Vida eyed Hazel warily for a moment, and then retrieved a chair from the kitchen for herself. Seated across from Hazel, Vida could see there was something very wrong. A look of physical pain had settled on Hazel’s face. “What is it?” Vida asked, her voice flat. “Tell it.”
Speaking carefully, Hazel said, “I got some real bad news, Vida.”
Vida searched Hazel’s face. Who was this going to be bad news for? she wondered. Vida braced herself, now fearing the worst.
“Vida, it’s about your daddy. He’s been arrested,” Hazel said. “Vida, I’m so sorry.”
Vida closed her eyes and gave out a deep breath, relieved. She had imagined much worse. “Then Daddy ain’t dead,” Vida finally said.
“No, Vida, no!” Hazel exclaimed. “He ain’t dead at all.”
“All right now, Miss Hazel,” Vida said. “Tell me everthing what happened. Don’t jump over nothing.”
“I don’t know it all, but I’ll tell you what I heard. Floyd got a phone call a few minutes ago, and I picked up the upstairs extension and listened in. Thinking it might be. . .” Hazel dropped her eyes for a second and then continued, “That part’s not important. It was Miss Pearl’s husband, Hayes, on the line. He told Floyd that the problem was taken care of.” Hazel stopped for a moment, making the connection. “Oh, Vida, if Floyd had anything to do with this. . .”
“Go on, Miss Hazel. What Mr. Hayes say?”
“Hayes said he guessed they wouldn’t have to worry about Levi doing any more agitating for the vote.”
“So let me get it straight what you saying, Miss Hazel. Daddy ain’t been hurt. He’s alive and they got him in county jail.”
Hazel nodded.
“I see,” Vida said, and thought for a moment. “Surely they can see he ain’t no agitator. Only feeble-thinking. They ain’t going to hold him for that silliness at the courthouse. They bound to see.”
Hazel was confused. “What silliness at the courthouse?”
“For trying to get his vote!” Vida said impatiently. The woman couldn’t keep her own story straight! “You the one said it. The reason he got hisself in jail. Agitating for the vote. Them’s your words.”
Hazel shook her head sorrowfully. “No, Vida, no. That ain’t why he’s in jail. Your daddy got arrested for killing Miss Delia.”
Vida’s eyes widened. She cupped her hand over her mouth and let out a muffled cry, then began shaking her head stubbornly. “No. No. No,” she said. “That don’t make no sense. They talking about somebody else. Probably not my daddy at all. Probably you heard wrong. They got Daddy in jail for voting. He was just confused in his head, he didn’t mean nothing by it. They let him go in no time.”
“No, Vida. I heard what Hayes said.” Hazel took another deep breath. “Vida, there’s more. I hate to tell you, but you need to know it.”
Vida could feel herself going numb.
Hazel reached out and gently shook her shoulder. “Vida? Are you still listening?”
“Go on,” Vida answered dully.
Hazel took a deep breath. “Vida, Hayes told Floyd that they might could overlook a crazy colored trying to vote, but not a crazy colored murdering a white woman. That the Senator and his family ought to be spared the spectacle of a public trial. That Levi was going to be. . .” Hazel reached for Vida’s hand. “That they were going to bust your father out of the jail and. . .” Hazel began to cry. “Oh, Vida, it’s. . .Hayes said they were going to lynch your father.”
At first Vida didn’t catch what Hazel had said because she was so shocked to find her hand in the white woman’s. Yet those words, “lynch your father,” kept beating against her brain like birds throwing themselves against a windowpane, until she at last had to let them in.
Vida lifted her face to Hazel, who with her other hand reached out to gently stroke Vida’s cheek. Vida jerked her head away. Her hand still in Hazel’s grip, Vida rose on wobbly legs, then dropped to her knees. She tried to wrench her hand from Hazel’s, but Hazel refused to loosen her hold.
