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.