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Some things you cannot be fix. Some can.
when two people see a thing, for better or worse, it becomes real.
“But, if you see her, don’t tell her I said nothing ’bout her. She don’t like being in people’s mouths. She say it uncouth.”
They also knew about the needle of lust that pierces the heart of small church towns.
Mister Bell, who was whiter than milk from a white cow in winter.
Hell, ain’t nothing strange when Colored go crazy. Strange is when we don’t.”
The woman had been banana pudding yellow
Ruby had felt it then. The audacious hope of rooted things. The innocent anticipation of the shooting stalks, the quivering stillness of the watching trees. For the next weeks Ruby walked through the Big Thicket, becoming.
if he didn’t want to take her body, then he must want something more vile.
What could that be?
Ruby realized that she had not breathed in this particular odor of obeisance for nearly a decade.
Hope was a dangerous thing, something best squashed before it became contagious. She
The absolute goal is contagion
it was a shame she hadn’t been born a man so that she could stand in the pulpit as preacher.
So much in this thought
Ruby was lost and found, all at the same time.
Unwilling to trade sovereignty for the brutality of protection,
The old dykes carried countries in the valley of their palms. Rivers ran from the rise of their fingers, the blunt of their nails. Thumbs jutting out, peninsulas coasting the sweat of a glass or thigh. Pinching the edge of a Camel or clit. They walked sex in the crook of their smiles, in the cut of their eyes. Ruby discovered that they were the best men she had ever known. For their manhood coagulated in the raw shimmer of spirit, not groin.
Then the girl said, “Don’t never tell them your name.” Ruby didn’t understand but something inside her felt like she’d just heard gospel.
Miss Barbara once said, “You girls are important here because gentlemen can do things with a Colored girl they simply can’t bring themselves to do with a White girl.” Ruby knew that the White girls were always good girls, even when they were bad, but Negro girls started bad and could be anything after that.
Still true in 2019
You sound like you been batter-dipped and fried in wrongfulness.
She tumbled into a sleep so deep, that she forgot to be afraid.
But he was only a boy so he buried that scream like an ax in his gut, where it remained to this day.
Know that feeling
from everything she had learned of the world, everywhere she looked, women stopped being their father’s girls when they became a husband’s wife.
Ruby was well trained in not following her wants and desires.
He gathered himself and added the truth that always makes a lie more plausible,
Lying was the shield she had picked up against the hate of life. It would save her still.
She was more scared than could fit into her body.
Even her children had not been bigger than this hate. Ruby knew then that she had never nursed her children with hope. She had nursed them with fear and death. She had nursed them with evil as truth. She taught them not to rise, not to fly, but to crouch, to hide. She had fed each the poison of self-hate and they had grown weak because of it. Weak enough to be taken.
Powerful realization
Ephram was different. He did not fight the world, he moved through it. He watched life marching before him and watched the beauty and the foolishness. Then he stepped, gently into the noisy, pounding fray. He had found his way to her door. He had tended her. He had stood right alongside her, not in front with his dukes up. Perhaps that is why Ruby learned that she could protect herself. Say “no” herself. Cast out the Dyboù herself.
And another
Ruby knew then that a lie could only control a person if they believed it.
AMEN
Then she knew. Before she could teach anything, she had to know it herself.
This is life
