by Cynthia Bond
After that, Celia was surprised that she had ever had time for classes; for spelling competitions; for A’s in Arithmetic and History; for boys like Chauncy Rankin and K.O. Charles, when there was so much to be done at home. Besides Chauncy and them had never made much time for her until her sophomore year, when her chest and hips had swollen up so that students actually pointed the first day of the school year. That was also the day Chauncy and K.O. began their friendly rivalry over the handsome, brown-skinned preacher’s daughter at number 8 Abraham Road.
Chauncy and K.O. fought over everything. Dominoes, dice, marbles, baseball, grades, rows plowed, races run, lakes swum and, most of all, girls won. Chauncy Rankin, at sixteen, stood six feet four inches, skin smooth and toasted almond, black hair that had the nerve to curl up and wave. His smile finished off most, perfect white with a twisted dimple under his left cheek. K.O. was the scholar, shale brown and only one inch shy of Chauncy’s height, but built for speed and strength. Angled jaw, cheekbones high, K.O. looked as if he’d been chiseled with a sharp blade.
The fall of ’36, Chauncy and K.O. descended upon Abraham Road. Since Celia’s father did not allow her to date, they came to her house, bringing Hershey bars and RC Colas. Sitting in the parlor for hours at a time until the Reverend made whichever one was there leave. Chauncy would tease her, blow bubbles in the soda and say, “I’m a huckleberry above K.O.’s persimmon any day.”
K.O. read her bits of Nature by Emerson, and when they were alone, leaned into her ear and asked her, if he could, in two years, ask her to marry him. When Chauncy got word he plain out asked her. Celia said yes, as long as long engagements were all right with him. Chauncy said they were his favorite kind. K.O. took the news as best he could.
They’d planned to ask her parents’ permission that Easter Sunday. At the picnic, Chauncy held her hand tight, until folks started laughing and talking and pointing. Chauncy let go of her hand and pointed too. Celia followed his arm, his index finger, and saw her mother at the end of it, walking over that hill naked save her Easter hat, her light blue shoes and her lacing tat. Chauncy would never take hold of Celia’s hand again.
At fourteen, Celia gathered her wits and stitched them into her apron. She gladly quit Lincoln High School and looked after Ephram, and their father when he came into town. In a year of chopping wood, and plowing ten acres of land, her arms grew thick and corded. Scars wrapped themselves about her shins and knees. At fifteen, her hair grew brittle from soap and steam, and her velvet eyes began to film with grease and onerous routine. At sixteen her full lips started their descent towards her jaw and grew tight with the anger of responsibility. At seventeen, Ephram came down with a sickness of the joints and she had to drag him back and forth from the County Hospital in Galveston for nigh on two years. She was nineteen years old when her father was found murdered out by Marion Lake. Ephram was only thirteen. And she’d tried the best she knew how to explain to him why Mama was still far away, and why awful men did bad things to good men. But looking at Ephram’s face, the only answers she could think of were not hers. They were found in God’s house, kneeling at His throne. She took Ephram by the hand, walked back into the church doors and began her new life in Christ. Where she stayed for the next thirty-two years.
And she was grateful. Of course she was. As she often said during testimony, “Satan set his hounds agin’ me, with a powerful mind to win me. But he chase me so high-hard, I run straight to the arms of God.” Celia had invented hundreds of what she called “Sanctified Saids” over the years. Different members of the congregation had their favorites and put in requests before service. Never a jealous man, the Pastor called upon Celia to testify often, said she had a gift.
It was only on rare spring nights, when the wind carried a pinch of jasmine into her window just before she fell asleep, that Celia would press her lips against her cupped palm … and wonder what it must be like to actually kiss.
THE DAY had long since broken its yolk and was high above the horizon. Ruby felt the morning tickling her fingers, tickling and biting. She opened her eyes and saw red ants scattered across her hands. She quickly brushed them off, wiping her palm across the ground killing an entire battalion. Then she saw the man. He was innocent with sleep. What was left of his cake lay in crumbs between them.
