“Lord, Miss Hazel! Is you OK? Let’s get out of here before they come back.”
Hazel didn’t answer. She sat erect, looking out over the steering wheel into the distance.
“Miss Hazel, you hearing me?”
“How’d I do, Vida?” Hazel said, her voice small, with a strange gurgle to it.
“Miss Hazel, you done real good. You showed them up.”
Hazel turned and smiled at Vida, pleased, and then she slumped over the wheel, still smiling. She knew she had done well. Except for the shattered window and the stream of blood slowly seeping into the fabric, the car was miraculously unharmed. And, as promised, so was Vida.
Chapter Forty-Six
MAGGIE’S DIME
Floyd carefully set the phone back into its cradle. For a moment he stood stone-still in the darkened stairhall, not breathing. He reached out into the dark to no one, but wanting it to be Hazel. Wanting her to take his hand, stroke the scars on his fingers, and tell him she loved him. He staggered backward, needing the wall, and finding it, he slid himself slowly to the floor. He put his head in his hands and began to sob.
Unaware of how long he had been crying or when the persistent knocking had begun, Floyd managed to get to his feet and then reeled toward the door. Outside, glowing under the porch light, was Brother Dear. He smiled tenderly at Floyd, letting him know that he was not alone in his trials. The love that radiated from the preacher’s face provoked a new round of tears. Right there in the stairhall, Brother Dear and Floyd knelt down together while the preacher prayed for Hazel as Floyd wept.
After his prayer, Brother Dear insisted on driving Floyd to the hospital. “Mrs. Dear is waiting in the car. She’ll be here in case Johnny wakes up. My wife is real good with children at times like this. Knows every Mother Goose there is.”
“Johnny would like that,” Floyd sniffled, grateful to have the confidence of the preacher to lean on. “He sure loves a good story, him and Hazel. . .” Again Floyd was leveled by his need for Hazel, by the pure necessity of her, missing her worse than he knew was possible. He let the preacher guide him out to his car.
“Why did this happen, Brother Dear?” Floyd sobbed as the preacher drove.
“That’s the way Satan operates. He sees a soul leaning toward Christ, and he wages full-out war. Hazel was wounded in the line of duty to Jesus. You can take comfort in that.”
“I do, Brother Dear, I do.” Floyd tried to smile in a courageous way. “The hospital said she was out ministering to the sick and needy when somebody. . .” Floyd couldn’t finish.
Brother Dear reached over and put his hand on Floyd’s shoulder. “Your wife is a real inspiration to the whole community, Floyd. Why, the way she’s come around, her life is a sermon. A sermon I am not good enough a man to preach.” He removed his hand from Floyd’s shoulder to brush a tear from his own eye.
All of a sudden Floyd blurted, “Get me to her, please. She needs to know.”
Brother Dear was calm. “What does she need to know, Floyd?”
“Everything.”
“No,” Brother Dear said carefully, “she doesn’t. I don’t know what it is you got to confess. Right now she only needs to hear you say one thing. And don’t let me catch you telling her anything except that. Do you understand me? Man to man?”
Floyd nodded.
“And are you ready to tell her that one thing?”
“With all my heart,” Floyd sobbed.
“That’s good, Floyd. That’s real good.”
The cabin was growing heavy with stale air. Mattresses had been dragged across the floor and positioned over the windows. Though it was a chilly November night, the maids were drenched in sweat as they huddled together in Vida’s darkened house, sitting around a sputtering oil lamp. They kept the light turned low, expecting white folks to race down into Tarbottom any moment, shooting off shotguns and tossing sticks of dynamite from car windows. This was going to be a nightly ritual, the maids had decided—taking turns staying together in each other’s homes while Hannah and Willie sat up guarding the juke.
“Y’all know this is crazy,” Sweet Pea fussed. “If they going to get us, we just making it easy for them peckerwoods. Us sitting here together like fish in a barrel. All we doing is keeping down they dynamite bill.”
Creola shifted her weight in her chair. “Don’t matter to me none,” she said, undaunted. “Rufus done got scared and snuck out of town in the truck. I don’t aim to die alone, and y’all’s all I got.”
