A Virtuous Ruby (4 page)

Solomon’s tense little body relaxed, and the baby’s breathing eased almost right away. Some of the other young women in the room took in a sharp gasp of breath.

“Praise him,” someone said.

Was that Ruby?

Solomon had asthma. Adam moved his Franklin-Bell over the thin child.

Did he have enough to eat?

Something in the home, as well kept as it was, made it difficult for him to breathe. The beautiful quilts in shades of bright red, green, blue, and orange might have something to do with it. He put the Franklin-Bell down and used his hands to inspect the baby again. “Come here, little fellow.”

He had been so angry at God for years, yet his mind scrambled in amazement as he examined the child further. Had he been brought here to care for this baby? He slipped one hand under Solomon’s tiny head and one under his bottom and lifted him up into his arms, holding him close. As he shifted the baby in his arms, Solomon opened his eyes and stared at Adam with a knowing stare, a gray stare. Adam’s skin tingled.

Solomon had Winslow eyes too.

He smoothed down the little shirt that had been lovingly embroidered by someone and the child was clean, even though he was small.

“Will he be all right?” Ruby’s freckles stood out on her pale, creamy skin, and her brown eyes brimmed with fear and anxiety. He would do what he could to calm her fear, since he didn’t want to see her beautiful countenance disturbed in such a fashion.

“Yes.” He couldn’t say more. It was as if healing the baby was healing himself, and a sharp pain he didn’t know he had inside of him began to scar over.

“But you came in and made him sleep again.”

“I would like to believe I have a magic touch with babies, and my mere arrival could put them to sleep.” He chuckled as he took Solomon away from the little room back through the kitchen. Continuing to the large front living room where the Bledsoes sat, he cradled the baby as the family stopped chattering and stared at him, striding through their home. He took the baby out into the June night air and Ruby followed him.

“But, there is something more going on here, isn’t there?” Adam smoothed down the baby’s brow. Sweet little fella.

“I don’t understand.”

“He seems small and light. He’s what, four months old?” He shifted him in his arms. The baby didn’t seem to weigh enough.

“No, five almost six.”

He shook his head, icy alarm running through his veins. This was his nephew…was he being well cared for? Keeping his voice calm he asked, “What are you giving him to eat?”

“I—I nurse him.” Ruby retreated back from him, folding her arms over her chest.

“He needs more to eat. If he were a little bit bigger, he might be able to ward off this asthma better.”

“What should he eat?”

Ruby’s intelligence showed earlier. He had to make sure she understood though, for her baby’s sake. “He needs food, not just milk. Do you have enough to eat here? If not, then David should be providing it.”

Ruby folded her arms and shifted her stance.

No
. A tight feeling suffused his body. He’d offended her. It was the last thing he wanted to do even as he appreciated her well-made chin in her heart-shaped face. The sweet touch belied the steel set of her jaw.

“We take care of our own.” Her jaw became more defined in the darkness. “Solomon is my cross to bear—my shame,” she told him, “or at least that is what people think. But I am not ashamed of him.”

He nodded, not judging her in anyway. One thing doctors learned, babies happened. “I have a syrup he can take whenever he has a breathing issue, but he should stay away from the kitchen. It’s not a good place for him. And you need to give him some finely ground up food, purees, protein. Something solid. Mashed up peaches, strained fine.”

“You telling me how to feed my baby?” Her brow furrowed. Clearly she wasn’t used to taking direction.

“He needs to be built up more to be able to ward off the asthma. It’ll take some time, but I’m sure your mother can help you.”

“She don’t want to help. She’d rather God take him.” Something sharp pierced his chest at the thought. Babies died too, but not this one.

“I can say something to the Winslows if you can’t provide for him.”

“I can provide for my baby. He will be fine. I just thought nursing him was good.”

“That’s fine. He needs more than that. I can stay and watch him, but as I said, he needs more.”

Ruby stared out into the night and the rigid set to her shoulders eased a bit. There was clear relief in her at his words and a sudden gladness in his heart. Gratitude washed through him, happy to have helped her. “We can take care of him. I didn’t want to believe it, but he’s a gift from God.”

