In the middle of Sunday service, Emma, overwhelmed by what she thought was the meddling of her own mother reaching into Ruby from the other side, raised a nger and tipped out. She went home and set a bowl of water by the door to welcome and guide the spirit. But she was on her way back to the church house when she remembered what Evangeline had taught her. “For every good spirit dey’s a bad one. Make sure you have balance when you working.” Now, as she stood beside Ruby, serving St. Jos eph’s members supper, Emma still hadn’t thought of a good balance to the water she’d set for welcome. She was racking her brain as she spooned out preserves, which didn’t always land on the plate, when the boy approached. Sampson stopped in front of Ruby rst. “Would you like a biscuit?” she asked. “Yes, please.” Ruby handed over the roll with the golden crispy edges and the u y center. Sampson reached to take it from her hand instead of letting her set it on his plate. Their ngers grazed. A shock ran through them both. Emma felt it too. She said, “Ruby Ann, take over my station.” “You all right?” Ruby asked. If Emma heard her, she didn’t let on. Instead, she handed over her spoon dripping with blackberry jam, removed the apron covering her clothes, and walked away dazed, chasing after something that wasn’t concerned with her yet. Back in the line, Sampson looked at Ruby and said, “I like your hair.” Heat swam beneath her skin. The kind that changed everyone’s color but hers unless you knew where to look. Sampson knew where to look. He said, “When you nish, you wanna get out of here?” “My mama and grandmama would have my hide if they heard tongues wagging about me running around outside with you.” “They’re not here, though. Your grandmama just left.” “Maybe so, but it’s still women watching.” “Well, when you nish serving, you leave rst like you headed home. And after a while, I’ll leave. We’ll meet at the tracks and then go somewhere together.”
Ruby nodded as one of the deacons waiting in line behind Sampson cleared his throat. “Say yes?” he pleaded. Ruby nodded, picked up another biscuit, and set it on his plate. He walked away thankful for the two pieces of bread he’d received to sop up the thick preserves. He ate the preserves slow, then licked his ngers, one by one, of the sticky and sweet refuse all the while looking at Ruby, who avoided his gaze. She passed out biscuits and spooned jam until all of St. Jos eph’s was fed and she was scraping the bottom of the jar with a spoon trying to taste a little sweet for herself. She hadn’t had much in life. Jubi gave her scorn, Emma silent contemplation. That’s how she’d made it into the elds all those years ago to run around with Sampson until the day he just stopped showing up. No warning. Just gone. She learned then that the things you like and the people you love have no obligation to like you back. To love you back. If they indulge you at all, count it joy. That’s why when Ruby walked away from the serving tables and slipped out of the fellowship hall she had no designs to go home. She was tired of being made to feel that folks only su ered her presence. Jubi especially. As early in the afternoon as it was, she knew Jubi wouldn’t dare set foot outside with the sun high. Ruby wasn’t sure what Emma would do, but she took a chance and walked to the tracks in her Sunday dress and shoes. Her braided hair swung across her back as the sun warmed her scalp showing through the parts. Sampson met her shortly thereafter. She saw him coming in his suit pants, shirt, and tie. The latter he took o and shoved in his pocket. When he reached her, she noticed he’d unbuttoned the top two notches of his shirt. She said, “Boys are lucky. They can loosen their buttons, roll up their sleeves, take o their clothes even, and nobody bats an eye. Us girls can’t so much as have a run in our stockings without crazy assumptions being made about our character.” “Do you care?” he asked. “I learned long ago not to think too highly of other people’s opinions. They always let you down.” “Not always,” Sampson said.
