Mama Ruby Read online

  Ruby shot across the floor like a cheetah. She leaned over Glenn and began to pry his fingers from Othella’s ankle, but his grip was too strong. His fingers remained clamped around Othella’s ankle like a vise. When Ruby bit his fingers, he released Othella, but then he grabbed Ruby around her neck and began to choke her.

  Just as Ruby was about to pass out, Othella crawled over to Glenn and bit his arm and he released Ruby.

  “You no good dog!” Othella yelled. “You almost killed Ruby Jean dead!” Othella turned to Ruby, rubbing her shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Let’s get out of here right now,” Ruby whispered, holding her neck and coughing. “If we stay here too long, he might kill us.”

  As Glenn lay on the floor cussing, writhing in agony, bleeding profusely, and praying, Ruby and Othella gathered their things and bolted.

  The same elderly couple who had been in the restaurant the day before was approaching. Ruby and Othella ran past them like the Devil was in pursuit. They didn’t stop running until they’d reached the end of the fourth block from the restaurant. They spent the next twenty minutes sitting on top of their suitcases on the sidewalk, mumbling disjointed prayers and hyperventilating.

  “You think that old couple got a good look at us?” Othella asked as soon as she was able to think and speak clearly again.

  “I don’t think so. Even if they did, can’t nobody prove we done nothin’ to nobody. Ain’t nobody seen us do nothin’ to nobody.” Ruby sniffed.

  “What about Glenn?”

  “What about Glenn?” Ruby asked dumbly.

  “He’s goin’ to tell somebody what we ... um ... what you done to him. You cut half of that man’s dick clean off!”

  “He was makin’ you suck it! What else could I do?” Ruby wailed.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “You damn right I’m right!” Ruby shrieked.

  “And if it hadn’t been you or me, it would have been some other girl, I guess,” Othella said, already feeling less guilty about what had happened.

  “Not no more he won’t,” Ruby scoffed, removing something from her jacket pocket. She dropped it to the ground. For a moment, Othella did not know what she was looking at. And when she realized what it was, she could not believe her eyes.

  It was the top half of Glenn’s severed dick.

  Glenn Boates didn’t die that day. But he would have if Mr. and Mrs. Charles Townes hadn’t arrived in time. The way those two strange teenagers with suitcases had run by made the nosy Townes couple suspicious. And since they were personal friends of Glenn’s, they had every reason to go to his apartment to check on him.

  Mr. Townes, a retired doctor, stopped Glenn from bleeding to death. He and his wife transported him in their truck to another black doctor in the area, and that doctor patched Glenn up and filled him with painkillers. But there was nothing that either of the two doctors could do to restore Glenn’s manhood: his sex life was over.

  When Ruby and Othella decided to wander around again, Ruby left Glenn’s severed body part on the ground. But before she walked away, she covered it with some leaves, pushing the leaves along the ground with her foot the same way she’d helped her mother spread manure in her garden.

  “That ain’t goin’ to do no good.” Othella looked at the mound of leaves with a grimace on her face. She hoped that as long as she lived, she’d never see a man’s dick—well, half of a dick—in a predicament like this again: on the ground with dead leaves and dirty rainwater. “Sooner or later a stray dog or some rogue coon is goin’ to sniff it out and ... eat it,” Othella said, wincing.

  “It don’t matter that much, I guess. Glenn is a real old man. He don’t have too many years left to use his pecker, anyway,” Ruby offered, trying to justify her actions. “And he ain’t got no wife that he needs to pester in the bedroom no more. He said so hisself.”

  “That’s all true, but that was a real bad thing that you done to that man, Ruby.” Othella noticed that Ruby’s hands were shaking. She didn’t know if it was because she was nervous, scared, or what. And she didn’t want to know. Just knowing that Ruby was capable of such an extreme level of violence was enough at the moment.

  Ruby gasped. “Let me remind you, girl. That was a real bad thing that he was doin’ to you, too—and was goin’ to do to me!”

  “I know, I know. But ... well, it was still a real bad thing for him the most. I could have got over what he done to me, sooner or later. I been forced to do even worse things by some of Mama’s friends, and I got over that. But what you done to Glenn, he won’t never get over. Dicks ain’t like hair; they don’t grow back. He won’t be able to have no more kids.”

