Hell's Diva

by Anna J.

  “No, it’s not okay,” she said. “She didn’t see what happened. Her mother and father are dead, she’s eight years old, and she’s been through enough.”

  Ruby grabbed Mecca by the hand and they left the apartment. Mecca’s mother’s prayer was answered. Mecca left Brownsville, but her life in Brownsville was traded for another notorious Brooklyn neighborhood, Coney Island. On the drive to Coney Island in Ruby’s 1982 black and yellow Camaro, Mecca informed her aunt about what she saw and heard when her parents were killed.

  “Daddy talked to this guy. His name is Darnell. He’s Tamika from my school brother,” Mecca said in her childish tone.

  “Auntie knows who you’re talking about,” Ruby said in a hoarse, scratchy voice. She held up two fingers to Mecca while she switched lanes on the Belt Parkway. “It was two of them?” Ruby asked.

  “Yup, two of them. The other one didn’t take his mask off.”

  Ruby nodded her head. She tried to hold back the tears because she wanted to be strong for her niece. Mecca needed her aunt, and if she saw Ruby crying Ruby figured Mecca would be deeply affected by first the loss of her parents, and the sadness of her aunt. Ruby wiped her eyes and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She glanced over at Mecca, who was staring out the passenger window at cars and the grimy Brooklyn neighborhoods that lay along the side of the Belt Parkway with tears running down her face. Ruby watched a roach crawl out of the collar of Mecca’s pajama top. She grabbed it and smashed it in her hand.

  Mecca turned and stared at her aunt as Ruby smashed the roach. They looked into each other’s eyes, both understanding the silent language that Ruby would smash the people who killed her sister and brother-in-law, just like she did that roach. Without any words, Mecca continued watching the scenery through tear-blurred eyes, knowing her life from then on would never be the same.

  Chapter Three

  Twenty-five-year-old Ruby Davidson was the total opposite of her now deceased older sister, who Mecca was named after and was known around the way as Big M. Ruby was a dark brown, five feet eleven inches, big-boned woman. She kept her shoulder-length hair constantly wrapped with a blue bandanna, and she refused to wear women’s apparel.

  Ruby was a beautiful woman under the masculine mask she kept herself under. Ruby and Big M shared the same birth mother but had different fathers who neither knew. Ruby and Big M’s mother was a young teenager at the ages of fifteen and sixteen when she gave birth to her two daughters. Big M’s father was found dead behind a Bedford-Stuyvesant bar with multiple stab wounds to his chest. His killer was never found. Ruby’s father was killed in the Attica riots serving a twenty-five-to-life sentence after killing a cop walking the beat in his Brownsville neighborhood.

  Ruby and Big M never met their fathers’ families so there were no grandmothers or aunts or uncles they could spend weekends or holidays with. Their mother’s family was spread out down south from Georgia to Louisiana, and their deep religious roots prevented them from dealing with their northern kin, who were into drugs and other sinful activities. Ruby and Mecca’s mother raised her two daughters on her own until she fell victim to heroin.

  One day a neighbor in Ruby and Big M’s Van Dyke project building, a housing project down the block from the Langston Hughes project Mecca watched her parents get murdered in, found Ruby’s mother in the staircase with a needle in her arm almost dead. The neighbor contacted the Board of Children’s Welfare, also known as BCW, and informed them of what was happening in apartment 5B. The city placed Ruby and her sister in a foster home on the premise that they would be returned to their mother when she cleaned up. She never did.

  Ruby, the youngest, and her year-older sister, ran away from their foster home when they were twelve and thirteen. Even though she was a year younger, Ruby was more mature than her older sister. She had more leadership qualities. It was her idea to take off from their foster home in Queens and make their way back to Brownsville. Ruby felt like she would rather deal with the street life in which she grew up and was comfortable with, than deal with foster parents who didn’t like her and her sister and only wanted them there because they were getting a check.

  Ruby’s body developed faster than her older sister so she looked older than her twelve years. Boys as old as eighteen approached young Ruby looking for a chance to get in her pants. Ruby had her first sexual experience on a project roof with this boy named Ron who was sixteen years old. She told her older sister afterward, revealing to her how painful it was. Ruby thought Ron was her boyfriend because he let her and her sister live in his two-bedroom apartment he shared with his ailing grandmother in the Langston Hughes projects.

