Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League

by Jonathan Odell

Hazel hadn’t been partial to the dewy part, but she did like the piece about a man taking care of his own. That sure sounded right enough. Hazel took her mother’s advice to heart, never forgetting her words, using them to measure all comers.

  And there was a host of them. Men dropped by the drugstore all the time, flirting and asking her out. Their hungry eyes and grinning, greedy mouths frightened her, and she remembered what her mother had said. Hazel could tell that all they had an appetite for was the dewy part.

  But the minute Floyd walked into the store, she began hoping he was the one she’d been waiting for. She wondered, is this how true love shows itself? Can a complete stranger walk into your life on a fine Indian summer afternoon while you are stacking tubes of lipstick, and then, just like that—in the twinkle of a mirrored eye and the flash of a toothy smile—all your hoping suddenly pays off, and life is never the same? Is that the way it’s supposed to work? Can something that happens so quickly be counted on to last a lifetime?

  Chapter Two

  THE VIEW FROM DELPHI

  They had been dating a few weeks and were seated in their usual booth at Donna’s Dairy Bar. Hazel could tell something was on his mind by the way Floyd attacked his butter pecan as if it were a chore to be got out of the way.

  Then he took a deep breath. “Ain’t no reason to go on doing something just ’cause it was done before us,” he firmly asserted. “There’s plenty of other ways for a man to make a living than farming. Don’t you agree, Hazel?”

  Hazel was taken aback, not at what he said. It was the way he said it, as if he had rehearsed the words beforehand in a mirror, and now he was acting out his little speech just for her. While she studied him curiously, he tilted his head to the side and smiled the way he did when he wanted her to answer a certain way. The idea that her response was so important caused Hazel’s heart to pound like the drum in the homecoming parade. She said, “You right about that, Floyd. Why, they’s many a man who get themselves a good route and never look back.”

  When Floyd’s face lit up, Hazel knew she had said the right thing.

  “Selling! You reading my mind. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” He leaned in over the table and let her in on his secret. “You see, I read a book while I was off in the Pacific.” His tone was reverential. “It was called There’s No Future in Looking Back: The Science of Controlled Thinking. Writ by a preacher who ciphered out a hidden code in the Bible. The ‘knock and ye shall receive’ part. He went on to make a fortune selling soap door-to-door.”

  “I swan.”

  “I’ll let you read it one day, but it all comes down to this. You are what you think. And your mind can be trained like any other muscle. Say your leg or your arm muscle.”

  Floyd’s eyes were shining, and he was speaking with such authority Hazel felt chill bumps on her arms.

  “Hazel, an untrained mind spends all its time looking back on things it can’t do nothing about. This preacher says if you keep your mind focused on what you want and think positive thoughts, you bound to get what you after. He says it’s right from the Savior’s own mouth. To cut the tail off the dog, it’s changed my life.”

  “Already?”

  He smiled shyly. “Met you, didn’t I?”

  “Floyd.”

  “Plus, the other day I got a letter from this ol’ boy that was on my ship at Pearl Harbor. He said he could get me a job selling these mechanical cotton pickers to the big Delta planters.”

  “The Delta? I heard of that.”

  “Sure. That’s where all the money is. Clear on the other side of the state from here. Cotton as high as a man and stretching as far as the eye can see. All being handpicked by a million niggers.”

  “A million? I swan.”

  “As soon as I get Daddy’s crop put in, I’m buying my bus passage to Delphi, all the way over in Hopalachie County. You never gonna catch me looking at the south end of a mule again.”

  “Nothing I hate worse than seeing a man married to a mule.” Then she blushed, afraid she might have mentioned marriage too soon, even if it was in reference to a mule.

  “Hazel, you and me think the same.” Floyd reached for her hand. “When I go on out to the Delta, would you wait for me—till I got some money saved up?”

  He grinned, but he didn’t need to coax. Floyd’s plan was so big with hope, Hazel believed she could live off the anticipation for years. By the time he sent for her, maybe she would be ready to give whatever it was a wife was supposed to give up to a man.

  “Hazel. . .” he said, and she felt the squeeze of his hand, “would you. . .I mean. . .”