“Rufus left you?” Sweet Pea asked.
“Never thought I see the day. Not if he had to get up out his chair to do it.” Creola managed a weak laugh. “He was some scared. But he be back when things ease up. Or he gets hungry first.”
“Y’all, maybe they ain’t even after us,” Vida said, trying to sound upbeat. “After I finally got Miss Hazel’s car to the hospital, they acted like they believed what I told them. That she been out visiting the poor and sickly when she got shot. I even had the turkey birds to prove it.”
Sweet Pea gave out a harsh laugh. “Who in they right mind believe that story? Fishier than a Friday night in a fry house.” She dabbed her neck with a handkerchief. “He know about us. He know everything. He’ll make his move in his own sweet time, when it best suits him. Our gooses is cooked.”
“If that what you thinking, then how come us be sitting around on our hands for?” Vida snapped. “We just going to wait till he come for us?”
“We could get out of the county!” Creola blurted. “Might even leave the state. Get a train up to Memphis and never look back.”
“Leave?” Vida was surprised that Creola had suggested it. “What happens if Miss Hazel dies? What if she can never speak for herself? Answer me that.” The maids could hear the sadness rising in her throat. “No, I ain’t going to leave her here all wrapped in lies. About how she done finally learned to behave herself and do what she was told. About how she got broke to saddle like ever woman oughta. And Daddy,” she continued, “who’s going to finish the story he started? I can’t go off and let him be one more crazy nigger who killed a white woman.”
The maids dropped their heads and studied their hands. They were too ashamed to look at Vida now.
“Y’all go on if you want, but I’m sure about my place. Somebody got to stay behind and tell the story.” Vida searched for their eyes, her voice trembling. “Don’t y’all see, if we don’t tell it, the white folks will. And it ain’t theirs to tell. It ain’t. . .” She couldn’t finish, her voice was so choked with tears.
Sweet Pea reached over and placed her hand on Vida’s shoulder. “No. It ain’t theirs to tell.”
“Praise the Lamb,” Maggie said softly, seeming especially peaceful tonight. For a moment everybody’s eyes rested on her toadlike figure, as if trying to soak up some of her calm. They watched her as she rocked her ancient body gently to and fro, her leathery hands folded serenely in her lap.
After a while Vida looked up, still with tears in her eyes, yet in a clear, certain voice she said, “You know, we could go to the courthouse and ask to take that voting test. We could do that.”
Sweet Pea snatched her hand away from Vida’s shoulder as if all her compassion had just drained through the cracks in the floor. “You gone crazy in the head?” she yelled. “I thought we was talking about how to stay alive! They put your name and address in the paper when a colored tries to vote. And since it be us, they might draw a map.”
“Weren’t that the plan?” Vida asked. “Ain’t that what we was asking everybody else to do?”
“The plan was to get a hundred of us to march on the courthouse,” Sweet Pea shot back. “Not four maids and a juker.”
“But we the Rosie Parks League, remember?” Creola asked. “What would Rosie do?”
“In Hopalachie County? I don’t know,” Sweet Pea said. “Rosa had Luther King on her side in Montgomery.”
“’Cept weren’t on that bus with her, was he?” Vida reminded them. “She face
d them down all by her lonesome. Besides, we got each other.”
For a long time no one said another word as the idea hung heavy in the room. Maggie began to hum softly again. Vida smiled gently at her and asked, “What you think about it, Maggie?”
Maggie sighed heavily and began moving her gums in three-quarter time. Then she lifted her eye. “When I was a little girl, Momma Nell and me always come to town on Saditty.” Maggie spoke in a low, quivery voice, like old people do when they’re remembering in front of late-night fires. “I loved coming to town with my Momma Nell. We get all dressed up. Momma Nell’d iron my hair and put a ribbon in it. It was good as Santy Claus time.”
Maggie stopped there, as if she were trying to remember the color of the ribbon. The maids silently watched her through the flickering of the lamplight, not knowing if she was finished with her story or not. For a long time she didn’t move.
