Mama Ruby (32 page)

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Authors: Mary Monroe

BOOK: Mama Ruby
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CHAPTER 57
R
UBY HAD NOT HAD THE TIME NOR INTEREST IN JOINING A
new church since she left home. Not only did she not have a church home to fall back on in times of need, she didn’t know of one single preacher that she could call on for spiritual comfort.
“Othella, I been in this jailhouse for two days, and they ain’t told me nothin’. I don’t know what they goin’ to do with me,” Ruby sobbed. “I wish my daddy was here to pray with me!”
“I can find a preacher if you want me to,” Othella offered. “Roy’s brother stopped by the house last night, and he told me that he was handlin’ the funeral arrangements, and that the service will be at the little Pentecostal church on Jersey Street if I wanted to come. If you don’t mind, I can ask that preacher’s name and have him come see you.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I don’t think anybody that knows Roy would want to have anything to do with me after . . . after what I done to Roy.”
“You want me to send a wire to your daddy? I know he’d be here lickety-split if you want him to. Your mama and probably all six of your sisters would come, too.”
“Oh good gracious no! I don’t want my family to know what a mess I done made of my life. I am . . . I am so ashamed of the way I turned out. Look at me!”
“Mama Ruby, you got a baby in your belly to consider. Florida ain’t no state to mess with when it comes to crime. What if they put you in the ’lectric chair, or whatever it is they do down here to killers.”
“Killer? Is that what you think I am?”
“That’s what people usually call people who kill other people. And you bein’ a colored woman, them white folks wouldn’t think twice about killin’ you before that baby gets here. Lord have mercy, what a mess this is,” Othella moaned, rubbing her own belly. “And Eugene ain’t nowhere to be found. I tried to wire him at that motel that he told me he’d be at while he was in Pensacola. They told me that he checked out two days ago.”
“And?”
“And where has that jackass been for two days? I ain’t seen him. None of his friends or family will tell me nothin’ about his whereabouts. Now with this mess you done got yourself into, I got a feelin’ I’ll be all alone when my baby comes.”
Ruby rubbed her belly. “You think they’ll let me out to have my baby? I don’t want my child to be born in no jail cell.”
“Mama Ruby, think about what you done. You done killed a man. They might not care enough to execute you because Roy was a colored man, but the white folks will sure enough send you to prison, maybe even a chain gang. They don’t care about you bein’ pregnant. At the very least, they might lock you up for life.”
“You got the key to my house. Go into my bedroom and raise up the linoleum by the window with the lamp next to it. There’s a bunch of money hidden there. Roy didn’t trust banks and he didn’t want Uncle Sam nosin’ around, askin’ how he made his money.”
“You got a lawyer? You want me to give him that money?”
“Yeah, unless you know a good voodoo woman.”
“I don’t know no lawyer, and I sure don’t know no voodoo woman.” Othella paused and a wistful look appeared on her face. “But I can assure you that I will hunt up a good voodoo woman that’ll turn things around for me and you. Maybe I’ll even have her teach that husband of mine a lesson or two, so he won’t be strayin’ like a dog every month. I can’t think of no other way to make Eugene straighten up and stop leavin’ me on my own so much.”
“You can kill him. If that don’t stop him, nothin’ will,” Ruby said.
“Mama Ruby, I know you ain’t tryin’ to make light of what done happened. You goin’ to prison and there is just no tellin’ how long you’ll be there. Now shet your eyes and let’s pray for mercy.”
Ruby and Othella prayed for ten minutes. Right after Othella left, Ruby sat down on the hard cot in the cold, ominous cell and cried like a baby. When she finished, she prayed some more. She promised God that if He kept her from going to prison for killing Roy, she would never shoot another man as long as she lived.
Her prayers were answered in a roundabout way. The judge had reduced the charge of murder against Ruby to self-defense, which is what she had claimed in the first place. And with the people in the bar who had witnessed the altercation, the self-defense claim worked in her favor.
