Promise, page 3
I know Ruby and Ezra find shame boring. We have seen it used at school by our teachers. At home, Mama and Daddy use it against Ezra and me even when they don’t mean to. While I know our parents are trying to make us into decent women, it feels strange to think they are wrong. But I do. It feels like a secret the way Mama makes something natural seem bad, forbidding me to look at or touch my own privates unless I am holding a bar of soap in the bath.
As I look at Ruby’s privates, I feel shame for looking. I feel shame for whatever it was that challenged Ruby and my sister into doing this in the first place. I think again about the shift in their gaits after their first periods last spring. I observed how their eyes sparkled while they complained of aches, cramps, and soreness. While they cupped the place that they called, with absurdly dramatic inflection, the Womb. They shooed me away when I suggested any of the roughhouse games we’d once enjoyed. They claimed that their sudden womanhood allowed them to think more deeply about their future lives, which was why they no longer felt it was natural for me to follow them everywhere. I couldn’t know anything about it until I changed too.
I wish Ezra would speak. I need her to confirm that what we are doing is not deserving of punishment but something we are entitled, expected to do. The awareness of our bodies makes me feel like I could cry—the looking has no explanation though I sense it has more meaning than any of us can summon. Our skin near Ruby’s skin stirs both fear and irritation in me. I want Ezra to tell me that she feels the same way as me. I want her to say something about our legs being better, stronger, but I know she won’t.
She allowed me to join her and Ruby today though I haven’t begun to bleed. Maybe that’s why I don’t know what I’m looking at, why I’m looking, or what is so important about it. If we were all the same color, I wonder whether the whole thing would feel so wrong. But Ezra and I would’ve never dared Lindy Junkett to play this game.
Then, suddenly, Ruby sits up, digs her hand into her pocket and shoves my crumpled panties at me without warning before she hands Ezra her bright green pair. Ruby is the last to pull her own torn underwear on.
“Boys do worse,” she says, staring at me.
2
We walked down from the high bluffs, into the woods that divided our house from the clearing. Ruby and Ezra spoke in low voices while insects hissed. Mama would expect us to be home to have our hair washed and fixed for dinner. I wondered how I could look at her face without her immediately knowing I’d done something so shameful there’d be no way to explain it. Branches poked my feet. In a matter of weeks, gold leaves would scatter through the air, dropping in spirals. That faint scent in the woods would burst open soon, and the odor of warm decay would shift into a fragrance like smoke.
“They really are all the same,” said Ruby, as if we’d interrupted her in the middle of a sentence. Her voice was both pleased and annoyed.
“We’re late,” I said to my sister. I didn’t want to hear any more of Ruby’s ideas and hoped she would just shut up.
“How can that be?” said Ez, as though Ruby had shared the unspoken sentence with her. “It’s you and I who got the curse.”
“Hers looked cursed too,” said Ruby, tossing her head at me. “She ain’t even bleeding like us. Not yet. Maybe the bleeding don’t matter.”
“Matters when it comes to babies,” said Ezra. “Matters when we’re in the village, and the men who never looked at us before are looking at us.”
“Uh huh,” said Ruby softly. “Once I get my license as a pilot, I might have me a baby someday too. At least one so I don’t have to be some man’s slave like Ma says I will. Women in the village say that motherhood makes them free. I don’t entirely understand that, but they’ve been saying it for years. Ma says she’s not my slave and makes me do for myself all the time.”
“What kind of slave are you talking about, Ruby?” said Ezra, scowling.
“Ma says Papa treats her like a slave,” she said. “And he does.”
“You wouldn’t know what a slave is,” I said.
“Shut up, Cinthy,” said Ruby. “I ain’t saying nothing ’bout coloreds. I was talking about men and women. You’re so smart but you know next to nothing most of the time.”
“Who is going to let a redneck like you fly a plane?” teased Ezra.
They both spoke as if I weren’t there, as if Ruby hadn’t just insulted me. Usually, Ezra would give Ruby a warning for talking to me like that, but they were too occupied with what we’d all just done.