Why did she have to keep mentioning God? Was it because of the strange connection to Solomon he had just experienced? He didn’t know, but he wanted to reassure her, “I can tell he’s a well-made child.”

“Who looks just like you,” Ruby faced him in a defiant stance. “It’s very strange isn’t it?”

The sleeping child stirred in his arms. “Incredibly.”

“He’s a Winslow, you know.”

“Yes. I guess he’s related to me.” He had a nephew. Not the family he had come to find, but family, nonetheless. And with Solomon as family, Adam would ensure the baby was sustained properly. Not that he looked forward to going back to the Winslows tonight anyway. His stomach plummeted at the thought. It would be better to stay here to help them.

Ruby stared back out into the night. “They thought if they had David attack me, I’d stop asking for better from Mr. Paul. Solomon’s what happened. They can point and stare at us all they want.” She looked at him, questioning. “You did good things with your life, being a doctor and all. Why can’t my son? Why does he have to be talked about?”

He didn’t flinch from her question. The way she spoke made such common, quiet sense, but she was angry and somehow, she had to talk out her anger. “He’s a beautiful baby. He’s just small.”

“They ought to be ashamed thinking they could keep me quiet.” Ruby set her jaw again. “But Solomon’s coming only convinced me even more to speak out against Negro men being lynched in this town for no reason at all.”

Adam swallowed a deep gulp. “Lynching?”

“Yes. That’s how the Winslows keep Negroes in their place ’round here. ’Cause I said something about the lynchings, I was attacked. And then Uncle Arlo got his lynching.”

Who was Uncle Arlo? Her allegations had his head swimming. Paul Winslow was responsible for these things? His father?

He swallowed. “What do you mean said something?”

Ruby’s eyes blazed in the darkness. “The Winslows used their precious son to try to keep me quiet. It didn’t work. I’m going to do more than ever to keep the life of my Negro son safe in this terrible place. They won’t get to him. God will make Solomon a great warrior in this battle. I’ll see to that.”

“Fine. But he needs to eat more, and keep him from the cookstove.” A sense of doom collected through his fingertips and gathered in his stomach. Given the way she had voiced it, he had no doubt what Ruby said bore truth. “Try to keep him calm and quiet as well. He doesn’t need extra anxiety in his life.”

She turned to face him, “Anxiety? What do you mean?”

“Don’t give him any cause to worry. What would Solomon have to worry about as a baby except his mother is causing trouble in the town by speaking up against lynching? You should be here, taking care of him, feeding him food. He needs his mother here.”

“I take care of my child. How dare you say I don’t?” She reached for her baby and with great tenderness, took the child away.

“I’m sure you do. But you ought to stay at home and see to his needs instead of going out and stirring up trouble. I hope that’s not why you were in town today. It won’t help him. What if something happened to you?”

“It’s what will help him, Dr. Morson. It’s people like you who don’t seek to help the cause who are part of the problem.”

“People like me?” He crossed his arms. What did this fiery woman mean?

“Do you know Mrs. Barnett? Do you know about the NAACP and the work they are doing?”

He opened his mouth, ready to respond, but Ruby continued to speak, cradling her son.

“Of course you don’t. You just keep silent, ’cause if you speak, you open yourself to being seen as one of us, instead of one of them.”

She lifted the baby to her shoulder and moved away from Adam, into the house, leaving him in the dark.

How could this beautiful stranger have such intense and direct access to the heart of who he was? Or who he wanted to be? Bolstered by the connection with the baby when he doctored him, he stared into the abyss of confrontation. He put a hand to his temple and rubbed it to get some relief. Confrontation involved heated emotions, a place he didn’t like at all. It was best to avoid her at all costs.

If only she, and her small son, had not already claimed some small portion of his heart.

Chapter Four

The meeting would take place in just three more days. Ruby didn’t have enough contact with the men to tell them about the meeting. Would they know? Would they come? Jacob’s hand injury and Dr. Morson’s attempt to cause trouble in Winslow had interfered with her plans to let the men know about her starting the NAACP chapter, her Uncle Arlo’s dream.

