Why should that be? she wondered. Why should her husband’s rock-hard certainty scare her so, making her feel so small and lost? What had happened to her own feelings of hope?
Hazel remembered the day Floyd had come home and found her crying, sitting by the new oven she was sure she had broken. Growing up, the only cookstoves she had ever seen burned wood. Floyd simply struck a match and lit it back up. And she knew it wasn’t just the oven. Somehow, it was as if the rush of Floyd’s success had blown out her own little pilot light.
Chapter Five
SNOWFLAKE BABY
Later in the day, Vida’s baby boy played on the parlor rug with his collection of wooden spools as she and her father, sitting on opposite sides of the room, worked hard to avoid each other’s eyes. Vida, on the sofa, stared down at the satin bows on the toes of her baby-doll shoes, and her father, in his armchair, studied his light-skinned grandson as the child stacked one spool on top of another, toppled them over, and began again.
They often found themselves embarrassed in each other’s presence, but it had not always been this way between them.
After his wife died birthing Willie, Levi had doted on Vida. He called Vida his Snowflake Baby. Not because her last name was Snow, which it was. And not because her skin was white, which it wasn’t. Vida had the same coffee-with-cream complexion as her father. Vida became his Snowflake Baby because he always dressed her in white.
For her eleventh birthday, Levi even sent to Memphis for a parasol of white satin, which he said would keep his Snowflake Baby from melting in the Delta sun. The day it arrived, Vida had excitedly snatched the package from the mail rider and torn away the brown paper wrapping. She twirled the pretty parasol over her head in the bright noonday sun. Her father had laughed with delight and proclaimed, “Now my Snowflake Baby can carry shade everwhere she goes.” He raised her up in his strong arms. “No sir! Nothing never going to hurt my Snowflake Baby.” Levi proudly pranced Vida around the yard, twirling her in half circles, while she giggled.
And then there were the music lessons. Vida was the only colored girl in all of Hopalachie County able to take piano. Her father had personally gone to Miss Josephine Folks, the white lady music teacher, and arranged it. That’s how important her father was. He could get things other colored people couldn’t even think about. Of course, Miss Josephine charged Levi a dollar a lesson, twice as much as her white students, and she insisted that Vida come only after last dark. That didn’t spoil it for Vida. She enthusiastically memorized choruses straight from the Broadman Hymnal to serenade her father when he picked her up in the Buick.
Except for one night when he didn’t. Her father was conferencing late with his deacons, and Vida had to walk the two miles to her house, alone in the dark. Yet she wasn’t scared. Vida had walked the road hundreds of times with Willie.
Mr. Bobber’s general store sat midway between Miss Josephine’s and Vida’s house, and when she passed, she saw the lights were still on. She had often gone inside the store by herself, but her father had solemnly warned her to never venture in there after dark, refusing to say more. Tonight she put the warning aside. With a robust Baptist refrain coursing through her blood, Vida marched right in to get herself an Orange Crush.
The screen door slapped behind her, and the music fled from Vida’s head. The light was dim, and smoke floated thick and eerie. From the back of the store came the sounds of laughter, yet not the free and easy laughter of daytime. This was hard and coarse.
Even the odors were different. No longer the clean bright scents of hoop cheese and mule feed and honey-cured hams and yard goods. The night smells were stale and rancid and clotted at the back of her throat when she tried to swallow.
Leaning with one arm against the counter, holding himself at a tipsy angle, stood the young white man, his dark eyes swimming drunkenly in pools shot with red. He smiled. It wasn’t at her. His sideways grin was meant for the squat man behind the counter who was placing a Mason jar in a paper sack.
Mr. Bobber frowned at his customer and said, “Boy, next time come around to the back, you hear?” He pushed the sack across the countertop.
Several men sitting in ladder-back chairs in the rear of the store under a swirling haze of smoke made coughing sounds and moved about uneasily in their seats. They kept their eyes cut toward the business up front.
“That’ll be three bits,” Mr. Bobber said to the man.
Eyeing Vida, the man sniggered. “She come with it?”