Ruby laughed loudly in delight. “I for damn sure won’t wait around for somebody like my papa to give me his blessing. Flying’s something you take into your own hands.”
“Girl, you stuck on a high hook,” said Ezra. “They don’t let girls fly planes. Be easier for you to have a baby than to get you a pair of wings.”
“I aim to fly a plane,” said Ruby, stretching her raspy voice until it nearly ripped. I knew they were suddenly close to having one of their frequent disagreements. “If you ain’t too pigheaded by the time I get my license, I’ll ask you to go up with me first.”
“Ha!” said Ezra. “You think they’d let a Negro girl get into a plane when they won’t even let us sit in the front of the bus?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said quietly.
“Goddamn,” snapped Ruby. “Nobody was talking to you.”
My face reddened.
“There must be another reason why adults act the way they do. It can’t just all be about this little pee hole,” said Ruby thoughtfully.
“Well, what is it?” I said. I didn’t intend for them to leave me out of anything ever again after what we’d just done. As far as I was concerned, I’d earned some permanent rights, whether or not I was bleeding yet.
“They don’t even know,” said Ezra. Her irritation at adults was evident. She sucked her teeth as though her tongue were tart from lemon.
“What if we went around carrying ourselves like boys do all the time?” said Ruby. “Shoot, boys make a game of their things, squirting piss like a fire hose on anything they find! And there’s never no trouble, because they’re just being boys. What if the truth was that we always have a choice the way boys do?”
“Who wants to be like a boy? They can’t all do whatever they want the way you say. White boys, sure, but what about colored boys? Daddy says if a Black boy fights it’s because he’s fighting not to be killed for the slightest thing,” I said. “Anyway, it’s boring to think that all we want is to be allowed to do what boys do.”
We were nearly at the path that would lead us to the rear of the haunted house. Relieved, I pictured us saying goodbye to Ruby, crossing Clove Road and walking up the swept, painted steps of our house. I was trying to decide whether I could get away with giving Ruby a good pinch. I knew Mama would be unhappy that we were late. It had to be midafternoon, and it always took more time than she needed to fix our hair and get the table prepared.
“Do you really think we have the same choices as boys?” said Ez, trying to see it from Ruby’s eyes.
“Not yet,” Ruby said. “One day. When we’re women.”
“Not ever,” I said. “No one would allow it. Especially our mothers. Especially your mother, Ruby.”
“Tell your sister not to say nothing about my ma.” She spoke to Ezra, ignoring me. “All I’m saying is I got a right to be free just like a boy. I intend to keep me a freeness, something better than what’s been given to the adults. I’d think freedom would be important to y’all too. The way it is to the rest of your people.”
When Ruby speaks to us of our people, when she proclaims that our people are righteous and mostly good-looking, that our people were queens and kings, supreme athletes and sublime entertainers, the first people who probably walked the earth after the dinosaurs died, we only murmur in response. Of course, we have read about slavery and the history of the white man’s fear. Who is Ruby to tell us? When she starts her easy talk about the struggle and the Man, when she explains salvation and the uplift of our people to us, we withdraw, fastening our lips together until that kind of talk passes over and Ruby remembers, finally, that she is white.
“What’s involved in this freedom you seem to know so much about? Your own papa beats you black-and-blue but you got the nerve to tell my sister and me something about some freedom. Our civil rights are just fine,” said Ezra. Without another word, she hurled the splintered branch she’d been carrying at Ruby. It made a whizzing sound before it struck a tree next to Ruby’s head, then dropped into a patch of what appeared to be poison ivy.
Ruby made a wounded sound. She lunged at Ezra, grabbing the flesh of my sister’s bare arm with her nails. I froze as Ezra easily shook her off. There was a look in her eyes that she’d given other white people, but never Ruby.
“Do you know what would happen to me if I grabbed a white woman the way you just grabbed me?”
“I’m a white girl suddenly? Because of what?”