She harbored no ill feeling toward Jacob. He couldn’t help his injured hand. But she had to go back to town. And she couldn’t.

She couldn’t go anywhere. It was all the doctor’s fault.

On the big wraparound courting porch, she sat with Solomon in the fresh air, as Dr. Morson had recommended. The nerve of him, suggesting that her family didn’t have enough food to eat, or they did not give Solomon enough.

Her father was one of the most prosperous Negro farmers in the surrounding county area.

He had plenty to feed his grandson, if he wanted. But everyone knew that babies needed to stay on their mother’s milk for as long as possible.

How dare he?

As she reviewed some papers sent by the Chicago chapter of the NAACP about starting a chapter, the earth shook with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. Or was it a mule? Yes, it was a mule, being pushed as fast as it could go, coming toward their place, but not slowing down, maybe headed to town. She set Solomon to the side, and stood to brush off her skirt. She recognized Nessie the mule and her owner, Bob Turnman riding hard toward the Winslow place.

Where was he going? To work? He couldn’t be in such a hurry to drive Paul Winslow anywhere.

Agnes’s time must have come.

Should she go?

Would he ask her to come to see to his wife? He better stop now. This was Agnes’s third baby and might not take that long to come.

However, the hooves did not slow down, seemingly fully prepared to go past the Bledsoe farm, if she hadn’t opened the gate and hurled herself out into the road. “Bob, Bob! What’s going on?”

Seeing Ruby, Bob pulled up on Nessie and stopped, the open concern etched on his face. “I-I-Agnes sent me to fetch help for herself. Baby’s coming.”

She clapped her hands on her apron. “I knew it. Let me get my kit. I can ride behind you.”

Alarm further etched on Bob’s brown features. “Ah, before the Almighty, Ruby, I wasn’t coming to get you. I, uh, was going to fetch the doctor up to the Winslows.”

Had she just been slapped? “He ain’t up there. He’s inside cause my baby took sick yesterday. But it don’t matter, I do all the grannying around here.”

Bob pulled up Nessie and turned around in the Bledsoe’s front yard. “You, well, Mr. Winslow said, you wasn’t doing it no more and if Agnes needed help to get the doctor up to his place.”

“I brought your own Sadie and Edie into the world.”

“And I blesses you for that. But, this here, well, its different. Mr. Paul says he fires me from my driving job if I get you. I’m sorry, Ruby. I’ve got to go.”

“Well he ain’t up there. He’s here. He stayed seeing after Solomon last night.”

“He okay?”

“He’s fine. I go and get him.”

She retreated into the house. Well, then, she had been slapped down. Paul Winslow was determined to cut off her access to her people in this way too. Agnes had been kind of an older sister all of her life. She wouldn’t want some strange man touching her.

Mags stood on the porch holding Solomon, and she knew her sister had seen the whole thing. “He don’t want you to come?”

“No. That doesn’t mean I’m not going though. I’m getting my kit.”

She opened the door and was faced with the sight of the uppity doctor sitting at the big center table with her family wolfing down her mother’s food. He ate to his heart’s content of bacon and biscuits and her mother’s famous peach jam. Guess he was eating plenty big today.

“Agnes’s time has come. She’s having her baby.”

Dr. Morson stood instantly and adjusted his shirtsleeves. “I appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Bledsoe. I’m going to help this woman.”

“Bob tied Nessie up in the barn to start up the Winslow car.”

“That’s enough time to get ready.” Dr. Morson ducked out of the room and her entire family turned to her.

“You afraid to go and help Agnes, daughter?” Her mother asked.

“No. Bob told me he don’t want me going.”

Silence.

“Well, maybe that is for the better now, since they’s a doctor now.” Lona determined and bent over her piecework again.

Ruby stood and spread her arms out. “So we just going to turn Agnes over to this here strange man, all because he say he have a fancy degree from a school. I say this. Negro doctors don’t go to no Michigan school.”

“Michigan?” John Bledsoe looked confused.

“That’s right.”

Dr. Morson stepped back into the room, fully dressed, gripping his black bag. “I went to the best medical school I could find.”

She whirled on him. “Did you go as a white man or a Negro one?”