She watched the rise and fall of his broad chest. His head lay upon a shoulder of earth. A bit of wind crossed her lap and Ruby noticed her eldest child as she leaned up from her grave. She pressed her waxy hand on his chin. Then came the others, like Lilliputians to sleeping Gulliver. Some held back, while some went boldly over and sat on his chest, plucked at his eyelashes and played with his ears.
He didn’t move and Ruby liked it that way. He was nice enough. If only he had been a sweetbay magnolia or a thistle blossom and needed only rain and sun. But he was a man and would require much more than that. Most of the men she had ever met had been devils or boys, and she already had enough of both.
Ephram rose quickly, brushing ants from his hands, his slacks and shirt sleeves. But his movements swept the ghost children away as well. They tumbled and fell on the grass. Ruby glared at his carelessness.
Ephram saw the fear in her eye and looked slowly at the ground lest he startle her, his body still, his breath soft.
Ruby felt his practiced calm and lashed out, “Ain’t you got somewhere you need to be?”
She watched him chuckle. “Not anymore I don’t.”
Ruby stared at him. He looked at his watch and then up at the orange blue sky, shaking his head and grinning.
“Who you laughin’ at?” she spat.
A bittersweet relief stole across his face. “Myself.”
“Then don’t let me interrupt you.” Ruby rose abruptly. The children gathered behind her like clouds.
She was set to spring. Ephram knew the signs. He wanted something akin to the salt lick he’d used to call a young doe when he was twelve. Then, “I go get us some of Miss P’s tea cakes. Made fresh yesterday.”
Her eyes pulled to him. His voice easy, “P & K open an hour on Sunday before church. I be there back in no time.” He waited, couldn’t push.
“Suit yourself,” Ruby sniped.
Ephram wiped the sweat from his forehead, and set down the road he’d traveled only a few hours before.
Ruby watched him walk away, back wide, collar wet. The man was patient—like he’d learned sweets after spinach early in life. He would come for her after breakfast—of that Ruby was sure. Scared, then frantic and quick. Then leave ashamed. Shame was best—it was as pliant as biscuit dough.
The old crow perched on the white fence and cawed.
“Shut up,” Ruby managed, closing her eyes.
It fluttered across the road and the short distance into the yard, gently scolding.
Ruby growled, “None of your damn business.”
It was the same damn bird—big. So big it snapped the skinny branches it sat upon. The same one who’d been clamoring about the place nigh on eleven years. Some might call it a raven, but they would be wrong. Ruby could tell by the caw and the way it purred when it was lonely.
Her youngest began to fuss, so Ruby rocked him. She tried to settle all of her children. They were restless so she sang to them:
“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry—
“Go to sleepy little baby.”
The black crow hopped down into Ruby’s yard, so she stretched her song across the ground.
“When you wake,
“you’ll have cake
“and all the pretty little horses.”
Voice soft so she wouldn’t scare them. It was their favorite.
“Way down yonder,
“in the meadow
“there’s a little baby crying.”
Her voice almost a whisper.
“Birds and butterflies,
“Round his eyes,
“Little baby finds his mama.”
Ruby felt them calm, their hands tucked under their cheeks, knees
folded. Soon they were asleep.
She looked at the crow scratching the ground softly, then picking up a cluster of hard green berries and flapping up to a low branch. In two weeks the tiny fruit would be yellow, in a month it would ferment, making all the birds and squirrels tipsy. Ruby and Maggie had watched them as children, the robins gorging themselves and then flying off like drunken pilots. Chickens, pigs and goats would nibble the shrunken brownish beads and wobble as they walked away, only to come back the next day. Maggie and Ruby had laughed and giggled in the front yard, saying they should open a Chinaberry Juke.
Years later, when Ruby returned to Liberty she had watched the tree in late August and smiled, especially at the large crow who seemed to have imbibed more than most—flapping and falling, stunned in the front yard. When the Rankins’ foxhound happened by, Ruby had decided to go outside and sit near her to keep the dog at bay. They had been friends ever since.
The bird cawed once more. Ruby looked around. The land felt different. The man’s footprints were still in the dust and the hill had not yet covered them. She looked down at her hands. The cut in her thumb, clumped with dirt. She thought about the polish she had worn into Liberty. The manicure Mrs. Gladdington had taken her to have in a private salon in Chelsea. She had chosen Lost Red by Elizabeth Arden. Ruby saw the clean taper of her hands folded in her lap as she took the train from New York. The brilliant scarlet of each perfect nail.
IT WAS the wrong Liberty. One hundred and four miles southwest from its Colored namesake, Liberty Township. Ruby should have known it the moment she bought the ticket at Penn Station, but the air about her was charged, and her thinking had flared and dimmed like a faulty fuse. Colors had flashed so bright that she’d had to wear her sunglasses inside, and sometimes the sound of static had fizzed and scratched in her ears.
It was 1963 and a world full of Negroes were making their way to Washington, D.C., to stir some change into the batter of the world. Taking trains, buses, some stuffed into the backs of pickups and some riding their thumbs, hitching five, six hundred miles. Like a lone salmon Ruby had taken the road south.
She should have known when the train stopped in Shreveport, Louisiana, instead of Lufkin, Texas, that she had overshot her Liberty.
But Ruby had been mean behind the train’s window. A low steady buzz shooting through her body. A voltage overdose that had amplified her spite and made it impossible to notice anything as benign as the world rolling and flashing in front of her. Instead she had twisted matchbook covers, unpeeled cigarette butts and shredded the moist filters. She had not spoken to the oozing woman across the aisle, although she had been given gentle leads to do so from the woman’s cow eyes, from her chubby hand waving a chicken drumstick like a baton, holding out the grease-stained bag as a communal offering. Ruby had shaken her head no in one clean glide. Ruby’s smile had been a wince. Even her hellos had been a reproach.
She’d sniffed at the elderly conductor as he walked by, silently impugning his personal care and hygiene. He had pretended not to notice, but the next time Ruby saw him he’d smelled strongly of balsam.
Ruby had not suspected that she was off-course until the conductor called out “LIB-er-ty next stop, LIB-er-ty,” and something tickled her. That something prompted her to truly look out the window. When she saw the flat prairie land of Central Texas instead of the piney woods, a panic rose then settled in her chest. She suddenly remembered the road to Liberty. Catch the Carolina South to Lufkin, Texas, change to the Buxton Limited until you reach Newton. Then take the Red Bus the thirty-seven miles to Liberty. She had not followed the bread crumbs she’d left over a decade ago and she had unfathomably forgotten her way home. She had only been able to spit out “Liberty,” the ticket was issued, and the train had barreled south.
Twenty minutes later, angry and confused, she pushed two fat quarters into the Red Cap’s hand as he helped her from the train. The weight of her mistake pushed her down on her luggage, where she sat and contemplated her next step.
That is how Ruby came to be sitting on the train platform amidst a fortress of new pink Samsonite bags. Her black hair swept straight and high, pressed within an inch of its life. Lipstick Persian red. The beauty mark on her right cheek darkened. The buzz in her head quieted to a hum as she secretly primped without benefit of mirror. When in distress, Ruby was certain, it was a matter of survival to look one’s best.
The last of the White folks and Negroes crisscrossed the platform to step aboard the train she had just vacated. The little stairs pulled up and the doors closed as a blue-black uniformed man walked up to Ruby, cap stiff, with a rail insignia brassed along the front. “Need help with your luggage Miss?”
Ruby raked through her purse—the Etienne Aigner purse—carefully avoiding the telegram from Maggie. The platform began to clear save a few men and women running to the train. She didn’t look at the Red Cap. Then she did. This was a man whose back had been used as a bootjack for the greater part of his life. Ruby realized that she had not breathed in this particular odor of obeisance for nearly a decade.
“Not exactly,” she answered. Her manner claimed unquestionable authority. It was one of the many things she’d learned on the Upper East Side of New York, how to use the tilt of a head, the jaunt of a chin to dictate and persuade. She found her cigarettes as the doors of the train sighed and closed. Leaving only Red Caps, the Station Master and little clusters of reunited families, lovers, White men conferring as they stepped away.
