Ruby (26 page)

At that Chauncy sank into a wizened laughter. “Y’all
know
that’s wrong.” Then with a flick of his cigarette ash, Ephram was dismissed. Ephram tried to lasso the right words but they hurdled beyond his grasp. Then the moment was gone as Chauncy slipped on his jacket and turned to the other men, “Now which one of you men’s fool ’nuff to think Cassius Clay got the stuff to win that there Thrilla in Manila?”

“The man’s name is Ali,” Percy corrected.

Charlie countered, “Hell, calling himself Mohammad like spitting in his mama’s face.”

Percy eased out, “Don’t matter, he already whooped Frazier once.”

“Fight was rigged,” Sim countered. “ ’Sides Joe knock him cold that first fight.”

“Truth is,” Charlie shot out, “yella man born weaker than brown. Joe gonna peel that nigga like a gorilla do a banana.”

“Yo’ own daddy’s a yella nigga,” Percy threw out.

Chauncy cut in, “Then I guess he know what he’s talking ’bout.”

Sim tried out, “Maybe we should ask Ephram ’bout yella niggas.”

Ephram leaned against a tombstone, great waves of self-disgust lapping against his heart. His insides twisted left and then right. He’d been called out three times in the last two minutes, he knew he couldn’t live in the town if he didn’t act now. He tried to muster his will, but something had cut into the trunk of his courage and he found his mouth flooded with saliva. Before he could stop himself, he’d heaved and vomited all over Weller Redding’s grave. The men glared at Ephram.

“Damn, that’s nasty,” Percy observed. In response, Ephram’s stomach pitched again and he heaved all over his shoes. The splatter deflected onto the cuffs of Chauncy’s pants.

“Damn!”
Chauncy shot out. “Watch yo’ fool self!” and before anyone knew what had happened he’d shoved Ephram back over the tombstone. Legs akimbo, he looked too foolish to inspire laughter.

No one had seen the clouds overhead, but regardless of anyone’s notice they had knotted in a soft, gray tangle and now began to rain. They sprinkled for a second and then, as if a faucet had been turned, they let loose a nice steady pour. Ephram felt the water splash off his upturned shoes, wet his ankles, his hands and eventually his face and hair. And without Ephram ever knowing it was there, the last of the red powder washed clean. Chauncy was cursing Ephram and the rain all at once, looming over him, fists tight. A new power and strength shot through Ephram, as if from the soil itself. He leapt to his feet and pushed Chauncy back. Chauncy staggered, disbelief splashing across his face.

“I was playing but now you done made me mad niggah!” He
charged, but a rivulet of water from Ephram’s direction stole under his size 13 Oxfords and Chauncy, the most surefooted of men, slipped and fell, chest flat upon Ephram’s vomit. The men exploded in rolling blasts of laughter.

Even Chauncy got the mean knocked out of him and surrendered to disgust. “Shit, man!” he said upon rising. “Shit! I got to walk home and change.” To Percy he called out, “Tell Mama I’ll be back directly.” He headed down the small hill, to the road, and once out of sight, veered left, in the distinct direction of Bell land.

The rest of the men ran and sought refuge under the leaves of a barclay tree. Ephram stood his ground, getting soaked through to the bone, heaving and strong, all tingling washed away, a steady calm surging through his body.

O
tha Jennings’s grave rested five headstones to the right and four up from where Ephram stood. A simple cement curved block with praying hands etched into the gray. Ephram tended it most Sundays after church, keeping the grass trim and flowers watered. The roots of buttercups and verbena wound atop the casket where Otha Jennings had been laid to rest. The coffin itself contained nothing of the woman, no bones, no teeth, not even a brush with a few strands of hair. Instead it contained her most dog-eared books, the
Complete Works of Emily Dickinson
and
Call of the Wild
by Jack London, a pair of her favorite gloves and her best lacing tat.

Ephram had been sixteen, Celia twenty-two when they had gotten the letter from Kindred Mental Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, telling them of Otha’s death in the hospital fire in July of 1945. The Colored wing had burned down to its pilings, leaving nothing but white ash. After Ephram had sent a total of twelve letters requesting her records, some kind clerk had finally sent them. Full of words like “psychotic break/schizophrenia” and “delusional episodes.” A list of medications that neither Ephram nor Celia had ever heard of. When they showed it to Dr. Tully, the visiting Colored doctor from Beaumont, he’d never heard of half of them either. He’d closed Otha’s file, shaken his head and
said a little curse and the words “lab rats” under his breath. When Celia had asked him what he meant, he’d just pressed his lips tight and said to be grateful she’d gone to her glory.