Then her chest heaved mightily, as if she had just remembered to breathe, and she said, “One Saditty we come up on a white man talking to a crowd about wanting they votes for guv’ner. This little sawed-off man say if he was to get elected he was going to put all the colored folks on a boat and send us back to Aferca. Then he see me standing there watching, and say, ‘Hey there, little girl!’ and I thought he was talking to me ’cause Momma Nell dressed me up so purty.”
Maggie stopped again to remember, smiling.
“Then he say, ‘Little girl, you going to like it over there in Aferca.’ Say, ‘Collard greens grow ten feet tall and they’s a possum in every stalk.’ He had a big laugh for a little sawed-off man. And everybody laugh right along with him. He petted me on my head and then reached in his pocket and give me a shiny new dime. Then he turns back to the peoples and say how much better Mississippi be without the niggers stanking up everything. Everybody clap and yell real loud.”
Maggie stopped again for a moment and looked down at her hands, still folded in her lap. “All I knowed was I got me a dime out of it.”
She raised her head and placed the back of her hand against the scarred flap of skin, like she might be shielding it from the sun. “I looked up at Momma Nell and big ol’ tears was falling down her face. ‘Why you crying for?’ I asked her. Momma Nell told me, ‘Girl, don’t you go spending that dime.’ She say, ‘Keep it and let it ’mind you of today. Don’t never forget who owns this here country. When you forget, you is dead.’ She told me to hold on to that dime till the day I can come to town and spend it free and proud.”
Maggie reached her stiffened fingers into the pocket of her dress. Out came a worn leather coin purse. She unsnapped it, reached into a little inside pocket, and brought out a tissue. Unfolding the paper in her hand, she held out a blackened coin in the lamplight. The maids all leaned in, staring wide-eyed, as if it were a hoodoo charm, pulsating in the dark.
“Many the time I got weak-willed and want to spend this here dime.” Maggie chuckled at herself. “Wanting me some candy. Or the fair come to town. Or a pretty boy. Dime burned a hole in my pocket, but I didn’t spend it,” she said proudly. “No ma’am. I held on to it like Momma Nell told me to.”
The maids were stone-silent, still studying the dime in Maggie’s old hand.
“Y’all know something?” Maggie asked, her eye circling the little group. “Befo’ I dies, I aim to spend this here dime.”
The next day four maids plus a one-armed juke proprietor, with little ceremony, wearing their best dresses and, in Sweet Pea’s case, a sassy red scarf, marched up the courthouse steps, through the vestibule, and past an oil portrait of the Senator looking as if he had everything under control. Not until they turned into the circuit clerk’s office did anybody take heed. Nellie Grindle looked up from her desk behind the counter, smile at the ready. Then she saw who it was. “What y’all girls want?” she asked sharply.
Vida hauled back her shoulders and opened her mouth, but it was Maggie who said, “I here to reddish for the vote.”
Nellie reached for her pointy-framed glasses that hung around her neck and studied the group for a moment before letting the glasses drop back to her chest. She managed to get herself to her feet. “Y’all wait right here!” she said, befuddled, and then fled the office.
“We in for it now,” Creola whispered.
“She gone for the sheriff, I just knows it,” Sweet Pea whispered back. “Our gooses is hanging on the spit and near about well done.”
Hannah patted her bosoms. “I got my razor if he tries messing with me. I’ll gut ’im like a catfish.”
“It ain’t too late,” Sweet Pea offered. “We can hightail it out that door.”
It was too late. Nellie had found Billy Dean across the hall in the chancery clerk’s office, double-checking the tax rolls, and returned with him in tow. Billy Dean took a few moments to study the group. His eyes lit on a woman, then he would shake his head and move to the next.
“Now, ain’t this a proud delegation from the colored community,” he said. “We got the county whore. A one-armed bootlegger. Two tubs of lard with three eyes between them.”
He glared at Vida. “And last but not least, the proud daughter of the local murdering reverend.” He smirked at his own cleverness. “This all them Yankee Jew agitators could scrape up?” He paused as if he expected some kind of response, yet the women had no idea what he was talking about. He homed in on Vida again. “So, you want to follow in your daddy’s footsteps, I see.”
