Memphis: A Novel(34)

Mrs. Finley’s mouth was frozen in the shape of an O.

“Myron, what’s going on?” Hazel said, placing her quilting to the side and rising from her seat.

“What on earth is this boy doing here?” Mrs. Finley said, emerging from her stupor.

Della sighed. “That’s Hazel’s sweetheart. We know him, Mrs. Finley.”

“But I don’t. And I don’t want him here.” Mrs. Finley hugged her chest as if she were Eve in the Garden, suddenly nude and exposed. “Get him out. I want him out of this shop.”

Della raised her eyebrows. Hazel couldn’t help admiring how her mother was able to embody contempt, albeit restrained, even from her diminutive position on the floor, head bent upward toward the white woman. “Pardon?” she said.

“Mama,” Hazel said warningly.

“Pardon?” her mother repeated, louder now, standing up to meet Mrs. Finley at eye level.

“We’ll go outside on the porch,” Hazel said, turning toward the door.

“No!” All three women started at the urgency in Myron’s voice. “I’m sorry, but I think your mama should hear this,” he said.

Hazel’s heart seemed to drop into her stomach. She reached for him. “What’s going on, love?”

“This boy can’t be in here,” Mrs. Finley said, her voice rising hysterically. She seemed disoriented by Della’s reaction, confused by the upset of power dynamics in the parlor she had visited so often. “I don’t want him here,” she repeated.

For a moment, the shop was still. Della and Mrs. Finley’s eyes were locked in a standoff, Hazel holding her breath. No one moved.

Then Myron dropped to one knee.

Mrs. Finley screamed.

“Lord on earth,” Della shouted, waving a hand to silence her. “Can’t you see he proposing? White folk don’t do this?”

Hazel looked down at Myron, realizing in a dazed way that he’d been holding his right hand behind his back since entering the parlor. Now he brought forth a tiny crimson lacquered box. Held it up to her.

The fog that had overwhelmed Hazel when she first met Myron in Stanley’s deli now wrapped around her again like a heavy quilt. And even though they did not own a record player, Hazel swore she could hear the unmistakable voice of Memphis Minnie.

She ignored all else but him. Ignored Mrs. Finley in her periphery, shouting something and clutching her pearls. She even ignored her mother throwing strips of lace into a basket with angry finality and directing Mrs. Finley to get the hell out of her shop if she was so afraid of Black love.

Hazel couldn’t hear Myron’s words over the music playing in her head. But she did not need to. She saw his mouth moving fiercely. It seemed like he was speaking an avalanche of words. She heard not a one.

The red box was light as a baby bird in her hands. Hazel held it for a moment, watching Myron’s lips. The front door slammed; Mrs. Finley must have gone. Hazel passed the box to her mother without looking away from Myron’s face, feeling relief sweep over her once it was out of her hands. She hadn’t even bothered to open it, look inside. See the pear-shaped sapphire there. That would come later. Instead, Hazel swept up the fabric of her skirt, fell to her knees in her mother’s front room, and took Myron’s face in her hands. Choking back sobs, she scolded him. Berated him. Told Myron he was a damn fool to waste all that money on a ring. Didn’t the man know she was his? Didn’t the man know he was hers? Didn’t he know this fact if no other?

I got you, remember? Remember? Such a damn fool to waste all that money. A shame, the whole thing. And supposed to be saving up for a house. Why, dear God, did she belong to such a damn fool?

What Hazel did not find out until later that afternoon—the three of them eating blackberry cobbler in the kitchen, her mother having decided to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments—was that as Myron knelt there on bended knee, concealed in the inside pocket of his jacket were his draft papers.

The two were married by week’s end. Myron gone to the front the following.





CHAPTER 15


August


1997


The morning had been trying. She was tired from lack of sleep, and she needed a cigarette. She didn’t even want to think about the number of appointments she had that day. August loved doing hair. She loved owning her own business and making Black women happy. But she didn’t feel much like doing hair that day. Something deep within her urged her to get back into bed and sleep.

She had groggily made breakfast for everyone: grits with sharp cheddar, salt pork fried hard. She heard the water running in their one shared bathroom in the middle of the house and knew Miriam was up and getting ready to go to her summer nursing school classes. There was a mound of dishes in the sink. August sighed, and got to work washing them.

It was Saturday in the summer. Summer meant August’s shop was full almost every day. It was hot—a humid, sticky, wet heat akin to the inside of a baked cornbread roll. The asphalt simmered and sizzled come late July. An egg could cook on the sidewalk. Mirages appeared distant and shimmering on the horizon. The nearness of the Mississippi made the humidity an enemy of most Memphis women. They needed their edges and curls tended to more often in the sweltering heat that words could not describe.

The argument that had ensued between Joan, Mya, and Derek lingered in August’s mind as she cleaned the dishes in the sink. Joan had run off to Miss Dawn’s—anger painted on her face like one of her artworks. A short walk, August had assured herself. The drive-by shooting had occurred the spring before, and tensions in Douglass seemed to thicken the already-heavy air. Kids didn’t play in the streets all day and night like they were wont to do. Mothers called their children in by sunset, shouting from screen porches, a whole hour before the streetlights came on.