Birdy’s mama gave Ruthanne hand-me-down dresses and did her hair up with laces and bows.
Not that things were always so bad at home. There were hugs and cuddles occasionally and mornings in bed eating cinnamon-roasted sweet potato and giggles at Ruthanne’s attempts to put her father’s head into ponytails with bobbles and barrettes and them knowing just what to do sometimes to make her stop crying, but by the time she was twelve, she hated them both, and when Birdy went off to college, Ruthanne couldn’t see any good reason to stick around her parents. They were lost souls. She, on the other hand, was full of purpose. She dressed good. She looked good. She spoke good—well. No one would know who her parents were, all crass and uncouth. Drunkards and burnouts.
Ruthanne left to go live with her great-uncle, a Baptist minister in Tennessee who called himself Buck. “Now, what do we have here?” he asked when she turned up at his door, dressed ever so fancily in one of Birdy’s old dresses, her hot-combed hair slicked into a bun, her white patent-leather shoes beautiful and unscuffed.
“You’re my great-uncle. I’m Clarissa’s girl, Ruthanne,” she said.
“Get inside, girl,” he said, then called for his wife, Freddy-Mae, to heat up some leftovers and make up a bed. “You will call me sir, and you will call her ma’am. We call you, and we hear you say, What? you get popped. So what do you say when Auntie Freddy-Mae calls you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ruthanne. She already knew the ropes. Birdy’s mother had been the same way. She would answer only to ma’am. Didn’t even like to be called Mama.
Ruthanne took to always calling them sir and ma’am instead of Uncle and Auntie, because then people wouldn’t know right away she wasn’t their daughter or granddaughter, and they’d never give thought to her sad life before she’d come here.
Uncle Buck demanded excellence, and Ruthanne delivered, flourishing under the high expectations. She loved the rules, the strict curfew, church on Sundays, Bible study, picnics, old women pinching her cheeks and telling her to steer clear of this and that boy, but, oh, wasn’t he handsome. She liked that Buck checked her homework for errors and made her redo it until it was perfection. He chose her classes for her, made sure that she was taking the most challenging course load possible. Eventually he paid for private school, where she was the only nonwhite student at Woodly Preparatory. Life settled down into an order. She knew that she was loved and cared about always and without question. She knew her future. She’d go to Yale, like Uncle Buck had. She would be the first Black woman Supreme Court justice. She would have children and be the best goddamn mother in the world. She’d never imbibe. She would only ever listen to the same wondrous music Uncle Buck and Aunt Freddy-Mae played. Gospel. The Lord’s music. She would be in God’s light forever, and she would shine with his love and change the world, and when she talked, folks would listen. Why? Because she talked so good—well. Speech and Rhetoric Competition Champion, 1988, 1989.
She was eighteen when her mother died of an overdose. Two months later her father threw himself off a bridge.
“Focus on the task at hand,” her great-uncle had said as she’d cried and cried, not knowing why. She hadn’t spoken to them since she was a child. She didn’t think they’d even been sad to see her go when she stormed out on a Thursday, suitcase packed.
Ruthanne did focus on the task at hand. She was accepted to Harvard University, where she studied history and linguistics, for a time. When Great-Uncle Buck died, she dropped out to return home to take care of Freddy-Mae, who’d recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She died a year later, Ruthanne by her side.
“Ruthie, dear?” asked Freddy-Mae.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“We did right by you, didn’t we?” she asked, looking for reassurance.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I never could have children,” she said.
Ruthanne nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I hope we loved you hard enough. You were our greatest gift.” Those were her last words.
Ruthanne lived off her inheritance from Buck and Freddy-Mae, and when that went, she lived off whatever flitty notion she happened to have that month. She dealt weed. She lived in her van. She was a nanny for two years, a time when she learned she truly, completely, and vigorously hated white people.
Without her great-uncle as compass, she was a boat lost at sea. Soon she’d capsize. Feeling wistful and nostalgic one day, she called Birdy’s old house, where Birdy’s mother and father were still living—though they hadn’t heard from Birdy in some time, they said. Still, they gave her the last contact info they had for her.