She pulled the top sheet covering Jubi’s body, exposing her long pale legs and blood-soaked gown. “I can’t feed this baby. Help it live? I can’t lose everything for her.” The sheet fell from Emma’s hands to the ground. She turned around to face Jubi, looking for the girl she’d raised. The one who’d tried walking the line between two sides until one became more advantageous than the other. Until she had to choose between her family and the handsome young man she’d met. The Danubes weren’t native to Land’s End. They’d made their money in Birmingham between the mining and the railroad. A venture that brought them south to lay the last of the tracks where the land ended at the water. The termination point of one of the new lines connecting the country by hitch or stitch. Their newness k ept them in the dark about the history of the Duprees, and their whiteness k ept them on their side of the tracks, where they opened a general store to serve the community they adopted as their own, without ever considering there was a need to ask, question, or wonder whether someone who looked the same as them was really one of them. If you could assume whiteness with ease, was it not meant to be? Jubi had gone to great lengths to supplant her former identity with the one Logan assumed of her and she asserted for herself. Their life was a happy one. Filled with all the ner things she’d never have had on the farm. Even in their ownership they’d still had to work. Once they’d begun running the farm, Evangeline, Emma, and Jubi had all taken to the elds, to show they thought themselves no better than anyone else, and picked as much and as hard as any hand even though their name was on the deed. That was in addition to being on call for the whole of the town on both sides of the tracks delivering babies in the dead of night, in the middle of winter, or against the backdrop of a burning sun. Logan had o ered her a way out. She’d taken it, and now this baby wanted to drag her back. Looking down at the girl she’d taken to calling Ruby once she made it past her fourth month, Jubi laughed. A crazed cackle erupted from her lips and lled the room with a curdling sound. It set into Emma’s bones. Reminded her of a scream she once heard but couldn’t place.
“You’re right!” Jubi exclaimed in her delirium. “I was careful about everything exc ept this. Eight years we’ve been trying for this baby. I even built the altar and spread the salt like you said hoping she’d be the apple of our eyes. And here she is, the spawn of the devil himself.” Jubi laid the squirming girl in the middle of the bed, satis ed in her conclusion that in all her scheming, in all her careful planning, she’d never planned for this. Maybe because despite all her attendances at births she’d never seen a situation like her own. A couple like her and Logan. An equation with exponential outliers to disrupt the nal outcome and make it wholly unpredictable. On her side of the tracks, or the other, she was used to seeing exact copies. Duplicates, of the couples who called forth life from the very substance of themselves. For her and Logan, she’d never considered the possibility of permutation, or worse yet, an aberration. She’d never planned for her baby to be such an anomaly that it’d upend her life before it was even an hour old. But that’s the thing about babies. Nothing about them could be planned for. Not their arrival. Whether they’d be a boy or girl. If they lived or died. If the mother would even make it through the delivery or keel over on the other side. And generally, those were the only concerns. The only ones Emma had ever had to consider in all her years of working as a midwife after taking over from Evangeline. But Jubi presented an altogether di erent set of conditions. She was trying to control color from head to toe. She thought because she and Logan were so close in complexion that naturally their baby would be as bright as them. Pale skin that would need protection from the sun. Eyes that changed over the years from green to gray to hazel. Hair like corn silk that held nary curl, kink, nor coil. Jubi thought that because she was the same as her mother and father, even though George was a shade or three darker, more yellow than pale, that she and Logan would most de nitely have a baby who could pass. This baby, she didn’t expect. It had never entered her imagination that something so black could come out of somebody almost white. Whiteness, she believed, was not only color, because some people had olive undertones, like the swarthy Greeks and Italians she’d seen working for Logan’s family in Birmingham. It wasn’t just class, because admittedly some of them
were poorer than the colored folk on the other side of the tracks. It was more a ectation and air. An attitude of ownership. That you were owed shit. The world. The day. The night. The people. The bodies. The labor. The land. And, of course, the money. If you could have the audacity to believe yourself appointed above all, delude yourself into believing that you were victim, yet posed as the victor while still demanding more tokens and tributes to a rm and establish the position you created for yourself, were you not white? After all she’d done, was she not white? “Jubilee, you need to feed the baby,” Emma said sternly. “Don’t call me that.” “It’s what I named you.” “But it’s not who I am. My name is Jubi now. Jubi Etienne Danube.” That was who she’d been for the sixteen years she and Logan had known each other. It began when he stumbled into her in the summer of 1901 on her way to the back door of the general store. Logan apologized by o ering his arm for her to walk with him through the front. