Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League

by Jonathan Odell

  Vida took care of that. Clutched in that tight, dark fist she brought the next kind of time, a fluid, river kind of time. At first she tried to resist, knowing it would take her away from her remaining child. Inevitably the medicine caught her in its current and gently drew her below the surface, and soon she was aware only of a beautiful refracted light and could hear nothing except the gentle hum of the water rushing in her ears.

  Then there was the time of surfacing, when she would open her eyes and see her son, the remaining one, the determined one, waiting by her bedside staring at her, his worried eyes trying to catch her like a net, beckoning her upward. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay warm and caressed by the river. Yet his stare was relentless, and finally the river gave her up.

  Lastly there was the night, when sleep would not come. During these hours it was as if she stood at the mouth of a secret cavern, and memories, indistinguishable one from the other, thick as bats at feeding time, swarmed her in a great black cloud. In those late-night hours the screaming cries of voices she could hear but not understand forced her out of bed, and she roamed the darkened house like a ghost, randomly picking up objects—a shoe, a toy, a photograph—studying them, trying to coax from them their secrets until, exhausted, she returned to bed. It was during this time she most wanted to drink, just to make the voices stop. Once she had sneaked a glass of Floyd’s bourbon to bed with her, desperate enough to test the pill that was supposed to make her violently ill if she mixed it with alcohol. It did, and after an emergency visit to the hospital, Floyd had mentioned going back to Whitfield—indefinitely.

  From the bottom of the stairs she heard a rattling of the breakfast dishes. Here she comes, Hazel thought, right on schedule. Sounding her two warning knocks, Vida entered the room and without speaking set the breakfast tray down in front of Hazel.

  “Good morning, Miss Hazel,” she said without feeling. “Take your pills, and I’ll sit here and keep you company while you eat your breakfast.”

  Hazel glared at Vida. She knew the real story. The only reason Vida stayed was to make sure Hazel didn’t stick a finger down her throat after swallowing the medicine.

  “Suppose you came in here one morning and I told you I wasn’t going to take your medicine. Supposing I locked the door on you. Then what?”

  Vida waggled her hand in her face. “Come on now, Miss Hazel. I got ironing to do.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “First thing, it ain’t my medicine. It’s yours. And two, if you was to act ugly, I suppose I have to call Mr. Floyd at his work.” She reached into her apron pocket again and produced a skeleton key. “Or maybe use this thing he give me in case you was to try something funny like that.”

  “Y’all think you know me pretty good, don’t you?”

  “Nome. I ain’t met nobody like you a-tall.” She looked at Hazel warily. “Now, I might have seed somebody like you at a distance, but I ain’t never met them up close.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Hazel hated it when people acted as if they had secrets on her.

  “I ain’t meaning nothing, Miss Hazel. Now take this medicine and swaller it down.”

  Hazel took the pills with orange juice. There was never any doubt that she was going to do as she was told. Only she didn’t care for Vida bossing her like she did, acting as if she knew everything there was to know about Hazel, yet she didn’t want to push her too far either. Something about this colored woman scared Hazel. The determined set of her face signaled that Vida was a woman who would do whatever it took to get her way.

  After eating a few bites of the scrambled eggs and toast, Hazel lay back on her pillows and waited for the warm current to rise up around her, gradually lifting her and then drawing her out into forgetful depths.

  She cast an eye toward the maid, who sat in the chair across the room, staring stonily out of the window. With her anger and despair muted, Hazel found herself becoming fascinated by this woman. She was so young, maybe even younger than Hazel, but her bossiness made her seem so much older. How did a woman that young get to be so sure of herself? What did it take?

  Hazel wondered if Vida had ever known loss. Maybe if things were different, they could have been friends. Secret friends—the kind you tell secret feelings to. Hazel could tell her many things. About voices that spoke to her at night. About death and fading love. About faith, hope, and charity. . .and the greatest of these is charity. . .tied up and dropped in the river. . .cast away like trash. . .how it feels.

  As the edges of her mind began to blunt, Hazel tried to stay focused on the woman’s face. Really a pretty face.

