“What the hell does that mean, anyway?” Hazel said back. “Sounds like something Floyd would come up with.”
Floyd’s slogans never made much sense to Hazel, but beneath the snappy phrases she could hear his scolding voice: “Catch up! Catch up! You’re dragging your end of it.” Just where was it they were going in such a hurry? That’s what she wanted to know. Hazel drained the last of the bottle.
From off in the distance she thought she could hear the gnarling and rumbling of what could have been a herd of ferocious animals closing in on her and her boys. When she turned toward the field she saw one of Floyd’s hulking green machines, growling greedily, eating its way through the impossibly white cotton.
Hazel glanced down at her two boys drowsing next to her on the front seat, Johnny leaning against the door and Davie nuzzled under his brother’s arm. After riding through the country with Hazel for hours, they were tuckered out.
Since her humiliation at the hands of her neighbors, Hazel had abandoned her town route and taken to driving down from the bluffs and out into the Delta. Each morning she drove the endless depression for miles, along desolate dirt roads where the only people who would see her were field hands or work gangs from the state penitentiary—nobody she expected Floyd was out to impress. Driving the earth’s flattened-down places, Hazel could yell and cuss and cry to her heart’s content. Nothing could creep up on her. Everything could be seen at once and for what it was. Out here was where the bare-bones truth lived, plain and simple and absolute. No silly childish dreams or false hopes or wishful thinking could survive. It was like looking God square in the eye and speaking your name and daring him to strike you dead.
Hazel usually drove until her half-pint ran out. Then she went home and spent the rest of the afternoon sobering up for Floyd. Lately, however, a half-pint hadn’t done the trick. Hope couldn’t be roused from its sickbed. So Hazel blew her horn twice and a colored boy sitting on the gallery saw her and then ducked into the store.
Her children had begun to stir with the honking, but Hazel didn’t notice. She had locked her eyes on Miss Sally again. The girl was still holding the bread up to her mouth, as if she had all the time in the world. No sense in gobbling it down. Sally knew there was more where that slice came from. Didn’t know what it was to make do with nothing.
“Yeah, Little Miss Sunbeam,” Hazel said, feeling good and sorry for herself now, “you don’t know what life can do to people like me. Make-do people. That’s what I am.” She hiccupped.
The screen door swung open and shut again. Otherwise, Sally Sunbeam remained unmoved. Hazel let a tear trickle unimpeded down her cheek. “My husband done put me behind the wheel of a Lincoln like Daddy put me behind Jawbone. I guess I’ll be plowing somebody else’s fields till the day I die.”
The door flew open again and the colored boy came running up to Hazel’s window with a paper sack in his hand. Hazel began to dig through her purse.
“Momma, I’m hungry,” Davie said, having just awakened.
“When we going to eat dinner?” Johnny called out.
While the colored boy waited with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his raggedy overalls, he watched the two white children with matching bow ties, dressed nice enough for Sunday.
“Here,” Hazel said as she handed the boy a little extra, “go on back in the store and get me a couple of banana moon pies and two Nehi grapes.”
The boy took off, leaving Hazel to feel Sally’s eyes looking disapprovingly at her. “Well, what do you expect, Little Miss Perfect? I’m a make-do momma, making do the best I can.”
Hazel sped along, the wind in her hair, sipping from her bottle. After a few miles she slowed the Lincoln and edged the car right up to the lip of a rickety one-lane bridge suspended between the two high riverbanks. When she’d passed this way earlier she thought she’d seen some colored people fishing down on the bank, and she wanted to make sure they were still there.
Getting out of the car, she walked unsteadily onto the bridge, her high-heeled pumps tapping hollow against the planks. Hazel tried to decide if the swaying she felt was due to the movement of the bridge or her present condition. Either way, she somehow made it safely halfway across.
Lacking any railing, the bridge offered an unimpeded twenty-foot drop into the dark, snaky water below. Hazel walked right up to the edge and still didn’t see the colored people. Leaning forward to get a look underneath, she tottered, frantically thrashed her arms in the air, and, a moment before toppling over the side, caught her balance. She dropped to her hands and knees to view the river through the cracks between the boards.
