Cynthia Bond - Ruby

A tan mulatto girl was standing in her door, no more than seven. She slipped in and stood eyeing Ruby, then looked in the candy dish. Her hair was reddish like Ruby’s mama’s but with sparks of blond. Her eyes were light gray and she had a dimple under her left cheek.

“Ain’t you had no friends yet?”

Ruby looked back in answer.

“You get to keep your change. Don’t let nobody tell you different. Tried to take mine ’til I learned better.”

They stared at each other for a long stretch.

Then the girl said, “Don’t never tell them your name.”

Ruby didn’t understand but something inside her felt like she’d just heard gospel.

Ruby nodded back as Miss Barbara stepped in the door with a lampshade. Her face tight she said, “Tanny now get back in your own room.” Tanny ducked under her arm and made a funny face, which smoothed out the terror rising like water. Then she ducked out of the door.

Miss Barbara’s eyes stabbed into Ruby. “Mind you keep that one out of your room. She’s a bad influence.”

Then Miss Barbara let a smile land upon her face as she fitted the shade over the lamp and quickly disappeared. A man with a big square head came in — the top and the bottom of it almost had corners. He was paste white with red-water eyes. He smelled sour like the rye Papa Bell kept for Sundays. His necktie was loose. Ruby thought about how it looked like a scarf her Auntie Girdie used to wear before she moved to Kansas to marry that porter and how dreams made you think of all kinds of funny things from all kinds of places. Like how real-life men didn’t walk around with tiny little bodies or with square heads. The man nodded that he wanted to sit beside Ruby so she let go of the scarf and Auntie Girdie and scooted over. Her heart was beating behind her eyes so hard she was sure she would wake up. And then she wanted, needed to wake up, because something in the quiet man beside her was more terrible than any monster she had ever imagined, and so she started pinching her arm. She started pinching it harder and harder but still he kept sitting, hands pressed together between his legs, head down. Ruby pinched again and again, her eyes watching his fingers, his square thumbs, the brown stains along the inside of them. Ruby wiped away the little welts of blood as they popped through her skin and kept pinching as they sat and sat and sat. She stopped when she saw his body begin to shake, saw his hands fly up to his face as if to stop a running pump. He was bawling, snot and tears running through his fingers, down his arms. Loud like a little baby. Singy song cries and big gulps of air. Ruby thought it would stop, but it got worse until he crumbled up on himself, clutched at his belly like someone had punched him, and hid his face from the lamplight. He cried like the whole wide world had split in two, cried like he had lost his first child and his mama and his best friend. Ruby had never seen a body that sad, not even Great-Uncle Tippy after he lost his dog Pete after sixteen years. Or even Papa Bell when he talked about Neva. The square-head man’s sorrow broke through her. Ruby breathed in the sweet and the sour of him, so that it filled her lungs and pushed tears from her own eyes. Until she felt so sorry for him that she made the mistake of reaching out to help him, and he turned on her.

The things he did to her hurt worse than anything she knew, than any way she imagined she could be hurt. But the things he called her hurt worse, words she didn’t know the meaning of but felt slugging through her, moving into her like poison. Slut , and cock-tease and whore . His stained fingers grabbing, opening, licking all the while, moving his hand inside of her pants, then pushing her down, hands like lobster claws. Anger sweating from his body, entering hers, his words spoken to the center of her own skull. Horny bitch. Fucking slut .

Then … then Ruby searched the dark of her own body and found a hiding place, thick in the branches of the chinaberry. It held her safe. The leaves full, always green. The sky all stars and crickets. There were sounds above her, horrible sounds, so she pulled herself closer and prayed to the tree. The tree answered, and she saw her hand turn to bark, broken mahogany ridges, her fingers tiny living twigs, with golden beads dangling from them. Her torso melted into the trunk and her toes lay safe underground. The sky shook over her head but Ruby was now the tree. She stood there safe and waited for the storm to pass.

But the girl still on the bed, trapped under the weight of a giant, had no such refuge. The thick tide of his hate poured over her, filled every inch until she had no choice but to swallow it down.

You nigger cunt. You little Black whore .

And so that is what Ruby became.

A firefly inside of that girl fought it. Then as if he knew, felt it, he slapped her like a father disciplining a child. Just hard enough to set off a lightning of fear that nearly lifted her off the bed, until she shattered, pieces flying like glass and landing all across her body. Each holding a fractured picture of the moment. The ceiling, his red eye; the wallpaper, his mouth stretching open; the lampshade, and the firefly. That last piece sank deep within her flesh, deeper than she could know, and lay dormant for the many years that followed.

Ruby did not unfold from her hiding place until the man was weeping beside her again. Holding her to his wet face, fumbling to put her clothes back on, crying so hard and so long that when he asked if she thought he was a bad man, Ruby knew to answer no. As he was leaving he smiled like a boy who had broken his mama’s lamp. He reached in his pocket and put two bits into the candy dish — a quarter. Her first tip from her first Friend.

Miss Barbara stepped back into the room, removed the shade and handed Ruby a damp towel and a blue dress. “Clean yourself up now Bunny, we got another friend coming for a visit in about ten minutes.”

So that is where Ruby waited each night for the next two whole weeks with grown White men entering the small of her room. As they left, they clinked a quarter, sometimes more, into the empty candy dish. She learned how some mothers and grandmothers brought change purses for their girls. On her fifth night there, one man, who Miss Barbara said had paid extra, told Ruby she was her own change purse, pushing the quarter into her and whispering, “Ching, ching.”

Ruby had wished the visitors would give them sweets instead of tips. How in the entire building there didn’t seem to be a sliver of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum or Pixy Stix or Chunky Bars to unwrap themselves into the hands of a little girl. “But plenty of jawbreakers,” she’d heard Miss Barbara joke.

Tanny and Ruby were the only Colored girls with Miss Barbara. Miss Barbara once said, “You girls are important here because gentlemen can do things with a Colored girl they simply can’t bring themselves to do with a White girl.” Ruby knew that the White girls were always good girls, even when they were bad, but Negro girls started bad and could be anything after that.

One long night, after Ruby had had more than eight Friends visit her, she had fallen into the twilight of sleep. She was awakened when her door creaked open and the little man with the hat crept in, reached his hand into her candy dish and scooped out $3.25. Without thinking, Ruby sprang from the bed. She was on him, arms and legs flying, speeding through the air like bullets, balled-up little fists pounding hard, fast. He held her at bay laughing, then pushed her to the bed.

“All right, all right, I was only counting it.”

Ruby was out of breath, heaving on the mattress.

He was turning to leave when he said, “Miss Barbara was right. You’re a born whore.”