“You didn’t answer me,” my sister said. “Because you know what I know. We don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere for you to know what I mean.”
“I thought you’ve always told me the truth,” said Ruby. Her eyes held tears, as did my sister’s. My own eyes burned with how ugly yet inevitable this moment was. Mama, Miss Irene—they’d predicted this for some time.
“Your papa, your ma, my daddy, my mama,” said Ezra. “Do you really think they’re all wrong?”
“We’re different,” pleaded Ruby. “We’ve always said so.”
Rubbing her arm where Ruby had left marks, Ezra shook her head bitterly. “We’re not.”
“But we just saw—”
“Ruby, what did you see?”
“Ez, please.”
“We have to go,” I said.
Ezra waved her hand at me to hush. But I could sense that what was coming had arrived last spring in Ezra’s heart. She’d been carrying it as far as she could, as Mama and Miss Irene had warned her when it came to trusting white girls who would come of age and live inside worlds that were both safe and dangerous when they became women.
“We’re not going to grow old together. We can’t. I know you want to make yourself believe that we’re chasing the same freedom, the same life. But we’re not,” said Ezra carefully. “We’re not sisters. I have a sister.”
Ruby moved as though she would attack Ezra but a force we couldn’t see held her back. Maybe it was the sight of me stepping next to Ezra, standing with our shoulders touching, that made Ruby understand, finally.
“I never called you out your name or nothing like that,” said Ruby. “I’ve been protecting you all this time. Even your bigheaded sister. And it’s finished because I’m white? This is what you want?”
“Protected me from what? You need protection from your own father, Ruby,” said Ezra. “And you know it.”
“Papa loves me,” said Ruby in a small voice. Her shoulders heaved. I knew she loved Ez, maybe more than she loved her own mama. But Ruby Scaggs had never suffered an insult, even in the name of love. “You say one more word, Ez, and you’ll be eating your teeth for supper.”
But I knew Ruby would do nothing. Like my sister’s, her heart was broken so cleanly they were both breathless.
“Let’s go,” I said to my sister, touching her arm. We were at the edge of the woods in the shadow of the ruined house. “Mama’s going to be mad.”
3
Ruby watched the two Kindred girls rush away from her voice. Their figures turned into smudges as the late afternoon sunlight absorbed their shapes. Turning away from the opening where Ez and Cinthy had left her, she began to pick an unmarked path through the woods that would lead her back to the bluffs.
Ruby resisted the urge to cry. Could she be feeling this way because of what she had seen in her best friend and in herself? It was hard to admit that Ruby had expected there to be a difference between what she had and what the Kindred girls had. The whole world had assured the three of them of that. The inside seemed the same but the outside was different. Now that she knew the truth, it felt burdensome to her. Ruby was rarely lonely, though she was often alone. She thought again about crying, but then she pictured her papa, who cried all the time and was the loneliest person Ruby had ever known.
Jonah Reuben Scaggs, after whom Ruby was named, was a man who still possessed the thinness of boys who dove from train bridges to fish when they were hungry and broke. Her father knew how to hold his breath even when he wasn’t in the water. For years, Ruby had watched him dive from the bridge of his memory into the wreckage of his past.
His blond hair, nearly white, stood out from his head. His eyes were blue, like a song banging on the door of the blues but somehow his soul couldn’t get in to sing it right. These days, her papa’s eyes were often closed. She’d come to the crooked porch of their shack and find him preoccupied, busy looking at his past the way a man might pull his finger over an enchanted map that led to buried treasures. Her father scorned the present and the future. It was the past that goaded him to keep living. He was trying to figure out how to name the moment when his life had fallen apart. Ruby had figured out a map of her own so that she couldn’t be blindsided by his attacks.
As Ruby came out of the woods and into her family’s clearing on the bluffs, she could smell smoke from the meat pit. Her father wasn’t home, but he was smoking pork back behind their shack.
