Ruby's Imagine

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Chapter One

Moon Day

A butterfly the color of my name did tell me that a Big Spin was coming our way. I was standing by Mr. Grant’s wisteria, which hung over his fence and down into our yard, when Ruby Butterfly, this jeweled metamorphosis of a cattypillar, landed on a bright green wisteria leaf like some kind of winged oracle and looked straight at me; we exchanged glances, you know, the way liked-minded and soul-bodied creatures can. We understood each other down deep to our transfigured and transforming cellular parts, and I knew the Big Oaks had told Ruby Butterfly and now she was letting me in on the not-so- secret secret: a storm was coming. Her message was akin to “Run fer ya lives!” in Big Oak and Ruby Butterfly speak. Or, “Stay and watch if you the stomach fer it.” I thanked Ruby Butterfly, who had flown back to the blue, for letting me know, and I watched Samuel Beckett Sparrow hop down from the aboves to my feet. He pecked at the dirt, and I wonders how I could warn the others. No times like this one right now. I went back into the house and to the kitchen, where Mammaloose was cooking red beans and rice. Uncle Gilbert sat at the table reading the papers and stirring his coffee—round and round his spoon went, creating its own little Big Spin.
“Where you been?” Mammaloose asked. “Never seen anyone who took so long gettin’ from one place to ’nother like you.” “I stopped at the library with Jacob,” I told her. “We have a report due on hurricanes.” This was near to the truth.
“Set the table,” Mammaloose told me. She seemed in one of her good-time moods, so I needed to make my words full of care. Mammaloose never hears my words as glad tidings. She says I is constantly putting a target on myself by using my Ruby words.
When I was small Mammaloose could not tolerate my Ruby words at all. Sometimes she whipped me with a leather belt she said my daddy used to hit me with before he died in the car crash with my momma. I knew her words were not part of the true imaginings. My daddy would never have harmed a hair on my head, arms, or legs, and not any other part of my being. Not with purpose. Not like Mammaloose used to do. She doesn’t touch me with hurt anymore these years. JayEl—that’s what I call Jacob—says it’s because I’m bigger than she is now. Maybe she is afraid of you, he says.
No matters. I pulled plates out from the cupboard and put them on the wooden table. Uncle Gilbert gave me cheerful glances as I set the plate near him. Fork. Knife. Glass. I poured beer in the glasses of Mammaloose and Uncle Gilbert.
“I think a big hurricane is coming our way,” I said, likes I was talking about the weather—which I suppose I was.
“I never heard nothing,” Mammaloose said. “Wouldn’t matter though. We been through so many storms, so many floods. This house danced with Betsy and came away just fine. And everything since.” Mammaloose says any part of her house stand up to any part of anything else. Except maybe the roof. She be after Uncle Gilbert to fix it since before the last storm ate a piece of it for lunch. She loves this house so much, she says, she chose a man who would fit the house; he had to be small enough for the low ceilings. So, she says, she looks around until she came up short with Uncle Gilbert. He cringe when she puts those kinds of words on him. And then he has another beer. He know how to hide. Same as me. We all have the urges to survive. And I has swamp learning. Knows how to survive and thrive even in the difficulties. Even in the Mammaloose difficulties.
“I ain’t worried about no hurricane,” Mammaloose said. Mammaloose and I sat at the table with Uncle Gilbert, who is no uncle to me, and we ate rice, beans, and cornbread, just like we did every Monday. Silence between us. The house sighed, the way houses do when they grow weary of the quiets. Mammaloose stared at her food while she ate. She did not notice me thanking the food for giving up its life for me. After living almost my whole life with Mammaloose, I had learned to say my talks with food and other things in the silence so only the intended of my words could hear. I have some memories of my before-Mammaloose life, but she says I have lived with her from the minute my parents died when I was five, and before that I lived next door in a little shotgun house. I don’t remember living in that house. I do has images in my mind of the swamp and my sisters, Opal and Pearl. I can hear my daddy’s voice, see the white alley gator Daddy called his good luck—though I don’t see how much good luck that white alley gator could have brought if my daddy got killed in a car crash. I has memories of waking up during a fais do-do and someone shushing me back to sleep while the partty went on and on in the other room. I has more images of watching someone make jambalaya—seeing hands chopping vegetables. Hearing singsongsssss.