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she had asked him suspiciously. “My family’s had business in the area for years, but I was raised in Birmingham. I’m down here now because my father wants me to take over the railroad business and my mother is sick of the city, so overrun with coons.” His casual language let her know he couldn’t tell she was colored. What should have made her wary and distrusting instead made her curious. She played pretend. What loyalty did she have for people in a city she didn’t know? He presented her with the possibility of another life through an open door, and she took it and all he o ered when she st epped across the threshold. Her mind was opened to what else she could have if she didn’t correct people when they were wrong. Who’s to say they were wrong in the rst place? The only reason she was called colored was because they called themselves white. She gured then that if she didn’t di erentiate herself, she could mix and blend and cross back and forth as she pleased. Over that summer Logan and Jubi became acquainted. He regaled her with tales about the iron city and how his family rst got into railroad work after the war in an e ort to rebuild the South. Their enterprise into coal mining soon
followed when they learned there were grand pro ts to be had without enduring the dirtiness of the work thanks to the practice of convict leasing. Jubi didn’t inch as he easily discussed how his family reenslaved Black people under the guise of punishment for crimes of vagrancy, loitering, or unemployment. She couldn’t stop playing pretend mid-game because the rules no longer agreed with her constitution. She smiled and laughed as she thought she was supposed to. When Logan asked after Jubi’s whereabouts and her own relative newness to town, she did the only thing she could think of: she lied—to ld him she was Cajun, her family originally from a bayou border town between Louisiana and Mississippi. “Only thing on the border there is the river,” Logan had joked. “It was a swampy place,” she’d told him. Whenever she came into the store, he always o ered to walk her home, but she declined. Instead, she’d leave out the front and then walk in circles and squares on the side of town she rarely had need to venture into until she thought it safe to make her way back across the tracks to the farm. She believed then that she absolutely could continue to play pretend as long as it stayed on the other side of Land’s End. And who on that side of the tracks would say di erent? Sure, there were some who k ept quiet out of both loyalty and pity for Emma. But it was really fear that k ept mouths closed and secrets inside. Who would dare speak a word out of turn against a white woman? Whatever Jubilee was up to, they gured it wasn’t worth getting lynched over a lie. Though at that time the possibility of what could be was short-lived. By the fall, Jubi returned to school at Alabama A&M in Huntsville and Logan headed back to Birmingham, where he was already betrothed to another, with a fancy wedding planned a year later. Only after he returned to Land’s End in 1908 did her plan fully move into motion. At twenty-six, she was a college graduate in a place where most only nished high school. Too educated and too saditty for the men around her, Jubi was intrigued upon learning of Logan’s return. I t ’ s d e s t i n e d , she thought. She made sure she visited the general store. Of course, they reconnected. Logan revealed his rst wife had died in childbirth and he couldn’t bear to stay in the city. She too killed o her invented family. Told him she was all alone in
the world with only a little inheritance to ke ep her a oat. She even rented at a white rooming house run by a woman who also lacked a long history of Land’s End to ke ep up the ruse and allow Logan to nally walk her to what he thought was her home. Their courtship after that was quick, connected by what Logan thought was grief when it was truly Jubi’s greed, her lust for his life, which she glimpsed the rst time she walked through the front door on his arm. They married at the courthouse without him ever meeting her people. When she was nally introduced to his family—after the wedding—th ey didn’t question her story either, who she was or where she was from, the kind of interrogation that evaluates wealth and assigns worth in determining deservingness of the Danube name. After all Logan had lost, they didn’t have the heart to try and sully his nd. In fact, his sister Adeline, who lived in Land’s End with her husband and two daughters, was so happy to see Logan happy, she didn’t suspect Jubi to be anything or anyone other than who she said she was, even though their house help knew better. Like Emma knew better. Like Logan was about to nd out. His footst eps pounded toward the door. Quick and insistent, it was the pace of a man who’d waited too long to meet the son he’d sired. Logan didn’t believe what Jubi said: that after all this time, all these years, all the miscarriages and stillbirths that’d nearly killed her, all he would end up with was a girl—a daughter who looked nothing like him, unlike the dead baby boys who were his spitting image, especially in complexion. Jubi hadn’t believed in the curse either. That Dupree women could carry only girls. She hadn’t believed her own mother when she detailed her struggles to carry a baby, all the lengths to which Evangeline had gone every time Emma had gotten pregnant, let alone the late-night murmurings about her brothers. Jubi didn’t believe in most of the stories, especially not of her grandmother. She didn’t believe a woman she’d never met, one who was long dead— dismembered at that—had that much power over her body. She refused to allow the stories to color her perspective or change her mind. That is, until Logan stood knocking outside their door while a black-ass baby girl she’d named Ruby lay in the middle of the bed screaming for milk Jubi withheld.