“Why did you want to meet here?” Ruby asked. “So we could walk over to the Gulf together.” “What for?” “Just something to do.” She studied his face, looking to see if he too wore a mask like her mother. One that taunted. She was looking for any sign to send her home to the women she knew, even if she knew very little. Ruby was unsure of whether she wanted to learn someone else who might nd her refreshing in the high heat of the day, but a poor salve for the soul by the time it ended. But she had no warning against it. No worries. No foreboding or misgivings. She tried to channel Emma by looking o down the empty tracks. The old woman was always staring in the distance, entranced by something no one else saw. Looking for someone no one else could name. “You can see the beginnings and endings of the world if you wait long enough,” Emma had said to her when she was a girl. Ruby waited, trying to see the past in the present. In a ash, there it was. Rather, there she was. The girl in the mirror, who looked so much like herself, running across the tracks. Ruby turned toward Sampson. Wanted to know if he could see. But there was nothing to belie vision. He blinked and reached for her shoulder. There it was again. The shock, electric energy between them. The same tingle she’d felt in her ngertips she now tasted on her tongue. Seeing the girl, seeing herself running free, Ruby trusted it. She trusted it all. “Let’s go,” she said. They walked with their shoes in hand once they reached the water’s edge. The blue-green sea lapped their ankles, dampening the hems of Ruby’s dress and Sampson’s cu ed pants. Side by side, feet leaving tracks in the sand, they enjoyed the quiet of the midafternoon, when the folk from Land’s End, on both sides of the tracks, were tucked away in their respective church fellowship halls, eating their ll of food and catching up on the week’s gossip. So consumed were they with spreading the goings-on of this one’s n ephew, and that one’s cousin, and the stories that inspired exclamations of “Oh, Sister, I’ve been meaning to tell you...,” no one had time to wonder on the whereabouts of Ruby and Sampson.
They made mention of Emma’s disappearance in passing. Though no one wondered about Jubi. She hadn’t set foot in a church house on their side of the tracks in more than two decades and no longer sparked the fevered whispers she once had. As for her daughter, who would whisper about her? Who knew to? Who knew that at the very moment they were picking apart the homegoing and r epast of Sampson’s grandmother Claudette, that Ruby would be shoulder to shoulder with him, sleeves nearly touching, longing for what she hadn’t known she desired? “We not gon’ get in trouble walking on this here beach?” Sampson asked. “I know everybody in town still in church, but it ain’t like white folk don’t get possessive about us strolling their land.” “This part doesn’t belong to them,” Ruby said. Both of Sampson’s eyebrows raised two inches from where they rested, unsure of her meaning. She threw her head back and gave a good-natured gu aw, relishing what she would tell him next. “This part of the beach belongs to us,” she said. “Mama Em bought it with the earnings from the farm.” “Y’all must be doing real good in this D epression to buy a whole beach.” “We do all right,” Ruby demurred. “Boll weevil be damned.” “How far down does the land go?” “Those trees further up yonder. The one that looks like a knotty elbow coming out of the sand.” Sampson looked toward the trees and then behind him to where they rst st epped on the sand emerging from a high thicket of brush and dunes. It seemed to expand by the second as he looked between landmarks. He had no idea how many acres they covered. He had no idea people like him could call such a thing their own. A two-hundred-acre farm and a piece of property on the water was almost too much for him to believe. Approaching the tree line, he asked, “How she get ahold of something like this?” “I don’t know. The farm always been ours. It’s where all of us were born. Me, Mama, and Mama Em. The beach, well, that’s a di erent story. Mama Em say, ‘Green is green when you hungry and lean.’ That’s how she got this here. Her
money spend the same as anybody else’s. Who cares if it came from us if it put food on their table. She didn’t go into the particulars, but I know that much.” Sampson looked out at the expanse of ocean and saw all he wanted for himself. Land, water, space, and a lady beside him. At the edge of the property line, he left the path they’d been walking and started toward the knotty tree. He climbed the elbow rst and then turned back toward Ruby. “Take my hand,” he said. Ruby looked up at the long and bending bark-covered limbs toward the lush canopy of green leaves that could shade them from the sun and being seen. Not that anyone else was out, but she had to make sure. She didn’t want to be the latest tale in a jabbering mouth running back across the tracks. Though no one ever said anything to her directly, she saw their looks when she left the house. Those mirthful glances from a joke in which she was never allowed to laugh. Whatever the case, she’d had enough of talk around her to openly invite chatter. But her heart beat