With no place to go, Vida laid her head on Hazel’s lap and at last began to cry. Loss filled the room—fathers and mothers and husbands and sons, dead and forfeited and snatched away. Vida looked up to see the other woman’s tears. She rubbed her cheek against Hazel’s hand. In their private grieving, each tried to comfort the other.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
THE FREEDOM RIDERS
School was letting out early because of the storms popping up all across the Delta, not to mention a tornado sighting over toward Little Egypt. As children inched their way in orderly lines from the school building, lightning lit up the dark sky while thunder shook the ground and rattled the windows. The children broke ranks and ran screaming for the buses. As they pulled out of the school lot, the sky opened up and the rain fell in sheets. By the time Johnny’s bus had turned down his lane, roofs had become waterfalls and the streets gushing rivers.
Johnny made a run for it up the sidewalk and through the front door. He was halfway down the stairhall, wiping the water from his eyes, before he noticed that the house was unlit. The rain, noisily beating down on the world outside, contrasted eerily with the dead silence inside the house. He worried that his mother and Vida might be somewhere out in this storm. He scurried back toward the kitchen, calling out “Momma! Vida!” No reply came back to meet him.
He tore through the kitchen door, then stopped in his tracks, taken aback by the sight of the maids sitting silently in the shadows. They looked up at him with weak smiles that quickly faded.
Vida got up without speaking and walked into the laundry room. She returned with a towel and began to dry Johnny’s head. “You’ll catch your death,” she said, but she sounded as if she were thinking of somebody else.
“Where’s Momma?”
“Out driving.”
“What y’all doing in the dark?” he asked, peeking out from beneath the towel.
“Lights is out,” Sweet Pea answered.
“And we can’t go home ’cause the river suppose to flood,” Creola said. “Again.”
The way everybody slowly nodded their heads up and down, Johnny could tell they were really sad. Since Levi’s arrest, they had been low. Even Maggie’s “Praise Jesus” sounded wobbly to him.
“Fourth time this year,” Sweet Pea said glumly. “Get a little rain and the bottom floods out ever time.” She was slumped over in her chair, her arms propped against her legs. The cleft between her breasts was more prominent than ever. Vida jerked Johnny’s eyes away as she continued to towel his hair.
“Nobody going to build no levee for colored folks, that’s for sure,” complained Creola. Her wet red hair was hanging stringy from her head, making her already huge round face appear more balloonlike than usual.
“Yeah,” Sweet Pea grumbled, “Miss Hertha put Misery’s house up on stilts. I bet she down there grinning like an albino possum, sitting high and dry up in her tree.”
A clap of thunder shook the house, but only Johnny jumped.
The sound of stamping feet came from the back porch, like somebody trying to shock the mud off their shoes. A moment later Hazel entered, smiling at everybody, and when she opened her mouth to speak, the dreary scene in her kitchen silenced her. She walked over to Vida, who was standing at her place by the sink, looking forlorn. “Oh, Vida, I’m so sorry. I heard them tell it on the radio.”
“Tell what?” Johnny asked.
“Now, I’m sure it’s for the best. Your daddy will be better off in Jackson. The sheriff was right to ask for it.”
“He ain’t there yet, Miss Hazel. You don’t know the sheriff. Lot can happen between here and Jackson,” Vida said, close to tears. “And, Miss Hazel, the sheriff won’t let me see my daddy. Only way I gets to see him is if I stand in front of the jailhouse and stare up at him in his window. He always there, looking down through his bars like a zoo animal. Mob of white men always gathered ’round. Calling him names. Some laughing. Some cussing. I saw one old man standing
on the steps, cackling like the devil and swinging a. . .a noose.” Vida stumbled on the word.
Hazel put her arm around Vida. The other maids glanced at each other, their eyes big.
“He didn’t do it, Miss Hazel. They framing him.”
“I’m sure they are, Vida,” Hazel comforted her. “It’s a shame on everybody claiming to be a white person.”
“But I know for a fact he didn’t. I got Miss Delia’s letter. I knows who did it.”
“Who?” Hazel asked. “If you know, you got to tell it to the sheriff and get your father set loose.”
There was a disbelieving silence. Vida and the maids shook their heads at Hazel and laughed sadly.
“What?” Hazel asked, hurt. “Why y’all making fun of me?”
“We ain’t, Miss Hazel. Just what you said. You done marked off the difference between being white and being colored as clear as if you drawed a line in the dirt.”
“Amen,” Sweet Pea said.
Flustered, Hazel said, “I don’t know what you-all are talking about.”
