Insomnia had brought Elise there in the wee hours of every morning since Kitty died. It sent her mother to roam the labyrinth in a silk nightgown, despite the forty-degree night weather. No one had seen Sarah shed a tear for Kitty, and the stroll was the only evidence of her suffering. Elise watched her chain-smoke in the dark middle of the maze.
Kitty was the only person Sarah smoked with. Kitty went through packs a day, but for a woman who had been eating organic since long before it was popular, tobacco was by far the dirtiest habit Sarah had. The two women had been photographed together at an Oscars party years ago, side by side, lit Lakes cigarettes in hand in front of an ashtray full of butts. The photograph was published everywhere and earned Sarah the wrath of her daughters, who had just lost their grandma Nellie, their mother’s mother, to cancer.
Upon Sarah’s second waking each day, she was cheery and accommodating, so far outside her basic nature that she seemed manic. It was as if she thought efficiency and speed would convince everyone she was all right.
It seemed to be working. Her sisters noticed nothing new. Elise wasn’t going to out her, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She was only a witness to the solitary manifestation of her mother’s pain because she also couldn’t sleep and was up smoking a joint and talking to Kitty in her head about the burden of all she had to do, coupled with the memories left on her shoulders.
Nothing was the same, but Sarah was intent on making everything seem so—a task that didn’t appear to be sitting well with her either. A few nights, Elise had thought about leaving the Perch to comfort her, but rooted by anger and blame, she couldn’t move.
CHAPTER 3
Hazel
July 1934
When Hazel met the preacher, he was living in Wadesboro, North Carolina, in a one-room house by the creek. He had deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth like the grooves in a tree trunk.
He was half-blind, so his niece escorted him every day to the bread shop where he worked as a baker. He needed no assistance on Sundays, when he caught the spirit. He hopped around on one leg, waving his arms, turning his head this way and that as if he was playing two parts in a play, and never ran into the chairs or stumbled down the pulpit step.
Hazel accompanied her mother to choir practice an hour before church to ensure a good seat. The seventh child of eleven, she was thirteen and, despite having the highest marks in her eighth-grade class, her schooling was over. Her parents were sharecroppers, and as the landowner continuously increased the prices of seed and other supplies, all their children, except the four little ones, were now needed to break even each year.
The pain that you’ve been feeling can’t compare to the joy that’s coming. Hazel recited the preacher’s words as she tilled the earth under the hot sun, trying to distract herself from the wet heat and the mosquito bites that swelled and itched just minutes after an attack.
Trees lined the fields, but their shade was reserved for the Whites. Everyone hated field work, but only Hazel was allergic to the sun; though she was deep hued, her siblings teased her about having skin like the Whites. Hazel’s mother would shoo them out of the house to give Hazel privacy when Hazel had to take oatmeal baths to calm the constant heat rash.
Though she was a middle child, Hazel was the runt. And as she grew, she remained daintier than her siblings, preferring to read rather than play outside. Dirtying her clothes meant extra laundry and less reading time. Her mother kept her old school books hidden in the back of the kitchen cabinet, though school was a sore subject. Hazel had the highest education of anyone in her family; neither of her parents could read.
Her mother didn’t work the fields. Instead, she cleaned fish and shrimp for the distributor who supplied most of the county. Anything that didn’t sell by Friday would be offered for sale to the employees. Hazel’s mother, after setting aside enough for her family, sold the rest to their neighbors. So, every Friday, everyone made fish—and cornbread and greens.
Hazel liked to listen to her mother sing while she cooked. Like the Sunday sermon, her voice—alone, or accompanied by the choir—caused a flutter in Hazel’s stomach.
One morning she was sitting in the lone rocking chair on the church’s porch when the preacher arrived with his niece.
“Your purpose is beyond here.” He told Hazel she was a vessel of the Lord, like Jesus Christ’s greatest disciple, Mary Magdalene, who received the Father’s teachings purely, unburdened by the need to compete and compare like the men. She was a witness to the evil and godliness of men. She witnessed Jesus’s murder and was the first to witness his Resurrection. The preacher said jealous-hearted people would downplay Mary Magdalene’s role in history with accusations of moral corruption, mistaking her identity or ignoring her significance to Jesus altogether. The joke, though, the preacher said, was on them. With one’s attention turned outward, one forgets one’s own ability to harness understanding of the truth.
Hazel believed him. Born into slavery, the preacher had the gift of inner sight. He had grown up in a one-room cabin in Tennessee with a man everyone called Grandfather, who traveled among plantations to calm unruly slaves with the word of Jesus. One night, the preacher, then a young boy, warned their massa that Grandfather was in trouble. Massa shooed him away, but sure enough, Grandfather’s corpse arrived home days later. Slave catchers had mistaken him for a runaway and, after being beaten, forced to walk tied to a horse, and denied water, he had died.
Massa, having heard the boy recite Bible passages at will, put him in charge of church for the slaves. See, Grandfather had made the boy memorize the verses first, before he taught him to read them. These verses were the ones the boy taught Belle, a house slave from birth as he was, to read. Belle taught the horse trainer, who taught his wife, who taught her sister. Pretty soon all the plantation’s thirty slaves could read. They ran one Saturday night, giving them an additional five hours before they’d be discovered absent from church. Miraculously, all thirty stayed free. That’s what the preacher told Hazel, anyway.
As he spoke, the preacher had pointed at her as if he could see her, as if he could see something good promised. Hazel was convinced this was true until her entire family drowned on the distributor’s fishing boat, and not only did Hazel lose faith in the preacher’s words, she stopped believing in God.
Hazel’s scaly skin had prevented her from helping her family serve the fish buffet at the distributor’s end-of-summer fete. Two boats were needed to transport the equipment and workers, but due to a miscalculation or corner cutting, everything and everyone went on one.
The waterfront event ended early due to a summer monsoon. The captain waited until the rain stopped to undock, but the rain and wind started again, heavier, halfway through the ride. The force made it hard to steer, and they hit a cluster of rocks. Eventually, the boat began to go under and Hazel’s family, including her baby niece, drowned.
She worked for another year in the fields, after being taken in by her neighbors, who loved to remind her of how much of a sacrifice it was. When she got tired of hearing it, she left for New York. Her mother had traveled there once with a White family and liked it. She felt a lightness in the air, despite the muggy, sticky August heat. Negroes there were, for the most part, left to themselves.
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