Thrown-away Child by Adcock Thomas

Author:Adcock, Thomas [Adcock, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Over the course of several hours and several more arrivals, the whole twenty-five pounds of crawfish and nearly all the rest of Mama’s spread vanished. Then when everybody was satisfied and variously slumped into sofas and chairs and rubbing their bellies and talking about all the food they liked that had not liked them in return, Mama opened up her photograph albums. She pronounced her collection “my treasure” and piled several albums into my lap, with the others set on the floor at my feet for later.

“You don’t have to look at each and every one of these Negroes you don’t want to,” Mama said, sitting next to me on the couch and looking on. Ruby sat on my other side, and Janice had the easy chair. “Just page through and find the Ruby pictures. Oh, she and Janny, they quite the little camera hounds.”

Ruby was not so enthusiastic as I was when I would come across her kid pictures, mostly black-and-white snapshots tucked into tidy slots of the heavy photo album pages. I particularly enjoyed the picture of Ruby when she was a seven-year-old flower girl at a family wedding, marching up the aisle in a floor-length dress over crinolines and her famous cat-eye glasses Her face was uptilted and those cat-eye specs were à glare of camera flash, and her little chin looked to be covered in butter.

“You take that picture home to New York with you if you want,” Mama offered. Ruby said no thanks, but I snatched it off the album page and put it in my pocket. “I’ll have it copied at a camera shop I know then I’ll return the original,” I promised Mama.

“Well then, take any of them strikes you.”

So I helped myself to three more. There was the one of Ruby and Janice mugging on the kitchen stoop in their blouses and jumpers, hands insolently on their hips, as if they were the models they saw in the fashion magazines. And a snap of Ruby at nine or ten in her Sunday-go-to-church clothes. And that high school graduation portrait, Ruby in her angora sweater and her Afro. The cat-eye specs were gone by then.

“Look at this one,” I said to Ruby, pointing to another snap of her in her high school years. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.” Ruby flipped the page.

“Let’s see.” I turned the page back.

“Please, Hock. Enough!”

“Oh, that one’s when Ruby went to her prom,” Mama said. Ruby glared at her. “Don’t she look gorgeous in that green satin dress, though? I like the way she done her hair for the prom. Wasn’t like a bush.”

“Gracious, big sister, you surely must have won all the votes for the title of ‘Miss Tits’ that night,” Janice said, recognizing the photo even though she was looking at it upside-down. Suddenly, a lot of Ruby’s little boy cousins who had been wrestling on the floor became interested in the family album. “Look how you forgot about wearing a bra under that scoop-neck drapey thing. And who’s

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