“Let me count it out to you plain,” Vida said. “First off, we colored. We ain’t got no sheriff. And second off, I seen the evidence. I know who kilt Miss Delia. But it comes back around again to me being colored. How’s a colored woman going to speak out and get believed? Well, she ain’t.”
There was a chorus of “That’s right” from the maids.
Vida picked up steam. She started counting on her fingers for emphasis, which reminded Hazel uneasily of Floyd. “And third off, since I’m still colored, how can I speak out the first word if that word is against the sheriff hisself.”
“That’s the truth,” Creola hollered and Sweet Pea chimed in with an “Amen.”
“And fourth off,” Vida said, “if I do say that first word, it will sure as hell be my last one. You know why?”
“’Cause you colored?” Hazel ventured.
That brought a response of grievous howling from the maids.
“That’s right, Miss Hazel. That’s why we was laughing at you.”
“You saying Billy Dean Brister did it?” Hazel sounded doubtful.
“Makes me so damned mad,” Vida grumbled to herself. She surveyed the room. “We a piteous sight. Things keep coming down on top of us like that storm outside, and all we can do is sit around in the dark with our tails tucked.”
Hazel pulled up a chair, let Johnny climb into her lap, and sat with the maids in silence, listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof over the porch.
After the rain had finally slacked off to a sprinkle, Hazel spoke up. “You know what helps me when I don’t think I can take it no more? A little drive. Never fails to get me cheered up.”
Vida looked at her as if she had cracked, yet Hazel insisted, “Let’s all go for a ride. Come on, now! Everybody in the car.”
Johnny jumped down from her lap, excited to go with his mother, but the maids only stared at her. Hazel went around the room grabbing their arms and pulling them up off their chairs, one by one. By the time she had herded them onto the porch, the rain had completely stopped and the wind had died. It was deathly still. The skies had lightened to an eerie Coke-bottle green. There was an unholy calm all around, like tragedy suspended in midair. Tornado weather.
Hazel wasn’t deterred. On the way down to the car she told them all about a man she’d met the week before on one of her drives who said that when he was a boy he was picked up by the Great Tupelo Tornado of ’38 and carried clear into another county, at a mile a minute, and set down unharmed into the Buttahatchie River. “He told me you got to cooperate and not fight it. Since I heard that, I’ve felt real peaceful about the weather.”
Hazel situated herself behind the wheel, and Vida slid in next to her. Sweet Pea took the front-seat window. Creola and Maggie loaded into the back, wedging Johnny between them.
“Lord have mercy!” Creola called out. “We going to sure nuff bust out the sprangs in Miss Hazel’s new car!”
“Don’t you worry about nothing, Creola,” Hazel reassured her. “Everything’s paid for.” She opened up her purse, retrieved a little blue bottle, and handed it to Vida.
“This is your hooch,” Vida said, taken aback.
“It don’t do nothing for me no more,” Hazel explained. “Take it. Y’all sit back and relax. Enjoy the ride.” Hazel mashed the gas pedal and the big Lincoln roared to life, taking off like a rocket for where the sun was about to break through the clouds.
They drove along winding roads, through masses of trees and vines growing so dense that the inside of the Lincoln grew dark and cool, until they burst out again into the dazzling light of open fields. Confident and in charge, Hazel worked the wheel as if she were a Talladega pro. No terrain could discourage her. She took back roads—gravel, dirt, sand, washboard, rutted, overgrown, and completely washed out. She navigated abandoned logging trails and mere pig paths. When it looked too muddy to continue and everybody swore she would have to back herself out, Hazel swerved off onto a shift road appearing out of nowhere and skirted the bog completely.
Even Vida was impressed.
Now and then Hazel pulled the car over, and heading off on foot she would reach behind a log or into the hollow of a tree or under a gnarly root and return with another blue bottle and hand it to Vida, telling her to pass it around. Hazel didn’t touch a drop.
The passengers surrendered to Hazel’s driving as they might lose themselves in the lament of a soul-scarred blues veteran or in the words and cadence of a revivalist burning with the holy spirit or in the rhythm of an old woman piecing up a quilt with nimble fingers skittering along the patches. It was obvious that Hazel was inspired. Creola turned to Johnny and said with reverence in her voice, “You momma can drive like Peter can preach.”
