Once, while he was in the service, he and a colored buddy had been drunk, and on leave, in Munich. They were in a cellar someplace, it was very late at night, there were candles on the tables. There was one girl sitting near them. Who had dared whom? Laughing, they had opened their trousers and shown themselves to the girl. To the girl, but also to each other. The girl had calmly moved away, saying that she did not understand Americans. But perhaps she had understood them well enough. She had understood that their by-play had had very little to do with her. But neither could it be said that they had been trying to attract each other—they would never, certainly, have dreamed of doing it that way. Perhaps they had merely been trying to set their minds at ease; at ease as to which of them was the better man. And what had the black boy thought then? But the question was, What had he thought? He had thought, Hell, I’m doing all right. There might have been the faintest pang caused by the awareness that his colored buddy was doing possibly a little better than that, but, indeed, in the main, he had been relieved. It was out in the open, practically on the goddamn table, and it was just like his, there was nothing frightening about it.
He smiled—I bet mine’s bigger than yours is—but remembered occasional nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable forests, came at him with a knife on the edge of precipices, threatened to hurl him down steep stairs to the sea. In each of the nightmares he wanted revenge. Revenge for what?
He sat down again at his worktable. The page on the typewriter stared up at him, full of hieroglyphics. He read it over. It meant nothing whatever. Nothing was happening on that page. He walked back to the window. It was daylight now, and there were people on the streets, the expected, daytime people. The tall girl, with the bobbed hair and spectacles, wearing a long, loose coat, walked swiftly down the street. The grocery store was open. The old Rumanian who ran it carried in the case of milk which had been deposited on the sidewalk. He thought again that he had better get some sleep. He was seeing Ida today, they were having lunch with Richard and Cass. It was eight o’clock.
He stretched out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought of Ida. He had seen her for the first time about seven years ago. She had been about fourteen. It was a holiday of some kind and Rufus had promised to take her out. And perhaps the reason he had asked Vivaldo to come with him was because Vivaldo had had to loan him the money. Because I can’t disappoint my sister, man.
It had been a day rather like today, bright, cold, and hard. Rufus had been unusually silent and he, too, had been uncomfortable. He felt that he was forcing himself in where he did not belong. But Rufus had made the invitation and he had accepted; neither of them could get out of it now.
They had reached the house around one o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Scott had opened the door. She was dressed as though she, too, were going out, in a dark gray dress a little too short for her. Her hair was short but had lately been treated with the curling iron. She kissed Rufus lightly on the cheek.
“Hey, there,” she said, “how’s my bad boy?”
“Hey, yourself,” said Rufus, grinning. There was an expression on his face which Vivaldo had never seen before. It was a kind of teasing flush of amusement and pleasure; as though his mother, standing there in her high heels, her gray dress, and with her hair all curled, had just done something extraordinarily winning. And this flush was repeated in his mother’s darker face as she smiled—gravely—back at him. She seemed to take him in from top to toe and to know exactly how he had been getting along with the world.
“This here’s a friend of mine,” Rufus said, “Vivaldo.”
“How do you do?” She gave him her hand, briefly. The brevity was not due to discourtesy or coldness, simply to lack of habit. Insofar as she saw him at all, she saw him as Rufus’ friend, one of the inhabitants of the world in which her son had chosen to live. “Sit down, do. Ida’ll be right out.”
“She ready?”
“Lord, she been getting ready for days. Done drove me nearly wild.” They sat down. Vivaldo sat near the window which looked out on a dirty back yard and the back fire escape of other buildings. Across the way, a dark man sat in front of his half-open window, staring out. In spite of the cold, he wore nothing but an undershirt. There was nothing in the yard except cans, bottles, papers, filth, and a single tree. “If anything had happened and you hadn’t showed up, I hate to think of the weeping and wailing that would have gone on in this house.” She paused and looked toward the door which led to the rest of the apartment. “Maybe you boys like a little beer while you waiting?”
“That all you got to offer us?” Rufus asked, with a smile. “Where’s Bert?” “Bert’s down to the store and he ain’t back yet. You know how your father is. He going to be sorry he missed you.” She turned to Vivaldo. “Would you like a glass of beer, son? I’m sorry we ain’t got nothing else—”
“Oh, beer’s fine,” said Vivaldo, looking at Rufus, “I’d love a glass of beer.” She rose and walked into the kitchen. “What your friend do? He a musician?”
“Naw,” said Rufus, “he ain’t got no talent.”
Vivaldo blushed. Mrs. Scott returned with a quart bottle of beer and three glasses. She had a remarkably authoritative and graceful walk. “Don’t you mind my boy,” she said, “he’s just full of the devil, he can’t help it. I been trying to knock it out of him, but I ain’t had much luck.” She smiled at Vivaldo as she poured his beer. “You look kind of shy. Don’t you be shy. You just feel as welcome here as if you was in your own house, you hear?” And she handed him his glass.