Just as she had hoped! The people were still up under there. From where she knelt, she could see a man who was standing up to his knees in the water throw a heavy line deep into the river and then drag it back toward the bank. A few other colored people, both men and women, stood by on the bank, watching intently. Never having seen this kind of fishing before, she rushed back to the car and her children and then carefully maneuvered the massive Lincoln over the creaking bridge, off the road, and into the shade of an old beech tree.
This was not unusual for Hazel. When she drove out into the Delta, she often stopped to observe coloreds at work, with the same fascination she’d had as a child observing a colony of ants or a nest of wasps. She thought there was a sad kind of beauty in the way their motions would blend into a shared dance, transcending their earthly lot. It was like something from the Bible. Or maybe a Carter Family gospel song.
Once she’d sat for over an hour watching a gang of colored convicts from Parchman work with their scythes in a weedy ditch. Garbed in black and white stripes, they moved in unison, their blades glinting into a single instrument under the eye of the fierce white sun. And how they could holler out!
Goin’ up to Memphis,
I’ll be able when I die.
Load my body on the freight car,
Send my soul on by and by.
The whiskey having shrunk any distinction between a white housewife’s melancholy and the woes of a dozen colored convicts, Hazel had hollered with them, with the boys joining in.
Uptomemphis,
Uptomemphis.
These colored people by the riverbank weren’t singing, yet they did appear very solemn about their fishing, so Hazel hoped for a good show. Maybe, she thought, if they caught something they would burst out into an old gospel song.
Hazel led the children to a shady place closer to the river where they all could sit and observe without being noticed. She then spread out a pallet she kept in the car trunk for such occasions as this. While she busied herself, smoothing out the lumps in the quilt, Johnny called out urgently. Hazel turned to see Davie scurrying up toward the road, no doubt returning to the altitude of the bridge.
Johnny saw the bewildered look on his mother’s face and broke after Davie. Just as he reached the bridge Davie stumbled in the road, and before he could right himself Johnny had him by the ankle. As Hazel stood there paralyzed, her heart pounding, she watched as Johnny led Davie back to safety, on the way inventing for his brother cautionary tales about drowning.
Like a brilliant flare, a single thought shone through the fog that had enveloped Hazel, the thought that all this she was witnessing, the way things were playing out before her that very minute, was how it had to be. The three of them were trains barreling down separate tracks, and none of them had a voice about direction. They might could slow, and they might could speed up. But they could not choose what it was they were bearing down on. Or what was bearing down on them. God had fixed it.
She knelt down and clutched her boys to her chest. She told them she loved them, over and over again. Still in a state of wonder, she distributed the moon pies and soft drinks as solemnly as if it were the Last Supper. She tenderly kissed each child on the cheek, and with her mind clouded with whiskey and shadowy revelation, Hazel leaned against a hickory tree with her half-pint firmly clasped to her chest.
Her attention returned to the spectacl
e unfolding in the river. Down below them, the man standing in the water and doing the fishing had moved a little farther upstream, like he was trying to find the perfect spot. Hazel was a little disappointed in him. A real fisherman would have more patience.
The water was the color of strong tea and very deep by the bridge, and Hazel was unable to see what was tied to the massive fishing line that, now that she studied it, resembled a rope. As she watched, the fisherman carefully pulled in the line and hauled a shapeless, dark mass up on the bank. A couple of other men gathered around and snatched away what had been grabbed from the river bottom—leaves and branches and snag roots and such. That’s when Hazel saw what they were using for a hook. Attached to the rope was what appeared to be a lead pipe with spurs on the end. No wonder they hadn’t caught anything! All they would catch with that contraption was more bottom trash. Amateurs!
Without even bothering to bait his line, the man doing the casting waded to yet another spot in the river and once more threw his rope into the water. This time when the man pulled on the rope he yelled something to the others on the bank. Two more men joined the fisherman in the water and began tugging at what looked like a big haul.