  No, Hazel thought, closing her eyes. It was a face that could have been set in concrete. Or carved from oak. Or painted on a screen door somewhere. There was no heart behind that pretty screen. This woman probably didn’t feel at all.

  That evil little boy was at the dinette table when Vida returned downstairs. He sat with his crayons and paper, looking like he had swallowed the catbird. What had he done now? She went to check the cabinets. Sure enough, he had switched everything around again.

  Vida crashed about the kitchen, pulling out pots and pans, fussing out loud to herself. Johnny silently sat there, drawing the big letter D.

  “Now I know good and well I didn’t put my pots here,” she grumbled loud enough for him to hear. When she looked up at him he rolled his eyes.

  This was the third time this week she had had to rearrange her kitchen. She couldn’t turn her back ten minutes on that child without having him restore everything to the way his mother had it.

  “Pots don’t belong by the sink,” she complained at him. “They belong by the cookstove where they is used.”

  “It’s called an oven. Never heard nobody call it a cookstove. That’s silly.” He rolled his eyes again.

  “What be silly is for some little boy to go ’round switching my kitchen on me. When he knows I going to switch it right back. That’s sure nuff silly.”

  “Ain’t your kitchen,” Johnny mumbled.

  Vida walked over to where Johnny sat and planted her fists on her hips. “I heared that. How you get so contrary? If you ask me, six years ain’t enough time to work up that much orneriness. You as nasty-tempered as an old woman.”

  “Ain’t your pots, neither. Them’s my momma’s pots.”

  “What’s your problem, boy?” she asked. “How come you getting crossways with me?”

  Rolling his eyes again at Vida, Johnny turned back to the table, where he drew a big letter H.

  “You put me in mind of a boy I once knowed called Tangle Eye. Never would look straight at you. Always peeking out the corner of his eyeholes. Sneaking around and looking cockeyed at folkses. Know how they come to call that boy Tangle Eye?”

  Johnny exhaled loudly like his daddy to show how exasperated he was getting. Bearing down hard on the lead, he put a cross on his little letter t.

  Vida was silent, still waiting for his answer.

  “No, I don’t,” he said, trying to sound not the least bit interested.

  “Well, since you so nice to be asking, I tell you. One day that boy roll his eyes a time too many and they got all twixed up. Don’t you know when he cried, his eyes were crossed so bad, his tears rolled right down his back.”

  Keeping his eyes down, Johnny pretended not to hear her. She’d get hers soon.

  “Humph. Why don’t you go outside? Ain’t you got no little play friends?”

  “Ain’t no boys around here. Just girls, and I hate them.” He looked up at Vida, as if to underscore his point.

  “Well, then, play by yourself,” she said. “Go fishing for a doodlebug.”

  “I can’t. He’s out there.”

  It took Vida only a second to figure out who “he” was. Today she had brought her father to work with her. Knowing how much he missed praying, she let him bring his Bible so he could sit and read and preach at the bottom of the Grahams’ sprawling backyard. She had hoped the yard was large enough for
him not to attract attention.

  Vida dismissed Johnny’s concern with a wave of her hand. “I ain’t got time for your foolishness. He ain’t studying you.”

  “He’s sitting in my backyard. Sitting on my bench. On top of my grass.”

  “He been eating your porridge, too? Who you? Goldilocks? They room for you and him both in that big ol’ yard.”

  “He talks to himself. And he looks at me funny.”

  “Well, maybe you funny to look at.”

  “He called me Nate.”

  Vida was silent for a moment. Lord, she thought to herself, what was her daddy thinking of? “You ever playlike?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” Johnny said hesitantly, sensing a trap.

  “Well, that man out there is my daddy. And some days he playlike, too.”

  “He’s old.”

  “Old people can playlike. So when he call you Nate, now you know he’s playing like.”

  “Does he playlike every day?”

  “No. Some days he don’t playlike at all. And then some days he talks to hisself. Same as I heared you talking to yourself behind my back.” Then Vida shrugged her shoulders as if the whole matter of people talking to themselves was no big deal. “So you see, there ain’t no need tellin’ on him. He ain’t going to bother you. He ain’t crazy, if that what you’re thinking.”

