Mama Ruby

by Mary Monroe

  “This is the most beautiful baby I ever seen in my life,” Simone said softly, tears in her eyes. “She looks like a little angel. If God created a prettier baby, He kept it for Hisself.”

  “Sure enough,” Ruby agreed, gazing lovingly at the child as Simone held it close to Ruby’s face. Looking at her baby, she had to blink her eyes several times to hold back her tears of joy. She was so pleased, she was beaming with pride, just the way a new mother was supposed to. “This baby is so precious ... and perfect,” she managed. Ruby’s voice was so hoarse, it sounded like she had a frog in her throat. At that moment, she was convinced that there was nothing on the planet more important to her than this baby—her baby. “Hand me my baby,” she ordered, grinning so hard her bloated cheeks ached. “I don’t care what happens to me now. I am goin’ to be proud to show off my baby!”

  “Oh no you ain’t!” Simone snapped. She moved a few steps away, making sure that the baby was out of Ruby’s reach.

  Ruby looked at Othella. She was stunned and puzzled by the peculiar look on her face. Othella looked like she was in a hypnotic trance. Ruby returned her attention back to Simone. “What do you mean by that?” she asked. She gazed at Othella again from the corner of her eye, her heart beating like a bongo drum. Her insides, or what was left of them, had formed a tight, painful knot. “What do your mama mean, Othella?” Ruby panicked. It felt like she was losing her breath. She shook her head and sucked in some of the stale air in the musty room. She was light-headed, confused, and frightened by what Simone had just said.

  Instead of answering Ruby’s question, Othella turned to her mother. “Mama,” she said, stopping with a hiccup. “You tell her what me and you talked about while she was passed out.”

  “Uh, I will in a minute. In the meantime, Ruby, you get a hold of yourself,” Simone advised, moving even farther away from the bed. When she bumped into the wall, she stopped and moved a few feet forward, back closer to the bed. But this time she stood at the foot where it would be harder for Ruby to reach her. “Now, Ruby Jean. Don’t you go gettin’ attached to this baby. The sooner you forget about this baby, the better.”

  Ruby’s mouth dropped open and she stared at Simone like she had suddenly got naked in front of her. “Woman, what’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Forget about my baby? What ... why ... I can’t believe my ears. What makes you think I am goin’ to forget about my own baby?” A strange eerie laugh shot out of Ruby’s mouth, a laugh that she couldn’t control. She laughed for several moments before a serious look appeared on her face. For a split second, she looked and felt like a very old, very tired woman. She didn’t know what to think. She even thought that maybe she was dreaming, because everything seemed so unreal. “Look here,” she continued, glancing from Othella to Simone. “I don’t know what y’all cookin’ up in this room, but I ain’t swallowin’ none of it.”

  “Be sensible, Ruby Jean. This baby was a mistake and you know it. You, of all girls, know your folks ain’t about to accept you gettin’ yourself into a mess like this. But don’t worry. I’m goin’ to handle everything,” Simone insisted with a vigorous nod. The baby began to squirm and whimper, and was about to cry some more. Simone stopped that from happening by gently squeezing and rocking the baby in her arms.

  Ruby was glad and grateful that Simone and Othella had come to her aid, but she was not happy about the way they were acting and talking now. It had to be the alcohol they’d drunk, or they had both gone crazy at the same time. There was no other acceptable reason for them to think that she was going to let them tell her what to do with her baby, Ruby told herself.

  “What in the world ... ? This is my baby, y’all. I can do whatever I want with it.” Ruby attempted to rise again. “Now stop talkin’ crazy. Both of y’all,” she ordered, her head swiveling from side to side to look from Othella to Simone. Her gaze landed on the top of the baby’s head, and she managed to smile. “Now tell me, is it a girl or is it a boy? Let me hold it!”

  “It’s a girl,” Othella announced in a tired, hollow voice. Her face looked like it had turned to stone. It took a lot of effort for her to make her lips move again. “It ... she looks a lot like me.”

  Ruby was pleased to hear that. Her next thought was that Othella’s brother Ike was the baby’s father, like she had hoped.

  Simone was thinking the same thing. With hesitation, she placed the infant in Ruby’s arms, but she remained close by in case Ruby dropped her. Ruby was, and had always been, as clumsy as an ox. How she managed to be so agile on the dance floor was a mystery to Simone. It would be just like her to drop the baby on her head. “This young’un looks like all of my girl babies,” Simone said with a grunt. “But that don’t mean nothin’. Even though I suspect you and my boy Ike been sneakin’ around doin’ somethin’ nasty, this baby looks like that Peterson’s boy’s sisters, too. He could be the daddy. What I want to know is, how come you didn’t tell nobody you had a pig in your poke?”

  “I ... I was ... I ... see,” Ruby stuttered. “I was goin’ to,” she said in a very small, very nervous voice. She was unable to take her eyes off the baby’s face.

  “When? You been walkin’ around with this bun in your oven for nine months! Exactly when was you goin’ to tell somebody?” Simone demanded, tugging the baby girl out of Ruby’s arms so hard and fast, she almost dropped her.

  Ruby stared at Simone with her mouth hanging open again. She wanted to punch this bitch in the nose, but she knew that that was the last thing she needed to do. She still needed Simone’s help. “I just found out for sure myself tonight!” Ruby boomed. Her voice suddenly got low and shaky. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant till tonight,” she lied, her eyes looking at the top of the baby’s head again. She was too weak to fight with Simone, and too concerned about her child to risk her being injured in a tussle. For now, she had to remain as calm as she possibly could. For the first time tonight, she wished that she had not come to the party. If she had given birth in her own bedroom like she had thought she would, with her bedroom window facing her mother’s impressive flower garden, she wouldn’t be in the mess she was in now. However, she realized that if she had given birth at home, she might have been in an even bigger mess.

  Ruby had to admit to herself that she was probably better off in Simone’s house under the present circumstances. At least Simone and Othella weren’t calling her names and threatening to beat her the way she thought her parents would probably be doing by now. She bowed her head submissively and spoke without looking up. “Let me hold and hug my baby again. I should probably be givin’ her some of this milk in my titties anyway. I love her already.”

  “Gal, didn’t I just tell you to forget about this baby?” Simone snarled, slapping Ruby’s hand. “Shame! Shame! SHAME! You know your daddy would give birth to a baby hisself, if he knowed you just had one. And your poor mama! Oh my Lord in heaven! Sister Upshaw would up and die if she knowed what you—a preacher’s daughter—done! You know how hysterical and frantic y’all holy rollers can get. Especially your folks. They are unpredictable, too. You and me both know that your folks could either beat you into the ground or comfort you for a predicament like this. My guess is that they’ll beat you into the ground first and comfort you later. That’s if you still alive after the beatin’. I know you ain’t forgot how that Hardy girl almost died from the whuppin’ her daddy laid on her when she fooled around and got herself pregnant last year. Be reasonable, girl.”

  Simone was right. Ruby knew how hysterical and frantic her parents could get. She also knew how unpredictable they were in some situations. She could imagine her father flying into a rage and tearing down the house with his bare hands if he walked into her bedroom and saw her giving birth. Or her mother fainting and falling to the floor, breaking her hip like the time she’d thought one of her daughters was thinking about divorcing her husband.

  Now that she’d had more time to think about it, and the few other things that Simone had pointed out, Ruby wondered how she cou
ld have given birth in her bedroom by herself the way she had planned to. What was I thinking? she asked herself. Simone’s house was bad, but if she’d given birth at home, it might have been a catastrophe.

