“You know she goin’ to talk to old man Danube ’bout what happened to her grandgirl.” “You think he know?” “If he don’t, he sho’ ’bout to nd out.” Jubi didn’t care for the whispers, but she smiled to herself anyway, giving the people something more to talk about. She’d been whispered about for thirty-six years; at least this time she knew all the talk would be in her favor. The gossip bolstered her st ep, pushed her farther and faster across the tracks until she was standing on a road familiar and unfamiliar all the same. Paved over to better handle the car tra c, with a few stop signs and a tra c signal, the road, now known as Main Street, looked much di erent from when Jubi was there last. Then it was still a dirt road and mostly everyone still walked to get what they needed. But concrete hadn’t changed much else. In addition to the colored folk automatically knowing to go to the back door to receive any type of service, there was now a sign proclaiming their entryway s eparate and apart from the whites’. As if they needed a billboard to announce their supposed humiliation. No one likes to admit that shame is an internal type of feeling, something you perceive within yourself. Can’t nobody give you shame to feel. They can’t pile it on a platter and hand it to you, telling you this is what your insides are supposed to contort around. There was no shame amongst the negroes of Land’s End, who didn’t need a sign showing them they weren’t welcome. That they already knew, but some of the younger Danubes had insisted. They had learned a di erent way where they were raised. Jubi saw the sign for the rst time with its narrow arrow pointing toward the back of the store. Colored Entrance. She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and k ept on her way to the front. She hadn’t entered through the back door of Danube’s since she was Gladys’s age, and she for damn sure wasn’t about to start now. As soon as she crossed the threshold, Jubi paused. Her eyes roamed as she took in the fresh coat of white paint and the shelves packed with cans and jars of packaged food that hadn’t been there the last time. The last time she’d visited, she had been run out. Refused service. The memory inched its way up her throat
so far that she had to cough it back down. She wouldn’t be turned away this time. “I’ll be right with you,” yelled a young boy from the front counter. “No need,” Jubi yelled back. “Where’s Logan?” She used her full voice and not the one she played pretend with when she was married. If Logan was around, which she knew he was, he’d hear the familiar tone and timbre and make himself known. Just like last time. “Granddaddy will be right back,” the boy said. “He just went across the way to get a haircut over by Mr. Jacob. You know he don’t like his hair getting too long nowadays. He say it’s bad enough the cataracts getting the best of him, he don’t need his hair trying to blind him too.” The boy laughed. Jubi only nodded. “Anything I can help you with, before I help them?” Jubi looked up to see the line of folks she knew waiting for service. Their dark eyes shined from brown faces knowing exactly what she was up to. She looked back toward the boy. H e c a n ’ t t e l l e i t h e r . Hmphing to herself, Jubi said, “Only Logan can help me with what I need.” “If there’s anything I can do for you, ma’am, just let me know, and I’ll stop and get it.” Jubi knew his delays had more to do with him than whether she wanted packaged chips, a chocolate bar, or soda. She shook her head as she moved down the aisles. Her gloved hands swiped across shelves in need of both a dusting and a polishing. She walked the creaky oor, which hadn’t been mopped in what looked like ages and suppressed the memories of when she used to burst through the front door and be sw ept up in a hug and twirled o her feet. The days when she was so sick from carrying babies that couldn’t live that she sat at the counter sipping a soda, hoping to make her ip- opping stomach feel better. Listening to the young boy, no more than fteen, speak to the other customers, calling them b o y and g a l when he was still scrawny enough to go over their knee, lled Jubi with some kind of sadness. She had wanted better, yes, but his behavior was hardly her desire. M a y b e e v e r y t h i n g h a p p e n e d t h e w a y i t w a s s u p p o s e d t o .
