by Richard Dry
“Let me just call Lonnie and check.” Lonnie was the head of the day-treatment program.
“It’s Krista,” she said into the receiver. “You know if Tom Riley still works with us? I know. That’s what I thought.” She shook her head to Love. “Lonnie, you remember Love LeRoy. Actually, he’s right here at my desk. By himself.” She held the phone to her shoulder. “Is there something we can pass on to Tom for you?”
“Naw.” Love shook his head. “I was just going to see if I could come back.”
Lonnie must have heard, because all Krista said was “Okay” and then hung up the phone.
“Lonnie is on his way down.”
Lonnie was a nice enough man, Jewish with a messy beard. He was short but willing and able to put you in restraint if he had to. He’d had to only once with Love, for kicking a wall repeatedly, but Love didn’t hold that against him because no one at Los Aspirantes held it against you for getting restrained. It was as normal as going to the bathroom.
“Love,” Lonnie said as he came around the corner. He nodded to him. Lonnie was a no-nonsense guy: he didn’t ever cave in, and he wasn’t afraid of you; he always gave it to you straight. “You want to take a walk?”
Love nodded and they went back into the parking lot and strolled down the long driveway. Love looked at the ground the whole time, crunching the eucalyptus leaves and pods under his feet.
“So you want to come back?”
Love nodded.
“Why’s that?”
Love shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to say, but it didn’t seem that easy to explain. He hoped Lonnie might ask him the right question to get him to figure out how to say what it was.
“Well, we don’t have a place for you right now,” Lonnie said. “And even if we did, we’d have to know the reason you want to come back. Things not working out with your grandmother?”
Love shrugged again. It wasn’t that his grandmother was doing anything wrong, and he couldn’t tell Lonnie he was running for the crew or it might also be used against him to be put in Juvi, which was far worse than Los Aspirantes or the street.
“You know, Tom left after you did. He’s doing something new now, too. But if you want, I could give him a message. He may call you. I can’t promise he would, but he might.”
“Naw.”
“Just because he left, Love, doesn’t mean he forgot about you, you know.”
“I know.” Love spat on the curb. Lonnie didn’t tell him to take a time-out, and he realized that he almost wished he had.
“Things just aren’t going the way I planned,” Love said. “That’s all.”
“You in any danger?”
“Not really.”
“Not really danger, or not really bad danger?”
Love shrugged again. If he said he was in danger, then Ruby might get in trouble.
“Can’t you just let me stay in the living room at my old house?”
Lonnie laughed. “I wish it were that easy. But it’s not. I could have someone come out there, though, and talk to your grandmother, and they might be able to place you somewhere for older kids.”
“You mean here.”
“Like here, but not here. But I have to tell you that it’s a long process and it might take a while, unless there is something immediately dangerous going on.” Lonnie looked at Love through his glasses, one eyebrow raised.
“Naw. It ain’t nothin I can’t handle.”
Lonnie nodded for a while, then said: “Let me just tell you, Love, that a lot of kids who leave come back here to ask the same thing, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But you should know that there’s going to be a period of readjustment that everyone goes through.”
“Yeah. I know.”
They’d walked all the way back down to the freeway overpass, and Lonnie stopped at the corner.
“I can call someone to come out there, but you’ll have to tell me more specifically what’s wrong.”
There were so many cars going by below that Love couldn’t hear himself think. He felt an urge to run to the railing and jump over right in front of Lonnie, just to show him how serious it was. But then Li’l Pit would be stuck on his own with the crew, and that was exactly what Love wanted to avoid.
“I’ll just give it some more time,” Love said.
“All right.” Lonnie held out his hand and Love shook it. “It takes guts to come back here,” Lonnie said. “I know that. I’ve always known you were a strong kid, and I mean inside. If it gets rough, you can always come back and talk, okay?”
Love nodded, watching the cars whiz by below. Lonnie patted him on the shoulder, then turned around and walked back up the hill.
