Thrown-away Child

you want to hear.” Mama picked up a bowl full of cooked crabs she had cooling off in tap water, and came over to sit down beside me at the table to shuck them. “Going to use the meat for an étouffée,” she explained. I studied her technique for a few minutes, and then we shucked together.
    “Poor Rose—bless her, God.” Mama shook her head back and forth. “That girl went to church every day, and prayed for the impossible dream.”
    “What was that?”
    “She want to pass.”
    “For white?”
    “That kind of sorry business, that’s right. Down here black folks want to be uppity class about it, they call it by the French —passant blanc. That’s from back in the old days of what they call the New Orleans gens de couleur.”
    “People of color.”
    “Shoo, what you know about talking French?”
    “Cela n’a pas d’importance.”
    “Whatever you say, I guess. Anyhow, we got regular American names for gals like Rose. Briquet, yalla, red, mariny, bright. Redbone, too, but that ain’t considered polite. Some old Creole folks, they say mulatto or quadroon or octoroon. All them terms, ain’t it terrible?”
    “How so?”
    “It’s depressing for us Negroes being all churned up on the insides on account of what shade we born with on the outside. It’s a sickness.”
    “Uncle Bud’s got it bad.”
    “Yeah, you right. I’d say Bud and Rose, they was cursed the worst.”
    “What happened to Rose?”
    “Rose was a yellow gal, pretty as Lena Horne. Thought she had talent to go along with the looks. But honest, she wasn’t no eye-popper in either of them departments. Pretty enough for St. Francisville, even New Orleans, and Rose’d carry a tune. But New York and Hollywood? I’m telling you, Rose was the only one ever thought she’d travel well.”
    “She lived in New York?”
    “Mostly she died there, thanks to some high-stepper come down here at Mardi Gras and dragged her back north. He was white.” Mama Violet stopped shucking and gave me a look I had to believe was for the white man who wrecked her sister’s life. “Ruby never told you about that ugliness with Rose up there in New York?”
    I thought, So maybe this is what has Ruby on her emotional loop-the-loop? The inescapable ghost of Rose Duclat? Here was Ruby, after all—back in the Projects where she started; a colored girl, as she would say, dreaming of show business in New York; a colored girl mixed up with a white man.
    “Not in so many words.”
    “Don’t that just figure?”
    “Anyway, what about Rose?”
    “Well, she just thought she was good as biscuits j, the morning. Used to tuck a gardenia in her hair—“
    “Like Billie Holiday.”
    “That’s right. And like I told you, she’d sing a¡ Billie’s tunes at Nikki’s Dockside Club. Wasn’t a professional engagement, though.”
    “She didn’t get paid?”
    “All Rose ever got was free drinks and disgusting propositions. And like I also told you, she always took little Perry with. Rose, she let the mens buy soda pops for the boy so long’s he never told Toby about Rost singing at Nikki’s.”
    “What did Toby think Rose was doing?”
    “Oh, just some little conjure tricks for the old ladies in Algiers. That or else over to Jackson Square singing for coins. Now, Toby don’t mind his Rose being a backstreet voudouienne, and he don’t mind her singing little songs for fool tourists. But any otherwise, he don’t want Rose shaking her stuff or such-like.”
    “He was a jealous man?”
    “Ain’t you all?” Mama laughed. She touched my arm affectionately. “But serious, Neil—that Toby Jones, he wasn’t just ordinary jealous. Brute mean is what he was. I’ll give you a for instance. Perry didn’t like calling him Daddy, he call him Toby. So Toby he put cigarettes to little Perry skin until the boy’d show respect by saying Daddy.”
    “I’d like to meet this guy in a squad room.“
    “Wouldn’t do no good now. Anyhow, my Willis more a daddy to Perry than Toby ever was. Perry even grow up looking like Willis.”
    “This Toby’s still around?”
    “Toby too evil to die.”
    “At some point Rose left him for good?”
    “Year Perry turned seventeen’s when it was. Like I say, this fancy white man come through town one Mardi Gras. I can’t tell you his name, or how Rose A him met up. All I know, one day I get a letter from Rose saying how she’s living the Manhattan high life.
    ‘‘But it turned out to be the low life.”
    “How’d you