Memphis(67)

Say, you can’t leave me. Where the hell you think you going go, how far you think you going get, with two babies, no degree, and a Black face?

Miriam watched Jax wash his prized pony and realized that his entire life had been and would be dominated by war. “Just don’t break Mya’s heart” was all she could think to say. She turned to go back in the house.

“What about Joan?”

Miriam herself was surprised by the harshness of her own laugh. “You broke that girl’s heart long ago,” she said. She climbed the steps made of stones her father had selected and wondered if she meant her own heart. She wondered why her marriage couldn’t have been like her parents’. Her mother had told her stories of her and Myron sharing secrets over their ice cream, being in such love on Miss Dawn’s porch swing. Miriam had wanted that for herself all her life. Simple, Black love. For the life of her, she couldn’t place a finger on what exactly went wrong or why. It was as if she held a broken teacup in her hands but couldn’t remember breaking it and had no idea how to mend it.

The next day, Jax was gone. But the black Shelby Mustang remained. There was a note next to the keys, which he’d left on the kitchen table: “Joan, Treat her better than I ever treated your mountain of a mother…Oo-rah.”





CHAPTER 30


    Hazel


   1985


The sun was bright that morning in Hazel’s garden, and the purple morning glories that lined the back fence were open and fragrant.

Hazel wore her gardening uniform: overalls, a straw hat, her yellow gardening gloves dotted with small sunflowers. It was the planting time of year—late April, when she was sure the last frost of the season was behind them. She carried a wicker basket full of seeds: sweet peas, haricots verts, hot peppers, lettuce.

Hazel knelt among the sprouting collard greens, the sweet corn stalks beginning to emerge, the sunflowers grown toddler-tall in her garden, and began to hum a Nina Simone song. Memphis in June, sweet oleander.

She thought of her daughters. August, inside with Derek, who’d turned five a few weeks back. And Miriam, pregnant with her first. She was thirty now, just four years younger than Hazel had been when she’d had her.

Hazel hadn’t liked Derek’s father, though at least he was out of the picture now, and she didn’t care for Jax, either. He and Miriam had married in a rush, and Jax had taken her daughter away just as quick. Hazel and Miriam’s interactions were now limited to Christmases, Easters, and phone calls between Camp Lejeune and Memphis.

“Well, you come on home to have the baby,” Hazel had told Miriam when she’d called to announce she was pregnant. “I want my grandchild born in Memphis.” They were set to arrive later that month, in time for the baby’s due date.

She knelt on her hands and knees in her raised garden bed and made neat rows spaced two hands apart for the planting. A hummingbird appeared in the hedges. Emerald green and dazzling. Hazel heard the quick beat of its wings and caught sight of it. It was so dark that, in the light, it was almost a dark purple, the color of indigo.

She wondered then if Myron could see her squatting in the garden he had built for her, planting her vegetables for the coming summer. She wondered whether he would even recognize her now, hair gray at the roots, thighs thickened from years of work and motherhood and suffering and laughter. What she never stopped to wonder, even after all the years, was whether Myron still loved her. That was fact. Always had been. She still spoke to him, albeit less often.

“God, I miss you,” she said aloud, pulling at a stubborn dandelion weed near the base of the bed.

A pain exploded in her outstretched arm. A second later, her entire chest felt like it was burning. She clutched at her heart. It was beating with the ferocity of a symphony’s final overture. She rested on her haunches and tried to catch her breath. She reached for the basket to steady herself, but it toppled over on its side, seeds spilling out into the dirt in haphazard abandon.

Awareness crept over the old nurse as the pain spread and spread. Hazel almost laughed. She was unafraid then. She no longer clutched at her chest. She lay down. Let her head hit the ground with a soft thud.

She let her mind wander.

I wonder what they’ll name her, she thought.

Strangely, the pain had subsided now. But she felt her breaths grow shorter and shorter as she lay there in the red dirt.

Hazel’s love of the Lord had always been a battle. She had shunned God when Myron died, and the silence was deafening again after August’s father’s assassination. But now, Hazel smiled. She almost damn-near called God a salty bitch—because, in that moment, Hazel’s mouth was filled with the taste of butter pecan ice cream.

“Myron,” she said softly. “Myron.” She smiled at the morning sun and was gone.

There was still a smile etched on Hazel’s face when August found her an hour later. August ran down Locust Street in pink pajamas screaming for help, for someone to call a doctor, turn back time, murder God.

But what could be done? Hazel had died. And August, feeling that not only her mother but a queen had died, thought of Churchill’s words on the death of a king, and tried to calm herself: Her mother had passed away as any Southern woman brought up to fear and love the Lord can ever hope to do—she died, very much loved, in her warm garden.

When Miriam got the call from August screaming into the phone, she sank to the floor with her first child inside her. She knelt there for a long time in silence. She lifted her head to Jax and said, “Why even bring a child into this world if she won’t ever know my mother?”