by Cynthia Bond
It was the easiest money Ruby had ever made.
Ruby walked home. She carried the quarter close to her, then opened her palm. The word “Liberty” hung like a banner over the White man’s head, which made it easy for Ruby to know whom it was promised to. Both word and coin. With God’s trust and blessing.
Then she thought about the other Liberty, her Liberty. Red roads and piney woods. The sun yawning across the Texas sky, too tired to keep pace with the rolling earth. She thought about the Carolina South, which had taken her to Manhattan, the same train that had taken her mama seventeen years before. But her mother had chosen to pass. She’d stepped on Colored and walked off White in New York, shedding Liberty along the way, including her Blackness, her papa and a brown-skinned baby named Ruby Bell.
Ruby was constantly amazed by the gush of life pressing against her on the street. The theater marquees towering over her head. The bands plunking away on corners, crooning jazz, Southern blues and swing. The scream of taxi drivers, the sounds of rubber on concrete and hundreds of feet landing on pavement, then pushing off again with purpose. The eyes that raked over her, some approving, some not. The crush of Colored and White pressing shoulder to shoulder on streets, buses and subways. The enormous billboard with a stunning Negro woman named Katherine Dunham surrounded by Black men in feathers and masks, books standing tall in shop windows with the brown-skinned writers Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks and J. Saunders Redding smiling back. And the people! Sure Ruby passed Colored men and women with their heads bowed, dressed as maids in loose overcoats, or men in coveralls with ashen, scraped hands. But there were also the immaculately groomed Negro women in matching olive skirts and scarves, cigarette holders and poodles on green leashes, hair coiffed and pressed perfectly under leaning hats. There were dapper chocolate men in brown velvet suits with piles of books stuffed under their arms. Along with hot dog vendors and pretzel men who glared at her, there were also thin White men with goatees who smiled warmly at Ruby and young, young White men with shaggy hair and baggy slacks and stark women in loose skirts, passing out pamphlets about socialism and social reform, looking her right in the eye and inviting her to meetings. Ruby was lost and found, all at the same time. She scanned the many, many faces as she had for five months, looking for the red hair, cream skin and green eyes of her mother, Charlotte Bell, like the painted photograph that had lived above Papa Bell’s mantel. She felt her mother there, closer to her than air, on the periphery of her gaze. Since Ruby had arrived she followed each woman she spotted with red hair until she saw her face. This hope kept Ruby in Manhattan after months of fruitless searching, that and a new seeded liberty, a sharp-edged freedom that seemed to have taken root inside of her when she first arrived in the city.
Ruby held the furrier’s coin tighter. When she reached the maid’s room she rented in the Roger Williams Hotel on East Thirty-first she clinked the man’s quarter into an empty Band-Aid tin in the medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin and the Dixie Peach.
After the furrier, Sherman Monty, the owner of Monty’s delicatessen on Fifty-third, gave Ruby a case of provolone and five dollars for a blow job. The night manager of the Roger Williams Hotel gave her free towels and sheets for the use of Ruby’s hand and her bottle of lotion. Her neighbor Mr. Moskowitz gave her five pairs of panty hose for Vaseline sodomy. She gathered their change as well.
Ruby thought about walking along the Hudson, but the other women had razors, better shoes and pimps. She had seen the women on corners, dangling like coat hangers—wearing deep V-necks, red bandannas around their necks, and purple bruises barely hidden from view.
Unwilling to trade sovereignty for the brutality of protection, she passed three years walking into bars where, sitting on silver gray stools, she could hide her feet in the shadow of the bar. She learned what to wear, how to speak, and shifted and slipped into and out of the mouths of men and darkened her beauty spot and lips and brows and uncovered the night Village throb. It was 1953. The hip and the beat crowd pretended to pretend that skin color was a frock you donned for the evening. Ruby was more than beautiful, causing men and women to pause in their stride, to bump into light posts and whistle long and low. She was younger than everyone and dangled easily and brightly from ears and throats. Until one night a stocky White woman at a table in Jim Atkins’s Restaurant invited her to Julia’s Place, a hidden, second-string lesbian club. There she learned about Swing Rendezvous, Stonewall, select house parties and the Pony Stable, where women in seersucker suits smoked like steam rising from a boiling kettle.