However, the same judge told Ruby that she had committed more than one crime that day: she had jeopardized the safety of those two white children who had been left in her care by leaving them in the house alone when she went to the bar to shoot Roy. Didn’t she remember that the older boy liked to play with matches? the judge had asked. As soon as Ruby had left that firebug alone with his baby brother, he’d searched around until he’d located a box of matches. His mother arrived home just in time from the beauty parlor to put out the fire that he’d started in the kitchen with some old newspapers. And these were not just two random white kids. The mother was the mayor’s niece— his favorite niece at that! The judge told Ruby that she had cooked up a “mighty big mess.” And for that, she most certainly had to be appropriately “chastised.”
The judge sentenced Ruby to one month and a day in the county jail for leaving the two white children in the house alone.
 
Othella was there to escort Ruby home from jail by bus on the day that she was released. They spent the first couple of hours drinking as much of the liquor that they could that Roy had left behind. Then they packed up everything else in the house. Roy’s brothers were coming to get his car, his furniture, and his other belongings. He had paid three months rent in advance the week before his death, but Ruby had vowed that she’d never spend another night in that house. And, since Roy was not going to return, unless he returned as a ghost, the landlord promised Ruby that he would reimburse the extra rent money to her.
“I’m right back where I started,” Ruby complained to Othella, minutes after they’d collected some of Ruby’s possessions and begun hauling them down the street in two large wheelbarrows to Othella’s house. Ruby had purchased so many new things for herself and her baby that they had to make several trips with those wheelbarrows. But Ruby didn’t mind doing that. She had other things to worry about. One was being alone again. “I ain’t got no husband no more.” She sniffed to keep herself from crying. She had done enough of that since she’d killed Roy.
“I guess I could say the same thing myself. Eugene was home for one day last week and now he is on the road again. He could have at least come home to attend Roy’s funeral,” Othella lamented, sounding even more morose than Ruby. She saw the pitiful look on Ruby’s face so she decided to lighten up the conversation. “I know you will feel so much better after your baby gets here. The midwife that lives across the street from me, she’s goin’ to deliver for me and you both for twenty-five dollars apiece. They don’t admit colored folks in the hospital here.”
“That ain’t nothin’ new to me. Me and all of my sisters was born right in my mama’s bed with a midwife. And don’t forget about my . . .” Ruby gripped the handles of her wheelbarrow tighter and looked straight ahead. Othella was surprised to see a smile suddenly appear on Ruby’s face. “My baby’s due any day now, and I know your due date ain’t too much farther away. But even after all that’s happened, we’ll still have each other and our babies. I guess I’ll have to work in the fields again, and take on as many babysittin’ jobs as I can get until my baby comes. And I’ll have to get back to work right away after that.” Ruby sniffed. “Boy, what I wouldn’t do to have my mama with me.”
“Mama Ruby, your mama would be glad to have you back at home. And she’d be happy as pie to be with you when your baby comes.”
Ruby shook her head. “I’ll send her a letter. You got a stamp?”
Othella rolled her eyes. “I got plenty of stamps. You ask me about stamps all the time, but you never take them. But don’t worry. Every time I write a letter to my folks, I tell my mama to send word through somebody to your folks that you’re doin’ just fine.”
“And I am doin’ just fine, Othella. I’m about to be a mother, and that’s what I need to focus on now,” Ruby said with a heavy sigh. Less than thirty minutes after they reached Othella’s house, Ruby went into labor.
 
Othella watched Ruby give birth, just like the first time. Virgil Lee Montgomery entered the world with a chip on his shoulder. Even with his eyes closed and his mouth stretched open as he screamed like a banshee, he challenged his mother. When the midwife placed him in Ruby’s anxious arms, he kicked his long, plump legs and waved his arms, hitting Ruby in the face several times, leaving a bruise on her bottom lip.
“He’s a feisty little booger,” Othella noticed, hovering over the midwife’s shoulder as Ruby lay on the bed, still writhing in pain. “You ain’t goin’ to have to worry about nobody messin’ with him, Mama Ruby.”
