Hazel couldn’t hear Myron’s words over the music playing in her head. But she did not need to. She saw his mouth moving fiercely. It seemed like he was speaking an avalanche of words. She heard not a one.
The red box was light as a baby bird in her hands. Hazel held it for a moment, watching Myron’s lips. The front door slammed; Mrs. Finley must have gone. Hazel passed the box to her mother without looking away from Myron’s face, feeling relief sweep over her once it was out of her hands. She hadn’t even bothered to open it, look inside. See the pear-shaped sapphire there. That would come later. Instead, Hazel swept up the fabric of her skirt, fell to her knees in her mother’s front room, and took Myron’s face in her hands. Choking back sobs, she scolded him. Berated him. Told Myron he was a damn fool to waste all that money on a ring. Didn’t the man know she was his? Didn’t the man know he was hers? Didn’t he know this fact if no other?
I got you, remember? Remember? Such a damn fool to waste all that money. A shame, the whole thing. And supposed to be saving up for a house. Why, dear God, did she belong to such a damn fool?
What Hazel did not find out until later that afternoon—the three of them eating blackberry cobbler in the kitchen, her mother having decided to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments—was that as Myron knelt there on bended knee, concealed in the inside pocket of his jacket were his draft papers.
The two were married by week’s end. Myron gone to the front the following.
CHAPTER 15
August
1997
The morning had been trying. She was tired from lack of sleep, and she needed a cigarette. She didn’t even want to think about the number of appointments she had that day. August loved doing hair. She loved owning her own business and making Black women happy. But she didn’t feel much like doing hair that day. Something deep within her urged her to get back into bed and sleep.
She had groggily made breakfast for everyone: grits with sharp cheddar, salt pork fried hard. She heard the water running in their one shared bathroom in the middle of the house and knew Miriam was up and getting ready to go to her summer nursing school classes. There was a mound of dishes in the sink. August sighed, and got to work washing them.
It was Saturday in the summer. Summer meant August’s shop was full almost every day. It was hot—a humid, sticky, wet heat akin to the inside of a baked cornbread roll. The asphalt simmered and sizzled come late July. An egg could cook on the sidewalk. Mirages appeared distant and shimmering on the horizon. The nearness of the Mississippi made the humidity an enemy of most Memphis women. They needed their edges and curls tended to more often in the sweltering heat that words could not describe.
The argument that had ensued between Joan, Mya, and Derek lingered in August’s mind as she cleaned the dishes in the sink. Joan had run off to Miss Dawn’s—anger painted on her face like one of her artworks. A short walk, August had assured herself. The drive-by shooting had occurred the spring before, and tensions in Douglass seemed to thicken the already-heavy air. Kids didn’t play in the streets all day and night like they were wont to do. Mothers called their children in by sunset, shouting from screen porches, a whole hour before the streetlights came on.
August understood that the summer meant blood. School was out. The heat was driving folk crazy. Intermittent gunshots could be heard throughout Douglass at all hours of the day. Late the night before, she had heard the phone ring. She heard Derek’s footsteps squeak across the old hardwood floors. She heard the click of the pearl-handled receiver leaving its hook on the rotary phone in the hallway. She could hear only one side of the conversation, and it was muffled at best. But she had heard enough.
Words like retribution and choppers and trunk and body.
Laments like We can’t let this shit just go, mane, unchecked and We hit back soon, mane, soon and with all our niggas and Fuck, mane, in front of my goddamn house, it’s a warning.
August heard the final declaration of Let’s show Orange Mound how real niggas live.
Heard the antique phone receiver slam down.
When Derek walked into the kitchen that morning, August had felt a pain in her rib cage, on the left, where her heart was. Every day, Derek looked more and more like his father. He was tall and dark and brooding. And every day, just like his father, he bored deeper into crime.
At first, it was petty stuff. August remembered the apologetic phone calls from Stanley informing her that Derek had lifted a honey bun or a can of Coke or, once, a pack of Kools. Things had been hell ever since Derek attacked Joan back in ’88. He broke a girl’s arm not two years later. For little to no reason. Broke it like a wishbone in the middle of his fifth-grade class.
The state had taken him away for a second time after that. The white folk at the Department of Children’s Services made plain the third taking would be permanent. A counseling program had been mandated—a revolving door of therapists and psychiatrists and social workers had all declared the child “problematic,” “aggressive.” One counselor going so far as to write “dissociative personality disorder” down on one of Derek’s countless evaluation forms.
August didn’t know what to think. Only what she had to do. The state had made clear that Derek would need twenty-four-hour “surveillance.” Constant, consistent monitoring and care. Monthly surprise home visits from state evaluators.
She’d agreed to the state’s strict terms. What choice did she have? Let strangers, detached white doctors, raise her son?
That night, she’d packed up her college textbooks—packed up her dream of attending Rhodes like her mother before her, of perhaps even becoming a doctor—and, like winter sweaters, stowed them away in her dead mother’s armoire. Went to the shelf in the kitchen Meer could never quite reach without straining, found the nearest bottle, and sat that whole night with the whiskey and her thoughts and her sobs. But by the time morning light had streaked into the kitchen’s windows, she had a plan.
Hair—the idea had hit her like a drunken husband. Singing, she knew, was not an actual plan. She knew she had a voice that could shame most angels, and she also knew she wasn’t classically trained. A single session with Al Green when she was all of six does not a Nina Simone make. And shit, she wasn’t prepared to go hungry for a gift that mostly annoyed her. She thought about sewing, turning the house into Hazel’s childhood home, but the thought of mending white women’s clothes almost made August spit out her drink. No. If she had to serve, had to work for her bread and butter, then, goddamnit, she’d serve her own.
Years of piano had made her fingers nimble and athletic. She had been the family’s informal hairdresser, pressing and setting her mother’s curls faithfully every Sunday evening. Had done up Meer to look like Diana Ross in the flesh. Hair it would be. A shop in the house. The basement in the back was the perfect place. Hardly used, off the kitchen. She could make a separate walkway around the side of the house easy. Lay a few stones. Use the last of her mother’s small inheritance to buy the chairs, the dryers.
Yes, August thought to herself with the kind of clarity that drunkenness brings. Yes, I can do this. Shit, I gotta.
At dawn that morning, donning her kimono and swaying from the whiskey, August had headed out into the back garden her mother died in and searched for stones for her new path. Around midmorning, she fell asleep in the same spot where five years before she had found her mother.