Chapter Thirty-Five: Help Arrives
Chapter Thirty-Six: Hazel Gets A Friend
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Answered Prayers
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Set Up For A Fall
Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Freedom Riders
Chapter Forty: The Rosa Parks League
Chapter Forty-One: Delia’s Last Request
Chapter Forty-Two: A Game Of Catch
Chapter Forty-Three: The Informer
Chapter Forty-Four: All Is Well
Chapter Forty-Six: Maggie’s Dime
Chapter Forty-Seven: Sweating It Out In Tarbottom
Chapter Forty-Eight: The Hospitality State
Chapter Forty-Nine: The Resurrection
PROLOGUE
It was up to Vida to save her boy. With Nate in her arms, she fled through the back door and toward the darkened field behind the house. If she could get Nate to the bayou beyond, into the dark stand of cypress, he would be safe.
The two white men must have heard the back screen slap shut, because the lights of their truck were now cutting across the field. She turned. It roared toward her, plowing through rows of cotton, the bumper mowing down plants half as tall as men. They were almost upon her. There was no way she could make it to the bayou. Vida dropped down between two rows, cradling Nate beneath her.
The truck braked and she heard a door open. She peeked above the row. They stood only a few yards away, listening to the night, the headlights throwing their shadows long across the field.
Nate whimpered and one stumbled off in the direction of the sound.
The old man lurched after him. “Don’t!” he shouted. “You don’t want to kill nobody, son. Specially not no little baby. Specially not yore. . .”
“Shut your goddamned mouth! He ain’t my nothing,” the other one slurred. “That boy lives, I lose it all!”
The old man called out in a panic, “Gal! Stay down. You hear me? Don’t raise up.” He reached out and tugged at the barrel of the gun.
Vida leaped up and started off again.
Moments later came the first blast, followed quickly by the second. With blinding force, the searing spray of buckshot sent Vida and her child tumbling into darkness.
As the explosions echoed throughout the quarter, the lanterns in the shanties dimmed as quickly as they had come on.
BOOK ONE
HAZEL AND VIDA
Chapter One
A MAN WHO TAKES CARE OF HIS OWN
Hazel was busy arranging a display of Tangee beauty products at the Rexall where she had been working in Tupelo when a tall handsome man right off the bus, fresh from the Navy and still wearing his summer whites, strode confidently into the drugstore. His eyes were two dark stars.
He grinned at her and tilted his head in a way that set the butterflies in her stomach to fluttering. “Is the druggist in? I need to get me a prescription filled for a root beer float.” He spoke in a voice like a country love song, tender and true. At first Hazel couldn’t answer, she could only stare wide-mouthed at him as if she were waiting for the second verse. “Now, you wouldn’t happen to know the formula for one, would you?”
Blushing, she could only stammer, “I sure do. . .can. . .will.” By the time she got behind the fountain, she had calmed herself enough to joke, “I won’t even ask to see your doctor’s note.”
That made him laugh. It was a good laugh, gentle, seemingly incapable of meanness. Setting the glass before him, she warned with a wink, “Don’t eat it too fast or you’ll freeze your goozle.”
He said, “I’m sure not in any hurry now.”
It was his eyes that really got her attention. Like dark mirrors of polished iron, they were beautiful to look at, but they wouldn’t let Hazel in. His eyes seemed to push back on her, which made her want to come all the closer. She told him, “I bet you could stare a buzzard out of a tree.”
He blushed and said, “You got the best posture of any girl I’ve ever met.”
Hazel could tell he wanted to say more, but he didn’t need to. In his mirrored eyes she saw herself as pretty, as pretty as she’d felt the day that traveling photographer had snapped her picture.
Hazel had been twelve years old when the slick-haired, sugar-talking man arrived one hot summer afternoon with the mysterious black box he swore would show her to be as pretty as anybody in the movies. Up until then, she had never seen a photograph of herself. While he set up his camera and posed each one of her brothers and sisters, she flirted with him, tossing back her hair and licking her lips the way she had seen Jean Harlow do. Standing out in the yard as the man took her picture, she felt her skin burn at the thought of escaping the Tombigbee Hills.
Her mother never had any patience for this full-of-feelings girl. Each time Hazel asked if the pictures had arrived, she was warned about getting her hopes up. “Hope does the plowing in Misery’s field,” her mother said. But the delicious anticipation of things hoped for had to be the best sensation Hazel knew of. She didn’t know how she could live without thinking something good was about to happen, not in the sweet by-and-by but tomorrow, if not today.
When the photographs finally arrived two months later, her hands trembled as she opened the envelope. The first was of her momma and daddy sitting stiffly next to each other, the way strangers share a bench at the dentist’s office. The next was of her daddy with his arm around his mule’s neck. How much more at ease he appeared posing with a plow mule!
Finally she