More laughing, hoarse and ragged, came from the back of the store.
Mr. Bobber wasn’t laughing. “You got it or you don’t, boy?” He looked down at Vida and said, not unkindly with a firm warning in his voice, “You better get on home now, Vida. You know better than to come ’round here past dark.” He glanced warily at the customer and then at Vida again. “Now git, do you hear?”
Vida found her legs and took two steps backward, bumped the screen, and fled the store, running through the yard for the dark of the roadbed. Her stomach had gone queasy from the way the man had looked at her.
Vida raced down the road toward home. She needed her father to promise that nobody would ever dare hurt Levi Snow’s little girl. Then the headlights fell upon her.
Nate tired of the spools and with his eyes narrowed and his bottom lip pooched out was pointing in the direction of his grandfather. Vida knew what he wanted—for her to fetch Levi’s watch chain. The boy loved gripping the two miniature praying hands that dangled from the chain. He couldn’t get to sleep at night unless he was gripping tightly to that gold chain.
“Hands, Momma. Hands,” he pleaded.
Vida didn’t move. She was waiting for her father to speak his mind. Waiting for him to say his first word since they had left the store.
Her father finally broke the silence. “That was the one who got you bigged up. That white man at the store be Nate’s daddy.” Levi Snow wasn’t asking, he was telling, speaking with the same certitude as when he told his congregations that Jesus was coming to total up their books and they’d best settle their accounts today.
These were not the words she wanted from her father, harsh and accusing. Trying to pretend she hadn’t heard him, Vida stretched out her legs so that the white baby-doll shoes caught the late-afternoon light streaming through the open window. The patent leather finish shone like the icing on a coconut cake.
“I said, that be the man. He be Nate’s daddy,” her father repeated.
Sweat had darkened the top of Levi’s white collar. Taking a handkerchief from his back pocket, he mopped his face. “Looka here, girl, and tell me the truth.”
Tears welled up in Vida’s eyes. Why was he asking her to say the truth, now that he knew it? The night her father came home to find her crying and her dress torn, he had gotten quiet when she told him it was a white man who had done it. That had been enough truth for him then. He hadn’t even asked which white man it was.
She wouldn’t have told him anyway. The man said he would kill her whole family if she told. For a while she made believe her daddy was protecting her by not asking, and that she was protecting them all by not telling.
“Yessuh,” Vida answered finally. “He be the one.”
“Oh, my sweet Jesus!” he said as she knew he would. “And now that man running for high sheriff. You know what that means?”
Vida wouldn’t look up, yet from his angry voice, she figured it meant something about his standing as the Reach Out Man. That’s what they called him and what he was most proud of. If you needed something from the white man, Levi Snow was the one to go to. People bragged that he sure enough knew how to tickle the white man’s ear. Colored folks were always coming to her father for a favor. Mothers who wanted to visit their sons in jail, or sharecroppers who got cheated at settlement time, or families who lost their credit at the plantation commissary. Very seldom did Levi get what he asked for, but sometimes he got something, and in the coloreds’ eyes that was a pretty good record. Two years ago
he even got the Senator to let Statia Collins put a little pea patch on her place to help feed her ten children, the first time the Senator had let any sharecropper raise something besides cotton and field corn for the mules. And the people knew that when the Senator’s wife died with a bad heart, it was Levi the big white man went to for consolation. Levi had made sure everybody knew that. Levi was favored above all coloreds.
“I’ll tell you what it means.” Levi struck the tops of his legs with his fists. “If that peckerwood get voted high sheriff, it be the end of everything.”
He bolted to his feet. “Let’s go. We got to go warn the Senator.” Calling to the back of the house, he cried, “Willie! Get out here.”
Vida’s brother bounded into the parlor and did a marching step up to where his father stood, giving his father what he called his Texas Ranger salute. “Yes! Sir!”
“Stop actin’ a fool. Go wipe down the car. I got to conference with the Senator.”
“Can I go too, Daddy?” Willie begged, no longer a Texas Ranger, but a boy of eleven. “Let me drive y’all out there. I can drive good. I can reach the pedals now. You let Vida drive.”
