Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

talk face-to-face with one of the biggest men in the Delta. You heard me tell about him. They call him the Senator. He asked me to come by this morning personal to look over his place. To get the lay of the land, so to speak.”

      “That’s real nice, Floyd.” Her voice was resigned.

      “He’s a real old-time planter. Lives down in the Delta amongst his tenants and the skeeters. Got him a mansion they call the Columns. Everybody swore he would be the last to buy mechanical cotton pickers to replace his hands with. Why, the first time I called on him he told me I was wasting my breath and his time. Remember what I told you I said to turn him around?”

      “It’s just that if you and me could spend some time—”

      “What got him was when I told him, ‘Senator, do you want to spend your time studying the mysterious habits of niggers, or do you want to make money?’ ” Floyd shook his head at himself for saying such a thing. “Then I told him, ‘Are you a planter or a dad-blamed anthropologist?’ You should have heard him laughing at that one.”

      Again Hazel smiled weakly, ashamed to ask him what an anthropologist was, even though this was the third time she had heard the story. “Floyd, it’s only that I’ve been feeling—”

      “You just wait,” he said. “If he sticks with me he’ll go from messing with six hundred niggers to only a handful of drivers. After the Senator buys in, everybody will get on board.”

      Hazel noticed a sudden pang of sympathy for the displaced. Was her husband becoming that important, where he could get rid of a whole world of coloreds because they had outlived their usefulness? And the little circus girl all dressed in white? Would she be gone as well, before Hazel could figure out her riddle?

      “Where they all going to go to?”

      “Who?” Floyd asked.

      “The niggers. You know, if nobody needs ’em no more, where they all going to go to?”

      Floyd shrugged. “Oh. Somewhere, I reckon.” He said, “Ain’t no stopping us, Hazel. We done put the mule behind us for good.” He playfully patted her on the rear on his way to the door.

      “Nope. You right about that,” she said, taking the frying pan to the sink to scrub. “Not a mule in sight nowhere.”

      Floyd pushed open the screen and turned to say good-bye, then stood there for a long moment, staring at Hazel with a curious look on his face.

      “What?” she yelped, afraid she had gone ugly in his eyes.

      He rushed back to Hazel and laid the flat of his hand on her stomach. “If I’m not wrong, looks like you might better go see the doctor.”

      Hazel’s heart sank. “You want me to go to the doctor ’cause I’m getting fat?”

      He only grinned bigger.

      Hazel thought for a moment and then her face burned. “You think I’m going to have a baby! That’s what you’re saying! Ain’t it?”

      He gave her a few seconds and then asked carefully, “Well, what do you think, honey? You the one it’s happening to.”

      She should have known. Her sister Onareen told her the only way not to get pregnant was to do it standing up, and she sure wasn’t going to suggest that to Floyd.

      Hazel sat down, all of a sudden feeling woozy. Oh, Lord, she thought, the only thing worse than being pregnant would be Floyd knowing about it before me. “No, I can’t be preg—you got to be wrong about it.”

      Floyd knelt down by Hazel and slipped his arm around her, placing his hand on her belly again. As if knowing her thoughts, he said, “Don’t worry. You gonna be a good mother. Remember that little saying I taught you, ‘If you can see it, you can be it.’ ”

      Her smile was pained. Well, that was just it, Hazel was thinking, I can’t see it. How was a “good mother” supposed to look? Back in the hills where Hazel came from, there wasn’t talk about good ones or bad ones—only live ones and dead ones, sturdy ones and sickly ones, fertile ones and ones who had dried up early. Yet now with this good–bad difference, she was convinced she would end up being a naturally bad one. Another thing Floyd would have to love her anyway for.

      She looked into his face. Floyd gazed at her with so much faith and hope, it made her heart ache. “I’m scared, Floyd. I don’t know how to care for a baby. I seen it done, but I ain’t never done it myself.”

      “Oh, that ain’t no problem. We can ask some of the women from church to help. Maybe your sister Onareen can come stay.”

      “Get Momma,” Hazel whimpered, for the first time in years finding a kind of comfort in that particular word. She couldn’t help saying it again. “Momma. I want my momma.” Hazel needed somebody who knew her, somebody who wouldn’t expect too much from her. Somebody who would be surprised at how far she had come.

      “You sure? You know she don’t take to me since I stole you from the hills.”

      “No, I want to show her how wrong she was about hoping. I want her to see how good you done. How good you been to me.”

      Floyd blushed. “Well, then,” he said with a snappy nod of his head, “I’ll go fetch her when the time comes.”

      She raised her eyes and looked into Floyd’s face again. He was so confident. The sense of dread returned.

      Why should that be? she wondered. Why should her husband’s rock-hard certainty scare her so, making her feel so small and lost? What had happened to her own feelings of hope?

      Hazel remembered the day Floyd had come home and found her crying, sitting by the new oven she was sure she had broken. Growing up, the only cookstoves she had ever seen burned wood. Floyd simply struck a match and lit it back up. And she knew it wasn’t just the oven. Somehow, it was as if the rush of Floyd’s success had blown out her own little pilot light.

       Chapter Five

       SNOWFLAKE BABY

      Later in the day, Vida’s baby boy played on the parlor rug with his collection of wooden spools as she and her father, sitting on opposite sides of the room, worked hard to avoid each other’s eyes. Vida, on the sofa, stared down at the satin bows on the toes of her baby-doll shoes, and her father, in his armchair, studied his light-skinned grandson as the child stacked one spool on top of another, toppled them over, and began again.

      They often found themselves embarrassed in each other’s presence, but it had not always been this way between them.

      After his wife died birthing Willie, Levi had doted on Vida. He called Vida his Snowflake Baby. Not because her last name was Snow, which it was. And not because her skin was white, which it wasn’t. Vida had the same coffee-with-cream complexion as her father. Vida became his Snowflake Baby because he always dressed her in white.

      For her eleventh birthday, Levi even sent to Memphis for a parasol of white satin, which he said would keep his Snowflake Baby from melting in the Delta sun. The day it arrived, Vida had excitedly snatched the package from the mail rider and torn away the brown paper wrapping. She twirled the pretty parasol over her head in the bright noonday sun. Her father had laughed with delight and proclaimed, “Now my Snowflake Baby can carry shade everwhere she goes.” He raised her up in his strong arms. “No sir! Nothing never going to hurt my Snowflake Baby.” Levi proudly pranced Vida around the yard, twirling her in half circles, while she giggled.

      And then there were the music lessons. Vida was the only colored girl in all of Hopalachie County able to take piano. Her father had personally gone to Miss Josephine Folks, the white lady music teacher, and arranged it. That’s how important her father was. He could get things other colored people couldn’t even think about. Of course, Miss Josephine charged Levi a dollar a lesson, twice as much as her white students, and she insisted that Vida come only after last dark. That didn’t spoil