for the both of them. Quick and fast, she felt that feeling. Ruby glanced toward the water where a dazzling light ashed against the shimmering sea. She trusted her intuition and took Sampson’s hand. One touch and she decided right then it was enough. He lifted her up to the sturdy knot on the rst limb. She savored the moment: the feel of his slightly calloused ngertips, the musky, sea-tinged smell coming from his skin, even the sweet taste of his breath as he blew air from his nose. It was all so much. The girl and now this. Ruby knew she’d be a fool to say no. To shrink away when she was hungry for more. She took every touch Sampson gave, tender and delicate, gru and gripping, as they climbed higher and higher until their heads were shrouded in the canopy and their feet dangled above the sand. Ruby surrendered to her senses, unaware and unashamed of the feelings that grew out of touching and came with consequences, or choices, d epending upon the perspective. She turned her face toward his and leaned in close, praying he’d lean back. When he did, their foreheads touched and their eyelashes rested on cheeks as their mouths met in the middle. She couldn’t believe she was the kind of girl to go o cavorting and canoodling, kissing and caressing with a strange man she only really knew as a boy. But who knew what kind of girl she was? A girl untouched and never kissed, not even by her own mama. She was k ept at
arm’s length, as if her color would infect, spread from body to body with a brush, a peck, or a tender press of ngertips. Ruby knew she was a hindrance to her mother’s way of living, whether Jubi said it or not. It’s no wonder that after that Sunday afternoon, she sought after Sampson every day he was in Land’s End. When her morning chores were nished and she was of no more use on the farm, she followed the road beyond the fork to the shacks and shanty homes away from Jubi and Emma. But she couldn’t just arrive at Ms. Claudette’s, walk up to the front door of the two-room house, and call on Sampson. That would trigger too much talk, too much wonderment for her behavior to continue. Instead, she had to arrive under the auspices of errands. Needing something, bringing something, even if it was just eggs from the henhouse or her able hands. “My mama and Mama Em told me to come on down the road and check on you to see how y’all doing with gathering Ms. Claudette’s things,” Ruby lied. She lied and lied about her leaving and her visits with butterscotch smiles and adolescent earnestness she hadn’t lost despite her bigger age. There was never the consideration that she wasn’t telling the truth. A girl like Ruby, as dark as she was, what did she have to lie about? And Sampson was no better. A few years older, smug and smelling himself, he concealed their secret. Too eager on his own to run o and swim in her at the base of the knotty tree, tangling the blanket they’d brought in sand-covered limbs. Their love was physical. All lust. Heavy breathing, dewy eyes, and wrinkled clothes. Ruby’s appetite for Sampson was insatiable. She craved him on her constantly. It was not enough to be near; they had to touch, be enveloped, one beneath the other. One within the other. When they met, it was thrust and throttle, a syncopated hum that escalated to rhythmic harmony before exploding into mu ed shouting. Just because no one was at the beach didn’t mean they needed to hear. Tending crops, though harvest season was still months o , k ept folk from their side of the tracks busy from can’t see to can’t see. No one had time to miss a daughter who did no eld work and a man spending borrowed time. It was always assumed Sampson would return to Mobile once the work of closing down the life Ms. Claudette had lived was complete. He never said as
much to Ruby. He assumed she knew. The weeks went by. He enjoyed her company, her body, the shape of her face, the curve of her back, the vastness of her skin. Looking at her, he saw starshine and moonglow, the beginnings and endings of creation in the crevices she unclothed. One particular afternoon, Sampson ran his hand alongside Ruby’s body. He traced her calves to thighs, thighs to hips, hips to arms, and arms to neck. He said, “I’m going to miss this when I’m gone.” The word was two hundred pounds of burlap-wrapped cotton on Ruby’s chest. “Gone.” She wanted to snap her body around and face him. She wanted to scream, W h a t c h u m e a n ? But she did nothing of the sort. She had no right. Finding air through the load, she asked, “You going back to Mobile?” “It’s time,” Sampson said. “I done prolonged my trip as long as my family could tolerate. Everyone else been gone but me. I had been staying here for—” “You don’t need to say what you don’t mean.” “I wasn’t,” he said. “I like you, Ruby, but I’m twenty years old. I gotta get a job. I ain’t a Dupree with a farm, eld hands, and a whole beach. I live in the real world.” “And you saying I don’t?” Ruby sat up, blanket clutched close and shoulders rounded. Anger pushed out her sadness. She didn’t need his excuses any more than she needed him to explain her life when she was the one living it. He didn’t know what it was to go your whole life hungry, unable to name the pain inside. To live