Otha Jennings had been born in Baltimore, in May of 1900, to an educated father and seamstress mother. She came from a long history of freedom. No great-grand nor grandmother, aunt nor uncle, had ever lived under the trace and toil of slavery. There was at the time, a very small yet substantial legacy of landed Negroes in America, Negroes who had achieved the unthinkable and had become doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, college presidents, businessmen. No one in Otha’s family had belonged to this group either. They were simple, striving people. Her father taught third grade at Washington Elementary, but before he died of consumption when Otha was fourteen, he’d already set aside enough money for her to continue her education at Fisk University in Tennessee. Otha was the only child of two only children. At seventeen she worked part-time with her mother after school and excelled in all things related to sewing, especially lace-making. Otha loved it so that she often dreamed in lace, delicate patterns covering her nighttime landscape. She was only a bit tall with skin as deep and rich as a plum. Her straight black “Indian” hair was from her mother’s side. It fell to her waist until she cut it, the summer before college, like Claudette Colbert. The hair on the floor had made the beautician cry. The next day she met the Reverend Jennings, a man twelve years her senior, on her way to church. She had just made a navy low-waisted shift dress for school and was feeling very grown up when he told her she looked like a new penny. She was shy until he told her he was a reverend visiting from Texas and that he was guest preaching at the Jesus First Name Holiness Church on Tinkle Street. He invited her to that evening’s revival. Since she
was already on her way to a church choir meeting, Otha didn’t see the harm and walked with him to Tinkle Street. Otha, who had always attended a calm, quiet Episcopal church, had never heard a first class Holiness preacher when he got riled. He slung words around her like comets soaring. She was in awe and waited for him after service as he had requested, so he could walk the star struck teenager home. He asked her questions about her life, her mama, her deceased daddy, her neighborhood, her friends. He asked her about the university when she told him she was to be the first Colored woman she had ever known of to get a college education. She told him of her plans to be a nurse in a Colored hospital. He listened with great earnestness, eyes deep and wide, nodding in tune to her yielding voice. He took her home and mentioned that he would be in town three more days until Friday, so she’d invited him to dinner the next night without asking her mother.

Marilyn Daniels disliked the man, but she was raised well and so she welcomed him into her husbandless home. She could see the loosely plastered desperation that hung over the frame of the man, the manners tacked on like pictures to hide the cracks. Worst he was a fly-by-night preacher, a man without a home except the one he wore on his back. And that, noticed the seamstress, was of shoddy cloth and make.

When he left for the evening, with a promise extracted from them to attend the revival the following evening, Marilyn could almost feel him marking her door like a male dog—done all the more easily because her husband’s scent of tobacco and bay rum aftershave had long since faded.

Otha Daniels fell in love that next evening sitting in the third pew. Otha and her parents had always kept a quiet house. Reverend Jennings was a trumpet blasting into the tender space under
her ribs. She could not understand why he was only the warm-up act for other, less worthy men. She was vexed by this, but knew that the injustice could be rectified—with her help. In that moment she ripped out the seams of her own dreams and patched them into his.

Her mother brought up ridiculous things like age and money. But when she mentioned Fisk and her daddy’s dream, Otha felt the wind leave her sails for a moment. She had been her father’s daughter and had believed and followed him in all things, but she was seventeen years old now, one month away from eighteen, and from everything she had learned of the world, everywhere she looked, women stopped being their father’s girls when they became a husband’s wife.

That next night the Reverend walked her home. There was not so much talking as they listened to their feet sweep along the sidewalk. They passed other Negro couples holding hands on the street and so he reached out and held her tapered, narrow hand in his. He began to talk about her hands, how long the fingers, how delicately they moved, how it had been one of the first things he had noticed about her. Otha had never thought of her hands as anything but agile tools to make lace and stitch. She felt a kind of magic running through her palms that made them want to dance like butterflies in the air.