“Is he here?” Logan peeked through the door. “She is, sir.” Emma st epped in front of him to block his view. “So it is a girl? I didn’t believe Jubi for one minute when she k ept referring to my son as a she and calling her Ruby. I just knew we were having a Robert. I was ne to ke ep the R name, but I just knew we were nally having my boy. We’d been waiting for so long. Even let her waste good salt all around the doors and erect a hoodoo altar to bring our dreams to reality.” Logan’s mouth fumbled over the word h o o d o o , as if it were foreign to him. As if venerating ancestors was so far outside the realm of worship he had to turn up his nose at what he considered primitive. Who were the angels and saints if not ancestors who’d found favor on the other side? Tucking her true thoughts, Emma answered, “I understand, s i r .” She emphasized the handle she put on his name. Deference she hated to show, and didn’t need to. Unearned respect she rarely gave. But in this situation, between her passing daughter, white husband, and black grandbaby, she knew she was going to need more than deference, more than respect to make it out alive. “Let me see her,” Logan demanded. “I bet she looks just like Jubi.” “She looks like her family, that’s for sure,” Emma said. “But Jubi needs to feed the baby to get her settled, don’t you, Jubil—” “Yes, I do, Emma.” Jubi snatched the baby from where she’d laid her in the middle of the bed and brought her to her breast. She said, “And you need to nish tending to me. Logan, please, let me get cleaned up, and then I’ll bring her to you. It won’t be long now.” “I just want to peek at her face, and then I’ll go and leave you ladies to it.” He was insistent. A petulant child trapped in the body of a grown man. Never used to being denied, told no, not even by his own parents. Logan Danube had inherited his fortune by digging in his heels and refusing reason. Once he had his mind made up, there was no persuading him. No coaxing him to choose di erently. See di erently. Think di erently. Standing a foot above Emma as it was, he rose up on his feet to try to get a glimpse of the baby wrapped tight in the dirty sheet and held close to Jubi’s breast. This close clutch would have delayed the inevitable a bit longer had the
baby not had a mind and mission of her own. Even latched to the teat, she continued to kick and stretch, exercising the limbs that had been cramped in the womb forty weeks. It was another characteristic about her daughter Jubi recognized as di erent from all other babies she’d ever seen. Most stayed balled up, knees tucked into their chest for the rst month of life. But not hers. No, Ruby k ept trying to make room. And it was in one of these ts of the legs and arms that Logan didn’t have to peek or sneak around the midwife he’d called to his home to deliver what he’d thought would be a son. He was able to see clear as day the pedaling legs and punching arms. Legs and arms that were in nitely more shades darker than he’d ever be. A baby that would never turn red and burn because it was protected by skin the color that had never run in the likes of his family. “Unwrap the baby,” Logan demanded. With gritted teeth and steely eyes, his voice hardened from the impatient charm it once held. Emma said, “She’s gotta eat, sir, and I have to clean up your wife. We’ll bring her to you once she’s settled back down. I reckon it won’t be long.” “I said, unwrap the baby.” “Sir—” “Unwrap the baby.” Logan pushed past Emma and closed the gap between himself and the bed where Jubi sat up, clutching the squirming baby to her breast. If she could have su ocated the girl in the fatty folds of her own mammary glands, she would have. But Ruby k ept kicking, k ept squirming, k ept turning for air, for food, for the freedom to look upon her father’s aghast face. “I don’t know what kind of shit you two are trying to pull in here, but somebody better start talking and tell me why this girl looks like she’s from some dirty nigger on the other side of the tracks.” “I, I, I, I,” Jubi stammered, trying to create a coherent sentence. To issue a satisfactory alibi. One that neither suggested she wasn’t who he assumed she’d been, nor, worse yet, that she’d had an a air on the other side of Land’s End and had tried to pass the baby o as his.