Vida tried her hardest to hold his stare. “I proud to. I ain’t ashamed for my daddy.” After the words left Vida’s mouth, the sheriff’s eyes bucked her off like a wild horse. She dropped her gaze and studied his star instead.
A world of silence was cram-packed into the next few moments. The sheriff stood there, his jaw muscles bulging and the forked vein in his forehead ready to pop. The hush was so complete and lasted so long that the women dared to shift their eyes questioningly to one another. What life-and-death matters were being considered here?
Deputy Butts walked into the office, and the tension snapped like a cable. Everybody jerked their heads in his direction. For a moment his eyes bobbled back and forth, trying to get a handle on things. He stammered, “What’s going on here, Sheriff? You got trouble?”
Billy Dean heaved a breath. “No,” he said wearily, reaching his thumb up to his temple. “Nothing more than usual. Bunch of niggers doing their damnedest to ruin my day.”
Nellie was indignant. “It’s a sight more than that! They say they want to register to vote. Sheriff, this is getting out of hand.”
Billy Dean exploded. “Shut up, woman! I decide when things are out of hand or not. You understand that?”
Nellie couldn’t answer. Scarlet-faced, with her mouth agape, she stood there frozen, humiliated in front of a bunch of coloreds.
Vida watched Billy Dean carefully, waiting with everybody else to see what he was going to do now, after yelling at a white woman. The sheriff’s gaze fell on her. Again Vida looked directly into his eyes. She did not waver. For the first time in her life, Vida was holding a stare with a white man.
It was as if the world around her was hurtling out of control, yet she herself was balanced at its absolute center, enveloped in an eerie calm. Her thoughts were focused and sharp. Things were revealed to her. First she saw that the sheriff’s eyes were the deep, dark blue of the night. Nothing at all like Nate’s.
Then she saw another thing. Something she had never seen before in a white man’s eyes, burrowing there in the corners and squirming under the lids. She understood why the colored were never supposed to look there in the first place, lest they see it, too. The sheriff was afraid, and she knew it had to do with her. The idea was so ludicrous Vida almost laughed right out loud. Her whole life she had been at this man’s mercy, and now she saw that he was afraid of her. Why on earth?
In a flash, she understood deep in her bones what her father had meant. Even though she was a colored woman and maybe nobody would believe her, a story is made to be told and passed on. If
it is picked up and touched and handled enough times, the truth will at last shine through the telling, and the world will finally see. What she was doing now, this very second, would set Nate and all those like him free. That’s why those bad men in the Bible always tried to kill the story, no matter how lowly the teller. That’s why her father put his faith in the story. And Vida knew this man’s story. It was forever intertwined with her own. She could recite it loud and clear this very minute. Every jot and tittle. And he knew that she could.
The sheriff dropped his eyes. “Give them the test,” he said.
“What?” Nellie gasped.
Billy Dean looked at the old woman again, yet the fury was gone. Only tired was left. “Just give it to them, Nellie. They ain’t going to pass it no way.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but Billie Dean wouldn’t have it.
“Nellie,” he said, his finger aimed at the woman, marking off his words. “Not. Another. God. Damned. Word.” He spun around and left the office.
Nellie and Lampkin looked at each other in astonishment. As if the women were not there straining at every thought, spoken and unspoken, Nellie said indignantly, “Well, Lampkin, I reckon you’re going to be in for a promotion soon.”
The deputy grinned but didn’t comment.
Nellie stared sullenly at the door. “Billy Dean Brister couldn’t win another election if the Senator voted every dead man in the history of Hopalachie County.”
The women left the office and walked through the courthouse doors. They halted when they stepped out onto the gallery overlooking the square. All the town’s colored had fled, and a small crowd of whites had gathered around the stone soldier, staring back at them.
The women, terrified, started down the steps. As they did, people began to line both sides of the walk. The crowd was eerily silent, like the woods after a shotgun blast. At first Vida thought it was because the women had taken the town by surprise and they hadn’t had time to plan their courage.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 36