Mammaloose says, “That’s just Ruby’s imagine. She don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’, especially no swamp. Too many stories from her daddy, that’s all.” I do sometimes have wonderings why Mammaloose never talks about my mother—her daughter. She has no photographs of my momma or daddy. Does she have reasoning for this? When I was small I asked. I ask no more. If I want conversing, I talks with the Flying or Rooted People, or with JayEl. Jacob Lazarus. He has a love for words like I does. Make every sentence a singsong. A fais do-do. He understands words have their purposes. They be magic. Conversing is not supposed to be like the white noise music I hears in elevators or at the big box stores. No. Conversing is a hearing, feeling adventure in conjuring, loving, and connecting. JayEl feels the same.
If JayEl not around, I might goes to the Place Where My Vegetables Grow, which is in the back of Mammaloose's house. Or maybe I go to the Crossroads. The first time Uncle Gilbert took me to the Crossroads, I was just a child. The lady behind the counter gave me a frozen cup. The first taste did tell me it was made of more than ice and syrup.
“Cher, you like my sno-ball?” the lady asked.
I nodded.
“It’s magic. You never be da same, cher. Laissez les bons temps rouler.” She winked.
A galaxy did reveal itself to me in her winking eye. A man be there, too. He shake hands with Uncle Gilbert, who called him Callaway Lanier. They talks about price of something while I looked at the stars in the lady’s eye. She smile at me sweetlike.
I didn’t go back to the Crossroads till I was about twelve. Went solitaire. Wandered inside and saw the Lady with the Galaxy in Her Eye. She handed me a frozen cup, like before, like this had been a kind of habit thing between us forever, a ceremony. I took it. “What you need?” she asked me.
“A garden,” I says to her. I had tried growing a garden, but nothing come up.
“The whole world can be a garden, dawlin’,” she said. “You trying to set down roots? Lessee what I can do.” I followed her to the back of the store, where she did have candles lit and a kind of shrine with flowers and such around the Mary and some of da Saints that I had no recollecting of since Mammaloose made with certainty I never been near a Catlick church. That be Daddy’s religion, not Momma’s, not Mammaloose’s. Mammaloose used to be going to the church of John the Baptist, but no more. I did have glad feels coming to the back room of the Crossroads with the Lady. A wave of heat touched my skin, as though a hand ran across my cheeks and forehead, like someone blind was figuring out who I was. Alongside those candles and pictures were bottles filled with plants. Maybe other things too. I had not much looking time. The Lady was holding out a few plastic bags. She began dropping seeds into those bags.
“These seeds are beginnings, cher,” she said. “They be blessed. You remember that.” As we left the back room, I turns around to say my farewell to the whoever’s residing there.
“You touched, cher?” the Lady asked.
“I have the feels of home back there,” I said.
She nodded. “You is home, dawlin’. The whole world is your home.” At the Lady’s counter was Mr. Lagniappe, like before. I calls him Mr. Lagniappe now ’cause he brought a little extra into my living, but then he was just Mr. Lanier.
“You planting a garden?” he asked back then. “That a fine thing. I bring you some manure from the zoo, if you like. That help them seeds.” He made the glancing eyes at the Lady and I sees then the love going out from him to her. She pay no mind to his glances—or else she had no knowing of their meaning.
The Lady nodded. “He can do right by your garden, cher. Even the Earth needs good eats.” The next day, Mr. Lagniappe brought zoo manure to the garden when Mammaloose was at work. And he did so the next year and the next. I never had trouble growing nothing after that. Mammaloose has never had a meeting with the Lady or Mr. Lagniappe, so she has a belief that they from my imagine. I don’t mind. That way the Crossroads is my place. I goes there and eat a frozen cup and every once or twice in a while, I let the Lady make me a po'boy. And she let me go in the back with the candles and such. I always feel that precious hand on my face. And the flames always dance a bit of a hello.
Mammaloose would have none of this coming my way if she knew about it. Even though I be nearly eighteen and in the last year of my high schooling, she tries to tell me every little thing to do. Or not to do. She be seeing me like she saw me at five years old. After we finished the beans and rice, Mammaloose and Uncle Gilbert went to look at da TeeVee and I washed the dishes.
“Nuthin’ ’bout no storm,” Mammaloose called out.