  He gave Ruby money and brought her clothes. The money he gave her she bought her older sister clothes with. When Ruby and her sister left the foster home, they dropped out of school. Ruby’s boyfriend sold drugs in Brownsville, and eventually Ruby began to hold his drugs while he stood on the corner. He would send the customers to Ruby after the customers gave him the money.

  He paid Ruby one hundred dollars a day. She saved money so one day she could get her and her sister an apartment. Mecca got a job at a local McDonalds when she turned fifteen after Ruby talked her boyfriend into taking Mecca down to get her working papers. Ron put Ruby on the lease of the apartment and when his grandmother died three years later the apartment was in her name. Ruby in turn put her sister on the lease because she had a job. Because Big M’s job was a minimum-wage job, the rent would be lowered to accommodate her income.

  Ron was arrested for a murder he committed against a rival clan in the Langston Hughes projects. Eventually, he pleaded to a five to fifteen–year bid and was shipped upstate to the same prison Ruby’s father was killed in, Attica. Ruby was devastated.

  She loved him. He was her first. She visited him faithfully. She sold the drugs he left behind and made sure his commissary account stayed in the three-digit range. She snuck in balloons of heroin for him to sell on the inside and accepted his collect calls. Ruby was always there for his calls. She wrote him love letters every night, crying herself to sleep. She never looked at another man, ignoring the advances guys made around the projects. Even some of his friends tried to get a piece of her.

  “Damn, that nigga got you sucked up, girl! Let me hit it while he gone,” they would say when she was seen around the projects. She ignored them all.

  At the same time, her older sister was seeing a guy from the neighborhood named Bobby Sykes. The prettiest nigga Ruby ever saw. Her sister was happy and that’s what made Ruby like Bobby. Ruby sometimes became jealous of her sister’s relationship because her man was in jail while her sister enjoyed the company of Bobby. Bobby bought her sister anything she wanted. Her sister stayed with the latest trend of clothing and he decorated her with diamond-studded trinkets, rings, bracelets, and necklaces.

  Ruby had a rough time selling dope in the projects because she was a female. At first the hustlers accepted it because they knew she was doing it to take care of her man, who they respected, but that didn’t last. Ruby knew she had to get her own respect if she was going to continue to hustle. She bought a gun from an old timer who ran the neighborhood number spot. Even though it was a .25, Ruby had to make do until she was able to buy and handle a bigger one.

  The day came when she had to put her weapon to use. The cousin of the guy her boyfriend had killed heard that Ruby was making money for his cousin’s killer. He had to put a stop to that. He was a known troublemaker around Brownsville. Anywhere he went, something was bound to happen. He was also known to carry around a blue steel .44 Magnum and wasn’t scared to use it. For that, he was given the moniker “Blue.”

  The rain poured down heavily on that Brownsville night, sending the dopefiends into the staircases to shoot up and the hustlers into project lobbies to hustle. Ruby stood in the hallway of her building wearing a black sheepskin with the hat to match, a black pair of Vidal Sassoon jeans, a black sweatshirt with “Ruby” written on it in white letters, and black Pumas.
She had a plastic bag in her coat pocket with two bundles of dope in it, and her .25 in her other pocket.

  Blue walked into the lobby with a black rain suit on with a black hooded sweatshirt underneath it. He took his hood off and glanced at Ruby while she leaned up against the silver mailboxes on the wall. He pressed the button on the elevator, acting as if he were waiting for it to come.

  Ruby knew who he was. Everyone in Brownsville knew who he was. Seeing him around the way almost every day, Ruby didn’t think anything of him coming into the building. She definitely didn’t expect him to try to rob her as he pulled his blue steel .44 and pointing it at her chest.

  Ruby had never had a gun pointed at her before and the shock of it made everything seem as if it were in slow motion. The graffiti on the walls looked as if it were moving. The pissy smell in the lobby seemed as if it were new to Ruby. She already had her hands in her pockets so she pulled out the plastic bag containing the two bundles and she put her other hand on the trigger.

