.

  “Sing this Mississippi River brown gal somethin’ bluesy, Black man. I needs it too bad.”

  He could not refuse her. What came to mind was Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”

  Well, I’d rather my man would hit me

  than for him to jump up and quit me

  Ain’t nobody’s business if I do

  I swear I won’t call no coppa, if I’m beat up by

  my papa

  Ain’t nobody’s business if I do, nobody’s

  business…

  Instead, Eggplant Man sang Sam Cooke’s rendition of

  “A Change is Gonna Come.”

  I was born by the river in a little tent

  Oh and just like the river I’ve been running

  ever since

  It’s been a long, a long time coming

  But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it

  will

  It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid

  to die…

  As Eggplant Man skillfully plucked the soothing strings of his banjo, his mother’s voice floated into his head. Mama had always said, “Boy, you never hits a woman, you hear me? If a woman make you mad, and they does, jus’ walk away. Tha’s what a real man do, you hear me boy? Amen.”

  “Yes Ma’am, Amen,” he replied.

  His father would just strum that banjo and be silent when Mama made him feel crazy or angry. He didn’t walk away. He didn’t raise his voice, but you could hear his banjo screaming.

  Eggplant Man felt embarrassed looking at this woman’s swollen face. The man who’d done this to her must not have had anywhere to walk or any song to play.

  After he strummed and sang the final notes to Sam Cooke’s song, there were fresh tears on the woman’s cheeks. “Tha’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout, …needed it, got it,” the woman sputtered though her split lower lip. She dropped a dollar into his banjo case and walked back into her bruised life.

  CHAPTER 15

  Fear is stronger than Love, n’est-ce pas?

  Stop turn around and look at me

  Stop turn around tell me what you see

  Is it love, is it real, can you deal with me?

  Ruby saw Eggplant Man turn to look in her direction. He seemed to be playing his guitar. She wasn’t sure if he was looking at her or just staring blindly ahead. She turned her glance downward.

  Ruby did not know what to do. The warm syrup drizzle had now coursed its way through the narrow cleavage between her breasts, down the smooth road of her soft rounded abdomen. It finally reached the mound which overlooked a private world she had not visited in 20 years. She could barely breathe. Her inhalations were shallow incantations for mercy from a God. She had nearly forgotten and never forgiven God for the untimely atrocity of the loss of her mother and brother. Her exhalations were imperceptible effor
ts to release the bolus of air now stuck in the back of her throat.

  She could hear Ma’ Dear’s voice from somewhere inside of her. “They love you and leave you, Baby. They don’t never stay. It is damn hard to find you a good man unless you just plain lucky or ‘specially blessed. And you ain’t neither, you hear me Baby?”

  “Yes. Ma’ Dear,” Ruby replied.

  Her mother’s warning about men kept whispering in her ear. In that moment, Ruby turned abruptly and headed back to her respite. She had to think. She needed to burn some candles. The smell of dark chocolate, tobacco and cloves wafted through her brain, smothering her. It was impossible to capture a deep breath. She felt a tingle course down the length of her scar. There was something pulling her to turn around and go to him, but her fear was stronger.

  She found herself running past people who were just starting their own days. Ruby arrived at her abode. Pulling back the metal window cover too quickly, she slid into her space. The metal caught her arm, inflicting a superficial laceration as the plate scraped against her and then slammed shut. The sharp pain was a welcome jolt, giving her a moment to change her focus.

  She felt warm blood ooze from the wound and run down her arm, matching the speed and consistency of the syrup river still coursing down the center of her body.

  The blood had soiled her white tee shirt. Ruby pulled off the tee, wet the clean end from the thin stream of water constantly running from the bathroom shower and used her special bar of brown soap. She vigorously rubbed it against the wet shirt. She cleaned the wound, rinsed it and applied pressure until the oozing stopped. Then she lit one unscented candle.