“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.