  “Where’s the money? I know you got money. If I search you and find some I’ma blast you, bitch!” Blue said between clenched teeth.

  “That’s…that’s all I got,” Ruby stuttered in a fearful voice.

  “Don’t play with me, I know you sending that bitch-ass nigga of yours money. He lucky I wasn’t around when he got my cousin or I would have murdered that punk-ass nigga!”

  Hearing Blue say vulgar things about her man made all the fear in Ruby vanish. Her fear was replaced by a burning rage in her chest. With the gun still in her pocket, she pointed it at him and squeezed five times. All five shots hit Blue in his stomach, his groin, and his thighs, sending him falling face forward. His finger pulled the trigger on his gun as he fell, sending a bullet into the building’s front door.

  “Who’s the bitch-ass nigga now, you faggot!” Ruby bent down and took his gun as he lay on the floor, moaning, then spit on him.

  She ran out of the building and disappeared into the Brownsville night. A bullet had traveled to Blue’s spine and he was paralyzed from the waist down. Ruby moved to Coney Island after she shot and paralyzed Blue. Blue didn’t tell the cops who shot him, though. He was embarrassed by being shot by a female, let alone the girlfriend of his cousin’s killer, so he told his friends that some cat he never saw before ran him down. When Ruby visited Brownsville, Blue, now being pushed around in a wheelchair by his little brother, only glanced at her, not wanting to stir up any trouble.

  Ruby’s world came crumbling in on her when she took one of her weekend trips to Attica to visit her boyfriend. The prison allowed inmates five visitors at one time. The prison only informed visitors that an inmate had visitors if the limit was reached; otherwise, they would allow a visitor to visit an inmate who was already on a visit. When Ruby was let in she immediately noticed her boyfriend hugging and kissing on a girl she recognized from Langston Hughes. She walked over to the couple just as they finished kissing.

  “Who the fuck is this bitch, nigga?” Ruby yelled, standing between her boyfriend and the girl. Looking at the both of them, tears began to form in her eyes.

  “She’s a friend, Ruby. Chill out, girl,” her boyfriend explained, trying to grab Ruby’s hand. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she was about to go off. The other visitors and inmates all watched the drama unfold. Even the correction officer positioned at a desk at the front of the visiting room watched.

  “After all I been through for you, this is how you pay me back? This is what I get, you bastard?”

  “Yo, you buggin’, Ruby. She’s my friend!”

  “Friend? Fuck you mean friend, nigga? You just asked me to marry you, and I’m your friend? You better tell this bit—” the girl responded. She was shorter and smaller than Ruby, but she wasn’t the least bit afraid of Ruby’s stature.

  She didn’t get the chance to finish her sentence before Ruby was all over her. The correction officer had to intervene before total chaos broke out. He had to call for backup to get Ruby off of the girl because she was already bleeding from the nose and mouth. The visit was terminated, and Ruby left the prison distraught and heartbroken. She never visited him again. She didn’t respond to his letters or accept his calls. She told her sister about the incident and the next day his name was taken off the lease. Ruby threw all of his clothes, pictures, and anything else that was his or reminded her of him in the incinerator. Ruby developed a deep hatred for men after her ordeal, and she swore to her sister that she would never let another nigga have her heart again.

  As Ruby and Mecca drove the streets toward home, Ruby tried her best to get these thoughts out of her head. She couldn’t help but notice how much Mecca looked like her now-deceased sister, and vowed to herself that she would do everything in her power to help Mecca get through these trying times that were clearly too much for a child to handle. Ruby also knew she couldn’t dwell on the past, and had to keep the flow going in her own life.

  Ruby brought her niece to her Coney Island apartment a few blocks away from the amusement park the neighborhood was famous for. Her duplex apartment on Twenty-Fourth Street between Surf and Mermaid Avenues was decorated with mirrored walls and bright-colored furniture. It had a seventies look to it. Ruby was living in the apartment with a female companion, but she was currently serving a ten-year sentence for possession of a half kilo of heroin found in a backpack she attempted to bring on a Greyhound bus headed to Virginia. When they entered the apartment, Ruby turned on the television for Mecca to watch.

