Memphis: A Novel(29)
Hazel’s father had taken one of those boats out and never come back. One of the families he’d saved had found her and her mother afterward, wrung their hands as they told how he’d climbed onto their roof to help pass their string of toddlers to the waiting hands in his fishing boat, the floodwaters rising around him. Over his head.
Two months now without her father, the ground was still mostly mud. It gave way so that folk slipped and slid in it, got their cars stuck in the thick of it. Folk got to calling it “Memphis mud.” Hazel hadn’t wanted to go out into the mess at all, but her mother wanted meat that night—flood or not. And when Della Thomas wanted a thing, she got it.
Della was the best seamstress in Memphis, Black or white. Women would come from all over to sit in her parlor and get fitted for dresses that would stop traffic on Beale, make married men slip off their wedding rings for the night, make women feel like gods.
Hazel took down her mother’s appointments for her in a large ledger book, surrounded by rolls of tulle and intricate lace by the yard, and all around the room were fat tomato pincushions stabbed with pins and needles. In a corner of the parlor sat a black Singer as big as a piano, with foot treadles and even the turn-of-the-century spinning wheel on which her mother had learned to make yarn; her mother loved an antique. Della may not have been able to read, but she could guess a woman’s corset size just from looking at her. Was a wonder with her seamstress’s ruler. Didn’t even need to memorize the numbers as she went.
Hazel had grown up helping her mother in the parlor. She’d take payments and fill out the customers’ dress orders. She could sit for hours watching Della tighten a corset around a waist or piece together a quilt. Hazel didn’t think of her mother as working; she thought of her as an artist creating. She saw the pride with which her mother made her stitches, as tiny as they were, how they became a dress that would be worn and loved and remembered. After the morning appointments, Hazel delivered finished gowns to the large mansions along Poplar and modest print dresses to the mothers along Chelsea, with a quick curtsy and without much conversation exchanged. Hazel loved the bridal appointments in the late afternoons best. The bride would hardly stand still for her fitting, twirling in the silk, admiring herself in the mirror, smiling for no, and yet every, reason. Hazel would sit in silence nearby, attaching floral lace appliqué to the bride’s veil. The white brides would eventually notice Hazel with a start and say, Well, my, I didn’t even know a little Negro child was here! But the Black customers would coo Little brown church mouse in a way that made her feel she belonged. It wasn’t that Hazel was shy; she was just observant. She preferred watching and learning from her mother in silence rather than interrupting conversation, announcing herself.
With her mother’s skills so coveted, Hazel had always had fine things, especially clothes. It wouldn’t do to have her sitting in the parlor not looking the part, and besides, it made her feel more adult. She was accustomed to lace pinafores and silk stockings and satin pantaloons—not to the rubber men’s work boots her mother had taken out of the closet for her that afternoon before Hazel set out.
“These were your father’s,” she’d said, holding them up high like they were a pair of prize catfish. “He picked a life’s worth of cotton in them,” Della huffed, maneuvering one boot onto Hazel’s foot. “Come on, girl. Step in them. Push hard. There you go. Step back. Let me look at you.”
Hazel had turned fifteen the previous November, and she was both proud of and a bit embarrassed by her thickening body. She found herself stumbling into furniture she previously could easily slip between. Her widening hips had knocked over many a helpless lamp. Her eyes—doe’s eyes, like her mother’s—were a deep dark brown that could turn emerald in certain lights, in certain euphoric moods. On the cusp of womanhood, she glowed, dark eyes contrasting with the lovely butter pecan color of her skin.
“You look like your daddy,” her mother had said, a catch in her voice.
“Really?” Hazel asked.
Her mother looked away. “Now, where’s that list you wrote?”
“It’s here in my pocket, Mommy.” Hazel held up a scrap of paper.
“Get everything on there, every single thing, you hear? And you come back quick,” Della had said, pushing Hazel out the door with a gentle shove and her usual forehead kiss.
Hazel maneuvered around pools of water as she made her way to Stanley’s. The family-owned deli was a two-story redbrick building on the corner of Chelsea Avenue and Pope Street in the North Memphis neighborhood called Douglass, where Della’s family had lived since emancipation.
Stanley’s was a staple in the neighborhood. Even though folk called it a deli, people went there to buy most things: fresh okra, fishing hooks and live bait, ice-cream sundaes and freezing-cold Coca-Colas. A long glass case spanned the length of one wall and displayed chicken thighs and beef sausages. A gilded Victrola in the corner was constantly playing the soft moans of Blind Boy Fuller and Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie. Shelves were stocked with saltwater taffy, tins of sardines in oil, bottles of molasses. A small garden in the back grew tomatoes and okra and muscadine and sweet corn. Stanley could be found either behind the counter or out front, stooped in front of his sign, boasting in chalk that he had the best melons for a mile.
Stanley was white and foreign and Jewish, but he was beloved in their Black neighborhood. Everyone liked him. His deli had a colored section, but the sign was more decorative than anything. The shop was too small to section off, and given that most of his customers were Black, Stanley never did make a fuss about it. Even the old Baptist ladies forgave him his Judaism, unable to resist his beef ribs. No one knew why he’d chosen Memphis or how he’d even heard of it all the way in Germany, yet here he was for going on ten years now. He talked sometimes of a storm brewing in his homeland; perhaps because he was a butcher, he could smell death.