“Look, boys,” Hazel said, rising up wobbly to her feet to get a better view, “they done caught them something. Must be a big ’un.”
Lifting Davie in her arms, Hazel moved closer to watch as they dragged a giant black catfish onto the shore. She heard one of the women on the bank scream.
Johnny bounced on his tiptoes to see the fish. “Momma, what’s that woman yelling for? Did she get bit by the fishie?”
Hazel’s eyes tried to focus in on the catch. It was about four or five feet long and was wrapped in barbed wire. There was a big piece of machinery tied around its neck. My God, she thought, the thing’s got a neck! She made out the bloated face, with one eye beaten closed and one hanging from its socket. She heard the woman call the fish by name.
“Emmett! Lawd, lawd!” the woman screamed. “My baby, Emmett!”
Then Hazel heard herself scream.
The Lincoln was all over the road, from ditch to ditch, all three crying their hearts out. Hazel didn’t know where she was heading, nor did she care. Speed and distance were all she wanted from the car now.
An hour later, when the black-and-white cruiser with the big star on the door happened upon Hazel and her boys, she had sunk the two left tires deep into a sandy ditch and was hunched over the wheel sobbing. Johnny was patting his mother gently on the arm. Then she heard a man’s voice at her ear. “That you, Missus Graham? You all right in there?”
Hazel raised her eyes to see the sheriff. He was watching her with a kind of detached, wary look, as if she might be a stray dog with a touch of foam around the mouth. “Oh, Sheriff!” she cried. “I’m so glad you come along. Back there. . .in the river. . .they’s a dead boy.”
His eyes narrowed. For a moment the sheriff seemed concerned. “A white one?”
“No, a colored one. I watched them pull him off the river bottom. He was all bound up and weighted down. Somebody killed him for sure.”
The sheriff’s eyes warmed a little. He took off his hat and bent down to the window. “Now, don’t you worry none. I’ll check into it, Miss Hazel.” His voice was reassuring. “You know how they always knifing one another. Come Saturday night ever creek in Hopalachie County’ll have coloreds floating in it.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m only sorry you had to see it, is all.”
Hazel thought he really did look sorry. What a kind, thoughtful man. He was treating her with so much politeness. More than she could say for that wife of his. Right then Hazel’s heart went out to the sheriff for being saddled with a horse like Hertha. He was such a nice-looking man, too.
“Let’s see if we can’t get you out of this ditch,” he said. “I got a chain in the turtle hull.”
When he motioned to his cruiser, Hazel was surprised to see somebody waving at her from the backseat. Why, it was that whore-for-a-maid, Sweet Pea, grinning to beat the band, her gold teeth gleaming in the afternoon light through the sheriff’s back window.
The sheriff saw the curious look on Hazel’s face. “Got me a prisoner,” he said quickly. “Just hauling her in for questioning.”
Nodding back at Sweet Pea, Hazel couldn’t help but think she seemed mighty happy to be a prisoner.
Chapter Twelve
LATE NIGHT VISITATION
Vida Snow had heard about the boy they fished out of the river. Everybody had. It’s all anybody talked about when the white folks weren’t listening. Vida had seen the boy once, walking to the store with his Uncle Mose. Down from Chicago and only fourteen, they say. Mississippi was dangerous enough for the colored brought up to know the nasty unpredictability of white folks. That boy’s momma should have never sent her son down to Mississippi by himself.
Vida laughed darkly at the thought. Who was she to talk about mommas keeping their children safe?
She wished she could forget. Of course, she couldn’t. She remembered too well the night after her father preached on the Baby Moses, how she was unable to sleep. She had been lying awake with her own child nestled to her side, fretting over her father’s meaning, when her room exploded in light. Outside her window, a truck revved its engine.
Her father’s feet hit the floor and Vida saw him flee past her room in his nightshirt and no shoes. He was heading out onto the porch.