  “I ... I wish he hadn’t provoked me. I didn’t really want to cut his dick off! I was aiming for his hand but he moved it at the wrong time... .”

  “It don’t matter what you was aimin’ at,” Othella mouthed. She couldn’t imagine the pain that Glenn had experienced, and would probably experience for a while to come, if he was still alive. “Can a man die from gettin’ his dick cut off?”

  “Them dudes in Italy don’t die,” Ruby pointed out.

  “What dudes in Italy?”

  “Them dickless dudes that they train to sing like girls. Sopranos,” Ruby explained. “Remember we read about them in Miss Spark’s class?”

  “Oh yeah. Them eunuchs. But they don’t go through what Glenn went through.” Othella sniffed. “I wonder how he’s goin’ to pee now.”

  “What if it had been a little four-year-old girl he tried to mess with?” Ruby asked, getting angry all over again by just thinking about Glenn attacking a little girl. “Men like him, they don’t care where or what they put their peckers in. Before my aunt Della died, she caught one of her field hands screwin’ one of her sheep.”

  “A sheep?” That piece of information disgusted Othella. She shook her head and cringed. “Men are so unnatural,” she mouthed. “I wonder what all Glenn would have done if you hadn’t cut him.”

  “After he got his blow jobs, he probably would have killed us. You keep that in mind when you think about what I done to him,” Ruby suggested.

  “I will,” Othella replied with a shudder. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the heebie jeebies.”

  They walked for another hour. Then they stopped in front of a large gray house with a sign tacked to the front wall of the wraparound porch that read: ROOMS TO LET. An old wooden icebox with the door slightly ajar lay on its side on the porch. A dusty red truck, at least ten years old, sat on the street in front of the house. There was an old mattress standing on its side in the cargo area.

  Ruby and Othella saw a few black folks walking around the area, so they assumed, and prayed, that this was a black-owned rooming house.

  They were relieved when a large, friendly-looking black woman in her sixties, who resembled Ruby’s mother, opened the front door and greeted them with a big smile.

  “Y’all look like you’d be nice tenants. Don’t give me no trouble and y’all can stay here as long as you want,” the woman told them. She even sounded like Ruby’s mother. With her crisp white apron over a floor-length, flowered duster, her thick gray hair in a bun, she seemed harmless enough. For the first time since they’d arrived in this city, Ruby felt comfortable.

  “I got two rooms available, but I’m savin’ one for a friend who’ll be comin’ to spend some time with me soon. If y’all don’t mind sharin’ the other room, y’all welcome,” the landlady told them, still smiling.

  After their violent encounter with Glenn Boates, this nice old lady was a refreshing relief. This turn of events seemed too good to be true.

  And it was.

  In addition to the ten dollars a week each that Ola Mae Logan said she wanted, she expected Ruby and Othella to scrub the floors of all eight of the rooms in the house as needed, and do all of the housekeeping that she didn’t have time to do.

  “The first time one of y’all don’t pay your rent on time, I add another dolla
r for each day it’s late. You will be responsible for spreadin’ the roach paste in your room once a week—and you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. This ain’t no charity house, and I ain’t the Red Cross.” The landlady paused to catch her breath. The big smile was no longer on her face. She continued with her arms folded, looking and acting more like a prison warden now. “No visitors without my approval, no electric hot plates in the room, no pets, no wild parties, no men in the room after ten, and no alcohol ’less you got enough for me and my other tenants. And if y’all don’t give me a thirty-day notice before you move out, I’ll see you in court. Any questions?”

  “Is that all?” Ruby asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Just one more thing,” Ola Mae said, waving a finger in Ruby’s face. She and Othella were still on the front porch clutching their suitcases, Ola Mae still in her doorway.

  “That suit y’all, y’all can stay here as long as you want. That don’t suit y’all, I want you out of my house by the end of the week,” she told them.

