“How could you keep from bursting out laughing?”
“And the colors!” Delia went on. “I couldn’t hear myself think, they were in such a riot.”
Hazel didn’t stand and listen because she wanted to. She stood there because she was too shamed to move.
“Now, that’s enough!” Miss Pearl was speaking. Hazel waited for her new friend to set them straight about her. Miss Pearl knew who Hazel really was. Hazel had seen it in the woman’s kindly eyes.
“You can’t blame her, girls,” she said in the same sad whisper in which she’d spoken earlier about charity. “Now, put yourself in her place for a moment. Being poor and from the hills, you’re probably thankful to get a new spread for the bed. You can’t be terribly concerned if it goes with your curtains. Or if your curtains go with the rug on the floor. It’s only natural that Hazel missed out on the concept of ‘goes with.’” That brought on another burst of laughter.
“I wasn’t trying to be humorous. Y’all are being too hard on her, now.” Miss Pearl was sounding flustered. “After all, she has learned to dress nicely. You saw that. Very tasteful. And she’s pretty. Maybe interior decorating is her next conquest. Give her time.”
The women stopped to consider Miss Pearl’s point for a moment and then sped right past it. Hertha said, “And that sassy colored girl she found. Sweet Pea. A real Saturday-night brawler. She might as well have been serving drinks in a barrel house.” Miss Hertha lowered her voice. “Billy Dean has that girl in jail more times than I can say. Why, every time I see my husband, he’s got her in the back of his cruiser. For soliciting, you know.”
There was a chorus of clucks and gasps.
“And speaking of soliciting,” Miss Hertha said, “Hazel seems to have her own route. Have y’all seen her peddling Lincolns for her husband up and down Gallatin? And with those poor children in tow. A sorry spectacle. What will become of them with a mother such as that?”
“Really!” Miss Pearl said. “That’s uncalled-for. You are being much too hard on that poor woman.”
By the time Floyd came home, Hazel had stopped her crying and pulled herself together. When he asked how things had gone, she didn’t answer. She went to the sink and began scrubbing a clean pot.
“Do you think they’ll invite you to join their club?” he asked. “That sure would be good for business.”
“Well, I’m not sure,” she said with her eyes closed, keeping her back to him. “I don’t think they have any openings.”
She dried her hands on her apron. “And besides, I might not be their kind of people, Floyd.” Hazel’s breathing was labored, and she began to feel a little wobbly. It was another one of those sinking spells she had been having lately. She leaned against the counter for a moment and then turned to look at her husband, hoping he might reach out and steady her. That would feel real nice about now.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You’ve got to stop thinking that way. If you want something bad enough, you can have it. Ain’t I proved that to you? Quit dwelling on the negative. Some right thinking would do you wonders,” he said.
Hazel looked up at the man who stood before her. Sure and certain. She really did wish she could think like him, as clear and positive as the slogans he was always spouting. “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” “Can’t never could.” “Failures find excuses and controlled thinkers find a way.” To him it was all a matter of knowing where you want to go, setting your jaw, and moving on in a straight line, without any time-wasting detours. To Floyd, life ought to be the straightest road between birth and death.
But Hazel felt she was living her life in an ever-widening curve, blind at both ends. Not only had she lost sight of where she had come from, she could no longer see where Floyd was taking her. Back in the hills she had had hope. At least she thought it was hope, that vague whispering in her ear that there was something grand up ahead. The whiskey in her daddy’s jug always confirmed it when she had any doubts.
Floyd kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Your attitude determines your altitude,” he said. Then he fixed a plate of Vienna sausages and pineapple ham and took it with him into his den to read the news. A moment later she heard him call out, “I think that colored girl made off with my paper!”
Hazel reached for the Jim Beam bottle in the shape of a pheasant and poured a small bit into her special tumbler. After returning an equivalent amount of tap water to the decanter and grabbing a couple of peppermints from the drawer, she went out to the back porch.
As the shadows lengthened across the yard, she watched two fat mourning doves wobble like a drunken couple under a nearby oak. It was obvious they belonged together. Staggering around in no particular hurry to get anywhere, not caring one bit if they were traveling in a straight line or not. She envied them their tipsy little dance full of stops and starts and unbalanced strides, and how, in all their separate, uncoordinated motions, they remained together.
The doves lifted in flight, breaking her reverie. Davie came toddling around the corner of the house, with Johnny screaming after him.
“Get that rock out of your mouth, Davie. You gonna swallow it and die!”
Should I do something? she wondered. No, Johnny could handle it. Barely five years old and he could do it better than me.
Down below, at the foot of the stairs, Johnny caught up with Davie and grabbed him by the shoulders. Johnny shook Davie firmly, yelling for him to spit. Instead, Davie swallowed hard, then grinned. Did he swallow the rock? Seeing the look of panic on Johnny’s face, Hazel almost cried out.
Before she could utter a sound, Davie, with his face beaming, opened his hand to reveal the rock. He began to laugh. He had fooled his brother, and he was proud of it. Hazel smiled.
Instead of being relieved, Johnny’s face darkened. He reared back and slapped his brother. Hazel could hear the sharp whack from where she sat on the porch, stunned.