“There’s an old rootwork woman across the tracks,” Jubi began. “I, I, I went to see her after our... after our... after our last loss. I asked her for her help. I, I, I think she put a hex on me.” Jubi looked up at Logan to see if he believed her lie. His hardened jaw and unmoving eyes suggested he didn’t. He asked, “What’s her name? Who’d you see?” “Evangeline.” Emma inhaled sharply. Logan reached into his pocket and, quick as a ash, brandished his switchblade. Pressing it to Jubi’s neck, he said, “Try again. I know Evangeline’s dead. She was the midwife before this one here.” Logan yanked the baby from Jubi’s arms and held her upside down by a foot. Stronger than she had the age to be, Ruby kicked and screamed, trying to right her own self in the white man’s hand. He sneered, “I’ll cut her limb from limb, head from body, if you don’t tell me whose baby this is.” “She’s ours!” Jubi screamed. Voice scratchy and hoarse, body trembling, tears leaking, she r epeated, “She’s ours. She’s ours. She’s ours.” From behind, Emma approached, and reached for the baby. “She’s mine, sir,” she said tentatively. “Both of ’em. Ruby is my granddaughter. Jubilee, here, my daughter.” “Jubilee?” Logan groused. “It sounds like a nigger name if I ever heard one.” “That’s Jubilee Dupree, my daughter,” Emma said. “This baby belongs to you and Jubilee. I reckon she take after my own mammy. Evangeline, she raised me, she told me my mammy was killed before she’d even passed her afterbirth.” “Looks like history will r epeat itself tonight,” Logan said, pointing the blade at the baby in Emma’s arms. With a free hand, Emma touched his shoulder. Gently, she said, “Let me take ’em back. You can say they both died during the birth. Nobody’ll question a man in mourning. It’s still late yet. The sun ain’t even up. No one has to know.” Logan looked from Jubi’s trembling frame, sitting up in the bloody bed, to Emma cradling the black baby that’d nally settled in the older woman’s arms. Bending beside Jubi, blade nearly drawing blood from her cheek, he whispered,
“Get your black ass out of my house right now, and don’t you ever let me even hear of you walking around on this side of the tracks.” Wrapping the soiled sheets around her dirty white dressing gown, Jubi inched herself o the bed and away from Logan’s wrath. She sidest epped the bowl of water lled with the refuse from the inside of her body and shu ed beside Emma. Head hanging, body aching from being ripped wide open, she led the way out of the house Logan had built for them and she’d decorated according to her taste. Past the mantel with their wedding portrait and the piano where they had entertained guests, Jubi scooted past the life she’d made from her imagination, leaving a lmy trail of blood behind her. If anybody was awake or paying attention that night, they would have been able to follow the blood from Logan Danube’s door, across the tracks, to the Dupree farm on the other side of Land’s End. They would have known that the woman who passed for white by calling herself the Cajun, Jubi Etienne, was really Jubilee Dupree. But Emma was right. No one on Logan’s side of town was awake. They would never know the wife and child he said he lost in delivery after years of trying to conceive were just across the tracks, alive and well. The folks on his side pitied his misfortune. Especially since it had happened before. Which is why Logan had been all too agreeable to the cover-up. He knew how to fake the pain of losing a wife and child. He’d already lived it once. Men o ered sympathy in what they believed to be his second bout of grief. Women pushed their daughters before him to help him in his time of need. They would never know. Across the tracks, however, was an altogether di erent story. Amongst the many who rose before dawn to pr epare for the day, they saw Jubilee, Emma, and the baby, shadows coming from a mile away. Under the moonlit sky they made out the old woman’s frame wrapped in white, carrying a bundle that looked like a baby, and then the thing behind her shu ing along, body falling lower and lower as if it had a wish to see the other side. Those awake saw Jubilee’s return, and those who weren’t lied and said they did. They said that by the end of the journey Jubi was crawling on her hands and knees to the door of the old house where she’d been born. They said she was so bloody and dirty that it was the one time in her life she resembled her daughter:
both black as night. And most of it was true. Jubi was bloody and dirty. And though she didn’t crawl to the door, she did collapse once she’d reached it. The blood se eping out of her every st ep of the way from the house she’d made to the home that was hers had made her dizzy and weak. She fell because she was unable to walk, to take another st ep. Face down in the dusty doorway, she lay there awhile as Emma tended to the still-hungry baby inside. Those who saw her shook their heads. Others muttered, “Serves her right.” Jubi couldn’t blame them. In fact, she agreed with them. She knew some dec eptions deserved the dirt.
J u l y 1 9 3 4 At seventeen, Ruby wore her color proud, braided hair too, despite Jubi’s disdain. Out of spite she didn’t own any hats. Every time Jubi had given her one, she had lost it. Sometimes it was an accident. Most times it was on purpose. What did she need a hat for? She didn’t burn in the sun. Her skin didn’t need protecting. Not the same way Jubi safeguarded her own. It was for that reason Jubi had told Ruby she didn’t go farther than the mailbox or the fence post. The reason Ruby had to do all her bidding in town and, once she was old enough to factor and gure, take over the running of the farm. Never did she say it was because she lived under Logan’s threat of death. She told Ruby she no more liked the day-to-day running of the farm than she tolerated the sun. She found both inconvenient and wholly unnecessary. “Why would God make something so oppressive and call it good?” Jubi had ranted the question on more than one occasion. She’d said it just that morning, when Ruby and Emma had left for church, their arms loaded with food for the fellowship hall. Ruby carried the biscuits. Emma followed with the jars of jam. It was then she said something about the two braids trailing down her granddaughter’s back. “When’d you do that?” Emma asked. “Yesterday when I came back from the general store,” Ruby answered. “Do you like it?” “Who taught you how to braid to the scalp?” “Nobody,” Ruby answered. “I was sitting in front the mirror, took my hair down, and did it. I taught myself.” “Mm-hmm.” Emma nodded. Quiet and pensive, she watched the girl move about, wanting to see for herself what had come over her.