Memphis(41)

The local news station was playing their daily five-o’clock roundup. Miriam saw one of her favorite anchors—a serious woman with a thick Southern drawl and hair piled high on her head—announce that there had been another drive-by shooting in Memphis. The war between Kings Gate and the Douglass Park Bishops did not appear to be waning anytime soon, the anchor warned.

Annoyed, Miriam turned away. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise that the doctor associated her with this news story, but it was almost enough to make her wish she hadn’t come down for coffee. Almost. She was exhausted. As the line crawled forward, the news anchor continued the report. Apparently, a house in the south side neighborhood of Orange Mound, rumored to belong to a known leader of the Kings Gate Mafia, had been another victim in this summer war. In a tragic turn of events, the anchor said, he had not been home during the time of the shooting. Instead, his grandmother and his three-month-old baby boy had been riddled with a barrage of bullets from an AK-47. A Memphis police car had, luckily, been parked nearby and had seen a tan Chevrolet Impala speeding away. Miriam’s neck tensed. Wasn’t that car tan, the one that had picked Derek up nearly every damn day this summer?

Trying to act casual, she slowly turned her head toward the television. “After a short chase,” the anchor was saying, “police apprehended two suspects: the owner of the car, a Ricky ‘Pumpkin’ Howell, and a second man, as yet unnamed.” Derek’s mugshot flashed across the screen. “Both men were arrested and are in custody now.”

Miriam pushed her coffee cup into the surgeon’s chest without taking her eyes off the screen. “Here. Be a dear and pay for my coffee, will you?”

She didn’t wait for his response. She dug in her purse for her keys to the van and was out the café and down the hallway in seconds.

She drove as if the highway behind her were on fire. Broke the speed limit on I-40 and ran a red on Warford, but she still felt it took the duration of a Civil War battle to reach home.

Miriam finally reached the large yellow front door of her ancestral home and threw it open. “August!” she shouted. “Girls!”

There was no answer.

Miriam had always loved this time of day best—dusk. Aged golden light reflected in all directions from the stained-glass windows in the parlor. But now the evening light made the house seem ghostly, haunted.

Miriam walked into the empty kitchen, still calling for her sister. She hesitated at the door that led to August’s shop. She breathed in deep, steadied herself. She closed her eyes and whispered, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” then exhaled, placed a hand on the knob, and turned it.

The shop was dim. Slowly materializing, Miss Dawn came into view like an apparition. She was sitting on the settee with both Joan and Mya in her lap. Miriam saw Miss Dawn smoothing Mya’s hair and whispering and wiping away her free-flowing tears. Joan sat motionless and unblinking.

Miriam’s eyes continued to scan the room. There in the dark, sitting in one of her wash-and-set chairs with her head in her hands, was her sister. The family Remington sat next to her. Two of Memphis’s finest stood over August with pads in their hands, poised to jot down notes.

Miriam heard her sister say, over and over, more statement than question, “What has he done.”





CHAPTER 19


    Hazel


   1955


The officer behind the counter did not glance up from the Memphis Gazette. Red wisps of hair swirled atop his head in a small tornado that receded toward his crown. His face, pale and peppered with freckles as red as his head, remained hidden behind a black-and-white print page announcing the Cubs’ two-pointer opening day win over the Cincinnati Redlegs with a full-page photograph of Ernie Banks under the headline savior? The officer leaned into the paper fully, let out a long whistle.

“Shit. This just may be their goddamned year,” he said.

Hazel cleared her throat.

The officer lowered the paper and glanced briefly at her with a flash of green eyes. “Twenty-five dollars,” he said. He shook the paper, lifted it back to his face.

“Pardon?”

“Twenty-five dollars,” he repeated without looking up from his paper. “Cash. If you ain’t got the cash, don’t go wailing on me now; a check will do. Made out to the City of Memphis. But it’s got to clear, understand, and that’ll take a day ’fore we release him. So, he stays another night. Otherwise, cash.”

“No,” Hazel said. “I’m here to see my husband.”

“Girl, what did I just get done telling you?” Annoyed, the officer placed the newspaper down on the counter the color of salmon innards and stared hard at Hazel.

The badge on the officer’s uniform read “C. Barnes” in bold block letters. Hazel vaguely recalled Myron cracking a joke about a certain white officer who was as red as a barn and dumber and lazier than the beasts inside one. This must be him, Hazel reckoned.

For a moment, Hazel forgot herself. When she heard that word, girl, she instinctively searched around her for something heavy and sharp that would draw the most amount of blood, cause the most damage. Then she remembered that she was nonwhite and a woman and carrying a child and in Myron’s place of work. She took a deep breath. Placed a hand on her extended belly. Began again.

“My name is—”