Derek was returned for the final time six months later, and though violence seemed to hum just underneath his skin, CPS hadn’t been called again. Within a year, August had become the most coveted, the busiest, the best hair stylist in all of North Memphis. She hoped more than anything that her mother, wherever she was, was proud.
* * *
—
Lost in her thoughts, August realized she had washed the same pot four times now. But she couldn’t get the morning’s events out of her head. Pumpkin pounding his car horn a few minutes after Derek walked in. He was coming to collect his new protégé. She knew Pumpkin well. Seventeen years old, the same age as Derek, Pumpkin was short and a bit thick and a golden-brown color; his nickname had stuck. He’d come to the house and walk Derek and the girls to Douglass. She let him. What choice did she have? She remembered the fierce argument with Miriam. It was their first in years. August remembered how it had come to screams.
“I’ll be goddamned if I get my girls messed up in this,” Miriam had said, pounding a fist on the table.
August was taken aback. Her sister rarely swore. When she did, August knew Miriam was not herself. But August struck back with her tongue: “Your God is dead, Meer. Where the fuck you think we live? This the hood. Our house is the hood now. There is a gang war in this place. They shoot children walking to school now.” August had stumbled around the last sentence. The word caught in her throat, and she fought back tears. “And not no one gives a single goddamn. Not no one. Not the police. No one. They’ll shoot them for wearing the wrong goddamned color, Meer. Think about that. Think about how absolutely fucked that is.”
“And so, what? We go along with the crazy?” Miriam had yelled. “We let our children walk to school hand in hand with gangsters? Not my girls.”
“My child is a monster, Miriam!” August’s voice, a natural alto, had shaken the rafters themselves. She had called her sister by her full Christian name, not her pet name. Something August couldn’t ever remember doing before. “They already live with a gangster!”
Finally rinsing the pot, August now thought about the kiss on her cheek Derek had planted before running out to meet Pumpkin. The “I love you, Mama” none of the girls heard him whisper in her ear.
“Nigga, go,” Joan had said.
August had felt Derek’s kiss long after he’d gone. Like every man she had ever known. She put the pot back in the soapy water and began scrubbing again, worried about everyone she loved around her.
CHAPTER 16
Hazel
1955
Hazel stood at the kitchen sink scraping scales from a catfish. She had cleaned and filleted five already, gutted out entrails and lined the fish on the counter to her left, face-up, their glassy eyes open.
She wiped her brow with her forearm, shifted her weight. She would make sure to take a seat, have a rest in a few. Myron was always on her about it. Only you would be frying fish hotter than hell outside, he’d said to her that morning, kissing her forehead. Stubborn as anything. Nine months pregnant in August in Memphis. Stubborn as all hell.
She smiled as she reached for another catfish. Silver fish scales caught the light and reflected the colorfully painted walls, turning Hazel’s sink into a rainbow of colors. She remembered Myron adding the finishing touches, flowers blooming on the walls against the warm buttermilk backdrop. Few knew he could draw. It was something he had hidden even from her—until, one day, doing the laundry, fishing in his pants pockets for loose change, she had discovered a napkin with an exact copy of her sleeping face on it.
How Myron survived the war was anyone’s guess. Hazel had received weekly letters from him, now a Marine Corps private, alluding to his location—Normandy, the Ardennes, Buchenwald. The atrocities at each, the details of the carnage, Myron never included. Only his love for his new wife, his desire for the touch of her.
They had waited—Hazel insisting throughout the years, stopping Myron’s kisses at a certain point—so that, on their wedding night, the boy who had grown into a man was waiting for her. All Hazel could remember, after he had removed her lace gown and laid her down on a quilt her mother had made for them, was that a man and a woman together, loving, reminded her of butter pecan ice cream.
When Myron had come home from the war in ’45, he had promptly begun work on his long-awaited wedding present. In the two years he was gone, Hazel had been true to her word, filling her hatbox to the brim with everything she saved. She remembered him standing on a small ladder in their new kitchen and hand-painting lilacs and lavender, hiding dates in the bouquets—birthdays, their wedding date.
Hazel fell into a reverie as she scraped the fillets, her mind on her wedding day. The rush of it. A different kind of shotgun wedding. Her mother had canceled her appointments for the week. Della had ripped the lace straight off Mrs. Finley’s dress order. She spent her nights applying Mrs. Finley’s lace to Hazel’s wedding dress. Stayed up that entire week muttering to herself that her baby would have the best on her day.
Miss Dawn. Word of Myron’s proposal and his draft papers had traveled like a winged messenger to her doorstep. The next day, Douglass awoke to the sound of the cowrie shells in her long braids jingling in the Memphis morning air. She wore a long print dress of a kind of fabric no one there had seen before—a West African batik the color of the sea. She walked straight into their house, not bothering to ring the doorbell. A simple toss of her long braids laced with shells and dove feathers was sufficient announcement. When she entered Della’s shop, Miss Dawn declared in a voice raspy with age older than her thirty-odd years that the wedding would be held in her backyard. And she’d not hear of anyone but her paying a dime for it.
But what even Miss Dawn couldn’t have foretold was that her money didn’t end up being necessary. All of Douglass had pitched in. The men smoked hogs slow for days and brought over vats of neck bones and jars of pickled pigs’ feet, and the women brought warm loaves of cornbread and saucepans full of candied yams and strawberries as big as rubies embedded in pies as deep as mines.
Hazel remembered cupping a hand to her open mouth when she first saw Miss Dawn’s backyard. Where the fields and fields of baby’s breath came from, Hazel was too stunned ever to ask, but the white fluff covered everything. Looked like snow had fallen in one particular spot in the South in early June. An old, cracked gazebo became the altar. Turned-over milk crates padded with quilts from her mother’s front room became seats.
Stanley had given her away. The morning after Myron proposed, Hazel set out early for the deli with determined steps. She pushed past the line of women already gathered to purchase their thin-cut turkey slices, their hand-churned butter and fresh, warm sourdough bread. Hazel issued “excuse me, ma’am” after “pardon me” until she reached Stanley, who had one hand around a can of pickled beets while the other held up a bouquet of river trout.
“Miss Thomas,” Stanley said with surprise in his voice.
“It’ll be ‘Mrs. North’ soon enough,” Hazel said, breathless and beaming. She held up her left hand. No one could miss the sapphire perched on her ring finger.
She heard the cries from the women behind her: