No, they weren’t invited. Jubi was lost to them. That is, until she dragged herself back, bloody and dirty, behind her mother. Emma and Ruby were all she had left, with George dead and in the ground the year before her unceremonious return. Everybody said his heart gave out while he was working. He’d gone to swing the ax but never got it o the ground, the attack sudden and swift, but Emma knew the real reason. Her George had grieved himself to death. He never got over the loss of their boys, and Jubi leaving was too much to bear. Jubi didn’t know what was worse. The fact she was back or back with a baby and no daddy, not even her own. She shut herself inside out of both fear and shame and did the very least for the girl who’d outed her and forced her back into her old life. Not that it wasn’t a comfortable life, but for Jubi it would always be less than the life she’d created with Logan. It wasn’t so much that she was covetous of what someone else had. She had learned, rst from Emma and then from Logan, that if you think you’re lacking you’ll never have enough. Because really, what is enough? Jubi didn’t long for more things, but she knew she could never be too white. She had tried it on and worn it for as long as she could, even though it was a dress that was forever two sizes too big, no matter the amount of alteration. Even when she was found out and had been forced to take it o , Jubi knew de ep down that her covetousness wasn’t about color. It was about access, ease. Land’s End may have been an outlier, but no matter how unique, how idyllic or utopic, it was still the South. It was still Alabama. Maybe the Klan didn’t ride across the tracks, bomb homes and churches, and set re to the elds, but the lynching letters from other parts of the state lled with pictures and postcards of mangled, mutilated bodies were still left in strategic places as a reminder of who they were. Where they were. Who they used to belong to, even if all of that now belonged to them uppity-ass Dupree women, including Jubilee. The night she returned, dragging ass and shu ing feet after having a black baby, was a night their side of the tracks wouldn’t soon forget. They speculated for years about where Ruby’s color had come from since she looked in no way similar to her mother and Emma. “What about Evangeline?” some would wonder. “Maybe Ruby’s color came from her.”
Most would nod, satis ed that they’d gured out the conundrum, until an elder on another porch, hearing the lukewarm gossip, would throw gas on the re with a casual reminder. “You gotta remember, Evangeline weren’t Emma’s real mama. She raised her, but she didn’t birth her.” The admission would make most wonder because there weren’t but a handful left living who could remember the one who had actually given birth to Emma, and they had been children then. They didn’t speak of such things. The pain they’d endured and the pain they’d witnessed was tucked away tight in the vaults of their minds. They didn’t visit those memories to make sure they were there. They held no value. Only a reminder of what was. Of what had been. Which is what most people did with their pasts, their history. Dimmed the details so dull that even when they added a little color to an old story they were hardly believed. The ones who remembered those details, even if only on semi- lucid days on their deathbeds, could only shake their heads and mutter to themselves about that damn Jubilee carrying on the way that she was. They didn’t expect Jubi to slip back into her old ways so easily. But she did when Gladys arrived. How could she not? Gladys’s skin never changed. She remained the color of tinted clabber. Only her thick hair with the rough roots could give her away. Nothing a hat couldn’t x. In matching hats, favoring dresses and little lace gloves, fashionable r eplicas Jubi made from fabric Ruby fetched from Danube General, grandmother and granddaughter made their rst venture together across the tracks. Jubi took Gladys because she was young. Just barely walking. She had not been seen on this side of town. She was not known the way Jubi once was. With their hats angled to hide their faces, eyes lowered demure-like, and chins pointed toward the ground, Jubi and Gladys walked through the front door of the store hand in hand. Gladys’s long, sandy hair had been curled with rags and pulled together into two bunches of ringlets owing down her back. Jubi’s was twisted, wound around itself, and held with a pin at the nape of her neck. She made sure none of their coloredness could give them away. Neither hair nor knuckles. Jubi put on her old drag and forced Gladys into it too, praying, as she stood in line, that it would nally t.