SANTA RITA JAIL
TODAY I READ from the Mississippi Law of 1865, Chapter 1, Section 3:
All freedmen, free Negroes, or mulattoes who do now and have herebefore lived and cohabitated together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes; that it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and on conviction thereof shall be confined in the State penitentiary for life.…
CHAPTER 11
NOVEMBER 1963 • CORBET 54, RUBY 25, SANDRA 18, EASTON 17, LIDA 3
BY THE FALL, Sandra had become a regular at Corbet’s home. She helped pass out candy on Halloween, and when Kennedy was shot, she immediately drove over and spent the afternoon with the family. They ate dinner, listened to the radio and watched TV at the same time.
Easton reached in and pinched the last grain of rice from his bowl between his thumb and forefinger. He rolled it back and forth, felt the sticky softness of it, then squished it flat and looked at its pure whiteness on his thumb. He scraped it off with his bottom teeth and swallowed it.
“Maybe it’s a hoax,” he said. Everyone else had retired to the living room. No one responded. Sandra stood by the stereo where she had been from the moment she’d turned it on, her head resting against the side of the bookshelf and tears still in her eyes.
Ruby stood up from the couch and shut off the TV. She shook her head and let out a heavy breath, but she didn’t cry. “If they can kill the president, then Lord only knows what they can do,” she said.
Corbet sat in his chair next to his crutches, his head bowed. He didn’t have anything to drink, and he wasn’t smoking. His hands were in his lap, one folded under the other.
“Every president that gets up for the colored folk gets shot down,” he said.
“You think it’s racial?” Sandra asked, lifting her head for the first time.
“Everything is racial,” Easton said. He looked at her sharply, and they locked eyes for a moment. She looked away and rested her head on the shelf again.
“Nothing is strictly racial,” Corbet said. “It’s all about power and fear. It’s like in the war, we’re all dug into our little trenches shooting at everybody we can’t even see. Takes a kind of blindness to hurt someone.”
Lida bent down and picked up a rubber band off the floor. She toddled toward Easton with her gift outstretched. Ruby saw her and quickly came up from behind, lifting her around the waist before she could bother him.
“I have to call my father,” Sandra said.
“Use our phone here.” Corbet pointed to the phone on the table. Though she’d been coming over to their house for months, she’d never used their phone.
“He lives in Oregon,” she said.
“Sure. We know.” Corbet smiled at her. She shook her head, but everyone encouraged her and she surrendered.
“I’ll pay you back for it.”
“You don’t have to do that. Call your papa, and then Ruby here is going to call her mama. And let me say hello to her myself.”
While Sandra used the phone, Ruby carried Lida outside onto the f
ront stoop. She stood on the porch like she used to do in Norma when Ronald came calling. She could still imagine the dusty steps and the sunlit dirt road, though it had been almost four years since she’d seen them.
“She yours too, Ronal,” she had said to him when she found out she was pregnant. Ronald had large stains of sweat under his arms and in the center of his chest. He had walked two miles in his slacks and shirt sleeves from the West River office of the Tri-County Free Press, where he was working as a reporter on the pesticide story.
He did not walk up to the porch, but stopped at the bottom and placed one polished shoe on the first step. She sat on the fir chair that her grandmother had made, the wood creaking as it accepted her full body.
“You don’t wanna chile wid me, Ronal?”
He wiped the sweat from his gray-black face and closed his long eyelashes so they met like the tips of contemplative fingers.
“You know my plans, Ruby. What am I going to do with a baby at college?”
“She yours and mine together.”
“You have always known that I’ve planned to attend Howard. Why don’t you resolve this like last time?”
Ruby looked away from him out across the dirt road to the field, stripped now from too many harvests of cotton. Beyond that, the green fir trees blew gently to the west like giant ancestors bowing and nodding. She was always faintly aware of the steady rush of the river far back in the woods.
