Saving Ruby King

by Catherine Adel West

Sometimes you barely love yourself or not at all, sometimes you barely drag yourself out of bed and function in a world that has nary a clue nor care you’ve abandoned the dreams you had for yourself. Instead you raised a child who loves you but resents you because of the mistakes you made.

We look to others to save us and we must save ourselves.

It’s okay to be my housekeeper but not my doctor. It’s fine to paint my house but don’t expect to see your work of art shadowing any great halls of museums. Be who you want to be as long as your potential doesn’t eclipse mine. Know your place. Stay in your place.

If we’re to truly look at ourselves and not at our pain. If we realized our value and spent less time captive to hasty perceptions. If we saved ourselves, what could we become? They fear our skin and we fear our power. It’s a perfect storm for destruction. Our destruction.

“He’s not a father! He’s not a husband! He’s the thing that makes everything ugly like him.” “We’re all he has, do you know that? You don’t walk away from that, from the responsibility of someone needing you. People have hurt him and let him down his whole life. Even his mother...she...she...” Mom searches for words, some improbable sentence that’ll help her explain why Lebanon is the way he is, and why she stays, and because of her, why I stay. Mom sighs. “I know your father in a way no one else does, and somewhere deep down he loved me once, he still does. What he does is...it’s more than bones and bruises, and the world can be so unkind to people, relentless, especially to men like him, to people like us. And those few times when it gets to be too much, he loses himself a little. But I find him, and he comes back or at least he used to, and maybe I can do that again. One more time.”

This story is ending a different way. With her and me. With marriages. With our kids getting on our damn nerves. This ends with phone calls and laughter and barbeques. Maybe even with our families coming back together. With grandkids and us complaining about how everything is too expensive now. This ends for us as old women rocking in porch chairs, hot days with cold sweet tea.

The easiest thing to do is nothing and we were all guilty of it. My parents. People in church. Our community. We sang our songs and prayed our prayers and talked in pleasantries, but very few of us really knew the business of the other.

It doesn’t matter I’m educated, that I volunteer at church. It doesn’t matter I have a family that loves me, or that I don’t have so much as a speeding ticket to my name, I’m black. That’s what matters. Cops cover for cops. Blue covers blue. Blue doesn’t cover black. And there’d be no one to speak for me. I have a bullet in my pocket right now and that’d probably be enough for them to take me into a police station where they could keep me for however long they want. My education doesn’t protect me. My father can’t protect me. In this moment, I question if even God can.

“I know whatever it is we find, whatever happens, we’ll learn to live with it. And, by learning to live with things, even the bad things of this world, we’ll be okay. That’s what I can promise, Layla.”

But then I went to jail. My body took more pain than I thought possible, and in those moments where darkness swallowed me and fists beat me, I thanked Sara. She bred me to this and for this. I survived prison because she gifted me pain while Jackson was gifted with love by his parents.

“Life for us in this world, especially in this city, is never simple, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try and make it better.”

“Sweetie, there are many things we learn in this world,” she says. “Those things can make you hard, but you have a choice to not let it. You don’t be the rock. You be the river. You hear me?”