Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

I ask you again. How mighty was his mother’s love?”

      The shouting now was deafening, and some rose to their feet.

      “Her love was mighty!” a deacon called at the top of his voice.

      Levi looked down at his daughter again as if giving her this final chance to give her answer, and then he raised his arms over his head and sang out to the rafters, “Mighty enough to let that baby go!”

      That day six years earlier, her father’s words had whipped up a roiling sea of emotion through the church. All around her, people were standing with their palms toward heaven, others rocking side to side on their benches and clapping their hands. Vida was caught up in a mighty current that promised to pull her and her son under.

       Chapter Eleven

       FISHERS OF MEN

      “What you think you’re staring at?” Hazel asked.

      She sat parked in her Lincoln, gazing through the windshield at the country store. On the front gallery stood a group of colored fieldworkers gathered for their noontime meal. They were pretending to ignore Hazel, all except one, a sullen girl about Hazel’s age who was at that moment trying her best to burn a hole in her freshly made face with a scalding look.

      Hazel didn’t take any notice of the girl. It was someone else who held her attention.

      “Look at you,” Hazel fussed. “Natural blond hair with a little blue ribbon to match your eyes. Good teeth. Probably never knew an ugly day in your life. Everything handed to you on a silver platter, like that slice of light bread you’re eating. You the kind everybody wants to have in their club, ain’t you, little girl?”

      Little Miss Sally Sunbeam, whose face stared back from the bread advertisement attached to the store’s battered screen door, didn’t answer. She just smiled, acting innocent. Yet Hazel knew this girl was doing more than selling bread. She was taunting Hazel. Her eyes, still baby blue after years of weather and dust, said, “Pretty is as pretty does.”

      “What the hell does that mean, anyway?” Hazel said back. “Sounds like something Floyd would come up with.”

      Floyd’s slogans never made much sense to Hazel, but beneath the snappy phrases she could hear his scolding voice: “Catch up! Catch up! You’re dragging your end of it.” Just where was it they were going in such a hurry? That’s what she wanted to know. Hazel drained the last of the bottle.

      From off in the distance she thought she could hear the gnarling and rumbling of what could have been a herd of ferocious animals closing in on her and her boys. When she turned toward the field she saw one of Floyd’s hulking green machines, growling greedily, eating its way through the impossibly white cotton.

      Hazel glanced down at her two boys drowsing next to her on the front seat, Johnny leaning against the door and Davie nuzzled under his brother’s arm. After riding through the country with Hazel for hours, they were tuckered out.

      Since her humiliation at the hands of her neighbors, Hazel had abandoned her town route and taken to driving down from the bluffs and out into the Delta. Each morning she drove the endless depression for miles, along desolate dirt roads where the only people who would see her were field hands or work gangs from the state penitentiary—nobody she expected Floyd was out to impress. Driving the earth’s flattened-down places, Hazel could yell and cuss and cry to her heart’s content. Nothing could creep up on her. Everything could be seen at once and for what it was. Out here was where the bare-bones truth lived, plain and simple and absolute. No silly childish dreams or false hopes or wishful thinking could survive. It was like looking God square in the eye and speaking your name and daring him to strike you dead.

      Hazel usually drove until her half-pint ran out. Then she went home and spent the rest of the afternoon sobering up for Floyd. Lately, however, a half-pint hadn’t done the trick. Hope couldn’t be roused from its sickbed. So Hazel blew her horn twice and a colored boy sitting on the gallery saw her and then ducked into the store.

      Her children had begun to stir with the honking, but Hazel didn’t notice. She had locked her eyes on Miss Sally again. The girl was still holding the bread up to her mouth, as if she had all the time in the world. No sense in gobbling it down. Sally knew there was more where that slice came from. Didn’t know what it was to make do with nothing.

      “Yeah, Little Miss Sunbeam,” Hazel said, feeling good and sorry for herself now, “you don’t know what life can do to people like me. Make-do people. That’s what I am.” She hiccupped.

      The screen door swung open and shut again. Otherwise, Sally Sunbeam remained unmoved. Hazel let a tear trickle unimpeded down her cheek. “My husband done put me behind the wheel of a Lincoln like Daddy put me behind Jawbone. I guess I’ll be plowing somebody else’s fields till the day I die.”

      The door flew open again and the colored boy came running up to Hazel’s window with a paper sack in his hand. Hazel began to dig through her purse.

      “Momma, I’m hungry,” Davie said, having just awakened.

      “When we going to eat dinner?” Johnny called out.

      While the colored boy waited with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his raggedy overalls, he watched the two white children with matching bow ties, dressed nice enough for Sunday.

      “Here,” Hazel said as she handed the boy a little extra, “go on back in the store and get me a couple of banana moon pies and two Nehi grapes.”

      The boy took off, leaving Hazel to feel Sally’s eyes looking disapprovingly at her. “Well, what do you expect, Little Miss Perfect? I’m a make-do momma, making do the best I can.”

      Hazel sped along, the wind in her hair, sipping from her bottle. After a few miles she slowed the Lincoln and edged the car right up to the lip of a rickety one-lane bridge suspended between the two high riverbanks. When she’d passed this way earlier she thought she’d seen some colored people fishing down on the bank, and she wanted to make sure they were still there.

      Getting out of the car, she walked unsteadily onto the bridge, her high-heeled pumps tapping hollow against the planks. Hazel tried to decide if the swaying she felt was due to the movement of the bridge or her present condition. Either way, she somehow made it safely halfway across.

      Lacking any railing, the bridge offered an unimpeded twenty-foot drop into the dark, snaky water below. Hazel walked right up to the edge and still didn’t see the colored people. Leaning forward to get a look underneath, she tottered, frantically thrashed her arms in the air, and, a moment before toppling over the side, caught her balance. She dropped to her hands and knees to view the river through the cracks between the boards.

      Just as she had hoped! The people were still up under there. From where she knelt, she could see a man who was standing up to his knees in the water throw a heavy line deep into the river and then drag it back toward the bank. A few other colored people, both men and women, stood by on the bank, watching intently. Never having seen this kind of fishing before, she rushed back to the car and her children and then carefully maneuvered the massive Lincoln over the creaking bridge, off the road, and into the shade of an old beech tree.

      This was not unusual for Hazel. When she drove out into the Delta, she often stopped to observe coloreds at work, with the same fascination she’d had as a child observing a colony of ants or a nest of wasps. She thought there was a sad kind of beauty in the way their motions would blend into a shared dance, transcending their earthly lot. It was like something from the Bible. Or maybe a Carter Family gospel song.

      Once she’d sat for over an hour watching a gang of colored convicts from Parchman work with their scythes in a weedy ditch. Garbed in black and white stripes, they moved in unison, their blades glinting into a single instrument under the eye of the fierce white sun. And how they could holler out!