That sounded about right to everybody.
As the sun began to set they came upon a pasture blanketed with a smoky mist. “Look,” Creola said pointing to the field. “The rabbits is cooking they supper!”
“Ain’t it purty,” Sweet Pea said wistfully. “Looks like a cloud bedding down for the night.”
With the cool November wind blowing gently in her face, Hazel inhaled deeply. “Don’t this make you feel free as a bird? Nobody in the world to bring you down.”
Turning to Hazel, Vida said in a sad voice, her words a little slurred, “That’s just it, Miss Hazel. We ain’t free. Don’t believe we ever going to get free.”
Hazel nodded as if she had heard all of this before. However, she was careful not to say anything lest she encourage this kind of talk. No telling where it could lead.
Vida continued anyway. “One day we going to take our freedom. Going to stop waiting for somebody to give it to us in the sweet by-and-by.” Vida took a quick little nip. “Anyway, I figger freedom really ain’t yours unless you take it. Nothing free if you owing somebody for it. Nobody give it to Rosie. No ma’am. She reached out and snatched from the white man.”
The maids erupted into a chorus of “Uh-huh” and “That’s right.” Nobody could mention Rosa Parks without soliciting some kind of heartfelt response from maids.
“Now, Vida,” Hazel cautioned, “that’s civil righter’s talk. You got to mind where you say things such as that. We all free in this car, but when we get out, we got our places. You have to be careful. People might take you for an agitator.”
Feeling no pain, Sweet Pea stuck her head out the window and yelled “Agitator! Agitator!” She snatched the bottle from Vida and took a swig. Wiping her mouth, she said, “I’m sick of y’all white folks blaming everything on agitators.” She passed the bottle back to Maggie.
Maggie held to it tightly, looking a little confused as to why somebody had handed her a bottle of laxative. “Take it to the Lord in prayer!” she sang out.
Reaching across Johnny, Creola eased the bottle from Maggie’s grip. “I’m sick of it, too,” Creola added. “And I don’t even know what a agitator is. Puts in mind of something that go crawling ’round in the swamp
s.”
Hazel said she wasn’t real sure herself what one was, but whatever it was, she was sure it was up to no good, and they should make sure they didn’t mess with any. It might get them shot or hung or drowned. “And I seen it done,” she said, thinking of the boy in the river.
“We all got to die sometime,” Vida said, sounding resigned to it. “What’s the difference how? Only matters why.”
“Might as well be something you believe in,” Sweet Pea said.
“That’s right,” Vida said. “My daddy sitting in jail thinking he going to die for the vote. Instead everybody wants to get at him for drowning a damned white woman. And he didn’t even do it.” Vida pounded her fist on the padded dash. “White man done took everything he got. Only thing left was his story. And I’ll be damned if they didn’t go and snatch that, too.”
“Poor Reverend Snow.” Sweet Pea began to cry. “Now, he was a righteous man. He was surely looking on the face of God. And such a good-looking man, too.”
“Y’all stop that kind of talk,” Hazel said firmly. “Levi ain’t dead. And Vida, you wrong. I do care how you die.”
Vida thought about that for a moment and turned to Hazel. “But do you care how I live?”
“I don’t understand what you saying,” Hazel said, not at all enjoying the turn in the conversation. They had been having such a nice time.
“I know you don’t want me to die, but that ain’t enough,” Vida said, and then took a quick pull on the bottle before continuing. “Being my friend and all like you claim, you got to want me to live my life free and equal.”
“You talking to the wrong person. I ain’t free neither. Only one mistake away from being sent back to the state hospital for the insane myself. They got a bed with my name on it.”
“Well, maybe you got some figuring to do, too, Miss Hazel. As for me, I’m getting to be more my daddy every day.”
“Tell it now,” Creola called out.
“You know I got a little boy out there I ain’t never going to see. He ain’t never going to know me as his momma. I has to live with that, I reckon. I can’t raise him up to do right nor wrong. Can’t help him with his homework. I missed teaching him everything a momma needs to teach a child. But my daddy say they is one thing I can leave him.”
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 31