“She bin right before,” I heard Uncle Gilbert murmur.
When the kitchen was tidy the way Mammaloose likes, I left the house. I walked outside in the place where we live. Some would calls the day hot and humid. I say it’s a different kind of rain. The air just can’t let go of the water long enough for it to fall. That’s what sweat is too, in a ways. Just rain popping out all over you.
I walked the place where I lives—I calls it my Garden of Neighbors—down toward JayEl’s Daddy’s Corner of Happiness Store. Some people talks about what ward they lives in. I don’t do that. I heard Mammaloose once say that calling where you lives a ward make you sound like you living in some kind of institution. I can only be agreeing with her. I says I is a citizen of the Earth and right now I be living in a place somewheres between the old oak next to the yellow two-story and the gum tree out front of the pale green double shotgun. I lives in the place where the wisteria dips over the fence to hold hands with the magnolia that dips down to say hello to the Place Where My Vegetables Grow.
That’s where I lives.
At Café Brouhaha, where I work, the owner’s daughter, Louisa, asks me if I’m not afraid living where I lives. She thinks we killing each other all the time. I always tell her—’cause she asks me a lot—I tell her, “Naw, that nonsense happens a few blocks down. We awright.” She never seen violence where she live. It pretty all the time, I guess. I imagine my Garden of Neighbors likes that. I sees it all for what it truly is, I think. Like Mammaloose. I don’t see her as bad. I’m not saying everything she does is good. Just like I’m not saying bad things ain’t happening where I lives. I is saying other things going on too.
As I walked this place where I lives, I waved to Miss Sweet Desserts and Her Man Lionel. Miss Sweet Desserts used to calls me into her house every time I went by when I was small. She had cookies or pecan pie or beignets to hand out. She is the one taught me how to make beignets. She baked in the mornings ’cause she could not get to sleep after working all night. She was on one of those crews that cleans big old office buildings. All nights. Most every night. Now she happier, working days at Big Charity. She says she don’t mind sick people as long as she can sleep.
“You bring me by a beignet one of these days, sugar,” Miss Sweet Desserts said.
“How ya doin’?” Her Man Lionel asked.
“I do fine,” I said. “I come by tomorrow with some beignets.” I came upon Mr. Grant on his way home from looking for work. He walking. His car been down longer than the summer been hot, it seemed, and he run out of money now that the end of the month near. “How you doing today, Mr. Grant?” I asks.
“I be fine,” he said. “Worse than some, better than most. Can’t complain.” “Any prospects today?” He looking for a job longer than his car be resting. He hurt himself when he worked on one of the fishing boats.
“Prospects everywhere, cher,” he said. “I just gotta find me one. You know what they says ’bout old Louisiana fishermen. We don’t die. We just smell that way.” I laughs. It is not the first time I hears this joke from him.
“I got some okra in the Place Where My Vegetables Grow,” I said. “You go on and get you some.” “I just might do that,” he said. “Make me some jambalaya maybe. Invite over my lady friend.” I smiles. Mr. Grant always talking ’bout his lady friend. I never seen no one looks like a lady friend. I sometimes have the wonders if she real. But I imagine she a charmer, and that Mr. Grant has the happiest of times with her.
“You have yourself a night,” I told him.
I waved to Mr. Grant and the Oak Tree and the Lincoln’s Little Black Dog, who was nice enough to stay on his own steps and just wag his tail as I passed by. He couldn’t see much these days, so his temper sometimes got the betters of him. He usually knew me by my smells, I suppose, but not always JayEl, so he nipped at his heels more than once. JayEl didn’t like that much.
When I reached JayEl’s Daddy’s Corner of Happiness Store, I saw JayEl leaning against the RTA sign out front, sucking on a frozen cup.
He held up his little finger, I linked my little finger with his, then we each pulled away. He offered a frozen cup to me, but I shook my head.
“You afraid you catch something from me?” he asked.
I laughed. “I may be afraid of many things, but that ain’t one of them.” We walked away from the corner and kept going until we come to the almost empty lot near the John the Baptist Church. Bottles and plastic bags and tall grass in the lot. We followed the path to the bench near the church. JayEl kicked litter out of our way.
