the beat in his Brownsville neighborhood.
Ruby and Big M never met their fathers’ families so there were no grandmothers or aunts or uncles they could spend weekends or holidays with. Their mother’s family was spread out down south from Georgia to Louisiana, and their deep religious roots prevented them from dealing with their northern kin, who were into drugs and other sinful activities. Ruby and Mecca’s mother raised her two daughters on her own until she fell victim to heroin.
One day a neighbor in Ruby and Big M’s Van Dyke project building, a housing project down the block from the Langston Hughes project Mecca watched her parents get murdered in, found Ruby’s mother in the staircase with a needle in her arm almost dead. The neighbor contacted the Board of Children’s Welfare, also known as BCW, and informed them of what was happening in apartment 5B. The city placed Ruby and her sister in a foster home on the premise that they would be returned to their mother when she cleaned up. She never did.
Ruby, the youngest, and her year-older sister, ran away from their foster home when they were twelve and thirteen. Even though she was a year younger, Ruby was more mature than her older sister. She had more leadership qualities. It was her idea to take off from their foster home in Queens and make their way back to Brownsville. Ruby felt like she would rather deal with the street life in which she grew up and was comfortable with, than deal with foster parents who didn’t like her and her sister and only wanted them there because they were getting a check.
Ruby’s body developed faster than her older sister so she looked older than her twelve years. Boys as old as eighteen approached young Ruby looking for a chance to get in her pants. Ruby had her first sexual experience on a project roof with this boy named Ron who was sixteen years old. She told her older sister afterward, revealing to her how painful it was. Ruby thought Ron was her boyfriend because he let her and her sister live in his two-bedroom apartment he shared with his ailing grandmother in the Langston Hughes projects.
He gave Ruby money and brought her clothes. The money he gave her she bought her older sister clothes with. When Ruby and her sister left the foster home, they dropped out of school. Ruby’s boyfriend sold drugs in Brownsville, and eventually Ruby began to hold his drugs while he stood on the corner. He would send the customers to Ruby after the customers gave him the money.
He paid Ruby one hundred dollars a day. She saved money so one day she could get her and her sister an apartment. Mecca got a job at a local McDonalds when she turned fifteen after Ruby talked her boyfriend into taking Mecca down to get her working papers. Ron put Ruby on the lease of the apartment and when his grandmother died three years later the apartment was in her name. Ruby in turn put her sister on the lease because she had a job. Because Big M’s job was a minimum-wage job, the rent would be lowered to accommodate her income.
Ron was arrested for a murder he committed against a rival clan in the Langston Hughes projects. Eventually, he pleaded to a five to fifteen–year bid and was shipped upstate to the same prison Ruby’s father was killed in, Attica. Ruby was devastated.
She loved him. He was her first. She visited him faithfully. She sold the drugs he left behind and made sure his commissary account stayed in the three-digit range. She snuck in balloons of heroin for him to sell on the inside and accepted his collect calls. Ruby was always there for his calls. She wrote him love letters every night, crying herself to sleep. She never looked at another man, ignoring the advances guys made around the projects. Even some of his friends tried to get a piece of her.
“Damn, that nigga got you sucked up, girl! Let me hit it while he gone,” they would say when she was seen around the projects. She ignored them all.
At the same time, her older sister was seeing a guy from the neighborhood named Bobby Sykes. The prettiest nigga Ruby ever saw. Her sister was happy and that’s what made Ruby like Bobby. Ruby sometimes became jealous of her sister’s relationship because her man was in jail while her sister enjoyed the company of Bobby. Bobby bought her sister anything she wanted. Her sister stayed with the latest trend of clothing and he decorated her with diamond-studded trinkets, rings, bracelets, and necklaces.
Ruby had a rough time selling dope in the projects because she was a female. At first the hustlers accepted it because they knew she was doing it to take care of her man, who they respected, but that didn’t last. Ruby knew she had to get her own respect if she was going to continue to hustle. She bought a gun from an old timer who ran the neighborhood number spot. Even though it was a .25, Ruby had to make do until she was able to buy and handle a bigger one.
The day came when she had to put her weapon to use. The cousin of the guy her boyfriend had killed heard that Ruby was making money for his cousin’s killer. He had to put a stop to that. He was a known troublemaker around Brownsville. Anywhere he went, something was bound to happen. He was also known to carry around a blue steel .44 Magnum and wasn’t scared to use it. For that, he was given the moniker “Blue.”
The rain poured down heavily on that Brownsville night, sending the dopefiends into the staircases to shoot up and the hustlers into project lobbies to hustle. Ruby stood in the hallway of her building wearing a black sheepskin with the hat to match, a black pair of Vidal Sassoon jeans, a black sweatshirt with “Ruby” written on it in white letters, and black Pumas. She had a plastic bag in her coat pocket with two bundles of dope in it, and her .25 in her other pocket.
Blue walked into the lobby with a black rain suit on with a black hooded sweatshirt underneath it. He took his hood off and glanced at Ruby while she leaned up against the silver mailboxes on the wall. He pressed the button on the elevator, acting as if he were waiting for it to come.
Ruby knew who he was. Everyone in Brownsville knew who he was. Seeing him around the way almost every day, Ruby didn’t think anything of him coming into the building. She definitely didn’t expect him to try to rob her as he pulled his blue steel .44 and pointing it at her chest.
Ruby had never had a gun pointed at her before and the shock of it made everything seem as if it were in slow motion. The graffiti on the walls looked as if it were moving. The pissy smell in the lobby seemed as if it were new to Ruby. She already had her hands in her pockets so she pulled out the plastic bag containing the two bundles and she put her other hand on the trigger.
“Where’s the money? I know you got money. If I search you and find some I’ma blast you, bitch!” Blue said between clenched teeth.
“That’s…that’s all I got,” Ruby stuttered in a fearful voice.
“Don’t play with me, I know you sending that bitch-ass nigga of yours money. He lucky I wasn’t around when he got my cousin or I would have murdered that punk-ass nigga!”
Hearing Blue say vulgar things about her man made all the fear in Ruby vanish. Her fear was replaced by a burning rage in her chest. With the gun still in her pocket, she pointed it at him and squeezed five times. All five shots hit Blue in his stomach, his groin, and his thighs, sending him falling face forward. His finger pulled the trigger on his gun as he fell, sending a bullet into the building’s front door.
“Who’s the bitch-ass nigga now, you faggot!” Ruby bent down and took his gun as he lay on the floor, moaning, then spit on him.
She ran out of the building and disappeared into the Brownsville night. A bullet had traveled to Blue’s spine and he was paralyzed from the waist down. Ruby moved to Coney Island after she shot and paralyzed Blue. Blue didn’t tell the cops who shot him, though. He was embarrassed by being shot by a female, let alone the girlfriend of his cousin’s killer, so he told his friends that some cat he never saw before ran him down. When Ruby visited Brownsville, Blue, now being pushed around in a wheelchair by his little brother, only glanced at her, not wanting to stir up any trouble.
Ruby’s