“Ruby Jean! That’s enough,” Lona snapped

“She’s going to get it now,” Delie said in a loud stage whisper to Em, almost provoking Ruby to smile.

“Well, which is it?”

“I went to the best medical school I could find.”

“And as a white man.” She folded her arms. “How shameful.”

“If people choose to believe what they believe, it’s not for me to say.”

“And you won’t bother to tell them.” The metal clanging chug of the Winslow car came around the corner. “There’s Bob now.”

Dr. Morson fixed her with a strange look and went out to the car. Mags came and they watched the men retreat with the car.

“I can’t let no fake-telling liar doctor bring on Agnes’s baby,” she said, clenching her fist.

“You going to have to walk, if you going. Unless you take Nessie.”

Quivers hit her in the stomach. “I’m not riding on no old mule.” If she had been able to ride, David might not have gotten to her. Still.

“I’ve got to get to Agnes. She won’t want some strange man helping her.”

She untied her apron in the back and ducked into the house to retrieve her kit. She hadn’t used it in a while. Her mother had used it to help her have Solomon, so she had to make sure that everything was in its proper place. It was. All those months in the house, she checked it and rechecked it, wondering what she would do if a birthing happened. Would she be able to go out to help the mother? Now, Paul Winslow beat her to the punch and brought in some doctor to start bringing babies in this small town.

Since when was he concerned with how Negro babies were born?

She had to go.

She put all of her tools down in a clean blue floral-printed flour sack and went outside where Mags stood with a worried look on her face. “Bob probably already there.”

“Agnes still might want a woman there in her present time of trouble.”

“Be careful, Ruby.”

“I will, Mags.” She pressed her hand to Mags’s shoulder, so much higher up than hers and turned out of the Bledsoe gate toward the forested area where a number of the Negro families lived on the other side of First Water Christian Church.

Instead of fear at passing those same cotton fields where the attack had happened, a happy laugh bubbled inside her throat and came spilling out. Men. Bob’s taking the doctor in the Winslow’s car was a nice idea, but there was no way they would be able to get to Bob’s house in it. The woods were thick and forested. A swift-footed, purposeful midwife would advance better. Paul Winslow had not thought of everything in his deep desire to improve the lives of the Negroes of Winslow.

The sight of the car parked before the thick forest where the road died out kept her smiling. Bob and Dr. Morson emerged from the car and she kept up her stride. Those men may be better than her, but they couldn’t best her spirit. Still, neither one of them looked happy to see her.

She didn’t care.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

Ruby kept moving past them, even as Bob tried to grab at her arm to stop her. He was not fast enough. “I got the doctor here, Ruby.”

“Fine. I’m just going to see Agnes.”

“What’re you carrying in that rag bag?” The doctor’s deep voice resonated throughout the forest. The tone had been enough to stop her and look at those gray eyes again, shining this time through sparkling gold-rimmed spectacles.

“This’s not no rag bag.” Her resolve to remain happy went away. He wasn’t anybody to insult her things. “This’s my kit.”

“A kit.”

“Midwifing kit.”

“You don’t need to bother. I have the latest implements right here in my leather doctor’s bag. You can return home to tend to your son. He needs his mother with him. Feeding him.”

“As I said, Doctor, I’m making a friendly call to Agnes. Excuse me, but she doesn’t know you from Adam.” She smiled at her little joke. “Bye.”

She pushed on through the thick piney woods and the carpets of kudzu. There might be snakes under the thick green leaves, but she couldn’t think of that. She had to get to Agnes before that citified, passing for white, very handsome, but shameful doctor got to Bob’s house. She relied on the age-old signs of the forest. There they were: moss on the trees, peeled pine bark, the fork in the road, and the bare space Bob and the other families kept for the children to play in. Thankfully, she could move fast because of her years acting more like a boy than a girl, running around Winslow, playing with David in the piney woods.

It was not cold but the remembrance of her carefree childhood made the chill rustle up her body.