Ruby’s papa disliked thieves and had no idea that Ruby had become very good at stealing. When she understood that she could die by starvation because she could not rely on her mother or father to provide, she learned how to steal from people in the village. This became another thing for the villagers to gossip about. They spoke of her father’s drinking and her mother’s dreaming. And now they could mostly say anything about Ruby too, because she wasn’t exactly a little child who didn’t know better. They didn’t think Ruby deserved to be anything more than an unlucky product of the Scaggses’ ruinous pride.
Ruby pressed her hands against her waist and thighs, thinking of summer evenings again and the way the last nights of August always felt sad to her because they seemed to know how long, bright days must end.
She wanted endless days of perfect summer blue skies. It was easier for her to dream that way, to picture herself as a pilot inside her own airplane cutting across the sky.
Ruby crossed the hard mud of her yard, cursing at her father’s hounds, who raced around her in hunger. It occurred to her that this would be her last year of school. Since last spring, she worried about finding herself stranded in Salt Point, forced to marry one of the six Johns in her class. That was something Ez and Cinthy didn’t have to bother with. Ruby had once read a column in one of her mother’s beauty magazines about women who complained that, in spite of their desire to find new kinds of love, they’d ended up marrying men like their fathers. When she’d tried to tell Ezra about it, Ez had only frowned and said that her own father was a decent man who had taught her and Cinthy about the stars, human anatomy, Egyptian pyramids, and how to be a good judge of human character.
The only stars Ruby’s papa had ever seen were when somebody had gone and knocked him out at the bar. Jonah Reuben Scaggs gave Ruby stars that flushed her skin green and purple. He was not a man who could teach Ruby about what men were made of.
Ruby’s mother did nothing but avoid getting knocked out herself. Like her husband, Mrs. Scaggs found her sanctuary in the past. Once crowned a beauty queen at a local county fair, Ruby’s mother still walked around Salt Point as though the village were crazy for not seeing her crown.
When Mrs. Scaggs still believed that she was supposed to be a good mother, she’d become severely concerned about Ruby’s welfare. It was another way to spite her husband. Too, when villagers had looked at her daughter and said, “That gal should be reading by now,” Mrs. Scaggs realized that the blame for Ruby’s poor education might be laid at her own feet.
One afternoon, Mrs. Scaggs was in the village with Ruby, buying flowers and making a show of it, when they saw Mr. Hobart. Dressed in a tailored suit, Mr. Hobart had removed his hat and patted Ruby’s tousled hair. He asked her age and she’d shyly turned to her mother, who proudly replied, “She’s eight or nine.” Looking intently at Mrs. Scaggs, he could still see her crown. Or so she hoped. Instead, he only asked her whether Ruby was reading yet, and if Ruby was reading, was she good at it. Batting her eyes as if they were rubbed with pepper, Mrs. Scaggs tried to see whether he might buy little Ruby a bouquet of daisies. His discomfort escaped her attention. Tipping his hat, he wished Ruby and her mother a pleasant afternoon, and added that because he believed that the Scaggs family was a very poor family in need, their daughter could attend his school to improve her future.
That afternoon, Ruby had felt the sting that went through her mother’s body.
Ruby remembered how her ma had dragged her away from the village square, taking a rough route back to their shack. The fresh flowers in her mother’s old mesh bag were bruised and torn. Ruby couldn’t help but notice all of the colorful wildflowers—free—they passed as her mother raged about the man’s insult. “He’s the poor one, he is. The poorest kind of man possible is one who thinks he’s so rich he can pay a woman with petty insults instead of proper compliments.”
“Pay for what?” Ruby had asked her mother, who’d replied by slapping her face.
Ruby had sat on the porch, holding her cheek, listening while her mother cried with rage. When Ruby finally went inside, she found her mother eagerly applying Pond’s Cold Cream to her face as she spoke about the dangers of tears, how they could ravish a woman’s complexion. “At least you’ll be in a good school,” she kept saying to her daughter while she tried to press those wilted flowers into the pages of a tattered book.