in such a way where food no longer nourished, heat no longer warmed, and money didn’t matter. What she was starved for wasn’t provision. Of provision she had plenty. But she could no more impress upon Sampson about why her need was more important than he could convince her of his. Ruby shook sand from her clothes and shoes. She put on the dress of the girl she had been before Sampson had asked her to take his hand. The clothes still t, even if the body inside was di erent. For her body tingled with his touch. It throbbed with the sensation wrongfully removed from within. But it was over. He was going home. It was high time she did the same. They d eparted together, each lost in their own thoughts. Hands at their sides, they walked back the way they came. Through one side of Land’s End to the
other. Across the tracks and down the road, Sampson arrived at Ms. Claudette’s house rst. It was empty now. The belongings given away or discarded. He started to nd some last words, but Ruby never stopped. She didn’t linger to say an awkward goodbye or a lying S e e y o u l a t e r . She knew that she wouldn’t and that because of his needs he absolutely couldn’t. So she k ept walking, stride straight, back sti , her own hands touching nothing but herself until she made it to the house sitting in front of the fork and had no choice but to go inside. On the oor in front of her mirror, a potion of oil beside her and the broken comb in her hand, Ruby parted out sections and shook loose the sand. Her ngers moved on their own; she had no need to look. If the girl was there, she didn’t want to see. She’d trusted her and been let down. Led on. It was too much to remember the magic of it all. The fortuitous happenstance that had been four weeks on the Black beach. Now all she had to show for it were sandy hair, a hollow body, and itchy drawls. Ruby shifted in her discomfort, knowing she should have heated some water for a bath and washed her hair, but she worried about what they would say. Emma and Jubi were somewhere around nishing up the work of the farm, even if they hadn’t yet come in the house. Odd behavior inspired odd questions. But for Emma there was nothing more odd than seeing Ruby inside her room, face down with her ngers in her hair, and a girl who looked liked her laughing and dancing in the mirror. “She’s still here.” Emma’s voice cut through all manner of Ruby’s emotions. She dropped her ngers from the braid she was constructing and let her long hair fall in heavy layers like a we eping willow tree. Ruby turned to Emma, who just nodded toward the girl in the mirror. Looking back, Ruby saw only herself. “What’s going on in here?” Jubi asked, coming to stand in the doorway. Emma walked o . She found who she’d been looking for. Mother and daughter left mother and daughter alone. Ruby went back to crisscrossing her strands until she reached the end. She didn’t even look up when she switched to the other side. Jubi sneered. “You not satis ed unless you bringing somebody else down with you? First me, then Mama, and now that boy.”
Ruby didn’t answer, didn’t even look up to watch Jubi walk away. Head down, ngers braiding, she grieved for all she’d lost. Not understanding who she’d found. What she’d been given. It took her a long time to recognize the signs. It wasn’t until everything was swollen, breasts, feet, hands, and belly, that she had an inkling that she was big with Sampson’s baby. At rst, she thought the tenderness in her chest came from lifting bags of grain and pushing the wheelbarrow around the farm. But the sensitivity didn’t subside when the harvest was complete. And the shooting pains that sent daggers through the bottoms of her feet didn’t dissipate, no matter how long she sat down for a rest. Her hands tingled always, whether she opened and closed them, or exed and relaxed her sts. Now, her stomach was an altogether di erent matter. She didn’t understand how the distention worked. One day she needed to let out the tops of all her dresses, the next day the bottom, until they hung away from her in an oblong shape. That winter, Jubi had seen enough of Ruby in her ill- tting dresses. She’d been waiting for the girl to come clean, to admit what she’d been up to, but she never did. She was also waiting for the blood. For Dupree women, there was always blood. Buckets of crimson, because the little boy babies never did live. After six months with no blood, Jubi nally confronted Ruby. They were all sitting in front of the re. Emma, in her rocker, stared o into the ames. Jubi sat in an opposite chair with sewing in her hand. Ruby was on the oor between them, feet stretched toward the hearth, stress tingles tapping through her toes and ngertips. “You might wanna write him a letter and let him know you’re with child.” Ruby snapped her head toward Jubi, who never lost a stitch. “I told you you wasn’t gon’ be satis ed until you brought somebody else down in the pits with you. Well, here we are.” “Jubilee, that’s enough, now.” Emma’s voice rang strong and clear. Studying the re as if she were trying to decipher code, she said, “What’s done is done now. Ruby Ann taking up with Claudette’s grandson ain’t so far and away di erent from what you did, now is it, Jubilee?”
