Thrown-away Child

needed.”
    “I like that story.”
    “I don’t.”
    “What was your present?”
    “A little boy doll with a lot of dents and no clothes. He had pink skin and blue eyes and he was missing, some of his hair—just like you, Irish.” Ruby gave a laugh that I did not mind. “Mama sewed him a little jacket and pants out of a scrap of something she had lying around. I named him Tommy, and I loved him.”
    “Do you still have him?”
    Ruby turns from me, and looks out to the plumes of dark fog in the hills. The miles and miles of Christmas trees appear to be on fire. Ruby says, “Sometimes, I think all I have of home is stories I don’t like.”
     

THREE
     

    “Before long, you’ll know all the family tragedies,” Ruby says, sighing. “The cottage... how Daddy got sick... Perry and his Mama Rose, and Toby Jones...”
    Ruby turns away and stares out the window for a while. Then she says, “You’re going to see where I mostly grew up, Hock. I don’t like it there. We didn’t always live in the projects.”
    “It doesn’t matter where—”
    “No, it matters.” There was no debating Ruby. “I should tell you another story now. When I was a girl, Mama told us all the story—and taught us how to pass !t along. She said we shouldn’t ever forget. It’s about where we started out, and how nothing lived happily ever after.”
    Then Ruby told me a tragedy.
     

     
    It was a cedar-sided cottage of four narrow connected rooms raised up on stubby hurricane stilts, with a high pitched roof, batten shutters over the windows, and French louvered doors on either end. In appearance and infirmity, the Flagg cottage was nearly the same as the forty or so others crowded into a rut-filled dirt lane between lower Tchoupitoulas Street and a levee almost crumbled away from years of flood and neglect. But Willis and Violet would make it the neighborhood showplace.
    Every morning before going off to work, Willis scrubbed down the front steps with a mixture of steaming hot water and brick dust to keep demons at bay. His people raised him in such belief, and although he did not speak much of these things, he felt obliged to maintain the customs of his bloodline. The back steps led to a small fenced garden. Willis kept the grass thick as a new carpet and clean of kudzu. He planted a big chinaberry tree in the middle of the garden and lilac bushes in the corners, a bed of namesake violets for his wife, and a row of morning glories to climb the fence.
    Despite the pretty Flagg cottage, the neighborhood was one that tourists were not encouraged to visit. It was one of many of the city’s hidden lanes, where pain and fears from the hard past overlapped an insecure! present. Some—Willis and Hassie Pinkney from next door included—said it was a haunted part of New Or-: leans, bedeviled by avenging African ghosts from slave times.
    On most afternoons, people in the lane would go to the levee for the coolness of the river breezes, or to catch themselves a dinner of Mississippi catfish. Aged black ladies and gentlemen—the women with tignons covering their hair, Madras kerchiefs favored by voudouiennes, tied with seven points carefully twisted heavenward—-would talk until dusk of the island days, and the old-time religious ways.
    Violet and Willis were fiercely proud of their house. It was truly theirs, free and clear—and no thanks to any Jim Crow bank or mortgage company. It was a cottage bought and paid for with the saved-up wages of a yard man and a cleaning woman whose ancestors had once been shackled to posts in the public square above Canal Street and sold as slaves. But on the twenty-first of March in the year 1948, a sunny day in New Orleans, Violet and Willis Flagg took title to a little wood cottage and became the first of their respective families to own their home.
    It was a long way up in a perilous, hostile world, and Violet and Willis were pleased to be gracious about their ascent. Everybody in the lane, with but one exception, shared generously in their reflected joy. The one who did not was Miss Hassie, who had a generally sneering horse face and a fondness for predicting disaster and spreading sour news.
    When she learned that the Flaggs had up and bought the cottage, Miss Hassie wasted no time in rushing next door to tell Violet, “Ain’t going to be no comfort to you or nobody else down here to be buying out your place when it’s the last one here ain’t yet owned by Minister Tilton.”
    “Who you