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.