The car in our driveway honked again, longer this time.
“Nigga, go,” I said.
“Hear, hear,” Mya said, her British inflection slightly muffled through her mouthful of grits. But behind Mya’s humor, her eyes were ice cold. She’d asked me that first night we arrived, and not one time since, what had happened between me and Derek. She didn’t need to know the details to know whose side she was on. Mya could annoy the shit out of me the way only younger sisters can. Her constant jokes. Always checking my forehead. The way she looked over my shoulder while I was doing geometry homework and shouted out the correct answers in her Mary Poppins voice before I got even halfway through understanding the question. But she’d fight Satan for me, tiny fists balled up and unafraid.
“Joan,” Auntie August said with a sigh. She sounded tired. The coffee had spilled down the front of her robe, and she reached for a paper towel.
Derek took one long pull from the pint of buttermilk and then placed it back and closed the refrigerator door.
“Goddamnit, Derek, don’t go,” Auntie August said.
During the school year, boys with pistols bulging from the back of their jean waistbands had showed up at our doorstep each morning promptly at seven-thirty to escort me, Mya, and Derek, their young new recruit, to the Douglass High School. The middle school and elementary were located just a block away. It had become the most dangerous block in North Memphis. The night before we first went to our new school two years ago, Auntie August had sat me and Mya down while Mama was in the shower and told us frankly that in the time since Mama had up and left with our Yankee father, the Douglass Park 92 Bishops had controlled our new neighborhood and the surrounding hoods of North Memphis: Douglass, Chelsea, New Chicago. I had a feeling Auntie wanted to add “no good” to her description of Daddy, but she stopped short. She sucked on a Kool and continued explaining calmly that we should never wear red, never wear blue. Stick to neutrals. Always. An affiliate of the Bloods, the Douglass Park Bishops wore red bandanas hanging off their back pockets or tied around still-growing biceps. They shot people, she said. Children. Asleep in their beds.
Mama would sometimes say Memphis had changed since she was last here. There were just as many abandoned lots, payday loan sharks, and liquor stores as churches now, peppering the city where once had stood pillars and monuments of Blackness—Clayborn Temple, Sun Records, the Lorraine Motel. I’d overheard Auntie August telling Mama that most white folk had fled to the countryside in the early part of the decade, to the cotton fields of Shelby County and its white-only schools. Sometimes I thought the gangs were a blessing in a way. Made Memphis Black. Utterly. Black men and women ran these streets without a white person in sight—a relief. If Memphis were alive, gangs would be both her red and white blood cells—killing and healing and repeating.
Earlier that spring, Kings Gate Mafia, a subset of the Crips, crept north and rolled on Derek’s new boss, Slim. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Slim was high priest of the Douglass Park Bishops, but even he could not dodge bullets. Slim’s house was across the street from ours. Back in May, a black Lincoln had pulled up slow in front of Slim’s house, and three almost-boys, barely men, hanging out the windows, AK-47s extended, had shot every living thing inside Slim’s one-story midcentury Southern home: Slim, his mama, his grandmama, and a German shepherd that had protected the family and the block for six years. Wolf had played with her.
Once we were sure the bullets had stopped, we’d all gone out on the porch in our pajamas. It was late at night, but even in the moonlight we could see that the pecan tree in Slim’s front yard, the one we had climbed and whose nuts we had gorged ourselves on countless times, had been ravaged by the volley of bullets. Auntie August smoked a Kool and drew her kimono around her tighter when the breeze picked up. Mama’s hair was tied up in a pink silk bonnet. She twisted her gold rosary in her fingers. Mya wiped sleep out of her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown. Derek, wearing a long flannel, muttered curse words under his breath. Eventually we heard sirens. Watched the bodies, draped in white sheets, being carried into ambulances. The police cars and ambulances lit up our street in an eerie red glaze. I don’t remember any of us saying anything until, finally, I had seen it all—Mama asked my aunt for a cigarette.
Another honk from outside, then a bunch more in rapid succession.
“Nigga, leave already,” I said. I knew the car outside, a tan-colored Chevy, belonged to Pumpkin. Knew Derek was likely to run around Memphis with him doing God could only guess.
Derek kissed his mother lightly on the cheek and walked out, but not before calling from the parlor, “You got a smart mouth, girl.”
“I got a nice left hook, too,” I shouted back.
“Joan!” Auntie August said again.
I looked down at my sketch. The vase of purple violets suddenly looked rotten and pathetic, like bruises overflowing from an urn. Damaged life spilling out of death. I felt hot tears coming on against my will, a burning rage born from utter powerlessness. I closed my sketchbook and got up. Our kitchen table was doing nothing for my art.
I shrugged. “What he going to do to me? Sorry, what else he going to do to me?”
“Why won’t anybody tell me what he did?” Mya asked and banged one end of her fork down hard on the table.
“Eat your grits,” Auntie August said.
“I’m going to Miss Dawn’s,” I said and as I traced Derek’s steps through the parlor and out into the morning light, I thought about curses and combs.
CHAPTER 13
Hazel
1937
Hazel took cautious steps as she made her way to Stanley’s. It was only a block way, but not only was the ground like quicksand, but she was also wearing her father’s too-big work boots, which made it extra hard to balance. She might be only fifteen, but she imagined that even when she was fifty, the boots wouldn’t fit.
The flood that winter had washed away most of Memphis. Old folk in the neighborhood said it was as devastating, as deadly, as the quake that had flattened the Delta city back in 1865. The Mississippi swelled with heavy rainwater, and with one last heavy thunderstorm, the river finally busted, flooding the surrounding tributaries at a rate no one had envisioned—and thus, no one was prepared. Entire neighborhoods and the people who lived in them were swept away in the rising brown waters. In a matter of hours. It was a force of God. The end of days. Families scrambled atop their roofs and held up signs that simply read, SAVE US. And some were saved. Boats usually used for fishing in Wolf Creek were outfitted to save as many of the thousands of Black folk perched atop their homes in North Memphis as they could.
Hazel’s father had taken one of those boats out and never come back. One of the families he’d saved had found her and her mother afterward, wrung their hands as they told how he’d climbed onto their roof to help pass their string of toddlers to the waiting hands in his fishing boat, the floodwaters rising around him. Over his head.
Two months now without her father, the ground was still mostly mud. It gave way so that folk slipped and slid in it, got their cars stuck in the thick of it. Folk got to calling it “Memphis mud.” Hazel hadn’t wanted to go out into the mess at all, but her mother wanted meat that night—flood or not. And when Della Thomas wanted a thing, she got it.