The Red Cap leaned in closer. Ruby felt the push in his voice. “Ma’am, you got somebody coming to get you?” he asked, his face creased with concern—a grandfather, an uncle, or a man with plenty of daughters.
His voice fell to a whisper, “Cuz with all this Colored March hullabaloo, Station Master ain’t gonna let no Colored woman set out here for too long without a ticket going somewheres.”
Ruby’s eyes settled on the man. The protectiveness of his voice was an affront to her. That and the bend-down-low in his carriage.
She pulled a Dunhill out of her purse. She placed the cigarette between her dark red lips, stared at the old man and waited. Ruby knew that years of habit would take his match and light the damn thing. He did just that. Ruby did not know why, but her eyes squinted in anger. She did not thank him. Just like a White woman. Just as Mrs. Gladdington had taught her—that some things were her right. That she no more had to thank the waiter or the cab driver than she would thank the air that she breathed.
Mrs. Charlise Gladdington had pulled Ruby from The Pony, a Village bar, and situated her in the maid’s quarters of her Upper East Side cooperative. Ruby was to be her companion—and that quickly, she escorted her to Bergdorf’s and brought home a world of Chanel and Emilio Pucci. Camel splashed with maroon and gold to better complement Ruby’s skin. She began taking her to the Met, the Museum of Modern Art and to quiet West Side parties where the women dressed in suits and ties. She sent Ruby, who had never gone to high school, to the City College of New York by the sheer weight of her position and the fact that she sat on the board. Ruby was one of a handful of Negro students, but the only one to be picked up by a driver at day’s end.
Ruby emptied glasses and ashtrays at the old woman’s parties, where the literati, artists and composers of the day gathered with benefactors, friends and would-be patrons. She lit cigarettes for Bukowski, Ginsberg and artist Elaine de Kooning. She brought gin and tonics to Ezra Pound, whom she had read, and Chivas on the rocks to John Hersey, whom she had not but pretended that she had.
Mrs. Gladdington’s only recompense for her largesse was the time spent reading to Ruby in the evenings, seated on the Charles Lane love seat, her clothed thigh just barely resting against Ruby’s knee.
“Miss?” The Red Cap was still standing there.
Ruby clipped her words. “I need to reach Newton, then on to Liberty Township.” The train spit and jerked to a start a few feet away.
“Liberty Township. Ain’t that that Colored Liberty by the Sab
ine?”
“Yes.”
“Ain’t no direct way there this time a day ’cept by car, Miss.”
“I don’t have a car. When is the next train?”
“Won’t be a train going that way ’til morning lest you catches the one you jes got off. It was Beaumont bound. From there, Newton’s a Greyhound bus away.”
The train pulling away from the station spit a spark of malice that landed in the tinderbox of Ruby’s throat. It conjured a wall of black soot and flames that filled her mouth, making it difficult for her to speak in full sentences.
“Is there a—where can I—is there a hotel I might—”
“Ain’t no place like that round here, Miss.”
Of course there isn’t, Ruby thought. Of course. Ruby realized that she had been out of the South for too long. She looked past the man at the slick green awnings, the red of the benches and the pinched face of the Station Master when his gray eyes landed upon her. It didn’t matter that she wore an original Mary Quant sundress, sky blue linen. It didn’t matter that she had winced at the spreading Negroes around her—sweating under flowered hats as they had stepped around her to get to the Colored car. None of that mattered. In his eyes she would always be a nigger. One he might be more likely to want to fuck, but a nigger all the same.
Ruby snapped back to the moment at hand. “Then can you arrange a ride? I’ll pay twenty-five dollars.”
The man jumped to attention, “See what I can do. I’ll be back directly, Miss.”
She looked back at the COLORED WAITING AREA sign. Nine years after the Brown decision and it still creaked boldly. Before she’d left Manhattan, her friend Billy, a costume designer at the X Theater in Greenwich Village, had been weeping. He’d equated the South for Northern Blacks with Nazi Germany for Jews. That it was insane to go. He’d said that Ruby hadn’t seen Maggie in nearly a decade, and that she should be as dead to her as the pickaninny, backwards town. For which Ruby had slapped him.