  Johnny wasn’t so sure. He took off in a run, and Vida watched as he scurried out into the yard, ducking behind trees as he went, mimicking a movie Indian sneaking up on a cowboy, until he was within spying distance of her father.

  Vida shook her head. “Hope his mouth ain’t as big as his eyes,” she said to herself before going back to arranging her kitchen.

  Truth was, sometimes even Vida didn’t know if her father was crazy or not. Their fall had been hardest on him. Losing his church and his position in the community, their nice home—that was bad enough. However, the thing that broke him was the Senator turning his back. That nearly killed Levi. The sheriff poisoned the Senator’s mind against Levi, convincing the Senator that the Klan had burned down Levi’s church because he was in league with the NAACP. Turned him out of their nice comfortable house, which the Senator owned, and forced Levi to make a crop and live in a tumbledown sharecropper’s cabin. That’s when his mind seemed to slip. On those long afternoons of hoeing, chopping, or picking cotton, Levi would sneak off into the woods, leaving Willie and Vida to do all the work. One day she decided to see where he was going off to.

  She followed him down the rows and he never looked back once, keeping his face pointed toward the east until he reached the bayou. There he disappeared into the swampy growth. Vida kept after him. She traced his footsteps to the very edge of the blackish water. She ducked behind a cottonwood tree.

  From her hiding place she could see her father standing motionless on the bank beside a giant bald cypress. For a moment all she heard was the plunking of turtles slipping into the water, until she noticed a rushing sound where the water ran fast and made deadly whirlpools.

  She understood. This was the place her father called his praying ground, the secret place where as a young man he had prayed day after day, night after night, to see the shining face of God. Finally God called out to him from a whirlpool of churning water. This was the very spot where Levi had received the calling to become a preacher of the Word.

  The frogs, now accustomed to human presence, resumed their chorus. Then came the dry rattle of the kingfisher that sat perched on a dead cypress stump. Next it was her father she heard. At first he spoke so soft and low she couldn’t make out the words. But she soon recognized the slow, singsong chant he used when he preached, right before launching into his sermon, when he would take a phrase and repeat it over and over in his deepest bass until he got the people’s blood to stirring.

  As Vida listened, his voice became fervent and full, larger than the swamp itself, groaning with emotion.

  “Let this cup pass,” he called out. “Lift up this yoke. Let this cup pass me by, oh Lord.”

  Over and over he called, louder and louder each time, until she was sure his voice resonated beyond this swampy place and thundered at the very door of heaven. He pleaded with God not to hide His face any longer, not to desert His good and faithful servant. He asked God to give him a mighty purpose and to please, please, show His face one more time: “Send me a righteous story to live out.”

  His words became angry, as if he were mad at God, offended that He would keep hidden from him, reducing Levi to a common fieldworker and plunging him into darkness. He cried out with a fury until a sudden upsurge of emotion strangled off his words and dropped him to his knees. For a while he sobbed bitterly, his shoulders heaving. Then he began sputtering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Vida’s father was now only a shadow against the late bayou dusk, a vanishing soul crying out to his white-faced God. As fireflies began their twinkling throughout the swamp, her father slipped like one of those turtles under the surface into another world, one she could not enter.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE MAIDS OF TARBOTTOM

  For the rest of the day, as every other day, Vida found herself locked in a battle of wills with the fractious little boy. She tried her best to coax him into watching TV. He would have none of it. The child was worse than a buzzing horsefly—you were always aware of his worrisome presence but never sure where he was going to light next. He just wore her out. The only peace she got was when he disappeared to play under the house, until she began fretting that he was starting fires beneath her feet.

  The long day was coming to an end at last. She rinsed her coffee cup and then pulled back the curtain on the window above the sink. She reminded herself why she had asked for this job to begin with. From here she could see clearly into the yard next door. Sheriff Billy Dean Brister’s yard. That was worth being a maid for a crazy white woman. No, she wasn’t here for the company. It was for the view.

