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.
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.”