“Thank you,” said Vivaldo. He took a swallow of the beer, thinking she’d probably be surprised to know how unwelcome he felt in his own house. And then, again, perhaps she wouldn’t be surprised at all.
“You look as though you dressed up to go out someplace, too, old lady.” “Oh,” she said, deprecatingly, “I’m just going down the block to see Mrs. Braithwaite. You remember her girl, Vickie? Well, she done had her baby. We going to the hospital to visit her.”
“Vickie got a baby? Already? ”
“Well, the young folks don’t wait these days, you know that.” She laughed and sipped her beer.
Rufus looked over at Vivaldo with a frown. “Damn,” he said. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty well—under the circumstances.” Her pause suggested that the circumstances were grim. “She had a right fine boy, weighed seven pounds.” She was about to say more; but Ida entered.
ROSA GUY
[1925–]
AS A CHILD, ROSA CUTHBERT IMMIGRATED FROM TRINIDAD TO Harlem in 1932. Two years later when her mother became ill and died, Cuthbert and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, a disciple of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, whose politics influenced her later activism. In 1937, her father also died, leaving the two girls in the care of foster homes. At age fourteen, Cuthbert quit school for a job in a lingerie factory, where she became involved in the labor movement. In 1941, she married Warner Guy, had a child the next year, and divorced eight years later.
Guy became active in the American Negro theater during World War II. Central to her work as an actor and playwright was the goal of creating authentic African American drama devoid of traditional racial stereotypes. To this end, she cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild in 1951, a groundbreaking workshop for black writers that included Maya Angelou and Paule Marshall, among other emerging artists.
Guy’s first novel, Bird at My Window (1966), portraying the social adversities of black men, was dedicated to the recently slain Malcolm X. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 led the author to tour the South, where she interviewed young people for her essay collection, Children of Longing (1970).
Guy is internationally renowned as a writer of young adult fiction, having established her literary reputation with publication of The Friends (1973) and Ruby (1976), the first of her many young adult novels. Ruby is set in a West Indian household in
Harlem. As with Guy’s most popular stories for young adults, her protagonist is a young black woman facing overwhelming odds. Unlike the author’s other works, however, Ruby deals directly with lesbianism, making the book the first young adult novel to depict a lesbian affair. Ruby is a desperately lonely eighteen-year- old, whose mother has died, leaving her and sister Phyllisia under the watchful eye of their tyrannical father. When Ruby meets Daphne, a beautiful, strong-willed classmate of exceptional intelligence, her love for the outgoing young woman becomes a hopeful source of liberation. In this excerpt, Ruby, who is frightened of Daphne, gathers the courage to speak to her.
from Ruby
[1976]
The moment the door slammed behind Calvin the next morning Ruby was up and dressing. Phyllisia opened one eye, and began complaining. “But Ruby, it’s Saturday. What do you have to do this early?”
“I have to see someone.”
“On a Saturday morning?”
Ruby rushed out without answering, and only when she actually found herself in the streets did she begin to doubt her intentions. Saturday was a morning that people stayed in bed. What if she was intruding where she was not wanted? Yet she quickened her steps, afraid of changing her mind. Turning the corner, Ruby bumped into someone. They side-stepped in the same direction at least three times before looking at each other.
“Ruby!”
“Orlando!” The meeting made them speechless. Then, to break the awkward silence, Orlando waved the container of milk he held in his hand. “I just came from the store.”
“I—I am taking a walk.”
“Can—can I walk with you?”
“No—I’m afraid not. I—I want to be alone.”
“Oh.” He touched her hand. She drew away. “Well, anyway it’s nice seeing you.”
“But you can always see me, Orlando. All you have to do is turn your head when I pass.”
“I—I mean to talk to…”
“Then—you can say hello.”
“And get another bloody nose? But I’d even take that chance if I had a little encouragement.”
“Encouragement? I always look at you. And anyway why blame me if you’re afraid of my father?”
His pleasant manner changed. “Afraid? Look, once a guy gets mauled by a lion, he gets mighty careful about touching the cub.”
“Not if he’s a real man.”
“Even if he is a brave man. It’s you who don’t have courage, Ruby. You’re old enough to tell your old man—”
“I have to go now.” She cut him off abruptly.
“But you’re still so beautiful,” he said. “I think you’re the most beauti—” She ran, trying to push his words out of her ears; him out of her mind. But as she rode downtown she could not help reflecting that he had grown even better-looking than she remembered. He seemed taller, thicker, and he had begun to grow a beard.
Ruby hurried off the bus and to the building she had gone into the day before, only to find that it was not easy to enter this morning—not easy at all.
Why did I come? What will I say? What do I want from her? I don’t know…I don’t know… She walked to the next corner, stood uncertainly. Then she walked back, stood again in front of the house, looking in. She walked to the opposite corner and wondered if she should wait for a bus. She walked back to the building, moving aside to allow a drunken-looking couple to enter. Panicking at the thought of following them in, she started again toward the bus stop, and might have gone home this time if she had not noticed a man leering at her from a parked car.