  She looked into his eyes to find herself, and she liked what she saw. “Floyd Graham, I ain’t budging till you come and get me.”

  Floyd hadn’t lied one bit.

  On a coolish spring day, Hazel said good-bye to her landlady and stepped onto her broad green porch, a cardboard suitcase in her hand. Her makeup was careful, and she wore bright red earbobs and a cotton print dress splashed with roses so big they threatened to bloom right off the cloth. Her toenails, which were on view for the world to see in a pair of fancy strapped shoes, were like ten rose petals fallen from her dress. When Floyd took her arm to lead her to his car, she noticed he squeezed a little tighter than necessary, seeing as how she wasn’t the least bit inclined to go anyplace but where he led.

  After a stop at the justice of the peace, they headed straight west, the Tombigbee Hills to their backs and the Delta in their sights. They were man and wife, muleless, betting their futures on an easy smile and an irresistible tilt of the head.

  The farther they drove, the more the geography began to straighten out and lose its rocky ruggedness. “Is this the Delta?” she asked every time she believed things couldn’t get any flatter.

  “Not by a long shot,” Floyd kept saying. “Wait till we get to Hopalachie County. That’s where God invented flat.”

  When the terrain began to lift once more, Hazel became confused. “Looks like the hills are taking over again.” There was disappointment in her voice. “Did we miss the Delta?”

  This time Floyd didn’t say anything. No way he could explain that what they were driving on was not a mountain of rock but a gigantic rim of river silt, windblown and piled over millions of years, and that these fragile bluffs contained the great floodplain like the cliffs contain the ocean. So instead of telling her, Floyd waited for her to see it for herself.

  Finally, drawing the car into a shallow curve, Floyd cut the engine. “Let’s go for a little walk. I got something to show you.”

  Hazel followed Floyd across a shallow ditch to a locust-post fence entwined with Carolina jasmine. After pulling up one wire strand with his hand and stepping on the bottom one with his foot, Floyd waited patiently for Hazel to gather her skirt and squeeze through. He led her up a rise crowded with oak and hickory, and then told her to shut her eyes. When she did, he reached for her arm and guided her to the top of the bluff. Again Hazel noticed how tight his grip was. Did he think she was going to bolt down the hill without him?

  “Now open,” he said.

  The sight made Hazel shudder. Spread out below her was the Delta, miles and miles of flatness stretching relentlessly to some foreign horizon, China perhaps. Nothing was hidden from sight. She saw vast open fields of black earth ready for planting and green ribbons of cypress swamps snaking through the terrain and lakes strewn about like pieces of a giant’s broken mirror, and not a single rising or falling to ease the unyielding openness of it all.

  The spectacle drew Hazel forward, and she momentarily leaned into it, like someone tempted to step into a painting. Home to Hazel had been a place where nature provided plenty of places to hide. Ridges and hollows and bends. Yet out there the world was laid bare for all to see. “What a wondrous thing,” she whispered reverently, as if God had just finished making it. “You can see everything at once.” Had that revival preacher been right when he said the earth was really as flat as somebody’s front porch? I
f he was, then the falling-off place must be out there on that very horizon. “How far does this Delta reach, Floyd?”

  He pointed. “See where the sun is sinking?”

  Hazel shaded her eyes with her hand and looked into the sunset.

  “That’s where the mighty Mississippi runs. The sun beds down in the river for the night. In a few minutes, when the sun slips between the levees, you can hear the river sizzle.”

  Hazel looked up at Floyd, half believing. “Don’t fun me.”

  “For true. At sundown, the river water gets so hot, catfish jump out on the banks already fried and ready to eat. All you need is the hushpuppies.”

  “Floyd, you could make me believe about anything.” Hazel reached her arm around her husband. “We going to have us a house down there somewhere and live off catfish and hushpuppies?”

  “Nope. We going to live up here in the bluffs with the rich people.” Waving his arm over the vast river basin, he said, “Down there is where the money is made. Nothing but cotton and mules and niggers. More niggers than you can shake a stick at. They outnumber white people four to one.”

