Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

had to do it. Taking the advertisement to Gooseberry’s Department Store, she suited herself up as close as she could come to the happy woman.

      Hazel put shirts and shoes and bow ties on the boys, loaded them up, and in her new picture hat with a blue satin ribbon, silk chiffon scarf, and white gloves, backed away from their beautiful home and drove up and down Gallatin Street, from the bridge to the church and around the courthouse, looking happy, six times a day.

       Chapter Nine

       THE TROIS ARTS LEAGUE

      Hazel stepped back from the hall mirror and tugged at her skirt, evening the hemline. The dress was the most beautiful thing she had ever bought, an ice-blue shirtwaist made of silk shantung, which the salesman swore set her eyes to dancing like the sunlight on lake water. She took a tissue from the hostess pocket and, leaning in close to the glass, carefully dabbed at the lipstick in the corner of her mouth. Next she fussed expertly with the collar, smoothing the tips down flat.

      Well, the clothes and the makeup were certainly up to muster. Everything shaded, highlighted, smoothed down and lined up. However, what Hazel couldn’t see was the person between the lines. Touching her cheek gently, she longed for Floyd and wished he was there to tell her how beautiful she looked. A glimmer in his eye would do. But he wasn’t there, and she needed to do this on her own. Floyd was counting on her to be a team with him.

      At his insistence, she had invited some of the neighbor ladies over for punch and to show them what she had done with the house. More than three months had passed since they had moved in, and not a single person had come calling. Floyd had told her, “Hazel, you can’t wait for success to come knocking. You have to find out where it lives and then go hunt it down with a stick.”

      “Floyd, I don’t know what to say to women like that. What do they talk about?” Whatever it was, she was sure it wasn’t mules, heel flies, and ringworm.

      The women reigning in the houses around her were formidable-looking creatures, skin untouched by the sun and white as alabaster, with rouged cheeks, severe as Delta sunsets, their shoulders pulled back and chests puffed out, dripping with brooches and breastpins and cameos like generals on inspection. They were proper in ways that were foreign to Hazel, having cultivated curious manners that pushed you away rather than pulled you closer. When met on the street they could use a smile like an extended arm as if to say, “OK, that’s near enough.”

      Hazel stood there at the mirror waiting for the bourbon to kick in. To make it through more and more days, she had been relying on the Jim Beam in the pretty decanters that Floyd received from the Senator each Christmas and kept lined up on the counter. She knew she shouldn’t, but sometimes it was the only way to muster the hope she needed to keep on going.

      She remembered her first drink. As a girl, wandering the outcroppings, she came upon one of the places where her father hid his shine under a rock ledge. When Hazel unscrewed the top and brought the bottle up to her nose, the smell cut her breath and made her eyes burn. Should she? The preacher said it was a sin. Her mother called it a curse. However, that didn’t stop her daddy from devoting a good portion of his life to it.

      Hazel took a drink. The clear liquid breathed its fiery breath deep down into her and caused her to tear up and cough. She took another.

      The sensation was like nothing she had expected, like two warm hands clasping her face. Her spirits soared higher than the chinquapin oaks before her, higher than the Appalachian foothills that surrounded her. She now understood why her father drank. He missed hope, too. When she couldn’t find hope in Floyd’s eyes, sometimes a sip or two of bourbon would hold her over the dry spells.

      Hazel heard Johnny yelling from the backyard. “Momma! She’s here! She’s here!”

      At last! The maid Floyd had promised for the day. A day was probably as long as she would last. Maids came and went with such regularity, Hazel barely got to know their names, because usually by the end of their first day on the job Floyd had found some reason to suspect them of stealing from him.

      Hazel waited to hear the confirming slap of the back door and then called out, “Bring her on in here!” She quickly drained the bourbon from the tumbler she kept hidden behind the flour sack and popped a peppermint in her mouth.

      A husky voice sang out, “Whoo-ee!” When Hazel turned, the first thing that caught her eye was a stretch of white fabric showcasing a prominent rear end. At that moment the colored woman it was attached to was gazing into the parlor, her hands planted on her well-rounded hips.

      “Look at all them pretty colors,” the woman said, apparently to the boys who stood on either flank. “More tints than One Wing Hannah’s jukebox.”

      Davie yelped and then took off in the direction of the green vinyl sectional, undoubtedly with the aim of scaling up the back of the couch and jumping off. A split second later, Johnny was in hot pursuit.

      The woman turned again toward Hazel. She was wearing the snuggest maid’s uniform Hazel had ever seen. Her breasts pooched out the top of her dress, reaching for daylight. Her smile involved at least two gold teeth. “Hidey. My name’s Sweet Pea. You Miss Hazel?”

      “Glad to know you,” Hazel said hesitantly. Where did Floyd find this one? she wondered. He was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

      Sweet Pea turned back around and surveyed the room again. “Where you get all them nice things, Miss Hazel? I never seen nothing like it in Delphi.”

      That definitely tipped the scales in the maid’s favor. She gave Sweet Pea a big grin and crossed the hall to stand next to the woman. “And you won’t see nothing like it in the whole state of Mississippi, neither,” she said excitedly. She had been wanting so badly to brag on herself. “I had to order all the way to Chicago. The salesman says this stuff is just catching on. Colors nobody ever heard of before. Just invented. Parakeet green. Flamingo pink. Peacock blue. I tried to get some of each.”

      Sweet Pea laughed. “Um-hum! I can see that. Look like a big flock of zoo birds done shedded all over your company room.” She took a moment to admire the yellow Formica coffee table in the shape of a prize banana, the plastic end tables with gleaming enameled metal legs, and the aluminum pole lamp with pink, blue, and green bullet shades. “Yo furniture shinier than the front end of a Cadillac. And not a stick of wood to be seen.”

      “You’re mighty gracious to say so,” Hazel said delightedly. “When that salesman showed me all those pretty pictures, I said to myself, why be old-fashioned when nowadays you can get everything in plastic, chrome, and vinyl?”

      Sweet Pea waggled her head appreciatively. “Must be a joy to sit here in this room when the morning sun hits it. You probably need to put you on some sunglasses to do your dusting.”

      The maid’s opinion, even though it was a colored one, was doing wonders to boost Hazel’s confidence. For the first time since Floyd suggested the party, she almost looked forward to the ladies coming over. If they were only half as struck as Sweet Pea, Hazel would do Floyd proud.

      After Johnny had successfully fussed his brother down from the couch, Hazel told him, “Take Davie outside and finish that quiet game y’all were playing, OK honey? We got to get things ready for company.”

      Sweet Pea asked, “What we going to feed these womens, Miss Hazel?”

      Hazel pulled the newspaper article from her waist pocket. It was titled Entertaining: Elegant and Easy. “Now here’s some new recipes they say everybody just loves. I thought between the two of us we could figure out how to put it together. I bought all the ingredients.”

      “What you want me to do?”

      “Well, I ain’t much in the kitchen,” Hazel said, “so you do the cooking part and I’ll do the opening and stirring. And you can serve it, if you don’t mind.”

      This took Sweet Pea back for a moment. “No’m, I don’t mind,” she said, half smiling, amused at the thought that her minding had something