“What I did was try to give myself a better life. It was bad enough I carried the curse. Then when it was all over, when I nally thought I had my miracle, I had something other than myself.” “That’s what happens when you run from who you are.” “And who am I, Mama?” Jubi asked. “Who are you? It’s not like you know much in the rst place. You said Evangeline took all she knew to the grave.” “Not all. I know some things. She living in this girl here, I can tell you that much.” “Makes sense, as dark as she is. She would be the one to carry her color.” “Ruby Ann, pay your mama no mind. But you do need to do as she say and let him know.” “Tell him it’s a girl,” Jubi added. “How I’m s’posed to tell him?” Ruby asked softly. “It ain’t like we had this planned.” “Babies ain’t nothing to be planned for,” Emma said. “Married or not,” Jubi added. “Babies come when babies come.” “And in this here family, our girls get here on they own time and of they own mind. No matter how many boys she has to sacri ce for the girls to get here rst.” “Who’s sacri cing what?” Ruby asked. Emma didn’t answer. She stared at the re and watched the ames dance. Legs and feet lifted from the ground and hands spread, arms akimbo, in the air. She watched her with joy before she recounted the pain. In a gravelly voice, Emma told the story of how she was born, the day of her own mama’s murder. Evangeline and the curse, the boys before and after Jubilee. “And the same thing happened to me,” Jubi said softly. “Between you and my daddy? Who was he?” Ruby asked, taking hold of the opportunity to get answers to questions she’d long stopped asking as it presented itself. A liberty Jubi nor Emma expected. Jubi looked to Emma. Emma looked to the girl in the re. There were only two choices before them and neither included t h a t particular truth. Jubi resorted to what she did best and made up a story on the spot.
“Your daddy was in the war but got injured right after he d eployed. He came home when I was still big with you, in his uniform and everything. White folks ain’t like how proud he was standing all pressed and sharp, brass medals gleaming, injury be damned. Especially the sheri . Your daddy took a billy to the back. Was arrested and charged with loitering, vagrancy, and for not having a job even though they all knew he worked with us on the farm. He got sent up on a chain gang out Birmingham or Huntsville way. I never knew for certain. Never heard from him since.” Overcome with the details, Ruby didn’t have the presence of mind to ask after his name, which was Jubi’s aim; to let a tragedy, one that was true in detail but not to the family, settle into Ruby to ke ep her inquisitive spirit quiet. Emma shook her head at the re too disgusted to contradict Jubi’s tall tales, but Ruby looked at her mother anew. If only for a moment. She’d never heard Jubi sound so fragile. As if she remembered the instant she was broken. Usually all sharp edges and gall, Jubi too stared at the re, looking to see if what Emma saw was true. A curse come back to life, taking over Ruby’s body. Despite their di erences and all their bickering in this moment, they were of one accord. Agreed in the ways of women with experience. Ruby asked, “Is it going to happen to me?” Jubi turned and narrowed her eyes. Clouds colored her face as her hair was backlit in a halo from hell. “You gotta girl on the rst try. Be satis ed. We cain’t carry no boys. Ain’t got no use for ’em.”
O c to b e r 1 9 8 0 By the time Nadia needed to tell Roman that he’d left her with life, it was decades after the Dupree women had stopped conversing about the curse. Evangeline, Emma, and Jubi were gone, and Ruby and Gladys believed it to have been broken, for Gladys d i d have two boys. The fact of those two miracles, minor complications notwithstanding, led them to believe that she had been merciful on account of what Gladys su ered. Though they had stopped conversing about that as well. In any case, Nadia had no reference point for the extremity of what she was feeling. All she knew was that nausea washed over her when she opened a tub of no-lye relaxer. She was in class on the West Side, working on Mrs. Johnson, her test client. With gloved hands, she smeared the cool white cream on the older woman’s new growth and kitchen, working her way from back to front, all while taking shallow breaths from her mouth. When she passed the rattail comb through to ensure for even distribution, Nadia had to close her mouth to ke ep the excess saliva and bile from bubbling out. “C’mon, let’s get you washed out,” she said to Mrs. Johnson. “I can’t let this set too long or you’ll burn.” “I been gettin’ my hair permed longer than you been alive. I know when it’s right.” Mrs. Johnson stared through the mirror. Her dark brown pupils girded by a thin blue circle were unmoved. Nadia backed away from the rising scent of chemicals. She said, “Okay, I’ma trust you.” “You mean I’m trustin’ you.” A satis ed smile spread across the woman’s rust-colored face spackled with freckles. She said, “Your skin sure is pretty. What kinda makeup you got on? Fashion Fair?”