“You wanna come in for some ice water?” she asked him.
He looked up the dirt road. “I ought to get back for press. The union is threatening to shut us down. Where is your mother?”
“In town.”
He climbed up two more steps. “Where is Easton?”
“In town.” The breeze stopped, and the thick heat held them in their places.
“You’re going to fix it?” he asked.
“Ice water? It ain’t no trouble.”
“Come on, Ruby. Not the water.”
She rubbed the spot on her rough muslin dress where she’d spilled tuna oil. All the other dresses she’d made went to be sold in town. This was the first one she’d gotten to keep, because of the stain.
“You still want to come in?” she asked.
“I guess now is the safest time there is, anyway,” he said. He started up the stairs again to the door. She blocked the entrance and took his hand.
“Here.” She placed his hand on her stomach. “Meet your own daughter. She ain’t goin nowhere, so you might as well as introduce yourselves.”
She held his hand on her stomach. There was no protrusion of her body yet, but they smiled at each other.
Thinking back on that time, Ruby could hardly believe how the unbearable pain she used to feel had melted into the melancholy sweetness of memory. As she looked out at Cranston, remembering, she swayed with Lida in her arms, almost too big to hold now. It was a beautiful, quiet day in West Oakland, and not a person was on the street.
In a few minutes, Sandra joined Ruby on the porch, pulling the door closed but not all the way shut. She came up next to Ruby and put her hands on the rail. “I’m all done now, if you want to call.”
Ruby nodded her head and rubbed Lida on the back. “You talk to your papa?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What he say?”
“He thinks it was the Cubans behind it all. He always says it’s some foreigner. When the economy gets bad, he says it’s the Mexicans, and when crime gets bad, he says it’s the Communists or, you know, other people.” Sandra spoke quickly, excited by the interest Ruby showed. Ruby didn’t usually ask her about herself.
“You tell him where you at?” Ruby asked.
“Nab. I don’t talk to him much about my politics. He doesn’t go for that.”
“I’m sayin, did you tell him where you was callin from?”
Sandra turned and looked at the house as if she needed to remind herself. “You mean here?”
“Yes.” Ruby had not looked at her the whole time they were speaking, and now Sandra detected more hostility behind the questions than friendly interest.
“Sure.” She folded her arms and cleared her throat.
“What’d he think?”
“I told him I was at a friend’s house.”
“So he don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“We colored,”
“No.” They stood in silence for a moment more, and then Sandra headed back to the door.
“You going to tell him?” Ruby asked.
Sandra kept her hand on the doorknob but didn’t turn it. “Sometime.”
“Not every White man’s proud to have his daughter out wit a colored boy. But dey don’t hardly never blame de girl. Most always de boy be gettin killed.”
“My father isn’t going to kill anyone.” Sandra came back out and faced her. “You don’t like that I’m White, do you?”
Ruby put Lida down but held her hand. The child bent to the floorboards and picked up a tack.
“Give me dat.” Ruby took the tack from her, then turned to Sandra. “I’m going to be straight wit you, ’cause you always askin us straight-up about how it is. I don’t mind so much dat you White. What I mind is dat you can’t tell your papa you seein a colored boy. Either you think maybe you’ll hang around and tell him later but you don’t know your own mine, or you scared to tell him and you ain’t never plannin to tell him; you just figure you wait long enough and den one day you just gonna up and go.”
Sandra was about to argue, to get indignant and say she knew her own mind, that she would stand up to her father or any other bigot, and that she resented the accusation. But she looked into Ruby’s eyes and saw no anger, just a serious concern, and then resignation.
“I know what you’re saying,” Sandra replied. She looked at the houses along the street, the brightly painted Victorians with wooden gates. “To be honest with you, I never really thought it through, how I’m going to tell my father and all if it gets more serious. It just makes me so angry that it’s such a big deal to be together. I’m not planning to just leave; that’s not what I want to do.”