Jubi released the thought as soon as it tried to settle in her mind. She shook her head to remove the cloud covering her face and continued her stroll down one aisle and up another until she was facing the door as heavy st eps, assisted by a cane, announced his presence. Logan stopped when he saw her. He ran his hand over the little hair he had left as if he was sprucing himself up for some long-lost lover. In a tan seersucker suit, Logan crossed one foot in front of the other and rested his weight on his wooden walking stick. Memories returned to him darkened his features and set his mouth in a thin line. “You still coming through the front door? After all these years?” “Why would I stop?” Jubi asked. “Especially today?” “What are you doing here, Jubilee?” She didn’t react to the spit that ew from his mouth when he enunciated every syllable of her given name. Steeling her eyes and planting her feet, she said, “You know exactly why I’m here, and don’t pretend you don’t.” “If my recollection serves me correctly, you’re the one who likes to pretend.” “I didn’t pretend nothing. You never asked. I never told. And we were happy.” Jubi couldn’t prevent the crack in her voice. She couldn’t prevent the wave of emotion that rolled down from the top of her body to the soles of her feet. Grabbing hold of one of the shelves, she anchored herself as the feelings she’d fought away daily for decades rushed at her from every imaginable angle. Eight years she’d spent married to Logan. Eight years they were together, the perfect couple. She’d k ept on his side of the tracks in Land’s End and was never suspected when they traveled to Mobile or Birmingham. She’d shopped in boutiques and been serviced by young white girls eager to help the wife of Mr. Logan Je erson Danube III. But it wasn’t the access she longed for. Not the things. Not any longer. It was those moments that couldn’t be accounted for she missed the most. The way his hands felt when they massaged her scalp and dragged through her hair. When she would wipe smudges of preserves from the corners of his mouth after breakfast in the morning. The way they’d dance around the parlor, swaying to music playing soft and scratchy from the gramophone. He indulged her when
she asked him to buy the record of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and even admitted that they’d sounded good for “colored gals.” Those moments of her youth, of their youth together, became cold air in her bones. Her ankles and knees swelled with ache. Jubi knew it was due to the lies they’d told. Her lie to es cape and his to save face. Both rotten at the root and souring everything connected to them. Logan wanted to respond with what was in his heart. He wanted to say he hadn’t been happy since she’d left. Since s h e ’ d left. As if he hadn’t forced her out, threatened her life, then called her dead. But that’s the way he chose to remember it. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he had spent many a night of his own sitting in a car parked far o to the left of the fork in the road staring at the Dupree houses. It was the only way he could see behind the new house to the old. To the home where his wife lived with her mother and his daughter he didn’t know, who was raised to believe her daddy was a war hero who became victim of his own pride. He made a point to never harass her when she came through the back door of the store, doing Jubi’s bidding. To him Ruby seemed a sad, lonely girl—n ow woman—b y herself all the time. She stayed close to her own kind, never having any friends outside of the Dupree line. He watched her every movement when she came for fabric and little foodstu s they couldn’t grow on their own, looking for traces of himself. For traces of Jubi. Of Jubilee. But found none. For years he’d tried to gure out to whom she really belonged. What Black man had Jubi run around on him with and why he hadn’t known. Why he hadn’t been told. But in all these years the rumors from across the tracks had never reached his ear. Not like they had when Jubi went back home. That he’d heard about. “Well, you know, she was over there passing for white.” The whisperings ran through the line of colored customers waiting for service for nearly three years after her return. And though Logan listened to it all, he never heard tell that she wasn’t telling the truth about the dark girl she called his own. Too stubborn to stomach his own nostalgia, to allow the cold air breaking