There weren’t too many people in the store. Just enough that Jubi had to wait in line behind a woman she wasn’t sure she recognized, with a baby boy about the same age as Gladys. The two little ones entertained themselves with games of peekaboo and ke ep-away from the comfortable distance of the grown- ups’ legs, exploring the newness of their environs as toddlers are wont to do. The cans stacked neatly on the shelves begged to be pulled, tugged, thrown, and jostled in a game only babies could play. So much so that Gladys’s hat came o and Jubi had to bend low to the ground and quickly r eplace it lest the top of the girl’s head be exposed, with its unruly roots that didn’t gather as good as the curly ends. “I’m so sorry, they’re just making a mess, aren’t they?” said the woman in front of Jubi. “They sure are,” Jubi answered, sharpening her shape to hide her face. “But you can’t blame the babies, can you?” “You sure can’t,” she said. “Come on up here with me.” Jubi scooped Gladys from the ground and held her against her left hip, further hiding her features with the little girl’s body. The line moved. Jubi was next. She listened in as the woman behind the merchant counter exclaimed a greeting to the woman and little boy standing in front of her. “What are y’all doing here! I thought you were heading back to Birmingham to be with your sister?” “Mama, Delilah can wait. We wanted to surprise you before we left,” the woman in front of Jubi said. “Had to let Carl Darren see his grandma before we got out of here.” “Karen, I told you about that word. I am nobody’s grandma. I can be a nana, though.” “Oh, Mama, you are what you are, no matter what name you give yourself. Grandma Adilene or Nana Adilene, it’s all the same.” “Not to me,” Adilene said. “Where’s Uncle Logan?” Karen asked. “Doesn’t he usually help you in the store? I don’t see him.” “He’s around here somewhere.”
Gladys squirmed in Jubi’s arms, working to wrestle herself away so she could go back to playing on the ground with Carl Darren, who had found his own fun in kicking the counter. Jubi held her tighter. Shifted the girl even more in front of her after realizing she was in line behind her niece, waiting to be rung up by her sister-in-law. Hidden beneath her hat, she tried not to let her sharp intake of breath blow her cover. Even if Adilene didn’t recognize her, Logan would know his wife. His lying, deceitful, colored wife. “You don’t belong here, and you know it,” Logan whispered in Jubi’s ear. She hadn’t seen him come from around the back of the store, where the colored customers waited. Hadn’t expected that he’d clocked her before she’d had a chance to realize he was there. He said, “Do us all a favor and leave. Take that little one with you ’fore you make any more trouble for yourself.” Jubi opened her mouth to speak, but Logan held up his hand. He st epped in front of her and blocked her from moving any farther forward in line. With Adilene, Karen, and Carl Darren hidden from view, Jubi nally slid Gladys to the side of her body to meet his gaze. In it she saw nothing of the Logan she remembered. The one who’d brought her owers and opened his arms, his life, to her. The green-eyed, mischievous charmer who had bumped into her and assumed she too was like him. That man was long gone. In his stead was a grim, stone-faced man whose rage seethed pink beneath his skin. The man who’d cussed her out of his house when she was torn from tip to tail and dripping blood and water with each unassisted drag st ep she took toward home. “Logan, move out the way so I can help the next customer,” Adilene yelled from behind the counter. Logan glared at Jubi. Heightening her voice, she said, “Silly me, I left my change purse at home,” and retreated from the store. Like the summer she rst became acquainted with Logan and didn’t want him to nd out where she was really from, Jubi marched for half an hour with Gladys in her arms, all on the wrong side of the tracks, to minimize her own embarrassment. She ignored the burning sensation of tired muscles seizing up from the weight of a fteen-month-old continuously against them. But no
