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.