Once again, Ruby was happy. Or at least she appeared to be. She was proud of her son and started parading him around the neighborhood two days after his birth.
“He’s such a pretty little yellow thing! And with all of that wavy hair, he should have been a girl!” one woman commented.
“My next one will be a girl, God willin’,” Ruby predicted, wondering how long it would be before she got pregnant again.
The first couple of weeks went well. And things got even better when Othella gave birth to her son Clyde a week later. Even though money was tight and their future more uncertain than ever before, Ruby and Othella spent their days and nights fussing over their babies.
When the money got even tighter, they were forced to go back to work sooner than they had planned. Once again, they were performing the backbreaking farm labor that they had both come to despise. Neither of the new mothers wanted to leave her baby in the care of a babysitter, even though there were several competent babysitters in the neighborhood. Ruby carried her son in a pillowcase pouch around her waist when she picked oranges at the Gembing Brothers’ orange grove. Othella was too frail to work ten hours a day with her baby strapped to her body. She placed her son in a basket on top of a flattened out pillow and set the basket on the ground under a palm tree while she worked.
But the babies didn’t fulfill all of their needs. At least not for Othella. Being a mother wasn’t enough for her. She was lonely. She hadn’t seen Eugene in two months and when he showed up a week later, it was just to take a quick peek at his new son and to get more of his clothes.
“I think my husband is involved with another woman,” Othella told Ruby. “And if he don’t come to his senses soon, I just might not be here when he gets back the next time.”
Eugene was a few steps ahead of Othella. He had already moved in with another woman in Sarasota. And when he did come home again, two weeks later, it was only to get the rest of his belongings. That was the last time Othella saw or heard from him. He never bothered to check on his son or send a dime to help support him.
“Let that fool go on about his business,” Ruby told her. “So far, all men have done for us was get us in trouble.”
“What about the babies?”
“And that, too,” Ruby said with a gasp and a cackle. “That was all Roy was good for. May he rest in peace until I get there. . . .”
CHAPTER 58
O
THELLA LOVED HER SON, BUT THERE WERE TIMES WHEN
she resented being tied down with a baby. It took a lot of money to support Clyde, which meant more hours of backbreaking work in those damn fields. She had begun to hate oranges, beans, sugarcane, potatoes, cabbage greens, and cucumbers from the bottom of her heart.
With the sun beating down on her for up to ten hours a day, five to six days a week, Othella had begun to lose her looks. Another reason that Othella was not too thrilled to be a mother was that she could no longer come and go as she pleased. And even though she had started seeing other men, she couldn’t entertain them as freely as she wanted to. She was disappointed that Ruby didn’t feel the same way.
Ruby
loved
being a mother. Despite the fact that she didn’t give birth to a baby girl, she didn’t let that stop her from treating her son like a daughter. She dressed him in frilly bonnets and ruffled gowns. She even adorned his thick hair with pastel-colored barrettes and ribbons, or braided it, despite his tearful protests.
At first, Othella didn’t give too much thought or concern to the way Ruby was dressing that poor baby. For one thing, Ruby had already purchased most of her baby’s wardrobe way before his birth, or before she even got pregnant for that matter. And since she’d been convinced that she’d give birth to a girl, she had purchased only feminine items. But as the boy grew, Ruby continued to purchase girly clothes for him. She bought a doll for him to play with, but that didn’t last long. The very first time that Virgil’s little friends saw him carrying a doll, they taunted him and called him a sissy. He ran into the house and cried and then he ripped off the doll’s arms and legs and bit its nose down to a nub. Ruby laughed it off, but she never bought him another doll.
Othella became concerned when she went to visit Ruby in the little three-room house she rented a couple of blocks away, finding Ruby ironing a girl’s bonnet that she had purchased for Vigil. Raising him like a girl had not been so bad when Virgil was an infant. But by this time, he was a year and a half old.