  “Well, my daddy and my mama is goin’ to know now. I got to go home tonight, and I got to carry my baby home with me. I already got my story worked out. I just hope they go for it—and let me tell it before they get all crazy on me.” Ruby paused and tried to organize her thoughts. But her mind was spinning in so many different directions, she couldn’t think straight. “I need to be home in time, so I can straighten everything out before our church revival meetin’ tomorrow mornin’. I’m goin’ to tell my daddy, and everybody else, that I got raped!” Ruby couldn’t hide the desperation in her voice. “I’m goin’ to say I got jumped and raped by that hook-hand man that broke loose from the chain gang a while back. The one that they say was so mean that he’d be a danger to anybody he came in contact with—especially females on account of he was in prison for raping a few. Well, I was the unlucky female he snuck up on, as I was on my way to choir practice. He threatened to beat me, and gouge out my eyes with that hook hand of his if I didn’t let him have his way with me. He said if I told on him, he’d burn down my daddy’s house—with us in it. They never caught that maniac, so it ain’t like he’ll come out and deny it! Besides, he’s a Cajun, and this baby looks like she could be half Cajun!” She was convinced that if her tall tale didn’t keep her parents from going crazy on her, nothing would.

  “Ruby Jean, that story might not work. Your folks might not even give you time to get it all out before they light into you. For one thing, that convict with the hook hand broke loose two years ago, way before you got pregnant. He wasn’t crazy enough to hang around this state. The newspaper said he was spotted in Arizona around the time you would have got pregnant,” Othella pointed out.

  “But my story could work.” There was a pleading look on Ruby’s face. “I know it could!” She was frantic. She said the first thing that popped into her head next. “There’s plenty of other maniacs on the loose around here, so I could say that it was one of them that raped me!”

  Othella shook her head. “Only a fool would buy that foot-long lie. And your folks ain’t fools. The bottom line is, you can’t go home with no baby tonight. Me and Mama, we got a plan, see. And, I have a feelin’ you ain’t goin’ to like it.” Othella paused and turned to Simone. “Tell her, Mama.”

  CHAPTER 13

  SIMONE SNIFFED AND HELD THE BABY TIGHTER, STILL GENTLY rocking her. “I know a preacher that owes me a few favors. I’ll get him to bless this young’un tonight. She’s a ... a miracle, and she deserve to be treated as such.” Simone paused and hugged the baby even tighter, not because she was afraid she might drop her, but because she didn’t want Ruby to jump up off the bed, snatch the baby and run. Simone opened her mouth to speak but paused again. This time it was to tickle the baby’s chin. “Oochie coo,” she said, smiling.

  It was obvious to Ruby that she was not the only one already attached to this unplanned miracle.

  Simone suddenly got serious. She pressed her lips together, took a few deep breaths, and then she began to speak slowly and with caution. “Uh ... them nuns at this asylum I know, they don’t turn nobody away. If Satan crawled up to their gate in distress, they would scoop him up and take him in! I’ll carry this child to them nuns in my own two hands. It ain’t a bad place.... I know that on account of it’s the same place where my mama dumped me off at for a while, when I was still in diapers. It was the only home I knew for a long time.” For a brief moment, Simone looked and felt unbearably sad.

  Nobody, not even her children, or the many men in her life, would ever know all the details of her painful past. At the top of the list was a family tree with a drunken Cajun on each and every branch. There had been frequent physical, sexual, and mental abuse in her stormy past so severe, her tortured mind had buried most of the memories.

  If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Simone’s history also included a mother with the mind of a lunatic. She had given birth to eleven children that she never wanted, six of them by her own father. She had left her last child, a severely retarded one-year-old boy, in the back of a wagon on the street while she treated herself to a night out on the town in a rowdy bar a couple of blocks away. When she left the bar several hours later to retrieve her son, it was too late. The boy had rolled around so much, his blanket had accidentally covered his face and suffocated him. When the authorities tracked down Simone’s mother a week later, hiding in a barn on her former lover’s farm, she was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Four of her remaining children ended up in other asylums. Simone had not seen or heard from any of her siblings in years. She had a very bleak outlook on life, and often used poor judgment when she made decisions. Like now.

  “This child will be safe in that asylum,” Simone said, her mind a ball of confusion.

  Ruby’s breath caught in her throat. The plan that Simone had for the baby was ludicrous! But because Ruby knew Simone as well as she did, nothing the woman said or did surprised Ruby. In spite of that, she still could not believe her ears! Had Simone not only lost her mind, but her memory, too? She must have! Didn’t she remember telling Ruby about some of the horrors that she’d experienced in that asylum? She had claimed that most of the mean nuns had used violence to keep things under control. Simone still had scars on the palms of her hands and legs where the nuns had beaten her repeatedly with metal rods and bamboo canes. And what about those male orderlies and how they had sexually abused the most helpless of the females that they had been hired to take care of?