Ruby would never have discovered Page Three and Abby, had it not been for the ease of older women. Nothing to wash. No gummed knots to comb out of her hair. No lipstick cum on her gloves. And they were kind, most of them, and when they were not, how easy to defeat them. One glance at a man, a pair of slacks, a pillow of breath in the right direction and they crumbled. The slackest, firmest mountain would quake and the avalanche always brought compensation.
Then there were the arms. Firm, cuffed, creamed, soft, wide, beneath crisp white and linen. Elbows bent against brass or wooden bars. Or stretching for a filterless behind a ducktail, pomade darkening a narrow strip of tobacco roll. Reaching for bourbon and melting ice. Arms rising, banded, weighted and swift. Ready for protection and pain.
Then there were the hands. The old dykes carried countries in the valley of their palms. Rivers ran from the rise of their fingers, the blunt of their nails. Thumbs jutting out, peninsulas coasting the sweat of a glass or thigh. Pinching the edge of a Camel or clit. They walked sex in the crook of their smiles, in the cut of their eyes. Ruby discovered that they were the best men she had ever known. For their manhood coagulated in the raw shimmer of spirit, not groin. It electrified the thrust of their tongues and fingers.
Abby Millhouse, the Page Three’s bouncer and the club manager’s best friend, was tall, plain and crackled white. She had let Ruby into the club after barring her for a long nice beat. Ruby had flashed the kind of smile that let her know that tonight, if Abby played it just right, she might have company. That night Ruby called Abby her “Little Jack Horner.” Because at forty-seven, Abby was the first woman to slip her wide, crooked thumb past Ruby’s panties, bury it and twist slowly, steadily and with firm deliberation, until, in a gush of slick awareness, Ruby learned the true magic of opposable thumbs. Ruby loved to trace the mighty chip in Abby’s front tooth with her tongue. She kissed the healed carvings along Abby’s legs, and her missing kneecap, which Abby revealed with pride after four bourbon and sodas. She’d nearly been beaten to death by the infamous Batman and Robin, two cops notorious for attacking and killing old butches, fairies and drag queens near Washington Square, and in hidden alleys of the West Village. The doctors had told Abby she would never walk again. Ruby smiled at the thought of such a pronouncement over the angry body of her Manby, Ruby’s word for Abby, which she would caw softly during sex, as the gristle warrior became melted cheese under the dome of Ruby’s thighs.
When Ruby told Abby that she’d come to New York to find her mama, Abby pressed into her heart and said, “Maybe you already have.” So one week after they’d met Abby came to the Roger Williams Hotel and watched as Ruby packed her life into two paper grocery bags. She filled them with: one midnight dress, one rabbit stole, one pair of black pumps, two Peter Pan padded bras, three pairs of panties, one pair of capri slacks, a black turtle-neck, hair supplies, toothbrush, makeup and an old clinking Band-Aid tin filled with quarters. Abby carried the tan bags seventeen blocks to 275 East Twelfth, apartment 7. Ruby rented her body to Abby now, curled her life into Abby’s warm lap.
Inside Abby’s skinny railroad apartment, there was a naked mattress lopsided on the floor tiles, a single ceiling bulb skitting dim then bright. One foldout tin chair and a card table with one weak leg jimmied against the wall to keep it from spilling over. Only a hot plate and a pot for boiling. Ruby quickly spent Abby’s savings on a Westinghouse stove, and ate the meals that Abby prepared for her.
She took down Abby’s torn sheet and hung new mint voile curtains instead. Introduced Abby to installment payments and finance charges in only four weeks. They painted the walls Pistachio. Ruby decided. Abby painted.