“Mama Ruby, I ain’t tryin’ to tell you how to raise your boy, but you don’t want no sissy on your hands. Remember that sissy man what lived on Powell Street back home?” Othella said.
“You mean the one that everybody called Punk Willie?”
“That’s him. Remember how people used to mess with him all on account of him bein’ a sissy?”
“He was a sissy and if he ain’t dead, he probably still is a sissy,” Ruby replied. “He didn’t try to hide it. He wore makeup, fixed his hair like a woman, and wore dresses from time to time. He looked better as a woman than he did as a man!”
“My mama told me that when he was a little boy, his mama used to dress him like a girl. She’d even marcel his hair to make him look like that Shirley Temple.”
“What are you tryin’ to say?”
“Don’t make your son’s life no harder than it’s already goin’ to be. He’s goin’ to have to deal with a lot of things because of his color. That’s enough of a burden; me and you both know that. Don’t add to his burden by makin’ him be somethin’ that so many folks don’t accept.”
“At least I don’t put dresses on my boy, and I don’t marcel his hair. He likes the way I dress him in all them pretty blouses and sandals.”
“But you do everything else that you’d do for a little girl.”
“Virgil is too young for it to bother him. And he looks so cute in his bonnet! Besides, by the time he’s old enough to know better, I’ll have me a new husband and a girl baby or two. Matter of fact, I got me a date lined up for tomorrow with that new overseer at the grove where we picked oranges at last week. He just might be
the one
.”
The man who took Ruby and her son on a picnic the next day was not “the one.” After he slept with Ruby that night, he never spoke to her again.
As the months crawled by, Ruby predicted that each new man whom she allowed into her life and bed could be “the one.” But the one that she spent the next few years preparing for never came.
Five more years passed, and the only male who remained in Ruby’s life for more than a night or a few weeks was her son Virgil. Ruby had become hopelessly addicted to beer. She drank up to twelve cans a day when she could afford it. She had also gained eighty more pounds. But since that didn’t stop men from approaching her, her weight didn’t faze her one bit.
Othella’s luck with men was not much better than Ruby’s. She had lovers come and go. And the only indication that she’d had lovers at all was the fact that she’d had five more children, four of them girls!
Each time Othella gave birth to a girl, Ruby slid into a deep, painful state of depression. But she didn’t want Othella to know that. As difficult as it was, she kept a smile on her face when she was around Othella with her babies. She wanted her friend to believe that she was happy enough with just her son, and she was—somewhat. Even though she still dressed him like a girl most of the time. But Virgil was not a weak or docile little boy. He eventually started to rip off and dispose of those frilly flowered blouses and lace panties. And as fast as Ruby dolled up his hair, he snatched those pastel-colored barrettes, ribbons, and bows off and either stomped them to pieces or threw them at her.
“I ain’t no girl, Mama Ruby! I ain’t wearin’ no girl stuff no more!” Virgil yelled on the day that Ruby attempted to make him wear a ponytail with a black ribbon dangling down the back of his head like a python. He was six years old now, and she had never had his hair cut. By this time, it was past his shoulders.
“But, honey baby, everybody talks about you bein’ way too pretty to be a boy. And the way they fuss and fawn over you, they wouldn’t do it if you was a
regular
boy!” Ruby reasoned. “Enjoy it as long as you can, sugar!”
“If you want a baby girl so bad, go take one from Othella! She got way too many—you said so yourself!”
That much was true. Not only did Othella have too many baby girls, but Ruby often told her so. “Othella, if it wasn’t a shame I’d sneak in your house one night, snatch one of them girl babies you got, and I’d run like hell. I’d raise her as my own.” Ruby laughed.
“And I wouldn’t try to stop you,” Othella told her. She laughed, too. “Maybe then poor little Virgil can lead a normal life.”
“Don’t worry about my boy. He ain’t goin’ to grow up to be no sissy. The boy is way too mean for that.”