  Hazel’s gaze swept once more over the landscape. “I swan,” was all she could say, still trying to imagine such a thing as a whole world of niggers, living on the flatbed bottom of the earth.

  “I want to see it. Take me down there, Floyd.”

  He smiled, pleased at how excited she was getting. They got in the car and Floyd happily aimed it down Redeemer’s Hill. The decline was sharp, and Floyd drove so roller-coaster fast, it made Hazel’s stomach drop. Then all at once the road went as flat as a pancake and straight as the finger of God. With Floyd smiling confidently at the wheel, Hazel gazed out the window, pointing to each new sight. She saw all manner of wondrous things. Mules by the hundreds and work gangs from the penitentiary in striped uniforms and towering cypresses rising from dark and foreboding swamps, and even an alligator staring up at her from a roadside slough. Things that gave her chill bumps. Not to mention all the coloreds. Floyd was right, there were millions of them, working the fields, filing down dirt roads, and crowding plantation stores. And not all looking dirt poor and raggedy as she had expected. When they pulled up for soft drinks at a crossroads grocery, Hazel spotted a colored girl outfitted in an all-white costume, gaily prancing around on the gallery twirling a parasol as snowy white as her shoes. Hazel had never in her life seen anybody dressed so fine, especially not a colored person. She guessed maybe the girl was passing through with a minstrel show or was part of a high-wire circus act. There were countless riddles out there that left Hazel mystified and wanting more.

  “Time to take you home now, Hazel,” Floyd said as the dark began to creep up on them.

  “Home,” Hazel said, trying out the word, putting an old name to a new world.

  Winding back through the bluffs, Floyd topped a ridge and there, nestled in the soft rolling terrain, was Delphi. The town was old even by Mississippi standards, settled long before the giant floodplain below had been tamed from bears and Indians and malaria.

  Hazel was struck speechless. Stately homes with expansive lawns and ancient live oaks crowned the hills of Delphi. Homesites were laid out without rhyme or reason, each fine house oriented without consideration of any other. To Hazel, each house gleamed brighter than the next. Until she was eight, she hadn’t known you could put paint on a house. About that time she saw a picture in her history book of Mount Vernon.

  “My Lord,” she gasped. “If it don’t look like George Washington went on a tear and built hisself a town.”

  Floyd turned onto a down-sloping gravel lane that led up to a little house sitting in the shadow of one of the grander homes. After turning off the car, he got real quiet. He looked up at the cottage and said almost apologetically, “It used to be a slave cabin to the house up on the hill. But it’s been fixed up real nice.”

  Hazel beamed, and without waiting for Floyd to get her door, hurried out of the car and ran up to the house. The front door was unlocked. Before Floyd had made it up the walk, Hazel was running from room to room. He was right. It had been fixed up nice, and already furnished to boot. There was an indoor bathroom, floors that were smoothed and varnished, and rugs throughout. A wringer washing machine sat right out on the back porch. There were two bedrooms and brown iron beds with roses painted on the posts. It even had a little parlor with a couch and two stuffed chairs.

  Then Floyd took her into the kitchen. “Look, Hazel, a stove that don’t need wood.” He turned a knob and a blue flame snapped to attention. As soon as she saw it she began to cry.

  Floyd’s face fell. “Don’t worry, Hazel. One day I’ll put you in one of them houses up on a hill. I promise.”

  “Oh! No! It ain’t that. I love the house.” She sobbed louder.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Oh, Floyd.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “I ain’t been honest with you. I can’t cook. I can’t sew. I don’t even know how to change a diaper or burp a baby. My sisters done all that. All I learned to do was pick cotton and strip cane and dig taters. I ain’t no good to you!”

  Floyd smiled at her. “It don’t matter, don’t you see? We’re starting fresh. You and me are through with them old-timey ways. I don’t care if you can’t cook. You’re my wife. You don’t have to earn your keep. And we going to have children ’cause we want children, not farmhands. I’ll take care of my family.”

  Hazel looked up to find herself reflected in his eyes. My God, she thought, he still wants me. She leaned her head against his chest and started to cry again. Today she was a brand-new wife to a new kind of man, living in a storybook town overlooking a mysterious flattened-out world. Her future was as wide open as that view from the bluffs, without a single familiar landmark. She felt lost and found all at the same time.