“Who that?” Levi called into the light. “What business you got here?” Vida lifted Nate and moved to the window.
She saw a man stumble from his truck. She couldn’t see his face for the light, but she knew who it was. Billy Dean weaved around to the rear, and pulled out his shotgun. He staggered back again and propped himself against the hood, between the glaring headlights. “Get that little rat out here,” he slurred. “That little albino piece of shit.”
Vida instinctively pulled Nate closer.
“Mr. Billy Dean, sir,” her father stammered, falling back toward the door. “We don’t mean you no harm. I sure didn’t know about you and Miss Hertha.” He took another step back, his arm reaching behind him for the door. “I hope you two be real happy,” he said. “And I sure sorry for that little misunderstanding.”
Lights began to come on throughout the quarter. Maybe, Vida prayed, someone would come to their rescue. Maybe it would be Rezel!
With one arm Billy Dean steadied himself against the hood of the truck and with the other he raised the shotgun to his hip. It was aimed at her father’s midsection. “Not as sorry as you gonna be. I told you what I wanted. Get that boy out here. Now!”
The door flew open and Willie came charging out past his father with a baseball bat. He took the porch in two leaps and was halfway down the steps before Billy Dean got both barrels aimed at the boy’s head.
“Stop right there, boy. I’ll blow it off. I swear I will.”
Willie froze.
Billy Dean’s uncle, who had been standing there frantically rubbing the back of his neck, spoke up. “Billy Dean, this old preacher ain’t going to tell the Senator about that baby. We already torched his church. You ain’t going to tell, is you, Preacher?”
Levi didn’t answer. His eyes turned toward the distance, at a lit-up place on the horizon where his church stood.
Furman put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Let’s get turned around and go on to the house. Tomorrow’s another day.”
His uncle’s words hadn’t softened the vicious expression on Billy Dean’s face.
That’s when Vida knew it for certain. The man wasn’t there to scare them. He was there to kill her son. No one could save Nate but her. She took her son up in her arms and ran. Trying to make it across the field and into the bayou had been the only way.
She remembered the shotgun blasts, the spray of buckshot that sent her reeling into the dark. But what else could she have done? Hadn’t she done all a mother could do?
The funeral had been a small, pitiful affair. Most people were
too afraid to be seen in public with Levi. A preacher from Holmes County, an old friend of Levi’s, had traveled in by night to hold the service. Nobody cried except for Vida, her wounds bandaged but still raw. Everybody else, including her father, sat dry-eyed before the little pine coffin as the preacher spoke mournfully about how the innocence of children was a sure ticket to the Promised Land.
As the preacher droned on, Vida’s body ached more from her loss of Nate than from the lead pellets that remained in her leg, embedded in muscle, so close to the bone. She tried to sooth herself by thinking of the Promised Land. She had never noticed before how often her people spoke of it. That made three the number of times that very week she had heard about the Promised Land. Once was from Lillie Dee. She had complained that Rezel was following the rest of her sons up North, to the Promised Land. Another time was from her father’s pulpit. It was where Moses was headed to.
Now this preacher was praying for Nate’s safe journey, saying Nate was gone off to the Promised Land, as if it might be a good thing she had lost her baby. Vida couldn’t believe that Moses’s momma would agree.
Even as a grown woman of twenty, Vida still didn’t believe it. Yet what she did believe with all her heart, what she thought about every day in the fields, what she lay awake at night promising Nate, what she swore to Jesus in every prayer she breathed, was that one day soon she would balance her books with the sheriff.
Chapter Thirteen
JESUS IN THE GRAVEYARD
Today up in Delphi at the white cemetery, Jesus weighed heavily on Johnny’s mind. He had listened carefully as Brother Dear talked to Jesus about keeping Davie safe and watched as they lowered his brother down into the hole. Johnny wanted to ask his mother how long Jesus was going to keep his brother down there, but she wouldn’t look at Johnny. She sat next to him stone-faced, smelling one minute of Gardenia Paradise and the other of the medicine she had been taking from half-pint bottles.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 9
