I want to start my car and drive away. Maybe across town. Maybe back to Atlanta. Maybe back to Oakland. I want to be anywhere but sitting in this hot ass car in the driveway of a house that had apparently once belonged to my great-grandmother’s murdered friend, which also might have been a brothel at one point, that has been haunted for nearly four times longer than I’ve been alive.
Look, I loved Sophie, I love Sophie, but this Southern family soap opera is too much. When people used to get into fights at the family cookouts, while everyone else would pull up chairs to watch the mess go down, I would take that opportunity to sneak a beer or a little shot of Hennessy or just go inside to play video games. I don’t like drama. Ever. At all. And I’m definitively not interested in drama from three generations back.
My current predicament, however, is that I left my keys in the house, and I don’t have enough money to make it back to California to tell my daddy how fucked up his family is. I do have my phone, though, and I lift my ass off the seat to pull it from my back pocket.
It starts ringing before I can dial home. I don’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this Noel Delisle?”
Sounds like a creditor. “Depends. Who may I ask is calling?”
“Oh, you’re definitively my kinda people. This is Nina. Nina Marshall, we met—”
“Yeah, I remember you. How’d you get my number?”
“Grapevine?”
“What kinda grapevine is the new White Pages?” I ask.
“Are you old enough to even remember the White Pages?”
“How can I help you, Ms. Marshall?” I ask in a flat tone.
She laughs, and I remember the way she’d flirted with me after her presentation just yesterday. My God, was that just fucking yesterday?
“Hey, I’m calling because I found some stuff out about your house, and I wanted to share it with you.”
“Aren’t you coming here at the end of the week?” I ask, even though I’m not even sure that I’ll be here at the end of the week.
“I am, but honestly, I’m just really excited to share this. You asked how your family acquired the house.”
“I did, yeah,” I say cautiously, even though I guess I know now.
“Well, according to the records, the first Delisle to own the house was a Pastor Samuel Delisle and his wife, Esther.”
I suck in a harsh breath, even though I know this already. “Mmhmm.”
“And the owner right before them was the apparently legitimate mixed daughter of John Randall, named Ruby Randall, birth name Ruby Lincoln.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“So, there you go,” she says excitedly.
“Yeah, I already knew this.”
She kisses her teeth in annoyance. “You what?”
I quickly tell her about my aunt’s letter, leaving out all the ghost stuff.
“Whew, shit, so you mean to tell me that Esther was Ruby’s best friend?”
“Yep.”
“And she married the Pastor? Really?”
Her indignation pulls me out of the frozen confusion of this moment. “What do you mean, really?”
There’s silence on her end of the phone.
“What else do you know?” I ask.
“Well,” she starts. “I mean, I’m still in the early phase of research. I could be totally wrong.”
“Let’s pretend you’re not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nina, I like you. I really do. But I am having the weirdest fucking day, and I just want to understand what the fuck is going on.”
“Okay. Remember, you asked for it,” she warns ominously. “I’ve been searching for traces of the Randalls and Delisles in official sources since we met, and the best place to start is legal documents.”
“Okay.”
“Well, Ruby Lincoln was apparently arrested for…um…solicitation and serving bootlegged alcohol.”
“Okay.”
“A few times,” she corrects. “And every time, she was bailed out by an Esther Cane, whose married name was Delisle.”
“Oh.”
“Was…was Esther arrested, too?” I ask.
There’s another moment of silence. “Not as many times as Ruby,” she says in a small voice as if she wants to placate me.
“Fuck.”
“Hey,” she says in a stronger voice. “Sex work is work, and even though your however-many-greats grandmother was a sex worker for a while doesn’t mean that she was a bad person.”
“What? I don’t give a fuck about that,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“Oh. Then what’s up?”
“My aunt said Ruby was murdered.”
“She was?” Nina needs to work on her poker voice because I can hear the excitement and awe in those two words; nothing but glee.
“Yes, and I…” I can’t bring myself to say it, but Nina is smart.
“And you think Esther killed her for the house?”
“Or the Pastor,” I say.
“Or the white people,” Nina responds defensively. “White people was killing Black people all over everywhere in the thirties.”
“But then how did the Pastor and Mrs. Delisle get their house?” I ask, thinking about the rage in Ruby’s voice when she told me that my ancestors had stolen this house from her cold, dead hands, and Sophie’s cousin Chrissy telling her that the Black and white townspeople had nearly rioted when she got this house.
