Inside the store, Ruby approached the far end of the counter. Away from the front door. Away from where Logan Danube and his niece Delilah Grace were helping a line of other customers. All she needed was our and salt. T h a t i s u n t i l t h e y t e l l m e t h e y n e e d s o m e t h i n g e l s e , Ruby thought to herself. I a l r e a d y b e e n i n h e r e t w i c e t o d a y . I ’ m s u r e t h e y ’ r e s i c k o f m e . The strange young man she thought she knew stood behind her. They waited for the Saturday-afternoon activity to calm. He studied her form. The black of her skin, the drumming of her ngers against the sides of her dress-covered legs. “Is it always this slow?” he asked. As soon as the other line dwindled to the last person, someone else came in, ke eping them from getting any service. The long wait inside Danube’s was part of the errand running. Logan had to be in an especially good mood to tear himself away from helping his white patrons. Growing up in the store, Delilah learned to do the same. “On a Saturday afternoon it is,” Ruby answered. “You either come as soon as they open or wait.” “Couldn’t come no earlier. Been stuck in church all morning.” “You here for Ms. Claudette’s homegoing?” “Yes.” He shook his head. “She was my grandmother.” “Your grandmother,” Ruby muttered. She turned around fully to look into his face. “You seem familiar.” “You do too.” “Ruby.” She extended her hand. A smile spread across his face, elongating his thick lips and accentuating the faint mustache above them that she hadn’t noticed before. “Sampson,” he said. Recognition danced in her eyes as she tried to ke ep herself from squealing. “I thought I knew you! How’ve you been? Where’ve you been? Seemed like one day we were playing in the elds and the next day you were gone.” “It did happen like that. My momma and daddy moved us to Mobile.” “Ooh, big city livin’. How’s that?” “It’s all I know really. Don’t remember much else.” “That mean you forgot about us down here in Land’s End?”
“I didn’t forget you,” Sampson said. Heat rushed Ruby’s body. So much so that Sampson detected the slightest color change in her skin. It started in the palms of her hands where she held on to the basket. Her tight grip on the handle turned her skin red. He found that same red in a barely there undertone beneath her cheeks and again on the back of her neck. Most people didn’t take the time to notice the gradients of color in dark complexions. One look at Ruby and the few folks in Land’s End formed one of two opinions, neither of them true. Their assumptions about the origins of her birth were ste eped in scorn and derision. Amongst themselves they called her skin a stain, an abomination, and attributed it to a curse. And in a way it was, but it wasn’t like her hue needed to be broken. It was more of a reminder of the history no one knew. Well, that’s not entirely true. There was at least one person who knew. One person, maybe two, who could give Ruby all the answers she was looking for to the questions she was too afraid to ask. Enough backhands to the face and open- hand slaps to the head quelled curiosity. She didn’t let her mind linger on the stories that started anytime she st epped outside her door. She told herself the buzz of voices didn’t bother her and the whispers weren’t about her. She tricked herself into believing the hushed tones and stolen glances were for her protection. A badge of honor she should be proud of instead of tail tucked in shame. Being seen from Sampson’s point of view was the kindest compliment she’d received in her life. His eyes told her that while he might not have remembered much else about their sle epy sea town, he’d held on to what was important. A seed of herself planted into him. “What do you want, gal?” Startled, Ruby turned around to face the voice. Logan Danube had nally come down to their side of the counter. His blue eyes blazed like the base of a re. She averted her gaze to where his forearms rested on the countertop. With his striped shirtsleeves pushed to the elbows, she noticed the hairs on his arms stood up. “Flour and salt,” she said.
