Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

in his crib. In the beginning she was afraid to touch him. Later, she was afraid to set him down. She studied him frantically for signs of intelligence, of hunger, of thirst, of infestation and blight, trying to read him like she would a field of corn, pleading with him to tell her what it was he wanted of her.

      “What would a good mother be doing now?” she asked him over and over. He stared back silently with those big, dark, Indian eyes, not so much looking at her, she thought, as considering her, like he was sizing her up.

      Floyd watched anxiously from the sidelines, hoping Hazel would find her gait and come around to the job. “Hazel,” he called to her one night, gently shaking her arm. “Honey, you’re doing it again. Wake up.”

      Awake now, she continued to cry. “Oh, Floyd! It was awful,” she sobbed. “I was trapped in Daddy’s storm pit and I couldn’t find the door. I knew it was there somewhere and it was so dark and I heard Johnny crying on the other side and I couldn’t get a match lit and he. . .and. . .”

      Floyd pulled her to him and soothed her with his words, letting her cry until she was all cried out. He said all the right things. That they were in it together. He would always be there for her. They had come a long way and had a wonderful life still ahead. He said even he had his doubts sometimes.

      “You, Floyd?” she asked, feeling an immense comfort in his confession.

      “Uh-huh. Everybody does.”

      “Tell ’em to me, Floyd.” She anxiously waited to hear what they were. Maybe she could comfort him for a change.

      Floyd switched on the light and smiled at her sympathetically. At first she thought he was going to say that he loved her. Maybe without the “anyway”—his expression was just that tender.

      “Hazel, honey?” he said.

      “Yes, sweetheart,” she answered, feeling comforted. “I’m listening.” She nuzzled up to his neck.

      “Hazel, honey,” he said again, “I think it’s time you learned about the Science of Controlled Thinking.”

      “Wha—?”

      “Now, hear me out,” Floyd said, taking her hand. “Controlled Thinking is the way to get rid of all the second-guessing you been doing. It’s the reason why I’m selling more equipment than any John Deere salesman in the Delta.”

      “Floyd, what has that got to do—”

      “Now, I’ve been considering it for a while, and I don’t think raising a baby is no different. Sure, you’re having a little problem adjusting to it all,” Floyd said. “Any change is hard. But change is also opportunity. If you let me help, I promise you’ll come around.”

      Floyd reached beside him on the nightstand and brought his book into bed with them. “Like I was reading last night, ‘Enthusiasm is contagious.’ And Hazel,” he said with a grin, “probably nobody around is more catching than me.”

      He began flipping through the pages and pointing out his favorite little sayings. “Listen to this,” he said excitedly. ‘. . .To a controlled thinker, every problem is an opportunity.’ ”

      “And here’s a good ’un: ‘Attitude determines altitude.’ And, ‘If life serves you a bum steer, eat steaks.’ How about this one: ‘If you get a raw deal—’ ”

      By then she had stopped listening. Those things didn’t make any sense to her at all, and she sure didn’t see what they had to do with Johnny Earl. So instead of looking at the book as he pointed out the words, she stared at the purple burn scars on his fingers and remembered the story he had told her when they were still getting to know each other. She had finally got up the nerve to ask about his mother. Without blinking, he said, “Died when I was six months old.”

      Hazel didn’t know what to say. She must have looked sad because Floyd quickly tried to reassure her. “It’s not like I knew her or anything.”

      “How’d she die?” Hazel asked, sounding a lot more sorrowful about the loss than he.

      Floyd looked down at his hands and began to rub the little purple blotches on his fingers that Hazel had always assumed were birthmarks. “Well, what they tell me is Momma was holding me in her arms, warming herself in front of the fireplace, when she had a stroke and fell out.” He held out his hands for her to see. “Daddy said I got these scars when I grabbed aholt of a burning log.”

      Hazel’s eyes had welled up with tears, not knowing what it would do to a person to reach out for his mother and touch fire instead. Yet Floyd told it as if it had happened to somebody else, somebody he had little patience for.

      Now she wondered why he wasn’t the one having nightmares, too. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t get past it all?

      Over the next few months, the more fearful she became, the more Floyd preached his religion of success at her. He told her in every failure is a seed for the next victory; it’s all in a person’s thinking. Then he began to write the sayings down on tablet paper and hung them around the house for her to find.

      “DON’T SPEND A SECOND OF TODAY FRETTING TOMORROW OR REGRETTING YESTERDAY,” the bathroom mirror warned her. The Philco greeted her with, “IT’S A MATTER OF MENTAL MAGNETISM: WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ATTRACTING TODAY?” “BE A CONTROLLED THINKER!” the hall closet door hollered.

      The last words she heard at night were from the lamp by her bed. The paper taped to its shade chided, “HOW FAST YOU TRAVEL ON THE TRACK TO SUCCESS IS DETERMINED BY YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT,” and to hear Floyd tell it, they were still only in slow motion. He had big plans for his family and was keeping a positive mind on the future, and she needed to be there with him.

      Hazel tried to live by his words, wanting desperately to be a good wife and a good mother, yet couldn’t gain that Floyd-Graham-rock-solid certainty. She watched with a mixture of wonderment and trepidation as Johnny ate regular, never got sick, learned to walk, and grew like he was supposed to. Best of all, he loved his mother and knew how to show it. That especially was a comfort. Of course Hazel loved him, too, but love took its toll. Hazel’s stabbing anxiety dulled to a constant dread.

      Not long after Johnny’s first birthday, Floyd talked her into getting pregnant again. He figured that with two children she wouldn’t have time to fret over things that didn’t matter. Another child would help prioritize her thinking, he advised.

      Hazel did as Floyd asked. She got pregnant and had another boy, Davie. She memorized more sayings. She recited them to her children like nursery rhymes. As much as she tried changing her thinking, she couldn’t get over feeling that she had only the loosest of handholds on the caboose of Floyd’s speeding train of success.

       1955

       Chapter Eight

       UP TO THE BIG HOUSE

      Even though she couldn’t find her voice to say it, Hazel figured their entire cottage could easily fit into this one room, and she was not alone in reverential silence. She and Floyd turned slowly in the middle of the empty parlor and neither spoke, as if a house this grand might not want to carry voices as common as their own. That the house was now theirs may have been a reality on paper, yet this minute, as they gawked openmouthed, that truth felt as hollow as the cavernous rooms themselves.

      “Well, punkin,” Floyd said, whispering for a reason unknown to him, “it took me six years to keep my promise. But I did it. I got you out of that slave cabin and put you up on the hill.”

      He