  “Y’all want me to turn my child over to a hellhole like you was brought up in, Simone? Why would a place like that even want to be bothered with a newborn baby? It don’t sound nothin’ like them orphanages they put kids in that I read about in school,” Ruby said through clenched teeth. She shook her head, trying to release all of the dark, ominous thoughts dancing around in her mind. But she couldn’t.

  “I know what I’m doin’, girl,” Simone said firmly.

  “Asylums is for crazy people. And the way y’all both actin’, if anybody should to go to that asylum, it’s y’all!” Ruby hollered.

  Simone held up her hand. “Uh-uh! The place I’m talkin’ about ain’t that bad no more. I heard that they made some real positive adjustments durin’ the last few years. They got a new director, and some more sympathetic nuns are workin’ there now. They welcome displaced individuals—especially newborn babies. They feel that they are the ones that need the most help. And them hoity-toity orphanages you read about in school, ain’t nary one of ’em mentioned takin’ in no colored kids, now did they? I know your papa and mama got you on a hog-high pedestal. But in the real world, folks like you and your baby will be considered second class. Compared to most of the other orphanages in Louisiana, the home I’m talkin’ about would be more like a walk down primrose lane for a colored baby.”

  The more Simone babbled, the more she angered, shocked, and confused Ruby. She had to get up and get the hell out of this place before Simone drove her crazy.

  “And what in the world do you mean by displaced, Simone? My baby ain’t nowhere close to bein’ no displaced individual. I got a home, she got a home. You want me to let you turn my baby over to some frustrated nuns? I ain’t goin’ to let you do that. Not after all the trouble I went through to birth her!”

  “I’m tryin’ to show you that I’m practical,” Simone told Ruby.

  “The only thing you showin’ me is that you done lost your mind!” Ruby shot back.

  “Don’t you keep sassin’ me, girl,” Simone warned, shaking a fist at Ruby. “I know I ain’t no church-goin’, high-level muckety-muck like your mama, but I’m still your elder! So don’t you fix your lips to sass me no more tonight. My Lord in heaven. Colored people ain’t never talked to me the way you do. It’s a cryin’ shame.”

  “I ain’t sassin’ you. I’m just speakin�
� my mind, and I ain’t goin’ to let you stop me from doin’ that,” Ruby protested. She sucked in some more stale air, and then she adjusted her body on the bed, turning over on her side. As much as she enjoyed visiting Othella’s house, this was one visit that she would put out of her mind as soon as possible. She had pressed and curled her hair earlier in the day. It was now nappy, soaked in sweat, and standing up all over her head like tentacles. She thought that the shadow of her head on the wall made her look like Medusa. That almost made her laugh again, but she didn’t. She was too angry to laugh now.

  “Ruby Jean, be reasonable. Mama is tryin’ to help you stay alive!” Othella hollered, her voice so loud it sounded like it was bouncing off the walls. Simone gave Othella a menacing look, and Othella lowered her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you want to live, girl?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Ruby asked with such a profound gasp, it almost choked her. She had to cough to clear her throat and catch her breath.

  Othella rolled her eyes. “Ruby Jean, what good are you goin’ to be to a baby if you dead?” she questioned, talking so fast and hard she almost bit her tongue. “How long do you think your daddy would let you live, if he found out you had a baby tonight? I truly believe that Reverend Upshaw would beat your brains out.”

  “How many times do I have to tell y’all that I can tell my folks that I got raped?” Ruby wailed. “By that hook-hand maniac that got loose from the chain gang—or some other devil!”

  “It don’t matter. I know your daddy real good, been readin’ him like a book since before you was born. He’ll feel sorry for you at first, but at the end of the day, you still brought shame on the Upshaw family’s good name. I guarantee you, he won’t care about no rape. Sooner or later, he might even blame you for puttin’ yourself in a position where a rapist could pester you in the first place,” Simone hissed, her eyes dark with anger.