She opened her mouth to call out, and again she was checked, this time by the look on Davie’s face. It was one of pure bewilderment, as if he were still trying to connect the sting of the slap with any action on his brother’s part.
Both boys appeared to have suspended their breathing. It was like they were waiting for the weight of what had just occurred to settle, so they would know how it had changed their world.
From Davie’s confused expression, it was obvious that this was the first time his brother had ever hit him. As the younger boy’s eyes brimmed with tears, Hazel could see that reality was slowly setting in. Something inside Davie was beginning to break. She felt it was perhaps a thing so fragile that when it did break, it would crumble into pieces as fine as powder.
She knew she should hurry down the steps and comfort Davie. To hold him. To tell him his brother hadn’t meant it. Tell him it wasn’t important. Lie to him. Anything to keep the pieces together for a little while longer. Yet still she sat there, her limbs heavy, because she knew the truth. Things do break, and there’s nothing a person can do about it.
Davie began to sniffle, and Johnny looked on worriedly, as if he were considering a favorite toy he had thrown in a fit of anger, frantically hoping it would fix itself and go back to the way it was before.
It was Johnny she pitied now. She knew he would never be able to take it back. That some things never could be put like they were before. That you can disappoint people and they really do lose faith in you and there is not a damned thing in the world you could do about it. Before she could decide which one was in need of comforting the most, Johnny did a strange thing. Still with an expression of fear tinged with sorrow, he pushed Davie squarely on the shoulder.
Davie dried his tears. “Stobbit, bubba,” he whined, covering an eye with the back of his hand.
Johnny shoved him again, a little harder this time. “Stobbit!” Davie yelled, angry now.
Johnny shoved Davie harder still. This time Davie pushed back.
Clumsily and purposely, Johnny fell to the ground and his brother climbed on top of hi
m and began flailing away with his tiny fists. Johnny let his brother hit him again and again, on the chest, in the face, refusing to make the slightest gesture to defend himself.
Chapter Ten
BABY MOSES
Vida stood among the fieldworkers who crowded the shade of the general store gallery, drinking her Orange Crush and glaring at the white woman as she veered her big fancy car sharply into the yard. She braked to a stop and Vida noticed she even sported white gloves and a hat as big-round as hubcap.
This was the kind of car her father might have driven, Vida thought, before the world got turned upside down, back when she herself wore starched petticoats and satin ribbons in her hair instead of the sweaty rags of a fieldworker.
This wasn’t the first Vida had seen of the woman. Several times over that summer, upon hearing the approach of the big engine Vida would look up from her row of cotton or behind her as she walked the road to see the woman barreling toward her, going eighty and blanketing everybody in a layer of dust. And always with the little bow-tied boys hanging out the windows, hands wagging in the wind. Once the woman flew by so fast Vida had to dive for the ditch. The woman carelessly tossed an empty pint of whiskey out her window, barely missing Vida’s head.
The white woman might have been drunk, but she never looked happy, not as happy as she should be, with her fancy car and fine clothes and two alive-and-well sons. Spoiled, Vida figured. All white women were. Never knowing when they had enough, and always wanting more. Usually somebody else’s. All the time flaunting their good fortune, speeding carelessly through life, making everybody else eat their dust.
As for Vida, she would be happy if she could just get back what white people had stolen from her. If He did that, she told God, she would never ask for another thing.
Her father used to promise Vida that nothing bad would happen to his Snowflake Baby. After all, Levi Snow had a reputation as the man who could read the mind of God. Yet now Vida often wondered—if her father had truly known how things were going to turn out, might he have done things differently? For instance, if he had known that his sermon that long-ago Sunday was to be his last, would he have perhaps preached on some other text?
If her father, the most revered colored preacher in Hopalachie County, a man favored by God with the largest of churches, had known that before that day was out he would be pleading for his life, he might have chosen to preach on Daniel in the lion’s den. Or Jesus being tempted in the desert. Or God’s taking everything away from Job for no other reason than to show Satan what a righteous man he was. A story that would move his people to see how the good and the upright suffer for their faith and need to be stood by in dangerous times. If he had, maybe his people would not have been deaf to his cries in his time of desolation. Perhaps then, someone would have been there when he himself needed saving.
But on that bright Sunday morning nearly six years ago, her father, the Reach Out Man, didn’t know any of this as the choir fell back breathless in their seats and he strode majestically up to the pulpit, on his way glancing down at the gold watch cupped in the palm of his hand and then slipping it back into its pocket. As if time was nobody’s business except his.
Vida remembered how her father towered over the congregation that day, how he searched every sweating face in the church, letting the tension mount as a hundred hand-held funeral fans flashed the face of Jesus back at him.
The rigid benches were jam-packed with field hands transformed for the day into baggy-suited deacons and white-clad mothers of the church and royally robed choristers. Fine white cotton gloves kept their secrets, disguising the field-wrecked hands of men as well as women.
Except for Vida, of course, who sat clutching her gloves, revealing smooth, delicate fingers that had never picked a boll of cotton in all her privileged life as the daughter of Reverend Snow.