“This me and your sister’s business. Now hurry on up.” He turned to Vida. “Get my hat and brush it off. Need to look my best for the conference.”
Vida finally looked up at her father, her expression pleading. Since she was a child she had heard stories about the Senator and how bad niggers disappeared into secret dungeons and how he ate colored babies for breakfast. “Daddy, don’t make me go,” she begged. “I ain’t got nothing to say to the Senator.”
Nate toddled over to Vida and looked up at her with searching eyes. When she picked him up and held him close, he grabbed hold of her plait and with his other arm reached out toward Levi, opening and closing his fist, signaling for the gold chain. “Momma! Hands!” he cried.
“You my baby,” she whispered to him. “You my baby and that’s the onliest thing that anybody need to know.”
Levi turned his back to both of them and straightened his tie in the looking glass. He talked at his reflection. “You tell the Senator how that white man got you bigged up. When he hear that, he’ll show that cracker the fastest road out the county.”
“He say he kill us all, Daddy!” she cried. “He say he burn us up alive!”
Levi didn’t turn from the glass. “Hush up, now. The Senator always done the right thing by us. You explain it to him how it wasn’t your fault.”
Without thinking, and still holding Nate, Vida ran across the room and flung her loose arm around her father. She began sobbing into his boiled white shirt.
“What’s got into you, girl? What you carrying on for?”
“’Cause you say it wasn’t my fault,” she sobbed. “You ain’t never said that.”
Levi tenderly patted the back of Vida’s head until his eyes fell upon his light-colored grandson.
“I ’spect you better bring the baby on to the conference, too,” her father said with a sigh, watching the boy cram the golden hands into his mouth. “He can tell the story without speaking a word.”
Chapter Six
THE COLUMNS
The sun was setting scarlet by the time Levi drove past the last cluster of tenant shacks and turned onto the generously graveled lane leading up to the Columns. Like emerald-suited soldiers, house-tall cedars lined both sides of the quarter-mile entrance. The Buick slipped between the last pair of trees and Levi slowed, proceeding at a crawl as if in reverence to the white mansion that rose up before them. Vida was forever in awe that something that gleaming bright had been plopped down in a heat-distorted world of mules and shanties and sweating field hands.
Tonight half a dozen cars were already parked in the circular drive. Instead of joining them, Levi pulled off the lane onto a rough track used by mules and tractors, and drove carefully around to the rear of the house, bringing the Buick to a stop at the back gate. He got out and walked over to the cast-iron bell that sat atop a cedar post. He pulled the rope three times. The bell clanged loudly.
The kitchen door was flung open and Vida was relieved to see that it was Lillie Dee Prophet, the Senator’s cook, who came out, limping across the yard up to the fence.
“That you, Brother Pastor?” she asked, squinting hard into his face.
“Hello, Sister Prophet.” He formally tipped his hat to the wizened woman. “How you this evening?”
“Ain’t jumpin’ no stumps, Rev’rund.”
Vida’s father laughed and shook his head in the way that made you feel like you were really something for saying what you did.
Lillie Dee bent her head down and strained to make out the shadows inside the car, her toothless gums working without pause. “But it’s like I told my last boy over there,” Lillie Dee said, nodding her head toward the woodshed in back of the house, “like I told Rezel, ever day I can get out of bed, I count it as a blessing from the Lord.”
Hearing Rezel’s name, Vida crooked her head to see around Lillie Dee. She spied him standing in the shadows, hard-muscled, wearing overalls and a ripped cotton shirt, gathering an armload of stove wood. She tried to catch his eye. Sullen, he stubbornly kept his gaze away from the place where people were bandying his name about. Vida’d heard stories about him singing the blues at the juke joints in a way that could turn sisters one against the other. Yet the Rezel she knew was gentle and shy-mannered, sometimes stopping by her house when her father was away with flowers or pears stolen from the Senator’s own trees. And he was good to Nate. They never talked about it, but maybe Rezel would take her and Nate in. He would be a good daddy. He could protect her, and, maybe love her enough to kill the man who wanted to hurt her child.