  “You hungry, baby?” she asked while walking into the kitchen. Ruby didn’t know why she asked that question, knowing her niece’s appetite probably was gone by what she had seen. She didn’t have an appetite herself. She just wanted to take Mecca’s mind off of what had happened as much as she could.

  “Yes, Auntie, do you have Cap’n Crunch?” Mecca replied to her surprise. Ruby knew at that moment that Mecca was tougher than the average girl her age. If she could get through the death of her parents with no problem, anything else that would come her way would be a breeze.

  Chapter Four

  He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.

  Revelations 13:10

  After two weeks of taking Mecca shopping for new clothes and furniture for the room once used by Ruby’s roommate, Mecca returned to school. Ruby allowed Mecca to continue to attend school in Brownsville with all of her friends. She, along with some of Mecca’s teachers, noticed a change in Mecca’s attitude immediately. Her temper, to be exact.

  Her first explosion was directed toward a girl her age named Tamika, the sister of her parents’ killer. Tamika didn’t know it was her brother who had killed Mecca’s parents. Tamika hardly saw her brother, and when he did come home it would be after a week of him missing and he would come home while Tamika was asleep. When she got home from school, he would be gone. It all popped off when Tamika asked Mecca for some candy during lunch period, something she was better off leaving alone.

  “Can I get one of your Now and Laters?”

  “No! Get your own,” Mecca replied to Tamika while rolling her eyes.

  “Forget you then,” Tamika came back, sucking her teeth and rolling her eyes at Mecca. When she turned to walk away she didn’t see Mecca charging at her like a speeding train. By the time she turned around, hearing the footsteps coming toward her, Mecca was swinging wildly, punching and scratching Tamika’s face. She pulled Tamika’s hair, forcing her to the floor and causing Tamika to squeal in pain.

  “Mecca, get off me! You’re hurting me!”

  Mecca had rage in her eyes and she didn’t hear Tamika’s cry. She didn’t hear the other students laughing and screaming for Mecca to “beat her up!” and “stop, Mecca, you’re hurting her!”

  Teachers hearing the commotion came to break it up. When Mecca was pulled off of Tamika, she had patches of her hair missing. Her face was scratched and bruised. Mecca was breathing hard and just stared at Tamika while the teachers walked her to the principal’s office
, where Mecca was told she was on a three-day suspension. Mecca thought she would come home to an angry Ruby. Instead, Ruby waited for Mecca to return home to a diamond bracelet and brand new Sergio Valente jeans and Reebok sneakers. Ruby was usually high off of the weed she constantly smoked, and smiled at Mecca.

  “You beat that li’l bitch ass, Mecca?”

  “Yeah, Auntie, I beat her ass.” Mecca smiled back at her aunt.

  Ruby hugged her niece and said, “If anybody says something you don’t like or tries to hurt your feelings, you beat they ass. If they beat you, you grab a bottle, a knife, anything you can find and you make sure they feel pain, you hear me?” Ruby asked. With a serious look on her face, she held Mecca’s shoulders and continued, “If I ever hear you let somebody hit you and you ain’t do nothing, I’ll beat your ass myself.”

  Ruby smiled again and handed Mecca her gifts. When teachers complained to Ruby, she told them she would deal with Mecca. Eventually Mecca got expelled at numerous schools in Brooklyn. By the time she reached junior high, Mecca had been to six elementary schools, and ended up in a school for problem kids known as “six hundred schools.”

  Ruby sold dope out of the apartment and didn’t have to worry about standing on corners subjected to harassing beat cops and detectives and the stick up kids. Coney Island was full of stick up kids. Ruby had regular clientele. People she knew. She didn’t run a spot where just anyone could come cop; her customers were also friends she invited in to drink and gossip with, most of them women.

  Ruby had some of the same customers she had before leaving Brownsville, and it was from her Brownsville customers that she received info she needed about the goings-on in Brownsville. The who’s who and what’s what of the neighborhood. This is how Ruby received the information she needed to make her move against the man responsible for killing her sister and her brother-in-law, and making her niece an orphan.