Every eye was riveted upon Levi, watching for him to cut loose and tear up the pulpit. Every eye including Vida’s, who waited more anxiously than most.
Her father had promised her an answer that day. The awful night they drove out to the Senator’s, the night Billy Dean Brister shoved her father off the porch and threatened to kill her child, Levi told her that God would find a way to keep them safe.
What story would her father tell today? she wondered. What story could he possibly preach to put everything back in its place? She prayed he would be able to create a story with a happy ending, big enough to hold them all. With the right story she had heard her father turn losses into victories, slaves into masters, pain and suffering into glory.
What about her boy, wanted dead by a white man? How would her father weave Nate safely into their lives again?
Levi Snow’s silence weighed heavily on the congregation, and they began to stir.
“Tell it, brother!” a bald-headed deacon called out in a voice frail with age.
Hooking his thumbs up under his arms and rocking back and forth on his heels, Levi Snow stared up into the rafters and shook his head like he was conferencing with God himself about whether or not to go ahead and preach today. Reverend Snow nodded solemnly, as if the Lord had whispered something that the preacher couldn’t argue with, and then glared down again on the congregation.
He began, “Next to God’s love there is no love like a mother’s love.”
Heads nodded. A few said “Amen,” and others “That’s right.”
“The Lord said, even though a mother’s love is mighty, His is mightier. Isaiah say, even if a mother forgets the babe at her breast, God will never forget you. Ain’t that right?”
“That’s right!”
“But a mother ain’t likely to forget the babe at her breast, is she?”
“No, Lord!”
Then he looked down at his daughter and smiled, as if to put flesh and blood on his story.
Vida swelled with pride. Her father was bragging on her in front of the whole church. Putting her arm around the boy, she pulled him close. She should have known her father would find a way.
Levi Snow continued. “We like to hear about Moses and how he stood up to ol’ Pharaoh and said, ‘Let my people go.’ Ain’t that right?”
“That’s God’s truth!”
“About how he marched the slaves out of Egypt and split the Red Sea wide open and then led the people to the Promised Land. Yes, Lord! We all know the story about Moses. Moses indeed was a great man. God surely loved Moses.”
“Sure did!”
“But there was somebody else who loved Moses.”
Levi let this new information settle in between the benches before he sang out again. “Moses had a momma. How mighty was his mother’s love?”
“Tell it, preacher!”
“When Moses was a baby at his momma’s breast, the Pharaoh wanted to snatch him up and drown him in the River Nile. How mighty was his mother’s love?”
“Go on!”
“Did his momma forget about that baby at her breast?”
“No, Lord.”
“Did she want to keep her baby close at her breast? Like any momma would? Course she did. But. . .how mighty was his mother’s love?”
“How mighty?”
“The love she had for her baby was bigger than her own selfishness. She had a love so mighty she laid her baby in a basket and put him in the bulrushes and let the river take him. Now I ask you, how mighty was his mother’s love?” His eyes burned hot and bright. “How mighty, Lord?”
He dropped his gaze onto Vida, like the question was for her. Then he answered it himself in a loud crackling whisper, “Mighty enough to let him go.”
At first she wasn’t sure she had heard him right. Holding on to Nate, she kept her eyes glued on her father, struggling with the divine revelation.
Levi turned back to his congregation. “Next to God’s love. . .there is no love. . .like a mother’s love. Before Moses could grow up and tell the Pharaoh, ‘You got to let my people go,’ his momma had to pull her own child from her breast and say, ‘I got to le
t my baby go.’ Now, I ask you again. How mighty was his mother’s love?”
The shouting now was deafening, and some rose to their feet.
“Her love was mighty!” a deacon called at the top of his voice.
Levi looked down at his daughter again as if giving her this final chance to give her answer, and then he raised his arms over his head and sang out to the rafters, “Mighty enough to let that baby go!”
That day six years earlier, her father’s words had whipped up a roiling sea of emotion through the church. All around her, people were standing with their palms toward heaven, others rocking side to side on their benches and clapping their hands. Vida was caught up in a mighty current that promised to pull her and her son under.
Chapter Eleven
FISHERS OF MEN
“What you think you’re staring at?” Hazel asked.
She sat parked in her Lincoln, gazing through the windshield at the country store. On the front gallery stood a group of colored fieldworkers gathered for their noontime meal. They were pretending to ignore Hazel, all except one, a sullen girl about Hazel’s age who was at that moment trying her best to burn a hole in her freshly made face with a scalding look.
Hazel didn’t take any notice of the girl. It was someone else who held her attention.
“Look at you,” Hazel fussed. “Natural blond hair with a little blue ribbon to match your eyes. Good teeth. Probably never knew an ugly day in your life. Everything handed to you on a silver platter, like that slice of light bread you’re eating. You the kind everybody wants to have in their club, ain’t you, little girl?”
Little Miss Sally Sunbeam, whose face stared back from the bread advertisement attached to the store’s battered screen door, didn’t answer. She just smiled, acting innocent. Yet Hazel knew this girl was doing more than selling bread. She was taunting Hazel. Her eyes, still baby blue after years of weather and dust, said, “Pretty is as pretty does.”
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 8