“I always forget a bag so I can pick this stuff up,” I says as we sat on the bench. “You’re not picking that stuff up,” he said. “Could be needles and all kinds of things in there.” We been friends, JayEl and I, since we was way small, so he could say something like that to me without sounding like he was bossing me. Other people sometimes talks to me likes I still small. Something about me or my words or my ways in the world they don’t have an understanding for, I guess.
“You be my daddy now, JayEl?” I asked. “He protected me from all ways and means of bad things too once upon a times.” “Yeah, I be your daddy. And the sky is green.” “It probably is green somewheres,” I said. “If you live under the water in the swamp and looks up, you’d probably think the sky is green.” “You might be right,” he said. “Though I imagine it wouldn’t be a good thing, otherwise, having a green sky. Not in normal life.” We watched the Mayeux brothers riding—and falling off—their boards. Hopping up and down. A breeze blew through so we couldn’t hear their wheels hitting the pavement.
“You finish the history assignment?” JayEl asked.
“Sure. You?” JayEl shrugged. He had troubles with motivation, especially motivating about stuff he didn’t see as helping him.
“You know I don’t like history,” he said.
“History is just stories about what has already happened,“ I said. “You been here all your life; you know the stories. You the one who told me about the I- Ten columns. How the Old Oaks had made their homes in those spots where the columns are now. Those Old Oaks sheltered slaves and free black people for as long as anyone knows. Then the people built the I-Ten. They pulled up the trees and left them for dead. Dug up the neutral ground. Split the neighborhood. They put the cement columns where the trees had been. And one day the Artists came and did what they suppose to do in times like these: answer the call of the land, the community, and make beauty out of destruction, out of their imagines, out of what had been and was now. That’s what they did.” JayEl and I have been to the concrete trees many times. Touching the painted worlds. Buying watermelons and veggies from the man playing chess.
“That’s history,” I said, “and you’ve told me that story many times.” JayEl laughed. “I’m not sure that story is gonna help me with my history assignment.” “She wanted us to write about a historical event. That was a historical event.” I likes thinking about those painted columns even if I wish the trees were there instead. I like the paintings all over our city. I especially like the big beautiful blue whales on the Whaling Wall on a hotel uptown. JayEl took me there the first time. I never seen any things so big and blue and watery as those whales. It seemed like those whales might swim right off the back side of the hotel.
“I bet if it ever floods here,” I told JayEl then, “they be gone.” “I sure would be,” he said.
JayEl always knows where the interesting is. And we friends for always. Was a few years where he was crazy over girls and he was getting into one trouble after another. Fighting. Growling territorial. His momma, Miss Celia Williams, work at the school. She turn him around. Got him accepted to college for next year. Same as me, though he didn’t get any gift of money like I did. Not many others we know have the same. Our school ain’t the pretty place. Too much tough. Too much falling into parts. Not to my liking. But I figures out how to survive, how to put on my normal life, as JayEl calls it, when I’m there.
I was never crazy for boys—or girls—the way JayEl was crazy for girls. I be loving the ground and the sky and the trees and Samuel Beckett Sparrow and Miss Sweet Desserts and the Lady with the Galaxy in Her Eye and Mr. Lagniappe and Maya Angelou Hummingbird and JayEl—and Opal and Pearl, even though Mammaloose says they ain’t real, they is part of my imaginings, too. I loves, but I never feels that crazy longing I seen in JayEl’s eyes. It gone now. He got his reason back. I hope he still loves but not like before. Not like it was a cold he caught that made him all mean and sad and away from me. I like JayEl ’cause he sees things. He says he likes me ’cause I paint pictures with my words. He says I talk like no other person he ever heard. JayEl’s momma was the one who said I was a citizen of the Earth; that’s why I talk like people from all over. I likes when she put those words on me. I likes it fine. So I be a citizen of the Earth. I almost told JayEl’s momma about my sister Opal giving me the diary of Opal Whiteley. Least ways, that’s what I believe happened. I found the book in a tin box in my locker, under some old clothes. I believes it come from the bayou with me. Opal Whiteley was a real life girl who lived up in the woods in the west corner of the U.S. of A. She talked to the trees and the animals likes I do. And she talked in the most beautiful ways. I have glad tidings each time I reads her. People thought she had the crazies, too. I have the thought that she a kindred spirit to me. She dead now. They put her in a place that had wards, and she died there. JayEl says I paints pictures with my words like Opal Whiteley. He says I should write my imaginings. I have tried. Never turns out like my imaginings. It never has the beauty on the pages like it does in my head. So I figure other ways to make beauty. At Tulane, I’m going to study bayous—swamps—and help them come back. They’re like sponges, you know, swamps. They soak up water and keep the land from drowning. They soak up bad things so the land and us don’t get sick. Right now, our city is sinking ’cause it’s all wrong. Land needs to build up. That’s what the Misi Sipi does. She brings all this sand and dirt out of her mouth and it build up the land. But the Misi Sipi don’t work that ways anymore. She cut up. We cut off from her. No new land, so the city sinks. When I tell Mammaloose I want to help the bayous, she says I got no sense. She thinks the whole city should sink. Sometimes I believes she wants everything to sink ’cause she feels like her whole life is nothing. It is a sad thing. JayEl doesn’t understand why I’m not mad at Mamaloose all the times. I just isn’t. I’ve felt afraid. Mostly I feel sad for her. But what can you do with another person’s unhappiness? It ain’t mine. She may want to give it to me, but I don’t accept it. I don’t want that gift. A gift can be a curse too. Can’t it?
