Tomb of the Unknown Racist by Blanche McCrary Boyd

Author:Blanche McCrary Boyd [Boyd, Blanche McCrary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

8

According to Ruby, Lucia’s skin had begun to darken about three weeks after her birth. Ruby used lighteners to try to keep the baby white, but the creams irritated her daughter’s tender skin, and when Ruby tried them on her own face, one cream itched and the other made her skin look milky and strange. Lucia’s eye color altered more slowly, muddying over the course of two months from dark blue to slate to brown. Ruby studied this transformation while she nursed. Nursing hurt her at first, but after a while it felt good.

“I’m edible,” Ruby would say to Santane, who was not amused. Santane was furious when Ruby came home pregnant, and she did not believe Ruby’s story about being kidnapped.

“You are trash,” Santane said, but Ruby knew she didn’t mean it, because once Santane walked all night carrying her, and when they were staying in the shelter, Santane had held her close. It wasn’t like being at Nod, when her father left her all alone that time and she had been scared in her heart. Maybe Santane did not touch her and cuddle her and praise her the way her father did, but Santane protected her. That proved something, didn’t it?

Ruby knew from the first that Lucia’s hair was never going to be black and strong and straight. Lucia would never stretch her hair back into a braid or a bun the way Ruby could. Lucia’s hair hardly even grew at first, and for weeks she was nearly bald. When it did begin to come in, the filaments were sparse and fluffy and wrinkled.

Ruby didn’t know what to do about this darkening child. For a while, she thought Lucia must be partly Jamaican. She’d known a beautiful Jamaican boy in San Francisco with lovely skin, a thin nose, and precise lips she wanted to kiss. He kept his hair in dreads. When Lucia’s hair got long enough, Ruby hoped to form it into dreads, but soon Lucia’s hair grew into a fuzzy halo, a tawny color, and Ruby loved it spread around her like that.

I learned most of these details many months later, from the nun named Sister Irene, who found out a great deal during what she called her “debriefings” with Ruby, after Ruby had been moved into the general population at the women’s prison near Santa Fe. Nevertheless, staring down at Lucia’s body in the shiny purple-pink coffin, I knew instantly that her hair was wrong.

Jimmy stood obsequiously behind Claudia and me. The photograph I’d given him yesterday had been black-and-white, but the image was clear about her fine wispy halo of hair. Yet in whatever basement room Lucia had been dressed in this white cotton gown, someone had presumed to cornrow her hair.

“I don’t think Lucia’s hair was like that,” Claudia said, clutching in each hand shopping bags from Kmart and Toys “R” Us.

“What did you do?” I said, not yet turning around to look at Jimmy. Oiled lines of hair, some decorated with cowrie shells, radiated across Lucia’s head like the marks around a melon.

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