“Fuck,” I say again, confused as hell.
“This is a lot.”
“Yeah,” I breathe.
“You heard the ghost story?” she asks.
“You know about the ghost story?”
“Oh my God, of course, I do. The Randall House ghost is a legend.”
“It’s Ruby,” I tell her.
“Oh shit. But actually, that makes so much sense. I’d assumed the ghost was the enslaved people, but then there should be hundreds of them, not just one. The illegitimate daughter makes so much more sense.”
“Does it?”
“I mean, if there is a ghost in the house, then yeah.”
“If there’s a ghost,” I parrot, my eyes moving back to the house for the first time since I’ve been out here. All of a sudden, it’s like I’m back in this moment, not three years ago when Sophie wrote me that letter or fifty years before that when she’d visited her cousin, but right here, right now.
“Seen anything?” Nina whispers into my ear.
“What if I say I have? Would you think something was wrong with me?”
“If you are, the whole town is.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Fuck yeah, I do. Would it…” she starts to ask but then stops herself. “Is it still okay if I come by on Saturday?”
I tear my eyes away from the house and look at the scattered papers in my passenger seat: Sophie’s letter and the old photographs. I pluck the old picture of Ruby from the bunch and stare at it. “Yeah,” I tell her. “Of course, you can. Deal’s a deal. Thank you.”
“No problem,” she says. “Hopefully, I’ll know more when I visit. Or maybe your aunt wrote you another letter.”
She laughs and hangs up.
I think it would be nice if there was another letter. I wish this had been like those horror movies where someone finds an iron box of letters and pictures, somehow perfectly preserved from like 1845, but I know that’s not going to happen here. Sophie told me what she knew and orchestrated my life to get me here with a promise from three generations back to help this random ass ghost find peace.
Whatever that means.
RUBY
I worry he’s not going to come back, even though I told him to leave. I stand at the window and try and see what he’s doing out there, but I can’t see around to that side of the house, so eventually, I go sit on the stairs and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
He does come back, eventually.
I stand from the stairs as soon as the door begins to creep open.
“Can you still see me?” I ask, worried about that all of a sudden.
He stops and makes eye contact and then nods.
I exhale a would-be breath. “Where you been?”
He clears his throat before answering, “Just outside in the driveway.”
“Why?”
“I needed space.”
“From me?”
“Yeah, obviously,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “But, you’re back.”
He nods and finally closes the door. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m back.”
“And you’re gonna return my house to me?”
He stops walking and looks at me skeptically. “You’re a ghost, remember? How exactly am I going to give the house back?”
I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve had nothing but time to think about this. “I ain’t ever had no children. I made sure of that, but I went through a lot to get this house. My granddaddy put his blood and sweat and love into this house, all this wood,” I tell him, reaching out to just touch the banister to my right. “This house was his crowning achievement. And do you know how much they paid him for it?”
“No,” he whispers.
I turn to him and frown so deep it hurts. All this history does nothing but hurt and hurt and hurt. “Nothing,” I tell him. “He broke his body, making all this beauty, and they whipped him when he talked back. They gave him his freedom and nothing else. And then John Randall, the boy my granddaddy hid from his father to stop him from getting whipped when he needed it, you know what he did?”
He swallows and shakes his head.
“He raped my mama on that kitchen floor and sent her home like she was trash. And then he did it again. And again. And again.”
“That’s why you stole the house?” he asks.
“Can’t steal what’s yours. This is my birthright more than any of them white people who just happened to be named Randall.”
He nods, and well… I appreciate that.
“What do you want me to do with the house, Ruby?” he asks me.
It’s the first time he’s said my name, and I like it. It’s gentle, careful; no one’s ever treated any part of me so kind.
I swallow the emotion welling in me to get to the matter at hand. “I had a friend who helped me get the house,” I tell him in a small voice. I’d never told anyone about what me and Esther had done. I’d seen more than one plan fall apart because someone was yapping their gums. Esther was the only person that I could trust with everything — every part of me — then and now. “I want you to give the house to her,” I say. “Well, her people, at least.”
There’s tears in his eyes, and his voice is choked up when he speaks. “What’s her name?”
“Esther. Esther Cane. She was my very best friend, and I… The house should go to her.”
He looks at me as tears start to fall down his cheeks. I don’t know why he’s crying, but he nods and steps forward, a small square of something in his hand. I don’t understand what I’m looking at until he tells me.
“Her married name was Esther Delisle,” he says, and my entire world goes black.