But that’s beside what we was talking about.
“We gonna get a Big Spin,” I told JayEl. “Ruby Butterfly told me and the trees told her.” JayEl looks over at me.
“It gonna be bad,” I said. “It’ll look like one of those spiral galaxies. And it’ll be almost as big.” “They all look like galaxies,” JayEl said. “Can’t help but think how beautiful they are.” “Can’t help,” I agreed.
“Should I tell my mom?” he asked.
“You tell anyone you can,” I said.
“You ever think maybe it’s time we left here?” JayEl was unsure of his place in this here galaxy. Or at least here here.
“You always wantin’ to go someplace else,” I said.
“Better than staying still,” he said.
“Sometimes it’s nice being still,” I said. “You can hear the Flying People, feel the ground at your feet, the breath of the Rooted People on your skin.” “Yeah, I give you that. I also hear that couple in the corner house there screaming at one ’nother. I can smell oil or gasoline or exhaust from some old chevy, oil rig, or trawler. And that breeze is way wheezy and wet.” “You a half-frozen-cup-full kind of guy, ain’t ya?” I said.
“Is this Big Spin the one?” JayEl asked. “The one that will bury us in water?” “I don’t think the Rooted People can see into the future,” I said.
JayEl looked at me.
“They just know what’s coming a little bit before everyone else,” I said. “That’s all.” JayEl laughed. “Guess psychic trees would be kind of strange. Wouldn’t surprise me though.” “Though when I think about this hurricane coming,“ I said, “I think about the word apocalypse. It means ‘to lift the veil.’ Did you know that? Sometimes I feel like I got a veil over me, or like there is a veil over this whole city. I think the Big Spin might rip off that veil. And it ain’t gonna be pretty, JayEl. At least not most of it.” “You think things will change?“ JayEl asked. He shrugged. “Not much has changed here since slave times. Poor people are still poor people taking care of rich people.” “Those words have the truth all over them, JayEl,” I said. “Can’t be arguing with you about that.” Just then, a hummingbird flies right up to our faces. She inches from us. We both so startled we stayed still. Seem like time stopped. Her rufous wings had the looksee of moving in slow motion. Her beak look like a needle. She look just like Maya Angelou Hummingbird, except Maya Angelou Hummingbird has a tiny white spot on her throat. Then time started again, and the hummingbird flew away.
“What was that all about?” JayEl asked. “Another message from the trees? My momma says you’re the only one she knows who gets hummingbirds in the summer. Now they’re following you. What’s that all about?” “Maybe she was following you,” I said. “You are pretty. They likes pretty.” JayEl grinned. “You think I’m pretty? I’m doin’ all right then.” I laughed. “Wanna come watch while I clean out the hummingbird feeder? I think maybe it’s time.” “Wouldn’t miss watching you clean,” he said. “I never seen one of them so close. They’re so tiny.” We gots up and started walking again.
“You sit on my steps out back and you see hummingbirds all the time.” “Never that close,” he said. “That’s what comes from sitting still,” I said.
“Uh-huh. I think maybe it has to do with your Big Spin. They want you to know it’s coming.” “It ain’t my Big Spin,” I said. “I’m just the messenger.”