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.
“Braiding is a service we offer free to all African American women, men, and children,” Jimmy said. “It is dignified and elegant and quite expensive.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “The child’s hair was badly matted. This kind of braiding dates all the way to the sixteenth century. We have a brochure. I’ll give it to you.”
“I think maybe you just wanted to pee on a hydrant like a dog.”
He drew himself up. His black suit, gray brows, balding head, and gray tie all rose. He was not a short man, but I was taller, even in my sandals. “That is an outrageous thing to say to me. Coarse and extremely offensive. Beecher’s is not a racist organization. I am concerned about security here, and I will admit that I believe this casket is not appropriate for Lucia. I went to school with your brother, and our families go way back. I took care of your sister myself. I’m just trying to help you.”
Claudia dropped the bags and began to write rapidly again.
I said, “Maybe it’s too late to cancel the visiting hours.”
His anger was obvious now. “I’ve already notified the police that the viewing has been canceled. The police will be here in case there’s any trouble.”
I managed to speak quietly. “So, could you just leave us alone with Lucia for a while?”
He left in a huff, and we were alone in the viewing room. It was large and carpeted and filled with about fifty folding chairs. Nicely padded ones. Discreet sofas and plush armchairs had been arranged around two walls. Near the entrance was a mahogany table with a lamp and a condolence book resting neatly atop a lace runner. Black pens that read BEECHER’S in gold lettering lay beside it.
We dumped the toys onto the soundless beige carpet. “Good job with these.”
“Most of the women who work in these stores have children of their own.”
“Right, so they can decide whether to spend their minimum wage on childcare or figure out some other solution. Extended family, maybe. Neighbors. Older kids taking care of younger ones.”
“You always sound so angry,” Claudia said.
“Not angry, just clear. You bought a stamp-collecting book? Aren’t some of these choices more appropriate for older kids?”
“Well, the ladies in the store got pretty excited. They knew about Lucia and River, and one of them told me quite seriously that although children are allowed to age in heaven, they have to max out about ten or eleven, before puberty makes them crazy.”
“That’s a good piece of news about heaven. Were the women who helped you black or white?”
“One of each, and they seemed like friends.”
Claudia tucked a blond Caucasian angel about ten inches tall on the silky cream polyester beside Lucia’s waxen face. “There weren’t any dark angels,” she said. “I got dark-skinned dolls, but I didn’t get the Native American doll because of its headband and feather. Is putting the white angel by her head too weird?”
Only the top half of the casket was open, and we were quickly filling it. “I think we need to open this bottom half to get the rest of the toys in. Will you do that for me?”
She raised the lower half of the casket lid, and we both stared down. Lucia’s feet were bare. They had painted her tiny toenails with clear gloss. I looked at her hands and realized they had glazed her fingernails too. Below her feet, the coffin was starkly empty, and the polyester fabric was stained and torn. I picked up one of the bags and dumped what was left of its contents into the open space.
“Do you think they glue their mouths shut when they prepare the bodies? I’m glad she has no shoes on. I don’t know whether that’s good taste on Jimmy’s part or if he forgot what he said he’d do. I think the makeup is amazing. She doesn’t even look like she’s wearing makeup. She looks like she’s sleeping. They’ve gotten a lot better at this since they buried my sister. My sister looked good, but she looked very dead.”
“I don’t think he was trying to hurt you with the hair.”
“I know, and what I said was crummy.”
Claudia put down the stuffed bear she was holding and dropped her notebook on the floor. She took both my forearms and tried to make me look at her, but I studied her hands instead. “Nice ring.” A large deep green emerald had been sunk flush into a heavy gold setting.
“My mother’s. Let’s go to the noon meeting. You need an AA meeting.” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I need to go to one too.”
I gazed into her face, which had a Semitic cast. But maybe that was because I knew she was Jewish. Claudia had brown eyes and curly dark brown hair, fuller lips than mine, dentist-whitened teeth. Maybe she looked Greek. If her name was Raptopoulos and I thought she looked Greek, would that be racist? “Claudia, do you think you look Jewish?”
She pulled me firmly away from the coffin. “Ellen, you don’t even know that you’re crying.”