The Return of "Ruby Brown"

Update: Earlier today, I posted a poem by Langston Hughes alongside my post on the Duke scandal. When a commentator queried its role on the sportslawblog, I retracted it until I could provide some explanation of its purpose.

No doubt, I mean to analogize the story of “Ruby Brown” to the lacrosse incident. Again, however, the analogy is about descriptive details and not declarative conclusions: I have not attempted to assess the criminal culpability of the accused rapists. Many of the players, and specifically the two presently accused of the rape, are both “white men” and “habitués of the high shuttered houses.” As for the victim, I take the detail of “kitchen” work and her characterization as “young and beautiful and golden like the sunshine that warmed her body” as illustrations of the “sinister” turn of the story.

My post on the lacrosse scandal was all about telling stories; the stories told of the victim and the accused as well as the stories told of accused African American athletes of comparable age and prior misdeeds. This is the story I choose to tell:

"Ruby Brown" by Langston Hughes

She was young and beautiful
And golden like the sunshine
That warmed her body.
And because she was colored
Mayville had no place to offer her,
Nor fuel for the clean flame of joy
That tried to burn within her soul.

One day,
Sitting on old Mrs. Latham's back porch
Polishing the silver,
She asked herself two questions
And they ran something like this:
What can a colored girl do
On the money from a white woman's kitchen?
And ain't there any joy in this town?

Now the streets down by the river
Know more about this pretty Ruby Brown,
And the sinister shuttered houses of the bottoms
Hold a yellow girl
Seeking an answer to her questions.
The good church folk do not mention
Her name any more.

But the white men,
Habitués of the high shuttered houses,
Pay more money to her now
Than they ever did before,
When she worked in their kitchens.

--[The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 73 (Rampersad, ed. 1994)]

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