“How much?” Logan demanded. “A few pounds of each. They didn’t say. Just told me to come get it.” “You’ve been in here already today.” Logan’s statement sounded more like a question. “Yes, sir.” Logan turned away before her nal r rolled. Ruby waited, overcome with insecurity, stuck between two men, Logan in front of her and Sampson behind her. She didn’t like being sandwiched between eyes that roamed, hands that reached, voices that startled, and noses that sni ed out her fear. Switching the grip of her basket to just one hand, Ruby let the other adjust the collar and lapels on the front of her dress. She pulled and smoothed, trying to invite more air around her neck. Anything to settle the acrobat doing a trapeze act inside her body. “Hey, boy, what do you want?” Delilah Grace asked Sampson. Though Sampson was ve years older than fteen-year-old Delilah Grace, she spat out the words with the venom and viciousness of a woman well on in years. One who had come through the war planning for a victorious life of leisure where she ruled and reigned and not one in which she had to work to earn her ke ep. The bitterness of her timbre was acrid. A reminder that hate was inherited. It didn’t belong to you by birthright, but was instead passed down by mother, father, and then some. In Land’s End, everyone on this side of the tracks had some version of the hard heart. Their contempt for colored folks unabashed and unashamed. Ruby knew that those still around from Emma’s generation and older had a very di erent plan for the future. One in which they won the war and held fast to their ways, their land, and most importantly their property. In the interest of returning to the natural order of things once the Union ended its aggression, the owners in Land’s End had all agreed to continue buying and building in the business of bodies. They never respected the 1808 ban. How could anyone other than planters, drivers, and their women know what was needed to manage the most important exports of their time—th e moral tari s , if you will. They continued to import. Under the cover of night, ships built to look narrow but held hundreds of people streamed up and down the bay. Even
the blockade didn’t suspend activity. When the bay was all stopped up by blue- pants-wearing patsies who never had any dealings with niggers, the Gulf was fair game. That’s how Land’s End became. Where the land ends, bondage begins. Only history hadn’t prevailed the way planting families, including the original Duprees, had predicted. Surrounded and forced to surrender to the Union, former property walked free, walked away, and some walked north. Made other homes beneath colder suns. Entire cities and towns all their own s eparated by an acknowledged dividing line, sometimes invisible, sometimes tangible like on the other side of the tracks. The heavy anger and tinged condescension coloring Delilah Grace’s voice told of the tales she’d been infected with since the occasion of her birth. A r eplica of the indoctrination that’d been rst used to radicalize her mother and uncle who wrapped his warped feelings in the packaging of Ruby’s our and salt and sent her on her way, after she pushed over her pennies, of course. Logan didn’t charge her extra like he did the rest who came through the back door of the store. It was the least he could do on account of who she was. Outside, Ruby breathed easy. The last of the errand items retrieved, she’d begun her walk back across the tracks when she felt she was not alone. “You wasn’t gon’ wait for me?” Sampson hollered, a few paces behind her. “Didn’t know I was supposed to,” Ruby said. “Just because we going the same way don’t mean we going the same place.” Sampson closed the distance between them. In his hand he held a pastry wrapped in a napkin. He o ered some to Ruby, who looked rst from the gift in his hand to his face and back again before shaking her head no. “That’s all you went in there to buy?” she asked, eyeing him quizzically. “I hadn’t planned on buying anything at all.” “Then why did you?” “I was following you.” At this, Sampson lowered his head to hide his smile, but it was too late. He’d already told on himself. Like Ruby, he felt the familiar even if he couldn’t call her name at rst. Walking back across the tracks, he was sure he’d never forget it again. “You still following me?” Ruby asked.
“I’m heading back to the r epast,” Sampson said. “I left to get some air. Too many people talkin’ about dyin’. It’s like they long for it. Me, myself, I like life. It ain’t everything, but it’s what we got. And only one chance at that.” Ruby nodded as she closed in on the elds of the farm. Sampson lingered at the fork, and so did she. He nished his treat as she held on to her basket. Neither spoke. What do you say to a friend you haven’t seen in ten years or more? The rst boy you’d ever known? One whose family worked for yours? They stood in their awkwardness, not wanting to walk away but knowing they should. At least Ruby did. She asked, “Y’all heading back to Mobile in the morning?” “I don’t think so,” Sampson said. “Mama said she still gotta clean out Granny’s house with her brothers and sisters, so I expect we’ll be here a little longer.” “You going to church in the morning?” “If we are, I surely don’t have a choice in the matter. Mama’ll have my hide I tell her I ain’t got time for the Lord.” “Then maybe I’ll see you there.” “Maybe so,” Sampson said. “Maybe so.” Back home, Ruby brought the basket to the wooden table, where Jubi would sift the our for worms. Aside from the table and the hearth used for both cooking and warmth, there wasn’t much else. Two rooms were in the back, additions to the original quarter shack thanks to a long-d eparted Papa George. But they were for sle eping, and she knew everybody was still awake. “It’s about time you came in the house,” Jubi said, emerging from the back. “Standing in all that sun, no hat on your head, and you got the nerve to be talking to a man almost as dark as you.” “He wasn’t no real man, Mama. Only three years older than me. That’s Sampson. Ms. Claudette’s grandson, remember?” “Everything and everybody don’t need to be remembered,” Jubi muttered. The utterance gave Ruby pause. Made her wonder who and what her mother was talking about. She knew it didn’t all have to do with Sampson and his family from the way her eyes closed and the breath in her chest became more pronounced, but she dare not ask.