Virgil was just mean enough to cut his own hair that night with the scissors that Ruby kept in her sewing basket next to her bed. He wanted his mother to give birth to a baby girl just as much, if not more, than she did.
When Ruby walked into the tiny room that was supposed to be a pantry and saw her son sitting on his roll-away bed scooping his shorn hair up off the pillow, she screamed and swayed from side to side. And then she fainted.
After that day, she never treated her son like a girl again.
When Ruby and Othella were not working in the fields, they spent hours at a time on Othella’s front porch kicking back, chitchatting about one thing or another, and drinking beer. Their lives had become predictable and routine. And in some ways, empty.
“Mama Ruby, you ain’t got to be over here all the time. With this house full of kids I got, they can help me all I need with these younger ones,” Othella told Ruby. It was a Saturday afternoon in March.
“You know I don’t mind comin’ over here,” Ruby mumbled. “After slavin’ away in them fields so much, this is real relaxin’ and I love watchin’ you with all of them kids.”
“Listen, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I really do feel bad for you and the fact that you can’t seem to get the family you really want.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I love my babies, and you know I do. And no matter how many times I douche myself out after I been with a man, I keep gettin’ pregnant. It ain’t fair for women like me to keep havin’ babies. It ain’t fair that there’s women like you with just one child that really wants a house full and can’t seem to have ’em.”
“Well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be. But the good Lord did bless me with one child, when there is women all over the world that can’t even have one. So I still feel blessed.”
“But you still want a baby girl to . . . you know . . . to replace that other one.”
“We ain’t talked about that in a long time,” Ruby mumbled, tears forming in her eyes.
“I know we ain’t, but I know you like I know the back of my hand. Ain’t a day goes by that you don’t think about that baby you gave up.”
“The baby you and your mama
made
me give up,” Ruby reminded.
“We won’t go into all that. But the thing is, you ain’t never goin’ to get over that until you have another baby girl. Maybe not even then. You been harpin’ on this for so long that by now you probably think you deserve a few baby girls, not just one.”
Ruby had stopped believing that she’d ever find another husband. But she still believed that she would eventually have a daughter.
“You know you can always go get you a baby girl from one of them orphanages. Even if it’s just a foster child. Them orphanage folks don’t care who they place colored kids with.” As soon as those words left Othella’s mouth, she wanted to bite off her own tongue. What she had just said was the last thing that Ruby needed to hear. Othella sucked in her breath and awaited Ruby’s wrath.
“What in the world makes you think I’d do somethin’ like that?”
“Well, I . . . I thought . . .” Othella couldn’t even finish her sentence.
“The
only
baby girl that I would want from a orphanage is the one you and your mama made me give up!”
“I’m just tryin’ to help!” Othella whined. She was holding her daughter, Mae Alice, so tight, you would have thought that she was afraid Ruby was going to snatch that baby and bolt. “I don’t know what else to say to you when you get like this.”
“Then maybe you should stop sayin’ anything about it at all!” Ruby hollered.
“Don’t you put all the blame on me, girl! You always the one that brings the subject up, most of the time!”
Ruby bowed her head and shook it. Then she looked up and gave Othella a tight little smile. “I know,” she said with a heavy sigh and a dismissive wave. “Give me that baby so I can burp her. You look awful. You need to get some rest.” Ruby paused and widened her smile. “Me and you both hope you don’t get pregnant so quick with the next one.”
“I hope there ain’t no next one. I done had enough babies.”
“Well, as long as you keep spreadin’ your legs, these babies will continue to come.”
“I know, I know, Mama Ruby. And I know none of them daddies will stay around to help me raise them kids neither.”
“Men! Low-down, funky black dogs. Just like Satan.” Ruby laughed. She hugged Othella’s new baby against her chest and patted the baby’s back. “I just hope I get me one of them dogs with some sap potent enough for me to have the baby girl I deserve.”
“Well, I hope I don’t hook up with another one with no potent baby-makin’ batter no more.” This time Othella laughed.

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