Ruby nodded her head. “Well, at least you honest about it. I got to say dat.”
Lida toddled to the door, pushed it open, and went inside.
“Well, I got to call my mama now.” Ruby followed her child in, and Sandra stayed out on the porch alone, watching the empty street.
* * *
CHRISTMAS EVE, RUBY sat at her sewing machine while little Lida slept on the couch. Ruby wet the frayed end of a blue thread with her lips and slipped it through the needle in a fluid rotation of her wrist. Her foot pressed against the pedal, and she turned the light blue chiffon so that the stitches hemmed in the collar.
She was making a dress for Sandra. Perhaps it was a peace offering, or an indirect gift to her brother. In either case, she had always thought that nice clothes made a person more attractive. She would have made a dress for herself if there had been someone who cared how she looked. But that was self-pitying nonsense, and she wouldn’t let herself go there. If she could do nothing useful for herself, at least she could help out her brother. Easton was out with Corbet celebrating; he’d finally landed a job at a garage.
Ruby’s hands were still young, the skin still tight and smooth. She loved her hands when they turned the fabric. She would finish this dress and then get back to making the yellow banana dresses for the stores. She made only half as much money from the dresses as from cleaning, but she couldn’t afford to lose any extra money now. Even if she could, she wouldn’t ever stop sewing and let housecleaning be her only job in life; that would be like chewing without tasting.
The water bill, the property tax, the ants, the food, the medication for Corbet’s amputation and diabetes, her own rotten tooth, Lida’s coughing—it all spun around in her mind. But the needle pumping up and down into the fabric narrowed her focus. She watched her hands and listened to the machine whir, and soon she was back home in Norma, her
mother sitting next to her at the dining table in the kitchen, sewing on the pocket by hand. Elise had said on the phone that her hair was getting gray now, but Ruby couldn’t imagine that. She saw her mama’s chestnut-brown hair wrapped in the black bandanna, her forehead glistening red in the summertime as she told her stories, lived her stories, which never had beginning or end, just endless interruptions.
Ruby remembered how their house filled with light and space in the summer; pollen floated in through the open windows, and the sun made streaks through the slats in the wooden walls. The house was old. Ruby’s great-great-grandmother, Pearl, rented the house from her former master, Ruby’s great-great-grandfather, after the Union Army burned down Norma and killed most of the White men in the Marlboro family. Elise always looked to the side when telling her stories, as if she were remembering the day when it happened, though it had been forty years before she was born. And Ruby imagined it too, since, as Elise told it, appearances hadn’t changed much.
“Nanna Pearl could take one a her shoes and hit a mouse ’cross the room. Wham!” Elise laughed like the wind coming around a corner, a burst of air with no voice. “She could do it in the dark when you asleep: wham! An you sit up. ‘JE-SUS, Lord, what was that?’ An Pearl’d say, ‘Go back to sleep, baby. You safe now.’ My Nanna Saluda slep in the same bed wit her mama Pearl till she was ’bout six, and she tell me she never get a night’s rest till both shoes been throwed.”
Ruby would finish the dress and hand it to her mother, and her mother would always say, “That’s another quarter for your pocket.” And she was good to her word: a quarter for every dress sold in town. But neither of them ever kept the money; they just put it in the pickle jar for the family—like Ruby did now in Oakland.
Ruby tried to keep her head back in Norma, but the bills started to swirl around. She finished the dress for Sandra and shook it out. Now, one more banana dress and she would finish the stack. This order would bring in another seventy-five dollars, which would pay for the shopping. She felt her sore tooth with her tongue and sucked at it, a warm sweetness in her saliva.
Lida coughed and Ruby turned to her sleeping daughter. Elise had asked on the phone about her, wondered if she had Ronald’s beautiful long lashes. She did—those long black lashes. She was going to be a beauty, and she would have any man she wanted, marry a lawyer and never clean a house or sew a dress, unless of course they had their own business together, mother and daughter.