  “But if we are payin’ you for our room, why do we have to do all of that other stuff, too, Ola Mae? We need time to go out and look for real jobs. That ain’t fair, and you know it ain’t,” Othella protested. She was so tired and frightened, she was ready to agree to just about anything, in spite of what she’d just said.

  “Like I said, if this don’t suit y’all, I want both of y’all out of my house by the end of the week. As a matter of fact, y’all ain’t even got to agree to move in. Go on back out yonder and see if you can find a better offer than mine. With this ragin’ war, and half of America gone crazy, y’all goin’ to need a heap of luck.”

  “We know that,” Othella said with her head hanging so low, her chin was almost on her chest.

  “All right, Miss Ola Mae. We’ll take that room,” Ruby sighed. She knew when to quit, and she was glad that Othella did, too.

  Ola Mae nodded and resumed her smile. But that smile was just as empty and false as the rest of her was. “All right then. Come on in and let’s get y’all settled. There’s three ten-pound buckets of chitlins in the sink that need to be cleaned for tonight’s dinner. Y’all need to clean ’em real soon.”

  CHAPTER 33

  WITHIN MINUTES AFTER ENTERING OLA MAE’S GLOOMY rooming house, Ruby decided that she didn’t like this new arrangement at all.

  They hadn’t even seen the chitlins in the kitchen that Ola Mae said she wanted them to clean, but Ruby could smell them. As soon as they stepped into the hallway, the stink hit her in the face like a fly swatter. It was a big house, so cleaning it was not going to be an easy chore. But Ruby didn’t want to start complaining too soon. She hoped that things would get easier as they went along. After all they’d been through already, she’d bend over backward to make sure they did.

  Under the circumstances, Ruby would have been willing to move in to a broom closet, and that was almost what they got. Ola Mae had assigned them to share a roll-away bed in an elevator-size room at the top of the stairs next to the bathroom that everybody used. A roll-away bed! The very thought disgusted Ruby to the bone. The only other time in her life that she’d been reduced to a roll-away bed was during a Memorial Day weekend two years ago when she and her parents had visited her sister Beulah and her husband. She asked herself again, what kind of mess had she gotten herself into? And how long was she going to live like a stowaway? Not long, she told herself. The incident with the horny restaurant owner was reason enough for her to decide that New Orleans was not the place for her after all.

  An hour after they’d checked in, Ruby realized that it was going to take a whole lot of effort on her part for her to tolerate living in this place. Before she and Othella could even unpack, Ola Mae had them on their knees scrubbing her kitchen floor.

  “Don’t y’all forget I need for y’all to clean them chitlins, too,” Ola Mae said. She stood stock still, fanning her face with a magazine as she inspected the mottled black and white rug on the kitchen floor that Ruby and Othella had just mopped and waxed.

  They cleaned the chitlins, but they skipped the chitlin dinner. Instead, they stumbled out to the front porch to get some fresh air, and so they could converse in private. The porch steps were falling apart, so they had to be careful where they sat to keep from getting splinters in their butts.

  “I didn’t come to New Orleans to be no slave,” Ruby complained, covering a spot with some old newspaper and then sitting down with a thud. Othella had already done the same thing. “I’d rather work in the cane fields than be crawlin’ around scrubbin’ floors and cleanin’ chitlins. This woman is crazy! And did you see the way them two men tenants of hers looked at us when they walked into the kitchen while we was cleanin’ that nasty-ass floor? That bug-eyed one, he was tryin’ to look up under your dress while you was bent over!”

  Othella considered Ruby’s concerns and offered her a hearty nod. “You are so right. I think we need to keep lookin’ for a place. We don’t want the same thing to happen with the men in this house that happened with that Glenn man.”

  “If you got a better plan, I want to hear it now,” Ruby said. “Let’s go talk in our room.”

  The rooming house had electricity, but Ola Mae was so stingy, she made her tenants keep it turned off most of the time. They had to use kerosene lamps, and they had to supply their own kerosene. That meant no electric lights, and no radio to help pass the time. But time was one thing that Othella and Ruby did not have much of anyway.