  1949

  Chapter Three

  A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

  Billy Dean Brister was chugging to the top of Redeemer’s Hill, and he wanted it all to himself. After honking twice, he butted his rattletrap Ford up against the tailgate of a gin wagon that was hogging the gravel road. The colored driver swung about, but when he saw the two white men, he smiled weakly, touched his hat, and popped his mules smartly with the ends of the reins.

  Nothing was going to hold Billy Dean back. He was determined to have clear sailing on the downslope. Though blind to oncoming traffic, he swerved the car toward the far ditch and held his ground.

  “Wait on it, you hear?” his uncle said. “They ain’t enough road for you to pass.”

  Billy Dean grinned. He drove the left tires into the ditch and straddled the road ledge.

  “Dammit to hell,” his uncle muttered.

  Billy Dean had no doubts. Good luck had finally shifted to his side of the road. Billy Dean Brister, once destined to take his place in a long line of white-trash Bristers, was going to break from family tradition. Come fall, Hopalachie County would be his for the taking, and nobody could keep him from grabbing ahold of it with both hands and a knee to the throat. No matter if he did have to make a deal with the devil to get it.

  With two tires on the road and two in the ditch, dirt and rock slinging out from the rear, he drowned the wagon, its colored driver, and his two brown mules in a storm of dust.

  Billy Dean jammed the Stetson tight on his head, reared back in his seat, and mashed the accelerator flat to the floor. The truck, propelled as much by gravity as by gasoline, sailed down Redeemer’s Hill, the final belly-dropping descent from the bluffs to the flatter-than-flat Delta. There was nothing ahead now but miles and miles of cotton plants studded with pink-and-white blossoms.

  Billy Dean’s uncle pulled up in his seat again. Furman was a big man with a nose that resembled raw hamburger. “You driving like a blue-assed fly,” he said, “Ain’t gone live long enough to win no ’lection.” He reached down to the floorboard for the fruit jar.

  Billy Dean tipped back his Stetson with his thumb. He knew better. The bargain had already been st
ruck. That primary was his for the taking. Senator told him that it didn’t matter that Billy Dean hadn’t yet had his twenty-first birthday: “In this county, I decide how old folks are. Why, when it comes to the voting, I get to decide if they’re dead are not.” Even the election flyers they were posting today were a waste of time, yet the Senator had insisted they make a good show of it.

  “Where’s the next stop at?”

  With two fingers pressed against his lips, the old man turned to the window and spit, finessing a brown trail of tobacco juice clear of the rear fender. “You gone take a right about a mile up ahead.” Furman unscrewed the top of the jar, took a sip, and swallowed hard. “Hodamighty!”

  Billy Dean took his turn at the jar while keeping an eye on a horizon that never seemed to get any closer no matter how fast he went. He hadn’t known how big Hopalachie County was until he decided he was going to be sheriff over all of it. Then it got mighty big.

  There was this, the Delta part, with its thousands of look-alike acres of nothing but cotton hiding tiny crossroads settlements built around gins and country stores. Farther west there were the swamps and bayous with little clusters of cabins and fishing shacks raised up on stilts. At their backs, where Billy Dean and his uncle had just come from, were the bluffs.

  Perched up there in those bluffs was the uppity little town of Delphi, looking down like an old powdered woman on the whole shebang. That’s where Billy Dean was going to settle when the devil paid him his due. He was going to be high sheriff and move to town and live in a big white house with the rich folks. The same ones that had shamed his daddy and their kind ever since Noah. They’d soon be calling him “sir.” All he had to do to make that happen was to marry the ugliest girl in Hopalachie County. Billy Dean took another drink.

  The gravel had nearly given out, and the road became like a ribbed washboard. They were coming up on the Hopalachie River. Shaking wildly, the truck began to drift off in a sideways direction. Uncle Furman reached down for where a door handle once was and then crossed his arms over his face instead. “Boy, what’s got into you?” he shouted with a mouth full of chambray. “You tempting the devil?”