Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

to hide. Ridges and hollows and bends. Yet out there the world was laid bare for all to see. “What a wondrous thing,” she whispered reverently, as if God had just finished making it. “You can see everything at once.” Had that revival preacher been right when he said the earth was really as flat as somebody’s front porch? If he was, then the falling-off place must be out there on that very horizon. “How far does this Delta reach, Floyd?”

      He pointed. “See where the sun is sinking?”

      Hazel shaded her eyes with her hand and looked into the sunset.

      “That’s where the mighty Mississippi runs. The sun beds down in the river for the night. In a few minutes, when the sun slips between the levees, you can hear the river sizzle.”

      Hazel looked up at Floyd, half believing. “Don’t fun me.”

      “For true. At sundown, the river water gets so hot, catfish jump out on the banks already fried and ready to eat. All you need is the hushpuppies.”

      “Floyd, you could make me believe about anything.” Hazel reached her arm around her husband. “We going to have us a house down there somewhere and live off catfish and hushpuppies?”

      “Nope. We going to live up here in the bluffs with the rich people.” Waving his arm over the vast river basin, he said, “Down there is where the money is made. Nothing but cotton and mules and niggers. More niggers than you can shake a stick at. They outnumber white people four to one.”

      Hazel’s gaze swept once more over the landscape. “I swan,” was all she could say, still trying to imagine such a thing as a whole world of niggers, living on the flatbed bottom of the earth.

      “I want to see it. Take me down there, Floyd.”

      He smiled, pleased at how excited she was getting. They got in the car and Floyd happily aimed it down Redeemer’s Hill. The decline was sharp, and Floyd drove so roller-coaster fast, it made Hazel’s stomach drop. Then all at once the road went as flat as a pancake and straight as the finger of God. With Floyd smiling confidently at the wheel, Hazel gazed out the window, pointing to each new sight. She saw all manner of wondrous things. Mules by the hundreds and work gangs from the penitentiary in striped uniforms and towering cypresses rising from dark and foreboding swamps, and even an alligator staring up at her from a roadside slough. Things that gave her chill bumps. Not to mention all the coloreds. Floyd was right, there were millions of them, working the fields, filing down dirt roads, and crowding plantation stores. And not all looking dirt poor and raggedy as she had expected. When they pulled up for soft drinks at a crossroads grocery, Hazel spotted a colored girl outfitted in an all-white costume, gaily prancing around on the gallery twirling a parasol as snowy white as her shoes. Hazel had never in her life seen anybody dressed so fine, especially not a colored person. She guessed maybe the girl was passing through with a minstrel show or was part of a high-wire circus act. There were countless riddles out there that left Hazel mystified and wanting more.

      “Time to take you home now, Hazel,” Floyd said as the dark began to creep up on them.

      “Home,” Hazel said, trying out the word, putting an old name to a new world.

      Winding back through the bluffs, Floyd topped a ridge and there, nestled in the soft rolling terrain, was Delphi. The town was old even by Mississippi standards, settled long before the giant floodplain below had been tamed from bears and Indians and malaria.

      Hazel was struck speechless. Stately homes with expansive lawns and ancient live oaks crowned the hills of Delphi. Homesites were laid out without rhyme or reason, each fine house oriented without consideration of any other. To Hazel, each house gleamed brighter than the next. Until she was eight, she hadn’t known you could put paint on a house. About that time she saw a picture in her history book of Mount Vernon.

      “My Lord,” she gasped. “If it don’t look like George Washington went on a tear and built hisself a town.”

      Floyd turned onto a down-sloping gravel lane that led up to a little house sitting in the shadow of one of the grander homes. After turning off the car, he got real quiet. He looked up at the cottage and said almost apologetically, “It used to be a slave cabin to the house up on the hill. But it’s been fixed up real nice.”

      Hazel beamed, and without waiting for Floyd to get her door, hurried out of the car and ran up to the house. The front door was unlocked. Before Floyd had made it up the walk, Hazel was running from room to room. He was right. It had been fixed up nice, and already furnished to boot. There was an indoor bathroom, floors that were smoothed and varnished, and rugs throughout. A wringer washing machine sat right out on the back porch. There were two bedrooms and brown iron beds with roses painted on the posts. It even had a little parlor with a couch and two stuffed chairs.

      Then Floyd took her into the kitchen. “Look, Hazel, a stove that don’t need wood.” He turned a knob and a blue flame snapped to attention. As soon as she saw it she began to cry.

      Floyd’s face fell. “Don’t worry, Hazel. One day I’ll put you in one of them houses up on a hill. I promise.”

      “Oh! No! It ain’t that. I love the house.” She sobbed louder.

      “Then what is it?”

      “Oh, Floyd.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “I ain’t been honest with you. I can’t cook. I can’t sew. I don’t even know how to change a diaper or burp a baby. My sisters done all that. All I learned to do was pick cotton and strip cane and dig taters. I ain’t no good to you!”

      Floyd smiled at her. “It don’t matter, don’t you see? We’re starting fresh. You and me are through with them old-timey ways. I don’t care if you can’t cook. You’re my wife. You don’t have to earn your keep. And we going to have children ’cause we want children, not farmhands. I’ll take care of my family.”

      Hazel looked up to find herself reflected in his eyes. My God, she thought, he still wants me. She leaned her head against his chest and started to cry again. Today she was a brand-new wife to a new kind of man, living in a storybook town overlooking a mysterious flattened-out world. Her future was as wide open as that view from the bluffs, without a single familiar landmark. She felt lost and found all at the same time.

       1949

       Chapter Three

       A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

      Billy Dean Brister was chugging to the top of Redeemer’s Hill, and he wanted it all to himself. After honking twice, he butted his rattletrap Ford up against the tailgate of a gin wagon that was hogging the gravel road. The colored driver swung about, but when he saw the two white men, he smiled weakly, touched his hat, and popped his mules smartly with the ends of the reins.

      Nothing was going to hold Billy Dean back. He was determined to have clear sailing on the downslope. Though blind to oncoming traffic, he swerved the car toward the far ditch and held his ground.

      “Wait on it, you hear?” his uncle said. “They ain’t enough road for you to pass.”

      Billy Dean grinned. He drove the left tires into the ditch and straddled the road ledge.

      “Dammit to hell,” his uncle muttered.

      Billy Dean had no doubts. Good luck had finally shifted to his side of the road. Billy Dean Brister, once destined to take his place in a long line of white-trash Bristers, was going to break from family tradition. Come fall, Hopalachie County would be his for the taking, and nobody could keep him from grabbing ahold of it with both hands and a knee to the throat. No matter if he did have to make a deal with the devil to get it.

      With two tires on the road and two in the ditch, dirt and rock slinging out