  As she was heaping food on a plate to carry home with her, she told Johnny, “Now, your daddy called to say he got a meeting out in the Delta, but he’ll be back soon.”

  Johnny wouldn’t look at Vida. He stood with his back to her, staring out the back door.

  “Now, listen here to me,” she said louder. “I done took a plate to your momma and I’m leaving you and your daddy’s supper on the stove. When y’all get hungry, jest warm it up. You understand?”

  Turning around, Johnny sniffed the air noisily. “Smells burnt to me. Don’t you know how to cook?”

  “Plain contrary,” she said to herself, putting on her funny-looking hat. She reached for her flour-sack purse and her arm froze. “I didn’t leave my sack on this peg.” She looked down at Johnny. “Somebody been going through my tote sack.”

  Johnny turned an accusing eye her way. “I was looking for my momma’s stuff.”

  Vida gave him a surprised look. “You think I’m aiming to steal something from y’all? Boy, you calling me a thief?”

  Johnny glared back. “You taking my momma’s food, ain’t you?” He dropped his eyes to the floor and said with a world-weary sigh, “You got to watch colored people in your house. They bad to steal things. That’s what my daddy says.”

  “Contrary as the day is long,” she said, shaking her head. Vida took Johnny by the shoulders and steered him out of the way of the back door. “Beatin’est mess of people I ever seed,” she grumbled as she took the steps down into the yard.

  When she got to the bench she touched her father on the shoulder, waking him from his nap. “Less go home, Daddy. I done had my fill of white folks today.”

  Vida and her father made their way out of the Grahams’ neighborhood, and as they did, other maids also finishing for the day exited from their employers’ fine homes, many also pan-toting leftovers. They formed a loose little procession of starched uniforms, some blue and some white, gradually making their way past the point where the expansive sprinkler-fed lawns gave over to a tangle of dusty trees and
vines. They descended still farther, past where the pavement ended and the road became gravel, then took a steep downward slope and wrenched itself around to the backside of the hill, as if turning its back on Delphi proper on its descent to the quarters.

  Vida heard a familiar squeal. “Whoo-ee! Girl, don’t I know you from somewheres?”

  Vida turned. The woman wasn’t hard to recognize, even without a man’s arms wrapped around her butt. Although she was wearing a maid’s outfit, her bright red earbobs and matching lipstick made her look ready for juking.

  Sweet Pea fell in uninvited beside Vida and her father. “I sees you took my advice. You went and got Miss Hazel for your white lady.”

  Vida said coolly, “This my daddy, Reverend Snow,” hoping that might tamp down the woman’s enthusiasm a bit.

  The woman batted her eyes at Levi. “Proud to know you,” she cooed.

  Don’t this woman have no off switch? Vida thought.

  Levi touched his old felt hat and nodded politely at Sweet Pea. “It’s good to know you likewise,” he said, as if he meant it. Vida could have sworn she saw him blush.

  “I took my own advice,” Sweet Pea told Vida. “I working for Miss Cilly Prevost, on down from your white lady. I’m done with the mens.” Sweet Pea smiled again at Levi and then pulled a sassy red scarf out of her bag and tied it around her neck. “These ol’ uniforms just ain’t flattering to a girl, is they?”

  Levi grinned shyly and opened his mouth to speak, but when he saw Vida glaring at him, he put his eyes back on the road.

  As the group continued on to the river bottom, the road lost its gravel and became nothing more than two deep ruts. Sweet Pea prattled endlessly about the domestic goings-on in the neighborhood in which they worked. Which families lived in which houses and how they were connected to each other. Who was good to the colored and who wasn’t. She talked without stopping until the road exhausted itself at a large flattened-out place, around which sat a community of wooden shacks, known as Tarbottom.

  Sweet Pea was saying something about how the sheriff’s wife, Hertha, was Miss Pearl’s niece and the Senator’s daughter to boot. Realizing that she was talking about the sheriff’s kin, Vida took a sudden interest in the brash woman’s babbling. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt getting to know these women. If anything big or little happened in a white man’s house, the maids were the first to know it. After all, that’s why she’d come to Delphi in the first place, to pry open a white man’s secrets.