through Jubi’s bones to get into his, he did what she would have done: shook his head and sucked his teeth, kissing away the clouds. “What’s done is done,” he said. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” Jubi asked. “She’s your granddaughter, Logan. Your own grandgirl.” “She ain’t none of my kin.” “Carl Darren is.” “You don’t know that it was him.” “If this tea don’t take, we’ll nd out in forty weeks whether she in Chicago or not. Especially if she carrying...” Jubi’s voice trailed before she could nish her sentence. As much as she didn’t want to believe in Evangeline’s curse, her body was a living witness to what could not be continued. The baby boys that had to die. Logan closed the gap between him and Jubi. Bending his head toward her ear, he said, “You lucky it wasn’t you.” “I know you don’t expect me to say thank you.” “You’re welcome anyhow.” He st epped back. Smile twisted with derision, Logan seemed satis ed with his empty threat. As if he’d considered then to dole out punishment of his own. To take advantage and steal the night from his wife because of a lie. An omission. Justice, Southern-fried, was of course justice all the same. It needed not sheri or record of arrest, neither judge nor jury. Only the scent of injury. The wounded party allowed to reap and r epair by issuing a sentence to assuage their own perceived su ering. Never willing to believe that the anguish had been equal. That there was parity in the internal torment. Those thoughts, those feelings, stayed tucked tight. Carapaces always covering the tender emotions and raw wounds they rarely returned to. Jubi neither swayed nor took a st ep back away from Logan’s wistful words. They were hollow. Carved out and whittled through until all that was left was old bark begging to fall. They were stumps of their former selves. Their lives the sum of their lies. I ’ m g l a d y o u k n o w y o u r m e s s w h e n y o u h e a r i t .
Jubi heard Emma’s voice from when Gladys rst staggered home. Her mess stood right in front of her, smug in his delusion that their brief union hadn’t caused all this. What Carl Darren and his mother, Karen, Gladys, and Ruby didn’t know, they did. Jubi knew she was alive and well just as Logan knew the box buried six feet under in the white cemetery reserved for the Danube family plot was empty as could be. She approached him gently and laid her gloved hand on his chest. Patting the same point below his heart that she used to when they’d lain in bed, she said, “It’s time to tell the truth.” Jubi pushed past Logan to walk out the way she’d come. He caught her hand. Held the tips of her ngers with all the familiarity of consummated man and wife. After all, it’s what they were. It no longer mattered who saw them. Who in the store was looking. Not the customers at the back door, not the white women perusing the shop windows of Main Street, not the boy behind the counter, a distant relation of them both. He held her ngers and for a moment his gaze softened so that his green eyes glowed. He would take to his own grave the truth. Buried above an empty box that couldn’t contain his wife. He let go. Jubi left. Again. It would be the last time she saw Logan. The last time she would greet the past versions of her fractured self with the clarity of age. Head high, gray hair swinging, buried secrets begging her for freedom, Jubi crossed the tracks, knowing the last folks left to confront were the ones at home.
D e c e m b e r 1 9 9 9 When Tati returned home for winter break, she arrived with a plan to meet Roman. Between nal papers and nal exams, her last three weeks in North Carolina A&T’s library had been productive. The bank of computers useful. She searched through Yahoo!, Google, Lexis Nexis, and even Ancestry, a new website, though that didn’t lead her to Roman Bishop Brown. According to his white pages entry, he was a club owner in Indianapolis. He had a website and email to boot. Tati had wanted to show Nadia the correspondence she had printed and shoved in her purse as soon as she got in the car at Midway, but instead, they argued most of the ride home. It had been three weeks since they’d spoken. Tati had tried to get Nadia to understand it was strange to go back to the way things were without acknowledging all that had transpired, but Nadia just shook her head at the thought that she was somehow supposed to excavate the things she wanted to ke ep from her own self for the sake of her daughter’s healing. “It’s always been you and me,” Nadia reasoned. “I don’t know what else you expect.” “It don’t have to be,” Tati had said. And that was all she needed to say. Nadia knew Tati had nally found the daddy she’d been looking for since she was four, when she realized there was another kind of parent picking up kids from the preschool. She asked, “When you supposed to meet him?” “New Year’s Eve,” Tati answered. “I’m going to his new club, Worship Haus, down the street from the Clique. He’s opening early f o r m e . Before the crowd gets there for the countdown.”