Ruby chose many things. Under her tutelage Abby went to a barber for the first time in her life, instead of snipping her own brindle-colored hair. It lay down and cooed against the width of her neck. She began sporting ties and jackets that Ruby had selected, and took on a new distinction at Page Three. Ruby played her part so well that all the girls in the club saw Abby in a new light. Ruby glittered against her in the dark. And when the police came at two o’clock one Saturday in June, as Abby and Ruby were leaving after closing, it was Ruby who chose to give the boys a blow job in the backseat so they’d leave Abby alone.
Abby waited against the shadowed wall, trying not to look into the car’s cloud windows. Car 224—Batman and Robin. When they’d called Abby over and opened the door of their squad car, Ruby had walked up to them in her stead, giggling like she was a bit tipsy, which she wasn’t. She’d leaned into the car until the red-faced Irish Batman grinned. He had glanced over at Abby, whispered to Ruby then laughed out loud. Ruby had slipped in and the windows had been rolled up. But Batman squeaked the window down to stare in Abby’s direction as soon as Ruby’s head slipped out of sight.
After a time, Ruby stumbled out laughing, waving good-bye. Until 224 drove around Avenue A. Then her face fell. Abby and Ruby walked home in silence, their feet crunching on the sidewalk, walking into the spill of lamplight and out of it again. Laughing cars rolling past them, then fading. The sky fogged black.
Abby put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. The spin of flint and flame cast light on the puff red of her eyes. She quickly snapped the Zippo shut and inhaled deeply as they walked. As was their custom, Ruby reached out and took the cigarette from Abby’s lips and took a long drag, coughing just a bit as she always did when she puffed Abby’s Camels.
Ruby was drawn to the bright red hair of a magnificently bedraggled queen as she stumbled towards them, beyond drunk, mascara streaked to her chin, black hose torn at the knee and ankle. She winked at Ruby.
“Got ’nother cig?”
Abby motioned to the cigarette in Ruby’s hand. “Last one.”
The drag queen paused and wavered. “S’right. Got a nickel?”
Abby reached into her pocket and gave her a quarter.
She winked now at Abby. “Thankzz, honey-pie.”
They parted ways. The redhead teetering on sky high heels. Ruby took another deep puff of the Camel as they walked. Then reached to replace the cigarette between Abby’s lips. Abby paused. Averted her mouth for just a fraction of a second. Then took the cigarette, wiped the butt clean, of Ruby, of the fogged police car. Watching, Ruby felt her face flush hot. Before Abby could bring the cigarette to her mouth, Ruby snatched it from her, turned around and called out to the queen half a block away, “Hey!” Then walking swiftly to her, reaching her. “You want it?”
The woman nodded. Her lips furry pink. Eyes blood red, rimmed in spider black.
“Thankzz, pretty.” The queen reached for the cigarette.
“Trade.” Ruby motioned to the quarter.
“That’s not right.” Then looking at the cigarette longingly she handed Ruby the quarter. She grabbed the cigarette, inhaled hard, swallowing the smoke in. She stumbled away mumbling, “Know that’s not right.”
Abby had stopped by the light. Ruby walked quickly past her, then had to wait on the stoop for her to open the door. When they walked into the soft green apartment, Abby asked Ruby, “What did that queen say to you?”
Ruby lied without blinking, “She asked me if I missed dick too.”
Abby stood bone still. “What. Did you say?”
Ruby started undressing. She unzipped and peeled off her dress in a quick easy movement. “I said, ‘Sure I do,’ ” she kicked off her shoes. “ ‘—but I got a fix tonight so I’m cool.’ ”
Ruby unsnapped her bra. Stepped out of her panties and sauntered into the bathroom.
Her hand shook as she locked the door and climbed naked into the comfort of the empty white bathtub, Abby’s quarter still in her palm. She turned the knobs and watched as the steaming water rose. Ruby opened her hand, looked at the coin and thought of the furrier. Remembered then how quickly she had thrown away the man’s card. But his quarter had been something else. So were all the quarters now filling her Band-Aid box.
