By the time Ruby and Karen got out the door—Ruby in a purple-flowered sundress that wouldn’t zip all the way up—they were not just late but horribly so. Karen was on the verge of a panic attack. Still, it seemed crazy to drive to the church and then have to look for parking when it was only four blocks away. So the two of them set out on foot and, at Karen’s directive, never stopped moving, not even when there was a red light or vehicles in their path. Karen knew that by crossing against the lights, she was taking risks. But despite being a nonbeliever, she childishly imagined that no God would allow her and Ruby to perish while en route to a church basement to deliver Easter lunch to the poor.
Karen had passed by the church probably twenty times in the past ten years, but until that morning she’d never taken a good look at it. On closer inspection, it was a boxy and charmless affair, its beige brick fa?ade interrupted only by two sliver windows that seemed designed to keep out the sun. A large black metal cross hung over a set of steel double doors. Next to the doors, a white nylon banner announced THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF CHRIST ALMIGHTY and implored congregants to FOLLOW CHRIST’S WORD. Someone had incongruously draped a pair of Air Jordans with the laces tied together over the rusted chain-link fence that separated the front yard from the sidewalk. On one side of the fence was crabgrass. On the other was a concrete sidewalk that had been broken and distended by the roots of a nearby ginkgo tree. Karen pulled open the door to the church, Ruby’s hand in her free one, and found herself face to face with an elderly African American lady in a robin’s egg–blue hat decorated with ribbons. The woman was sitting at a folding table covered with photocopied brochures. “Welcome to First Baptist,” she said.
“Thank you!” said Karen. “I’m from Hungry Kids, and my daughter and I are here to help with the Easter luncheon.”
“May the Lord bless you,” said the lady, beaming. “And may the Lord bless your daughter.”
“Oh, that’s very kind,” said Karen, smiling as broadly as she felt she could without seeming patronizing. “I hope we’re not too late.”
“They’re just getting started, I believe.”
“Fantastic! Where do I go?”
“Right that way,” said the lady, pointing down a short staircase with frayed rubber treads.
“Thank you very much,” said Karen. “And happy Easter!” Did people wish each other a happy Easter? Or did that sound weird? Karen suddenly couldn’t remember. By then, she was at the bottom of the stairs, gazing into a windowless room with brick walls painted a dirty shade of yellow and a half a dozen long metal tables covered with pale blue nylon cloths. On the far wall, a few citizen volunteers dished out beef and gravy, honey-glazed carrots, and potatoes au gratin from large metal vats. A line of about thirty-five, with an equal number of grown-ups and children, stretched from the vats to the wall. Karen was thanking the citizen volunteers for their service and apologizing for being late when Ruby pointed at the far end of the food line and cried, “Look, Mommy! It’s Jayyden!”
Karen looked up with a start and confirmed what her daughter had already discovered. A baseball hat casting a shadow over his already deep-set eyes, Jayyden stood surrounded by five other children ranging in age from four to fourteen. The lot of them, with their vastly different heights, formed a mini-skyline of their own. Behind the children was a very large woman with a somber expression. She was wearing sweatpants and shower shoes, and her hair was pulled back and enclosed in some kind of net. Was this Aunt Carla? As Karen connected the dots, she realized that her fear of Jayyden’s potential for violence, however justifiable, was a cover for something deeper, more nefarious, and less easy to rationalize—namely, contempt for the version of poverty Jayyden’s hodgepodge family embodied. Poor blacks. That was how Karen’s mother had referred to people like them. The two words had been inseparable and almost interchangeable to her, possibly because Ruth Kipple didn’t really know any middle-or upper-class African Americans, but also because it had been an easy way of dismissing an entire subset of society that she didn’t understand—a way that Karen herself had not entirely escaped. That was clear to her now as never before, and she cringed in recognition.
Nor had the irony of the present situation escaped her. Here she’d gone to near-criminal lengths to get Ruby away from the boy, only to voluntarily bring them together on Easter morning to teach Ruby about social responsibility. “What a funny coincidence,” murmured Karen—really, to herself—as she watched her daughter walk over and say, “Hey, Jayyden.”
“Hey, Ruby,” she heard him reply in a neutral voice. “How come you don’t come to school no more?” If he was embarrassed to be there, waiting in line with his aunt for a free meal in a church basement, he didn’t show it.
“I go to a new school,” Ruby told him.
“Why’d you leave ours?”
“My mom wanted me to.”
“Oh.”
“What are you guys doing in math?” was Ruby’s next question.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just stuff. Like fractions.”
“Oh. At my new school, we’re doing multiplication.”
Just then, Jayyden’s baby cousin fell onto his bottom and began crying. Not untenderly, Jayyden turned around, picked him up, and dusted him off—and for the moment lost interest in Ruby.
But the two joined forces a half an hour later for the egg hunt. Karen watched as Ruby and Jayyden playfully tussled over a purple plastic one that had been hidden under the church pews. In the end, it was Ruby who claimed it. But after she separated the two halves and discovered the raisins inside, she made a face and handed the reassembled egg back to Jayyden, who opened it and popped a raisin in his mouth. And hadn’t that been Karen’s goal all along—to get poor children to eat fruit and vegetables? It was true that Ruby’s dentist had recommended staying off the dried versions. Even so, Karen hadn’t stopped believing that raisins were nutritionally superior to Milky Ways.
“Mommy, why were there raisins in the Easter eggs?” was Ruby’s first question on their way home.
“Because they’re healthier than candy,” Karen told her.
“So the Easter Bunny wants poor people to be healthier?”
Karen had forgotten about the Easter Bunny. “Something like that,” she said, already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going.
“But then, why do other people get chocolate? The Easter Bunny doesn’t care if rich kids eat healthy?”
“I think he wants everyone to be healthy. But a little chocolate isn’t that bad,” Karen said unsteadily.
“Mommy, can I ask another question?” asked Ruby.
“Of course!”
“Why did all the people getting free food have dark skin? And also, the people you see on the street who are asking for money, they always have dark skin too.”
“Well, that’s a complicated question,” said Karen, struggling to come up with an explanation that would be intelligible to an eight-year-old. “You see, in the olden days, even after slavery was outlawed, people with white skin wouldn’t give people with dark skin jobs or let them buy houses or, in some places, even let them vote. So, even though things are a little better now, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, a lot of people with dark skin are still very poor, because they don’t inherit anything. And it’s hard to join the middle class when you start off with nothing.”
“What does inherit mean?”
“It means that when someone dies, they leave you money.”
“Like Grandma and Grandpa left us money?”
“Exactly.”