Thrown-away Child

appreciation for the heads God planted on our shoulders. That’s how white folks want us—kept down, blind to our own black brains—because the scariest thing in the whole world to the man is the possibility that colored folks is just as smart as he is. No smarter, just the same. You see how terrifying that is.”
    “Yes.”
    “Facts of life go double for colored womens. You always got the mens to keep you down and not seeing too good, whether they white or black.”
    “So Janny…” Ruby’s thoughts drifted off, and with them her words as well. She marveled at her mother’s new and feisty spirit. When had Mama awakened? Ruby also tried to appreciate the impulses that lay behind her sister’s on-air subversion; for maybe the first time in her life, Ruby imagined Janice not as the silly sister she could always wrestle to the ground, but as a grown-up woman who could no longer be flattened into submission.
    “Janny still got her ditzy side, which you saw last night for your ownself,” Mama said, picking up the drift as if she had just read Ruby’s mind. “But she coming along. One thing, Janny don’t settle no more for playing that pretty-face Negro TV lady. She somebody real like you now, Ruby. Like she up and moved on. Yes, ma’am, Janny Flagg is a late-blooming somebody.”
    Ruby wondered, again, Since when has Mama wanted either Janice or herself to be somebody? My little old mother has the capacity for change?
    “She deliberately held back in her report on the Cletus Tyler murder... Ruby said. She was not so much speaking to her mother as she was thinking aloud, wondering about the new sensibilities of Mama and Janice, and how to test them. “She held back about Perry. Why do you suppose?”
    “Less said about him the better.”
    “Have you changed your mind? Do you think Perry killed that man?”
    “A’course not!”
    “Mama, tell me what Perry’s been doing since you took him in.”    m
    “Tell the truth, he mostly been a pain. He been all right about chores, and I admit it’s good having a man around at night. But it all come at a price.”
    “Perry’s light fingers?”
    “Ain’t just that. Just you go up and see that Negro’s room with all them nasty cigarette butts he leave around—and bent-up Dixie beer cans, and them notebooks. He sit up there watching a old TV. Like he just waiting around his Mama Vi house for one of them knock-at-the-door jobs.”
    “Notebooks?”    s
    “Well, when he ain’t laying around here Perry be off to the old place off Tchoupitoulis Street. You remember?”
    “Sure.”
    “Perry, he obsessed with it. He write down things about it in them notebooks. He even talk himself into a little work down there, just so he got business hanging around the neighborhood.”
    “What’s his job?”
    “Nothing steadylike. Perry just do a little yard work and such for old peg-legged Mr. Newcombe.”
    “The tenant who took over when you and Daddy left.”
    Mama’s eyes went blank. Ruby would sooner see tears in her mother’s eyes than that blankness.
    “About the notebooks,” Ruby said, changing direction. “What does he write in them?”
    “I don’t know. Miss Hassie next door, she all the time ragging on them notebooks. She say Perry spying on her, always peeping at her through the window when she in her kitchen.”
    “She complains to you?”
    “It comes to me, by way of Minister Tilton.“
    “Mama, I will never in a thousand years understand about Zeb Tilton. You believe going to his little church makes you a good Christian?”
    “Going to church don’t make you Christian no more than going to a garage make you a car. I know that much, girl, even if I ain’t with it like y’all in New York.” Mama snorted. “I go to Zeb church on account of my friends. We all just stuck with Zeb is all. Zeb like glue for us. You understand?”
    “Yes. I’m sorry, Mama.”
    “Don’t be worrying about it.” Violet found her purse and zipped it open, checking the contents. With Perry gone, there was all the money she expected inside. “All right, I got to off to Miz LaRue’s. You tell Neil I’m very sorry I missed him this morning.”
    “I will.”
    When mama left the house, Ruby was upstairs in a heartbeat. She pushed open the door to the room her mother and father once shared, the room where Daddy died.
    She spotted the notebooks, stacked neatly atop Perry’s unmade bed. They were the red-covered Big Chief notebooks of her school days. As