matter how long she delayed her return home, the whispers and murmurs were already waiting. In her e ort to slip into Danube General Store unnoticed by the other white customers, Jubi had forgotten to attend her attention toward the colored customers who’d crossed the tracks with her on their own errands. The ones who knew she’d left the porch after all these years. The ones who, when they nally saw Gladys, remarked with smirking mirth about how much she favored Jubilee. They knew it was the two of them marching in Jubi’s own madness toward the front door. In line at the back, they snickered amongst themselves about how the new baby had brought her back to the scene of her old shenanigans. W h a t s t o r i e s d i d s h e t e l l h e r s e l f t o g i v e h e r s o m u c h g u m p t i o n ? It was these out loud wonderings that Logan listened to as he helped the negro customers while his sister helped the whites. When he realized who was in the store and then saw her for himself helping the little girl, he refused to let history r epeat itself. He would not stand for being made the fool twice. No matter how many hats she wore, gloves she covered herself with, and ways she hid her muddy accent, Logan would forever know Jubi Etienne neé Jubilee Dupree. The woman he’d held, the woman he’d loved, the woman whose body he’d clutched close to his own. That woman who’d left his home smelling of lavender. A scent that surrounded him in springtime when it bloomed wild and fresh and drove him mad with memory. It was her deceit that had broken him. Her lie that had killed her and the baby they’d made together. The Black girl and her white-presenting mother had been banished across the tracks until she thought she could pass again with a grandbaby who’d grabbed another color. Logan wouldn’t stand for it, and neither would the neighbors who were watching and waiting when Jubi and Gladys nally returned. By then, Ruby and Sampson had already heard. He was busy building their house to get out from under the Dupree women when he was rst told of the whereabouts of his daughter, a message he passed to Ruby, who passed it to Emma. The three were outside waiting when Jubi walked up with Gladys. They were her bu er from the wild words and mocking m m p h s that were ready to y
had the main employers for this side of the tracks not stood as her protection from scorn. Jubi k ept her eyes on them as she moved. Arms tired, lace gloves ripped across the knuckles from weight strain, and Gladys sle eping on her shoulder, their hats askew. Jubi walked with what little pride she had left, chin high and nose toward heaven. She would not be pitied for wanting more. Desiring better. Even if that meant she was the talk of the tracks from those who could never pass. For she had tried, and for a time she had succeeded. For a time she had been one of them. Had tried them on despite the ill t and partied and danced and laughed and had family. Community. Shorn hers for theirs and was loved. Acc epted. For a time. Facing Ruby as she made her way to the porch, Jubi couldn’t hide her contempt. She handed o the baby that should’ve been hers to the black girl who’d ruined her and the baby’s brown-skinned father, who shouldn’t have made any o spring that close to white. But they had. And so she had tried again. Refusing to face her own mother, Emma, who never maximized her color for conceit, Jubi walked past them all into the house, stirring the water, mussing the salt, and leaving a cloud of goofer dust in her wake. Emma said behind her, “You should’ve known it weren’t gon’ last.”
P a r t 3 A f t e r m a t h
N o v e m b e r 1 9 9 9 What doesn’t last is lies. It had been four years since Tati had learned her daddy’s name, and she was no closer to knowing anything more about Roman Brown than she’d been that Sunday in the salon. The only thing that had changed between her, Nadia, and Mimi was the date. Home from her freshman year of college on Thanksgiving break, Tati was lounging on the futon in the salon reading a copy of V i b e when Nadia gave her a direction that would nally yield some answers. “Tati, go upstairs in my room, and in my closet on the side by my shoeboxes get that new pack of plastic rollers so I can set Mrs. Loretha’s hair.” “What color?” Tati asked. “The aqua ones.” Tati left the basement and bounded up the stairs to her mother’s bedroom closet. It had an earthy smell from the new products she’d ordered from some woman in Brooklyn who was making hair cream in her kitchen. Between the products and the new computer Nadia had bought to ke ep better track of her books, it was almost like going to a real salon. Tati found the rollers easily enough. She snatched them from a plastic bag on the oor between the chest of drawers and shoeboxes, but when she turned to leave she kicked one of the boxes open. Instead of shoes tumbling out, there was nothing but junk. Sewing needles and thread even though Nadia couldn’t do more than patch a hole and maybe hem a pant leg. Tati put the box back together and stacked it on top of another shoebox when she noticed a piece of paper sticking out of the side. She grabbed it to throw it away, but the paper was wider than she expected. A folded piece of notebook paper that had yellowed around the edges. The blue lines were faded