Her father said to the old cook, “Well, Lillie Dee, you certainly blessed to have your boy staying on with you. That bound to be a comfort.”
“Rezel?” Lillie Dee shook her head sadly. She looked back at the boy, throwing her voice loud enough for him to hear. “He the same as all the rest of them. Talking about going up North. Say people up there pay him money to sing that devil’s music. Pardon my snuff, Rev’rund.” Lillie Dee spit juice on the ground and continued, “Why, you think it be the Promised Land, the way they all heading off up thataway.”
For a moment the news saddened Vida. Then her spirits lifted. Maybe Rezel was planning to ask her to go with him to this Promised Land! Out of the reach of the white man. And if he was too shy to ask, then she would certainly ask him.
“I’m sorry to hear about it, Sister Prophet,” her father said. “They still plenty of good life left in Mississippi for the upright colored man. ’Cause of you, Rezel got him good work here with the Senator. Too bad he can’t see that.”
“That’s the truth, Rev’rund.” Lillie Dee grinned slyly at Levi. “Carrying my wood never did you no harm, did it?”
Vida saw that Lillie Dee’s comment brought a rare expression of bashfulness to her father’s face, and for a moment Lillie Dee was no longer a member of his flock. This was the woman who had overseen his chores when he was the houseboy for the Senator’s father.
He cleared his throat and removed his hat. “Lillie, will you tell the Senator that I need to conference with him on something weighty?”
“Senator’s got company tonight, Rev’rund. Why don’t you come back in the morning after breakfast?”
“It can’t wait. Tell him it’s about the election. He going to want to see me and my girl.”
The old woman worked her gums thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” she said, “y’all drive on up in the yard and I’ll tell him.” As she unlatched the gate, she said, “I’m warning you, now, he ain’t going to ’preshate it. They been drinking most the afternoon and just commenced they supper.”
While Vida, Nate, and Levi waited in the car, the Senator’s bird dogs sniffed around the Buick and, one by one, hiked their legs and relieved themselves on the tires. Field hands drove tractors and led mules in through the gate and put them away in the barn for the eveni
ng. White people’s laughter, cold and brittle, broke over the darkening yard. For over an hour, Levi sat sweating behind the wheel, mopping his face and jumping in his seat every time the door opened. But each time the screen swung back, it was only Lillie Dee announcing the start of another course.
This was not how Vida had imagined the “conferences” her father talked about so proudly. She had expected the Senator to welcome her father on the front gallery under those grand columns and make him comfortable in a room fit for Solomon while her daddy advised the Senator on important matters.
The smells from the Senator’s supper drifted into the car, and Nate began to whimper and tug on Vida’s braids. She tried to comfort him by stroking his soft black hair, but her own fingers trembled.
“It’s a ways past Nate’s suppertime, Daddy. Maybe we ought to do like Lillie Dee says and come back again.”
Her father gripped the steering wheel tightly, staring through the windshield into a grove of pecan trees rapidly disappearing in the dark. “Can’t. The Senator know we out here. Anyway, he be glad we come with a warning. He going to thank us. You wait and see.”
There was something missing from her father’s words.
“He’ll show that peckerwood which road leads out the county. I know he will. You wait and see if he don’t.”
At last Lillie Dee poked her head out of the door and called, “I just served them they cake and coffee. Won’t be too long now.”
Levi turned to Vida, his eyes pleading through the darkness. She had never seen her father fearful, and the sight jerked at her stomach.
“Now, Vida, you pay respect to the Senator. Say ‘yessuh’ and ‘nosuh.’ Don’t look him in his eyes. Don’t shame me, girl.”
“I’m scared, Daddy. What he going to do to Nate?”
Her father didn’t seem to hear Vida’s question. “The Senator been good to me. He raised up my first church. He believed in me when I told him about seeing the shining face of God in a mighty whirlpool of churning water, calling me to be a preacher of the Word. He believe me then. He’ll believe me now.”
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 4