They were the calling cards she kept. She’d been given the first in 1939 at the Friends’ Club in Neches County, Texas, when she was only six. Ruby set the quarter on top of her pubic hair as the water rose covering her belly. The water reached her breasts, her heart. Ruby could hear Abby clunking around outside the room. She heard her open the cupboard, heard a glass shatter in the kitchen sink. She imagined Abby drinking straight from the bottle. Then Ruby let her mind wander past a gated East Texas lot in Neches.
THE FRIENDS’ Club was comprised of abandoned offices of corrugated tin. There was no grass for miles, as if a large boot had stomped its grilled sole upon the land and demanded nothing grow. Miss Barbara had been the hostess. She was plaster white and hard, poured wet into her skin dress and solidified in gooey mounds. She wore her inky wig high. Frost pink lips circled a gnash of rotting incisors. She smiled with her lips tight in camouflage, until some random act of cruelty caused her to laugh, exposing the corrosive brown. This was the woman who Ruby was handed over to periodically when Papa Bell was sick, and then more often after he died.
The first time the Reverend Jennings had taken her to Neches, she was dressed in her Sunday pink fluff dress, black patent leather shoes with lacy socks. Her Grandmother had heeded the Reverend’s suggestion that Ruby work that summer for a nice White woman who ran a children’s boarding school in Neches. Ruby would get paid for keeping the younger ones company and bringing in wood, washing dishes and such. She was to come back for a visit home every two weeks, then back to work until school started. Grandma Silvia had pressed her hair and tied it in a fancy bun on her head and packed a satchel with clothes and a traveling supper. The Reverend told her he was going to Nacogdoches to preach at the Faith Temple Revival and wouldn’t mind at all dropping Ruby off in Neches.
After an hour of driving they stopped in Zavalla, near Rayburn Lake, to have their supper. Ruby felt nervous being with the Reverend but he was very polite and asked the kinds of questions grown-ups like to ask. They talked about the Reverend’s children, Ephram and Celia. Ruby asked if they went to Lincoln Elementary School where she was to start in the fall. The Reverend said that they did. Ruby ate the drumstick and corn fritter that her Grandma had made her. The Reverend shared a cup of fresh milk that tasted funny and they talked until Ruby’s eyelids got so heavy they dropped right down to her cheeks. She fell into a crashing sleep.
When she woke up from a very strange dream, the sky was pitch black and the Reverend was sitting across from her, smiling.
He said she seemed over-tired, so when she’d taken a nap, he just let her go on sleeping. The Reverend packed his tin and poured what was left in the milk bottle into the earth.
They had driven another hour to Miss Barbara’s, then turned down a crooked dirt road in the woods towards an old building with a red porch light. There was a flag nailed on the side that Miss Barbara later told her stood for “the Confederate States of America.”
A strange little White man was waiting outside. He was just a head or so taller than Ruby, but his legs were shorter. He wore a plaid blue cap but his hands and boots were dirt black. When he saw the Reverend he gave a nod and knocked once on the porch door.
Miss Barbara appeared. Her whole body seemed to be smoking when she opened the door. She took a puff of her cigarette and rubbed Ruby on the head. The tiny man disappeared.
“Hey, y’all.”
Ruby just nodded, awestruck by the sight of her.
The Reverend introduced Ruby to Miss Barbara, then the two adults to
ok a few steps away from the porch and whisper-spoke, close, his mouth almost on her ear. Ruby watched Miss Barbara hand him an envelope. The Reverend looked inside then Ruby heard him say quiet, “You short by ten.”
RUBY MADE little waves in the bathtub with her knees. She picked up her washcloth and a bar of soap. A brindle-brown hair curled on it. Ruby lathered the cloth and washed the makeup from her face, then under her arms. She’d forgotten to put on her shower cap and accepted that tomorrow her hair would be nappy. Ruby slid down and dunked her head under the water.
Miss Barbara was there just under the surface, offering Ruby her hand.
