Hazel nestled her to her side, whispering that they’d talk at home. “You’re the same as me, but we don’t need to talk about it. White folks don’t think about being White every second, so why should we?” A chameleonic character would have to become second nature to the child to achieve what Hazel had in mind for Mary’s future. “Let people think whatever they want to think about you. It’s none of their business anyway. You learn to fit in, wherever you happen to be.”
Hazel never told her daughter not to tell anyone about their trips to Charlotte, but somehow Mary knew better than to mention the White ladies who sat her on their laps, fed her candy, and played with her hair when she visited Ivey’s salon or restaurants to anyone in Cottonwood. Hazel watched, swelling with smug knowledge, as the White salesladies fawned over her daughter. They’d spit on her if they knew the truth.
Born fair, Mary would remain that way until the day she died. She had a petite, thin frame with shapely legs, big doe eyes, a slender jawline, and a tiny nose. Each feature was smooth, like an ivory bust with perfect lines. Her eyes changed from a brownish blue to a gray blue, as if they knew the pain of her origin and the murky future it had sowed. Hazel, knowing the troubles beauty could bring, tempered others’ praise. “Pretty is as pretty does.”
White ladies’ compliments did nothing to overshadow the way Mary was treated at home. Any degree of conceit was impossible in Cottonwood, where those who knew the girl rejected her and offered only insults. Her beauty made her a target of male desire and, thus, female envy. Her mother’s stain ostracized her, rendering her unsympathetic to her teachers, who watched the cruelty happen every day without intervention. People hated her, but still she drew all the attention in the room, a power she didn’t yet know she possessed.
While everyone was seated in church on Sunday morning, Hazel and Mary were seen marching out of Cottonwood in their Sunday best. The women, who were the hardest on Hazel, assumed she was taking the child to see her father; according to rumor, Hazel had never stopped seeing the Lakes boy. No one knew the truth, but all agreed that whatever happened between Hazel and Teddy Lakes couldn’t have been that bad if she was still working in the Lakes home after all these years. And from their view, it looked like she was getting a lot out of it. Getting paid pretty good, too, they’d heard.
At school, the kids repeated the things they had heard their parents say. Mary came home from school one day gasping for air and inconsolable with questions about who her father was. The kids had called her a “mutt,” a “golden retriever mix,” circling her with the slur during recess as the teachers looked on.
“Don’t they know I have to sit in the back of the bus too?”
Mary was barely six years old, too young for this conversation. Hazel would have preferred to sprinkle in the delicate bits over the years, like the trail of breadcrumbs in the fable Shirley Claire liked. The moment reminded Hazel that no matter how fair Mary was, she wasn’t White. Her innocence couldn’t be protected. The world forced Negro girls to mature faster than anyone else; the ugliness in the world was inflicted upon them first.
“His name is Theodore T. Lakes the Third,” Hazel said, tapping the family name on the label of the tin can of snuff tobacco sitting on their kitchen table. “Named after his daddy and his daddy before him.” She enjoyed a pinch of the tobacco in her bottom lip every night while Mary read aloud to her from the books she took from Mr. Lakes’s study.
“Does everything belong to me too?” Mary asked. The red-and-white Lakes Tobacco label was plastered everywhere—on buses, buildings, and billboards. The family rode through town on a street-wide float in the state-famous Fourth of July parade every year.
Hazel flung her arm around their two-room house. “Does it look like it?”
“But why do the other kids say I’m rich?”
“’Cause they don’t know any better.”
“But my daddy is.”
“Your father is, yes.”
“But why—”
“That’s just the way things are, you being a Negro girl. But we’ll never go hungry or be out in the cold.”
“Why hasn’t he come to see me?”
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Well, where is he?”
“Last I heard, Virginia.”
“Won’t he visit?”
“Maybe, but not to see you.” Hazel pulled Mary onto her lap to deliver the most important sentence. “And should you ever see him on the street, you can’t speak to him.”
Mary’s face crumpled, and Hazel hushed her before a tear spilled. “There are some truths in life you better come around to accepting sooner than later. This is one.” With that, she slid her daughter to the floor and walked into the bedroom to retrieve her prized gold ball earrings from the drop board in the dresser.
Still seated on the floor, Mary looked up at her when she returned. “I hate this ugly place.”
Hazel knew she was more embarrassed than hurt; the Cottonwood kids knew more about her than she knew about herself. “You know, people like you—all mixed up with a little this and that—have been born since even before America was called America. They were the sons and daughters of important men in this country.”
Mary perked up a little.
“And trust me,” Hazel said, “they couldn’t call their daddies ‘Daddy’ either.”
“How do you know?”
Hazel opened her left hand to show Mary the shiny gold spheres in her palm. “These earrings have been in our family since slavery times. Your grandfather four times over gave them to his slave, Elizabeth. They had two children. He gave us our eyes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he give them to her?”
“I suppose he loved her, and he was a rich man.”
“Well, did he give her her freedom too?”
“No.”
“Then what did she need earrings for?”
Hazel chuckled at her daughter’s logic. “They can serve as a reminder.”
“Of slavery?”
“No, of who you going to be. There are two types of people in this world, Mary: people with time to sit under the trees, looking up at the sky and pondering life”—she jostled the gold balls in her hand—“and those who end up hanging from those same trees, looking down on the life they might have had, had they been born different. You were born different, by the grace of God, so you get to choose. Choose the gold-earring life.”
Mary looked at her with big eyes, unable to process what she was saying. But Hazel knew she eventually would—she’d be sure of that, if it was the last thing she did.
Mary took one of the earrings. “Your momma gave these to you?”
“Something like that.”
“What was she like?”
Hazel smiled, realizing it was the first time Mary had asked. “She sang a lot.” Looking back, Hazel realized her mother had been happy, despite her days spent cleaning fish and caring for a household of thirteen. Even if it all hadn’t been her choice, she acted like it was. “She had a beautiful voice. She had our eyes, too, you know.”
Mary sighed. “You told me. But I still want dark brown eyes like everyone else’s.”
Hazel sucked her teeth. “Take it up with God. You look how you look, and it ain’t ever gon’ change.”
* * *
The next day, Hazel went up to the school to confront Mary’s teacher, Mabel Wish. Most of Mary’s troubles at school were attributable to things she couldn’t control, and Mabel’s hatred of Hazel was one of them. Mabel had been one of the self-appointed leaders of the teen group at church who had wanted nothing to do with the pregnant Hazel. Ostracizing her became an obsession when Mabel’s boyfriend carried Hazel’s groceries home one evening after seeing her struggling to calm an infant Mary. Mabel shared her speculations about Hazel and Teddy Lakes with anyone who would listen. Now, here was Hazel’s child in her class, smart as a whip, pretty as a doll, and as unfortunate as one could be in terms of circumstance. Hazel suspected that it had felt good to Mabel to put the child in her place.
When she arrived in the school building, Hazel looked so angry Mabel thought she might hit her. The woman blamed all of Mary’s problems on her high intelligence. Mary was writing stories during class and ignoring the lessons, all while the others were still struggling to read.