Hell's Diva:. Anna J. Stewart

Commandments

      “Mommy, Daddy, get up! Please, Mommy!” Mecca crawled out from under the bed and ran to her parents. Mecca cried, shaking her parents. Both of their eyes were open with the blank stare of death in them. A look Mecca would never forget. Mecca ran to the phone that was hung up on the kitchen wall near the refrigerator. She stood on her toes to reach the phone, and dialed a seven-digit number.

      “Hello.”

      “Aunt Ruby? My mommy and daddy gone,” Mecca cried to her mother’s younger sister.

      “Baby, where they at?” Ruby asked tersely.

      “They lying on the couch,” Mecca said, sniffing and sobbing loudly. “And they won’t get up, they bleeding.”

      Ruby instructed Mecca to open the door when the neighbor knocked. Ruby had called a friend of the family who lived on the ninth floor along with Mecca and her parents, and asked her to go check on the apartment and Mecca until she got there. It would only take her about a half an hour.

      The neighbor, a girlfriend of Mecca’s mother and Ruby, knocked on the door. When Mecca let her in, the woman, used to seeing murders growing up in the rough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, still reacted as if this were her first time seeing dead bodies. She covered her mouth, ran into the bathroom, and the food she ate for breakfast and lunch found its way into the roach-infested toilet. Afterward, she called the police. They arrived just as Ruby did. Ruby saw her niece sitting at the kitchen table with a plainclothes white female officer kneeled down in front of her. Mecca ran to her aunt as soon as she saw her. Mecca cried as they made contact. Ruby picked her up, and while hugging Mecca she looked at the bloodstained sheet that covered her sister’s and brother-in-law’s bullet-scarred bodies, not believing what took place.

      “Everything is going to be okay, baby. Auntie’s here,” Ruby whispered in Mecca’s ear as she tried to offer her some comfort. Her parents were killed right in front of her, so Ruby knew there was only so much she could say or do at the moment.

      “Don’t tell these cops anything, okay, baby? Don’t ever speak to the cops. They are bad people! They’re just like the people who did this bad thing to your mommy and daddy. Auntie gone take care of this, all right?” Ruby gave the white female cop a menacing look, whispering to Mecca as she rubbed her back.

      “Uh huh,” Mecca mumbled, agreeing to her aunt’s wishes. Mecca whispered in her aunt’s ear, “Auntie, I know who did it!”

      “Tell Auntie later, okay?” Ruby whispered in Mecca’s ear before putting her down on the floor.

      “Is it okay if we talk to your niece?” the officer asked indistinctly, approaching them with a notepad in her hand, poised to write whatever Mecca was willing to share.

      “No, it’s not okay,” she said. “She didn’t see what happened. Her mother and father are dead, she’s eight years old, and she’s been through enough.”

      Ruby grabbed Mecca by the hand and they left the apartment. Mecca’s mother’s prayer was answered. Mecca left Brownsville, but her life in Brownsville was traded for another notorious Brooklyn neighborhood, Coney Island. On the drive to Coney Island in Ruby’s 1982 black and yellow Camaro, Mecca informed her aunt about what she saw and heard when her parents were killed.

      “Daddy talked to this guy. His name is Darnell. He’s Tamika from my school brother,” Mecca said in her childish tone.

      “Auntie knows who you’re talking about,” Ruby said in a hoarse, scratchy voice. She held up two fingers to Mecca while she switched lanes on the Belt Parkway. “It was two of them?” Ruby asked.

      “Yup, two of them. The other one didn’t take his mask off.”

      Ruby nodded her head. She tried to hold back the tears because she wanted to be strong for her niece. Mecca needed her aunt, and if she saw Ruby crying Ruby figured Mecca would be deeply affected by first the loss of her parents, and the sadness of her aunt. Ruby wiped her eyes and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She glanced over at Mecca, who was staring out the passenger window at cars and the grimy Brooklyn neighborhoods that lay along the side of the Belt Parkway with tears running down her face. Ruby watched a roach crawl out of the collar of Mecca’s pajama top. She grabbed it and smashed it in her hand.

      Mecca turned and stared at her aunt as Ruby smashed the roach. They looked into each other’s eyes, both understanding the silent language that Ruby would smash the people who killed her sister and brother-in-law, just like she did that roach. Without any words, Mecca continued watching the scenery through tear-blurred eyes, knowing her life from then on would never be the same.

      Chapter Three

      Twenty-five-year-old Ruby Davidson was the total opposite of her now deceased older sister, who Mecca was named after and was known around the way as Big M. Ruby was a dark brown, five feet eleven inches, big-boned woman. She kept her shoulder-length hair constantly wrapped with a blue bandanna, and she refused to wear women’s apparel.

      Ruby was a beautiful woman under the masculine mask she kept herself under. Ruby and Big M shared the same birth mother but had different fathers who neither knew. Ruby and Big M’s mother was a young teenager at the ages of fifteen and sixteen when she gave birth to her two daughters. Big M’s father was found dead behind a Bedford-Stuyvesant bar with multiple stab wounds to his chest. His killer was never found. Ruby’s father was killed in the Attica riots serving a twenty-five-to-life sentence after killing a cop walking 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