The emerald fabric draped itself around Hazel as she bit her lip, pressing needle through cloth. She adjusted the quilting hoop in her lap. It was difficult to get comfortable with the sheer size of her front and the angle of the oval wooden hoop that held the quilt together.
“This quilt going to get done, you hear me?” In frustration, Hazel stopped fidgeting and spoke again to her almost child. “And I’m going to get my shape back after you. Mmm-hmm. You heard me. Mama cannot be this thick forever.”
Maybe it was the music, but Hazel did not hear the car engine idling in her driveway. Perhaps because she was focused on adjusting the cushions behind her back, getting her sewing hoop to sit on her lap just right, all while the baby kicking inside her, she did not see Casey Barnes get out of the squad car, tuck his cap in the crook of his arm, and climb the steps that led to her porch.
But the neighbors must have, because the guitar strumming ceased and Mr. Emmanuel’s voice down the way died down.
Puzzled at the sudden quiet, Hazel glanced up from her work. Caught a glimpse of red hair standing outside the front door like an omen, the Argo’s black sail.
She thrust the quilt and her sewing pincushion to the floor and rushed to the door and out onto the porch.
The officer stood before her and muttered under his breath that Myron’s squad car had been found in an abandoned salvage yard on Mud Island, his body, bruised and broken, found and pulled from the Mississippi a mile downriver.
Before Hazel could process this information, she was drawn to the demeanor of the man. The way Barnes avoided Hazel’s eyes was all the proof she needed that whatever had happened to Myron, her Myron, had been no accident. Myron had been murdered. By members of the very force who had sworn to protect and defend and honor.
Earlier that day, cleaning out the catfish entrails, Hazel had grieved her mother. Hazel knew loss. Grief was all she had left of her mother. Nothing to be done about it but miss the woman. But that early evening on her front porch, Hazel came to know rage. It was not Myron’s time. Nothing natural took her husband. No heart attack, no old age, no cancer. This white man had taken him. That, and only that, became Hazel’s mania.
What Hazel did next she had wanted to do her entire life. She mustered everything inside her, let it marinate, soaked it up in the back of her throat, cocked back her head, and hurled a glob of spit at the officer’s face. The spit landed just above his left eye and slid down along his nose like egg yolk hitting a wall.
Barnes paused for a moment. He gave a startled, nervous laugh. Nodded his head. Took out a white handkerchief and wiped his face. “You’re lucky you’re pregnant,” he said.
“You’re lucky I’m pregnant, too,” she shot back in an alto she never knew she possessed, staring him straight in the eye with pure wrath in her heart. “Because if I had the strength,” she said, raising a quivering arm to point at the large magnolia in her yard. “I’d hang you right there. Right from that tree. Watch your body rot. Picnic underneath it.”
Snickering all the while, Barnes placed his cap on his head and slowly walked backward down the porch steps. Eugene was waiting for him in the driver’s side of the idling car. His smile Cheshire cat big.
After they left, after Hazel sank screaming to the stone of her porch and had to be carried inside by the men and women on Locust Street who had come running, sprinting to her aid, something quiet and lovely happened.
All of Douglass—the teenagers in love, the tired workingmen, the even more tired womenfolk—all of them stood on the steps of the porch of the house Myron had built for Hazel, stood on the lawn, climbed up in the branches of the magnolia and found seats where they could. The people in the neighborhood stood watch that night. Stood there all night. Not a one saying a word. Stood watch over Hazel and her baby. Some of the men fetched their old war uniforms. Stood saluting the house. That whole night.
A week later, Hazel pushed her daughter out of her insides the same day the headline of the Memphis Gazette read, NATION HORRIFIED BY LYNCHING OF CHICAGO BOY EMMETT TILL.
Hazel had erupted when she read the news. Along with apple sauce, Earl Grey tea, and a piece of stiff cornbread, a white nurse had left the morning paper on Hazel’s breakfast tray. Hadn’t given it a second thought. Security was called into the delivery room, the same white nurse screaming for help. Guards had to restrain Hazel. They tied her wrists to the bed, avoiding her teeth and nails, which tore at the closest white flesh they could find.
The new mother had set fire to the newspaper. Watched it burn black on the floor.
“Miriam,” Hazel christened her daughter. As close a girl’s name as she could get to “Myron.”
CHAPTER 20
Joan
2001
The beginning of fall in the South was something to behold. The summer heat—a slow-moving tornado—had finally left the area. Nights were a pleasant cool. We could sit out on the front porch unbothered because there were fewer bees, fewer birds, fewer cats even. Magnolias in Memphis, including the big one in the backyard, had blossomed their last flowers. The plum tree alongside the house had dropped its last fruit some time ago, but the area around the base was still stained indigo. The dogwoods and maples and cherry trees lining Poplar Avenue had a slight touch of corn husk yellow as if God had placed dabs of butter on each leaf, so that when a breeze caught, the trees ignited in soft flame. Fall in the South meant Midas came down and touched everything. The trees seemed to be made of gold itself. Leaves became copper coins catching in the wind.
It was the beginning of my junior year. Through the window of my Honors U.S. History class, I could see a maple just beginning to turn crimson in the September wind. Mr. Harrison stood at the front of the room, lecturing while covering the chalkboard in his neat scrawl with details about Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Mr. Harrison, a gruff man whose accent reminded me of an old Confederate general, was a secret liberal and a devout Cubs fan. A diamond in the rough in the South. I’d had him in tenth grade, too, and in the afternoons, he’d let me sit in his room and listen to the Cubs play the Cardinals, our archenemies. He was an acceptable white man, but not one I could trust. The man still taught that the Civil War was over states’ rights.
“Yes, the states’ right to own human beings!” I had shouted in the middle of one of his lectures last year, to stunned silence.
My mind wandered as he went on about the New Deal, walking up and down between the rows of desks. I loved history, but truth be told, I wouldn’t fully pay attention unless we were studying the Civil War or Stalingrad or the Battle of the Marne. Wars fascinated me. How on earth could a sane man charge into a volley of bullets—say, at D-Day? Weren’t they terrified? The odds of surviving something like the Marne or Shiloh were so, so small. Didn’t the men know that? Standing there, waiting for death? Knowing they were walking straight into harm’s way? Didn’t they know that it didn’t matter who they were or whom they loved or what else they’d gone through, bombs or bullets would take them down just the same. Like me, I thought suddenly. Like me walking into Auntie August’s house six years ago, when I knew what lived inside.
“Joan,” Mr. Harrison said warningly. He had made his way over to my desk and was looking down at my notebook, where I’d been sketching the maple in one corner of the page.