The old crow perched on the white fence and cawed.
“Shut up,” Ruby managed, closing her eyes.
It fluttered across the road and the short distance into the yard, gently scolding.
Ruby growled, “None of your damn business.”
It was the same damn bird — big. So big it snapped the skinny branches it sat upon. The same one who’d been clamoring about the place nigh on eleven years. Some might call it a raven, but they would be wrong. Ruby could tell by the caw and the way it purred when it was lonely.
Her youngest began to fuss, so Ruby rocked him. She tried to settle all of her children. They were restless so she sang to them:
“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry—
“Go to sleepy little baby.”
The black crow hopped down into Ruby’s yard, so she stretched her song across the ground.
“When you wake,
“you’ll have cake
“and all the pretty little horses.”
Voice soft so she wouldn’t scare them. It was their favorite.
“Way down yonder,
“in the meadow
“there’s a little baby crying.”
Her voice almost a whisper.
“Birds and butterflies,
“Round his eyes,
“Little baby finds his mama.”
Ruby felt them calm, their hands tucked under their cheeks, knees folded. Soon they were asleep.
She looked at the crow scratching the ground softly, then picking up a cluster of hard green berries and flapping up to a low branch. In two weeks the tiny fruit would be yellow, in a month it would ferment, making all the birds and squirrels tipsy. Ruby and Maggie had watched them as children, the robins gorging themselves and then flying off like drunken pilots. Chickens, pigs and goats would nibble the shrunken brownish beads and wobble as they walked away, only to come back the next day. Maggie and Ruby had laughed and giggled in the front yard, saying they should open a Chinaberry Juke.
Years later, when Ruby returned to Liberty she had watched the tree in late August and smiled, especially at the large crow who seemed to have imbibed more than most — flapping and falling, stunned in the front yard. When the Rankins’ foxhound happened by, Ruby had decided to go outside and sit near her to keep the dog at bay. They had been friends ever since.
The bird cawed once more. Ruby looked around. The land felt different. The man’s footprints were still in the dust and the hill had not yet covered them. She looked down at her hands. The cut in her thumb, clumped with dirt. She thought about the polish she had worn into Liberty. The manicure Mrs. Gladdington had taken her to have in a private salon in Chelsea. She had chosen Lost Red by Elizabeth Arden. Ruby saw the clean taper of her hands folded in her lap as she took the train from New York. The brilliant scarlet of each perfect nail.
IT WAS the wrong Liberty. One hundred and four miles southwest from its Colored namesake, Liberty Township. Ruby should have known it the moment she bought the ticket at Penn Station, but the air about her was charged, and her thinking had flared and dimmed like a faulty fuse. Colors had flashed so bright that she’d had to wear her sunglasses inside, and sometimes the sound of static had fizzed and scratched in her ears.
It was 1963 and a world full of Negroes were making their way to Washington, D.C., to stir some change into the batter of the world. Taking trains, buses, some stuffed into the backs of pickups and some riding their thumbs, hitching five, six hundred miles. Like a lone salmon Ruby had taken the road south.
She should have known when the train stopped in Shreveport, Louisiana, instead of Lufkin, Texas, that she had overshot her Liberty.
But Ruby had been mean behind the train’s window. A low steady buzz shooting through her body. A voltage overdose that had amplified her spite and made it impossible to notice anything as benign as the world rolling and flashing in front of her. Instead she had twisted matchbook covers, unpeeled cigarette butts and shredded the moist filters. She had not spoken to the oozing woman across the aisle, although she had been given gentle leads to do so from the woman’s cow eyes, from her chubby hand waving a chicken drumstick like a baton, holding out the grease-stained bag as a communal offering. Ruby had shaken her head no in one clean glide. Ruby’s smile had been a wince. Even her hellos had been a reproach.
She’d sniffed at the elderly conductor as he walked by, silently impugning his personal care and hygiene. He had pretended not to notice, but the next time Ruby saw him he’d smelled strongly of balsam.
Ruby had not suspected that she was off-course until the conductor called out “LIB-er-ty next stop, LIB-er-ty,” and something tickled her. That something prompted her to truly look out the window. When she saw the flat prairie land of Central Texas instead of the piney woods, a panic rose then settled in her chest. She suddenly remembered the road to Liberty. Catch the Carolina South to Lufkin, Texas, change to the Buxton Limited until you reach Newton. Then take the Red Bus the thirty-seven miles to Liberty. She had not followed the bread crumbs she’d left over a decade ago and she had unfathomably forgotten her way home. She had only been able to spit out “Liberty,” the ticket was issued, and the train had barreled south.
Twenty minutes later, angry and confused, she pushed two fat quarters into the Red Cap’s hand as he helped her from the train. The weight of her mistake pushed her down on her luggage, where she sat and contemplated her next step.
That is how Ruby came to be sitting on the train platform amidst a fortress of new pink Samsonite bags. Her black hair swept straight and high, pressed within an inch of its life. Lipstick Persian red. The beauty mark on her right cheek darkened. The buzz in her head quieted to a hum as she secretly primped without benefit of mirror. When in distress, Ruby was certain, it was a matter of survival to look one’s best.
The last of the White folks and Negroes crisscrossed the platform to step aboard the train she had just vacated. The little stairs pulled up and the doors closed as a blue-black uniformed man walked up to Ruby, cap stiff, with a rail insignia brassed along the front. “Need help with your luggage Miss?”
Ruby raked through her purse — the Etienne Aigner purse — carefully avoiding the telegram from Maggie. The platform began to clear save a few men and women running to the train. She didn’t look at the Red Cap. Then she did. This was a man whose back had been used as a bootjack for the greater part of his life. Ruby realized that she had not breathed in this particular odor of obeisance for nearly a decade.
“Not exactly,” she answered. Her manner claimed unquestionable authority. It was one of the many things she’d learned on the Upper East Side of New York, how to use the tilt of a head, the jaunt of a chin to dictate and persuade. She found her cigarettes as the doors of the train sighed and closed. Leaving only Red Caps, the Station Master and little clusters of reunited families, lovers, White men conferring as they stepped away.
The Red Cap leaned in closer. Ruby felt the push in his voice. “Ma’am, you got somebody coming to get you?” he asked, his face creased with concern — a grandfather, an uncle, or a man with plenty of daughters.
His voice fell to a whisper, “Cuz with all this Colored March hullabaloo, Station Master ain’t gonna let no Colored woman set out here for too long without a ticket going somewheres.”
Ruby’s eyes settled on the man. The protectiveness of his voice was an affront to her. That and the bend-down-low in his carriage.