She might wish to be alone, but that intense gray gaze burned through her thin cotton housedress. So, the citified doctor could keep up? She would have never thought it possible. Wonder where he had come from? She had no time to ponder it, but instead, realized that Dr. Morson’s hot breath was at her back and his large hand had encircled her wrist. The last man to lay a hand on her was David and she wasn’t going to let that happen to her ever again. So when he touched her, her workboot-encased foot reacted by lashing out at the doctor right in the shin.

He bent over, in pain, but he kept going through the clearing. Bob stopped to help him and Ruby heard him behind her say, “You okay, Doctor? Ruby, you ought not to have done that.”

“I’ll be okay. From what I hear, your wife is in worse pain.”

“Ruby, you’re just like a she-cat,” Bob fretted.

“Don’t nobody lay a hand on me,” Ruby shouted out in the woods, free of town talk.

And she meant what she said.

Adam closed his open hand on her arm and she seemed stunned to see him standing next to her. He wanted to speak clearly, but her kick had marked him. “I’m trying to get you to return to your son.”

“My mother and sisters will take care of him.” She struggled to be free of him, but kept walking on, dragging him with her.

“A boy needs his mother.”

“You need to watch your own business, white man, sir.”

“Enough.” He stilled her accusations with a firm hand and Bob’s house emerged in the clearing. This house looked more familiar to him. The property was well-kept but the peeling paint and the crooked nature of the front door told a different story. A slight shiver went over him despite the heat of the June day. Did they have enough to eat here?

Bob’s wife shouted from within. He had only delivered about five babies, but the circumstances they were born into always gave him pause. Just as his had. It looked to him like Bob’s next child was to be born with no advantages. And this was the house of the man who worked for the Winslows? Did Paul Winslow pay this man fairly?

Bob held up a thick branch of the rich green kudzu foliage and beckoned Adam through. “Please, sir.”

He went up the unstable porch steps, made of wood. Darkness. His eyes adjusted enough to make out the poor bed in the front of the room and two small girls in the corner, arms wrapped about one another. The metal smell of blood resonated throughout the one-room house. No, this place was nothing like the Bledsoe’s.

Agnes thrashed about on the bed and before he knew it, Ruby was there next to her, and she almost growled in a low-pitched voice. Amazing. She sure could be loud when she wanted to be. “Aggie. Calm on down. You know the more sound you make, the worse it will be.”

“Ruby, what are you doing here? Thought you didn’t come out no more.”

“You come to see me when I had Solomon. I couldn’t leave you alone. You going to be alright.”

“Help bring my baby.”

“I brung the doctor, like Mr. Paul said.” Bob stepped forward and the doctor stepped forward with him.

“Mr. Paul ain’t told you to bring no white doctor up here.” Agnes’s voice carried a hint of wariness in it. Did he have some kind of marking as if he were a murderer?

“Aggie, this man is as colored as us. And he’s a sure enough doctor, I suppose, but I didn’t want you to be alone with him.” She patted her arm.

“Ma’am, I can help you bring forth your child with the most recent medical knowledge. Do you have a basin of some kind?” He made his voice loud and full of confidence.

“Of course she does, what kind of question is that?” Ruby shoved him to the side and reached through a faded and greasy curtain tacked onto the galvanized tin sink. “Sadie, go pump this full of water.”

A small brown girl with many braids on her head went outside to do Ruby’s bidding. The other little girl squatted in the corner and he smiled at her, never thinking that he had a fearsome presence, but he did for this child.

Ruby had donned an apron, a clean looking one, he was relieved to note, but she kept reaching into that disturbing looking flowered rag bag full of clanking tools. “I’ll need another basin for my tools. I need to wash them.”

“This ain’t no time to wash dishes, it’s time to bring this baby.” Ruby placed herself squarely between Agnes’s bent knees and began to touch the woman with her unwashed, unsanitized hands. He could have acted much faster if the ache on his leg hadn’t reminded him of what he had gotten the last time he had dared to touch her small, cool wrist. He spoke instead.

“Aren’t you going to wash—?”

A loud moan, long and anxious escaped from Bob’s wife. “Be still.” Ruby held Agnes’s brown legs apart with her elbows. The cream-colored petite woman looked as if she had enough strength to hold off a battalion of men.