Lifting her head proudly, she went into the building, walked through the dark, dark hallway to the elevator, and pushed the button. She waited with impatience as the car creaked painfully downward and the elevator door reluctantly opened. She entered, praying apprehensively as the tired car labored back up, and thanked God when it stopped on the fourth floor.
She followed the letters on the doors to apartment 4E. But when she reached the door, she was unable to ring the bell. “I am not bold,” she muttered. “I am not bold at all.” Back at the elevator she was reluctant to get in it again and suffer its age, aches, tiredness. She decided to take the stairs, but only went down two steps before she turned, ran back up and rang the apartment bell.
Waiting was agony. Seconds, minutes eased away while her heart pounded in her chest, her ears, her temples. She heard no sound and thought that perhaps it was because of the pounding in her body. She leaned against the door, and the stillness she heard within the apartment was a waiting stillness. She stared hard at the peep-hole, wondering if someone was standing there staring back at her, refusing to open simply because it was her standing there. She flattened herself against the wall.
What am I doing here? What am I doing here? I must be mad…mad to be here…at the door of a stranger…a stranger who obviously despises me…I must be mad… Suspense, fright, her lack of purpose forced her away from the door. She walked quickly toward the stairs.
“The name is Ruby Cathy, isn’t it?”
Ruby whirled around. The door had cracked open and the words were spoken through the unlit, chain-latched opening in the doorway. “Ye—es.” Her unsteady answer did not appear to satisfy the listener, and, after a pause, she stumbled on. “Your—your friend gave me your address.” Her voice trailed off. She did not want to lie. She had not come to lie. But how tell that hostile, unseen presence that she had followed her home from school one day? What was her reason? “I—I wanted to talk to you.”
“Well fathers!” A soft exclamation. “Whatever friend can you mean? I have so few—and even my worst enemy knows better than to wake me up early on a Saturday morning.” The tone—intellectual, carefully rounded, and pointed to embarrass—killed all hopes for understanding. And wasn’t that the reason she had come?
“I—I—want—I—need…”
“These are not my office hours.” The hostility deepened. Tears sprang into Ruby’s eyes.
“Please, please,” she sobbed softly. “I’m unhappy. I’m so unhappy.” “Stop that!” The voice was sharp; almost brutal. But the chain was lifted, the door opened. “Did you come to cry at my door and disturb my neighbors? Come in.” And, as Ruby hesitated, “Don’t stand there wetting my welcome mat. Come in, come in.”
Daphne led her down a long, darkened hallway from where she could see the sun lighting the drawn shades of the living room. But Daphne’s room struck her first. It was before the living room, at a corner where the hall turned sharply. Upon entering, Ruby noticed a second door in her room, closed off by heavy, wine-colored drapes, matching the drawn draperies at the window, which obviously led back into the L-shaped hall.
Daphne’s room was bright, however, from overhead lights. It was a large room, furnished with a big mahogany desk and chair, a mahogany bureau, a ceiling-to-floor lamp, and a convertible couch-bed. The walls were lined with crammed bookcases.
Daphne sat down at the desk and motioned Ruby to the unmade bed. Ruby sat down primly on the edge, trying not to stare. Daphne was lovely. She wore shortie, see-through pajamas which revealed nothing more than that there was little softness about her. Her legs were well shaped, muscular; her shoulders broad, yet femininely rounded; her stomach flat and hard. Muscles accentuated her slim arms. Yet her hair, crispy-curly, tied with a string, hung to her shoulders, in a disarray Ruby found charming, softening the effect of her thick neck, her square jaw. Her feet were as well manicured as her long tapering fingers. Ruby had never seen such lovely feet. Struggling against showing her admiration, she settled for staring at Daphne’s feet, and stared so intensely that Daphne’s toes began to wiggle. This forced Ruby to raise her eyes, slowly; slowly noticing, even as she did—self-consciously—the smoothness of Daphne’s taut, tan skin.
Then she was looking into the eyes, the gray eyes in which the merest glint of humor surfaced—mocking, waiting. The silence stretched out and Daphne’s controlled face made clear her invention not to break it. Ruby reached in her mind for words.
“I—I…” She swallowed. Finally she blurted: “You don’t like me, do you?” Daphne’s face relaxed in surprise. “As I live and breathe!” she exclaimed softly. “Did you wake me up on a Saturday morning to ask me that?” Reaching behind her on the desk she took a ten-inch toothpick from an inkwell and began digging around her large white teeth. Ruby gazed fascinated. They were so large, so lovely.
“But you don’t—do you?” What did it matter that her words made little sense? At least it was a starting point.
“I don’t believe it.” Daphne blinked, deliberately. “But since you ask, let’s put it this way. I neither like nor dislike you. That’s the way I feel about most people. There are some, however, that I don’t dig. You—happen to be one of them.” Slipping slang into conversation was her way of showing that it was not her natural speech pattern, that she did it from choice. It seemed to matter to her that this was understood. “Why? Tell me why? What have I ever done?”
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