  Right after breakfast the next morning, Ola Mae ordered them to iron three bushel baskets of clothes. One of the other tenants told them that these were clothes that Ola Mae got paid to iron for people in the neighborhood. Then they had to scrub mold off the walls in her pantry, sweep the front yard, and scrub the rest of the floors. What was so frustrating about all of the cleaning was the fact that mostly the house was already spotless. Ruby and Othella spent hours doing unnecessary housework. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they didn’t see any of the other tenants doing any housework at all!

  “How come we the only ones doin’ work in this house?” Ruby asked Ola Mae as she stood watching Ruby wash clothes in the kitchen sink using a washboard and homemade lye soap.

  “Old lady Royster in the room next to y’all in her eighties. And the rest of my tenants all work. Besides, they are men. Ain’t no woman in her right mind goin’ to ask no man to do woman’s work. You missed a spot,” Ola Mae said in a gruff voice, pointing to a dime-size spot of oil on the sleeve of the man’s plaid shirt that Ruby had already rinsed.

  That night, Ruby was too angry and too tired to sleep. She paced the bedroom floor for twenty minutes, mumbling profanities under her breath one minute and complaining the next. “One of us better come up with a better plan, or I’m goin’ to go stone crazy,” she whimpered. She was close to tears.

  “I’ll come up with somethin’,” Othella promised. “Now get in your gown and get to bed.”

  The next couple of days, Othella disappeared from the house for a few hours before Ruby got out of bed. Each time when she returned, she told Ruby that she’d just been out walkin’, but she never said where she’d been “out walkin’ ” to. She didn’t see any reason to tell Ruby that she had been visiting some of the brothels that she knew about from her mother. Her mother had been a very active prostitute in her heyday. When Othella approached some of the same madams who had pimped her mother and told them who her mother was, they wanted her on a limited basis. “Not much work for colored gals, but you might do all right on account of your young age,” she’d been told repeatedly. But when Othella told them that she would only work for them if they hired Ruby, they lost some of their interest. And when Othella described Ruby to them, every single madam lost all interest—even in Othella.

  “Where you been all this time?” Ruby asked Othella as soon as she returned from one of her mysterious walks. They’d been in town for four days now, and things were still as bleak as the first day.

  �
��Don’t worry about it. I’m workin’ on a plan,” Othella told her.

  The next morning when Ruby opened her eyes, Othella was gone again.

  “Where is that high yella gal?” Ola Mae asked Ruby, barging into the bedroom without knocking.

  “Uh, she’s out walkin’,” Ruby replied, buttoning her blouse.

  “That good friend that I told y’all about is movin’ in this evening, and I want this house spotless. When Othella brings her tail back here, you tell her I want her to scrub that commode and spread the roach paste around in every room downstairs. Is that clear?”

  “Yessum,” Ruby muttered.

  When Othella returned around noon, she ducked and dodged her way through the house. She hid behind doors and peeped around corners, hoping not to bump into Ola Mae. She found Ruby in the kitchen, on her knees, scrubbing spots off the floor with a toothbrush.

  “Come on with me upstairs,” Othella whispered to Ruby.

  “Girl, you got to spread the roach paste around in every single room downstairs. And Ola Mae said you have to scrub that nasty commode, too,” Ruby said, speaking low. She looked toward the door to make sure Ola Mae was not eavesdropping. “I am so damn tired... .”

  “Come on with me,” Othella ordered again, pulling Ruby up off the floor by the hand.

  They stumbled upstairs to their room and locked the door behind them. Ruby still had the toothbrush in her hand.

  “I got some good news and some bad news,” Othella announced.

  “Give me the good news first. After all we’ve been through already, I can wait a few minutes more before hearin’ some bad news,” Ruby said, looking at her hands like they’d suddenly developed scales. There were no scales, but her hands still looked rough and ashy from all the scrubbing she’d done lately. And all the harsh lye soap she’d used to do it.

  “The good news is, we can get out of here today,” Othella informed Ruby. “I got jobs and a place for us. And we can stay there as long as we want to.”

  Ruby’s chapped lips curled up at the ends, forming a smile on her face that was so wide it reached from ear to ear. As soon as she had thoroughly digested Othella’s words, her smile faded. “And what’s the bad news?” She held her breath as she awaited Othella’s answer.