They walked in circles, around parks, and dragged their feet long after the sun had fallen out of the sky. When they walked right by the graveyard where her daddy was buried, he’d kissed her so sweetly she melted into the earth. It was then that she had done it, given her daddy’s dream back to him. She had done it with tears of sorrow but also with joy, because this new dream was filling her solar plexus like blown glass, scalding hot and liquid at
the same time. So they walked back to the church where Minister Bowing made them man and wife.

Her mother had let out a small scream of agony when Otha told her she had married the Reverend. It was the loudest noise anyone had ever made in the house. Otha held her mother, her dark arms wrapped around the older woman’s neck, wet cheek to wet cheek, both crying in the dim of the evening lamps. She whispered into her mother’s ear that he gave her a reason to breathe in and out and that she would follow him and love him for all of her days.

Marilyn held her daughter. She would be hurt, of that Marilyn was certain. Helpless to protect her, Marilyn felt a wildness in her own chest, like a bird trapped behind a glass door. But when she looked in the girl’s eyes she could see that she was already gone so she gave her words to help her in the dark days:

“Your daddy and me named you Otha. It means ‘wealth.’ You were your daddy’s treasure from the time you were born until he died. He used to say there were rubies buried deep inside of you. Remember, baby, don’t never let a man mine you for your riches. Don’t let him take a pickax to that treasure in your soul. Remember, they can’t get it until you give it to them. They might lie and try to trick you out of it, baby, and they’ll try. They might lay a hand on you, or worse, they might break your spirit, but the only way they can get it is to convince you it’s not yours to start with. To convince you there’s nothing there but a lump of coal.

“Honey, one day I’m going to die, and that’s not all, one day you’ll die too. And between the here and the there, God sets us upon the business of collecting life’s true fortune. I’ve gotten plenty: the way your daddy smiled when I met him; the apple pie
your grandmother used to make, with whole cinnamon grated in with the sugar; the maple leaves in the fall and how that always meant your daddy’s fig maple syrup would be on our pancakes. And you. You my big beautiful jewel baby. You my prize. And one day you’ll have a child and that child will be your prize.

“Teach them to see it, teach them by doing. But if you can’t, if you done give your treasure away, if you find it hard to make your way in the dark of your own soul, if you forget who you really are, know that it comes back to you when the lie they give you die. That lie don’t die easy, and sometimes it take you with it. But for all that, your bounty yet waits for you to claim it.

“Remember and it will yet shine. Shine brighter when you let love touch you. Shine brighter when you love yourself. Shine on into heaven when you leave this old world.

“Remember what I say Otha. Remember to lay claim to your inheritance. Will you make that promise to me?”

Otha shook her head, eyes spilling with tears. “I promise Mama,” she whispered.

Then she gave her mother a kiss on her dark cheek and went upstairs to pack her bags. She left that hour. Marilyn watched them drive away—the Reverend had waited in the buckboard, never entering her home again, not even to pick up her daughter’s bags.

He was good to Otha for a month, and the days of that month were full of talk and big dreams and pictures the size of the sky painted with flourish. He told her of the South as they rode on his buckboard to Liberty, gentle breezes full of gardenia, and blue-bonnets littering the sides of hills. He talked about seeing and knowing, how he was a grown man and knew what he wanted, how he wanted to shepherd the lost. He talked about the church
he would have one day, and the rainbow glass with angel wings. He said how she was a little bitty thing who he would keep under his wing at least until forever.

The thirty good nights filled Otha with a kind of joy that broke her heart. It was too great a feeling to fit into her temperate body, her delicate spirit, so she had to keep breaking apart to accommodate it, only to glue herself back together each morning. By the time they reached Oklahoma she could no longer recognize herself. But Otha liked this new woman in the looking glass, with tired smiling eyes and world wise lips.

It would be years before he hit her. But in Texarkana, five days from Liberty, he began a covert assault on her judgment. It was little things, like how not to hang linen on the traveling line, what not to wear during Holiness service while he was guest preaching. When they arrived at the Jesus Hearth Church in Dearing and he gave his “Out of the frying pan, into the hands of Jesus” sermon with a 102-degree fever and chills to a decidedly cool congregation, he shamed Otha in front of the congregation by speaking about Northern women with shorn hair who thought the rib was bigger than Adam. By the time they reached Liberty his face was sullen stone that only cracked at night between white sheets.