Jubi sighed. “You get what I asked you for?” “It’s right here.” Ruby motioned to the basket on the table. “Well, go’n head get out the way so I can work. Gotta get these biscuits made to go with the jam we preserved.” “What for?” “With so many people in town for the service, they gon’ be wanting to continue in the fellowship hall tomorrow. Somebody gotta make the food.” Ruby raised an eyebrow. “ Y o u going to the fellowship hall tomorrow?” “No indeed!” Jubi glared. “But you are.” She bumped past Ruby as she rounded the table, intentionally shoving her shoulder and st epping on her foot. Taking the hint for her disregard, Ruby excused herself. In her own room, with just the sunlight pouring in from the window, she sat on the oor at the foot of the bed with a broken comb in her lap. She stared at her re ection in the old mirror with the initials EGD carved in the wood. She assumed it was for Mama Em and Papa George, but she never asked. She’d been living in the same house all her life and was no closer to understanding its mysteries or unlocking the secrets of its other inhabitants. Ruby shrugged and studied herself in the mirror. Her skin, closer to Sampson’s than it would ever be to Jubi’s or Emma’s, was still darker than that of anyone else she knew. She wondered where it came from. W h o d i d i t c o m e f r o m ? It was a question she’d asked herself since the rst time she was admonished for running around like a little tar baby, blackening up with no regard for her own mother’s feelings. “You just outside aunting yourself and taunting me like I didn’t try to make our lives better,” Jubi had sneered when she was only eight years old. Anger and sadness colored Jubi sallow and left her soul sorry; in a perpetual state of apology for not being able to es cape what lived in her too. It would be the curse of her coupling that reversed the trend that started with Emma. Light skin, light hair, light eyes. Not for Ruby. Dark. Black as night. Eyes obsidian. Hair unruly. The only saving grace was its length. She unwound the locks pinned to the top of her head and let them fall to her shoulders. Using the end edge of the comb with patches of missing teeth, she parted her hair in sections. Normally, she only did this to oil
her scalp with a vial of potion Emma made up for her from the herbs in the garden, but something had come over her. Ruby let her hands lead. They parted and sectioned, secured and lifted, crossed and bound as she began to braid. First one side and then the other, until her hair trailed down her back in two neat rows. When she was done, Ruby set the comb to the side and looked at herself with new eyes. As if she was seeing someone other than herself. Another girl of seventeen. Or maybe she had never seen herself this way before. Fully Ruby and not an o -brand image of the mothers she could never mirror. With Jubi and Emma, her family connection was always in question. The way she looked now, with her braids, it didn’t matter who claimed her. She knew she belonged to someone else entirely. “Ruby Ann, come in here and help me with the re,” Jubi said, st epping into the doorway. Looking over her shoulder, Ruby reveled as Jubi gazed at her until disgust crawled across her face and derision turned down the corners of her mouth. Jubi swallowed. Her face cleared. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” she asked. “Doing things you ain’t got no business doing just to hurt me.” “Whatchu mean, Mama?” Ruby asked, but Jubi didn’t hear. She was trapped in her own tirade. Inserting Ruby into questions she’d been asking herself for years. Substituting her daughter for the ones she couldn’t talk to. The ones she couldn’t get answers or second chances from. Scratchy voice husky and de ep, eyes heavy and dry, Jubi’s features wore wretchedness as she continued her screed. “I tried to give you more than this, but you just didn’t want it. Never did, I guess. It’s a shame y o u were the baby who lived.” Ruby wanted to ask again what she meant, but she was hanging on to the other girl in the mirror so hard she didn’t have room to hold the past a n d the present at the same time. She’d listened to her mama go o on her enough times to know to just let her be. Eventually, she’d shake her head, r eplace her face, and go on back to being Jubi. Emma’s Jubilee. Jubi sighed. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
Ruby didn’t know how to explain the possession. How her ngers instinctively knew what to do. She turned back. The girl in the mirror gave her the answer. “I don’t know.” Ruby shrugged. “Something just come over me, I guess.”
J u n e 1 9 8 0 Nadia’s decision to do hair was a touch more deliberate than Ruby’s. She didn’t just learn to braid by the spirit of possession. She was trained in the ways of tresses, a graduate of Debbie’s School of Beauty Culture. She attended years after she dropped out of the University of Illinois Chicago, about the same time she’d met, dated, and broke up with Tati’s daddy. It was early in the morning of a new day when Nadia woke up at his home, which buttressed a park on Ninety-Ninth and Princeton. It was where they connected and convened to congress without acknowledging that when they left it was to go to the places they truly called home. Where mail came addressed in their names and the people who said they loved them were waiting for them to make a timely and consistent appearance. She stood in front of the large picture window at the front of the house that overlooked a dewy jungle gym and sagging swings. Gladys’s voice nagged her. I f y o u a i n ’ t g o n ’ m a k e t h e m o n e y l i k e t h e m w h i t e f o l k s , t h e n y o u n e e d t o fi n d s o m e t h i n g e l s e f o r y o u r s e l f t o d o . Staring out the window, Nadia had only one answer so far: N o t t h i s . As a twenty- ve-year-old college dropout still living with her parents and kid brothers, Nadia worked as a cashier at the Carson’s d epartment store in Evergreen Plaza. When she’d rst started there four years ago, she’d told herself it was just so she could make enough money to reenroll in school and nish the last year of her nance degree, before going to business school, and then eventually working downtown at the Chicago Stock Exchange. She’d always been good at math and excelled in her high school economics classes, a fact that garnered her attention from her AP teacher, who’d done some day-trading in New York before moving to the Midwest.