Cynthia Bond - Ruby

As if part of an orchestrated dance, men in slick city clothes and polished shoes stepped out of the shadows and joined the circle. Men she had never seen — tall, high-yellow Creole men who looked like they had come from New Orleans. As they joined the circle, one by one, they handed her husband what looked like folded cash, each nodding, until her husband’s pockets were bulging and full. They were paying for something yet to come. Yet to — Otha felt the stars tilting, the world spin … it was too much, the thing to come.

She heard her husband speaking to the men. Their eyes rapt, alive. She could only make out a phrase here: “… at the peak of …,” then nothing, so she pushed against the wall of fear and crept even closer until the dangerous melody of his voice fingered the loose edges of her hair.

The calf’s sides were rising and falling like a bellows, skin so thin near its ribs. The heifer began to quiet some, but kept a steady beat, its hollow call unanswered. No mama. No field of grass. Only fire and the eyes of those men.

“Welcome all. Welcome all. Obeah, will you draw the circle?”

Obeah, a squatted man, opened a heavy tan sack and poured red powder in a wide circle around the men.

Otha looked around the forest, hoping for something to stop. This. To stop it. She looked up. The sky was heavy and a mist hung about the tops of the trees and the calf was groaning low. Nothing. No one was coming.

“We want to welcome our out-of-town members, come down here to experience the way we Sabine Negroes do our business.” Her husband smiled so pretty at the crowd and gave off a little wink. She had never seen him look so handsome.

“Now y’all, we got us two initiates joining us today if they got the grist.”

Two young boys, who looked to be about twelve, turned. Otha gasped as she recognized young Chauncy Rankin. His face fresh and upturned as if he was getting a medal. His younger brother Percy was the second. The men formed a tighter circle. Otha crept closer, and crouched lower still. Little Chauncy Rankin — he’d once stolen a pecan pie from her kitchen window.

All of them, all of the men began speaking into the flames, but they weren’t words, they were chanting something that Otha couldn’t make out. Words like snakes slithering from their mouths that made Otha’s hands fly to her belly, where she imagined her soul to be.

Her husband lifted his hands with a wide embellishment he’d never wasted on his congregation. His voice rang clear through the air. “I speaks these truths, my brothers. They done come into they manhood high time, so I speaks to them and to the rest of you who done forgot.”

Penter Rankin called out, “Tell the truth!”

The Reverend flashed the grace of his body against the flames and leapt up onto a stone. “Now Brothers, I was a little boy when my papa sat me down and tell me this. Just like his papa told him. Just like I’m telling y’all cuz I don’t want you getting down on your knees asking no God for nothing, not no fine clothes or no grand house. Don’t be asking for no wife to love you, or to feed your children neither. I seen men doing that whiles the whole family starve bug-eyed and them still down on they knees when they carried the youngest one out. I don’t want no man on earth to be that kind of a fool.”

Peeking through the brush, Otha watched her husband point his long, firm arm like an arrow into the sky and say, “That man up there? That one on his Roman chair? With his snow whiskers and his icicle nose? That White man what breathe out frost when he speaks, with them froze blue eyes like a lake in winter? You got to know he already done picked out who he favor and it ain’t the likes of you. It ain’t nobody with a lick a color spread over they skin. Not them he seen fit to drag down into four hundred year of slavin’. Not my grandpa who died in them salt swamps of Florida. It ain’t your brother Tom got lynched over in Jasper, and dragged some twenty miles ’til they wasn’t nothing left of him to bury.”

The men started stamping. “Call it Brother Jennings.”

“You ain’t got to look far or wide to see whose ass he lean down and wipe anytime they ask him. God ain’t nothing but a butt boy for rich White men. He let them do whatever thing they want, then make they way as smooth as glass. But White man, he ain’t content with all that. He got to rule it all. God his mistress, but he wed to the Devil. How many times we find his workings in them woods? How much our blood he feed his soil, how many upside down crosses he be burning. They been courting the Devil since before Jesus walked the earth. And they doing it still. Back to the day Eve spawned them.”

The men pushed closer, their faces hungry for his words like dogs waiting to fetch.

Otha watched her husband’s eyes go black as he talked about Eve. He told the old story of how she alone baked evil in the bread of the world. Then he added, “Cuz who you think give birth to every nature of pestilence on this old planet earth? Locust and yellow fever — cotton blight and slavery — and when she took that bite of the apple, she open her legs and out come all of that, and worst of all — out come the White man!”

The Reverend looked at the two young initiates. “You just boys and just catching on to they curse. You got to know they born with it, but when they get they first blood it’s too late. One day you’ll find yourself wrapped up in knots for the want of a woman. You gone want her touch and she gone make sure you do by how she parade in front of you, but the second you reaches out she got to say no. Why? Cuz it’s the nature of woman to make you shamed of the desires she done give to you in the first place. Cuz she carry evil inside her like a disease she don’t never catch but can’t help but spread.

“So hard as it might be for y’all boys to understand, we got to get them early. Got to snatch they evil when we can still use it against any enemy what come to cut us down.

“Some folks say slavery and the whip make us crazy. Some say we got so twisted up with pain and hate so we do this here. But is that true, brothers?”

The men screamed out like someone held a knife to their throats. “No! No Brother!”

“I say unto y’all, we as wise as Solomon and learn to use what we got, to take the reins of evil. We needs us some vessels to do just that!!!”

There was a pause in the crowd. Her heart pounding in her mouth, Otha watched as a giant of a man brought six little girls into the center of the circle. They were crying. Weeping. Little crumpled girls who looked like they had been kept in a dark box, cramped, wincing in the light of the fire. Next she saw Papa Bell’s grandbaby, little Ruby so pretty, her face like a heart. She wasn’t dirty, but had on a pretty blue dress. A blue bow in her hair. Why!? What are they gonna do to that girl? Those girls? What are they—? Otha almost stood. Almost. But God or the Devil held her tight to where she crouched.

“And these little ones here?” A practiced treble rang in her husband’s voice as he preached hellfire. “Don’t be mistook by they age, like a rattler and they poison, they come of age they gonna bite us.”

The circle of men shouted out “Heya!” and “Speak it Brother, Speak it!”

Otha watched in horror as he pushed six crying girls forward.

A power surged through her husband so that he shook from head to toe, reached his hand into the heavens and screamed, “And do you know how we take they evil?”

The men answered, “Yes! We do, Brother Jennings!”

“How we do it?!”

A man hollered like a hammer. “We teaches them!!!”

“What do we teach them?”

A flurry of voices screaming on top of each other: