A couple of years after losing her family, Hazel was sitting just hours from her hometown of Wadesboro, North Carolina, in a new church, amongst Negro women who could afford hats decorated with lace and beads and netting. Everyone could speak in tongues but needed the hymnals to sing along with the choir. They all felt the spirit the same way—head back, eyes closed, rocking on the wooden pews; Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus, with a faint to finish. They weren’t godly, or else they wouldn’t have been so cruel. Grown women sneered at her pregnant belly, and the preacher, a married man in his thirties, announced a departure from his planned sermon. The Lord called upon me to speak on sins of the flesh this morning.
Hazel was the one they’d heard about: the new girl from the country with the captivating eyes, who’d gotten herself in trouble with that White boy. And not just any ole White boy—one of them Lakes boys.
She almost left when the preacher spoke of a prostitute named Mary Magdalene who fell at Jesus’s feet, begging for absolution. Hazel’s hands went to her stomach as the old preacher from home came to mind for the first time in a long while. She could see an outline of his face in her mind’s eye, smiling at her as though he were there, listening. A warmth came over her, and even though the sermon was meant to shame her, she smiled for the first time in a while. She done gone crazy, she heard them say.
What happened to Hazel was added to the lengthy list of warnings remitted to every Negro girl in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, upon the first budding of a tit. White men were as much of a threat to Negro women and girls as they were to Negro men and boys. Instead of lynching, the Negro female body could be snatched to satisfy some White men or boys’ curiosity, frustration, or lust. This fact, being central to the early education of a Negro girl, caused blame for her predicament to rest on sixteen-year-old Hazel. Many said she had invited the attention of the twenty-three-year-old tobacco heir upon herself.
The Lakes name was a brand, and the unborn child a marker of Hazel’s past. Hating where and whose she’d been, Negro men thereafter would want nothing to do with her. An orphan and new in town, Hazel would raise her half-breed alone.
Some might have hated the baby growing inside them, but Hazel fiercely loved her child from the moment she felt the spark of life below her belly button. She began to pray again, this time for her child’s deliverance, and when a baby girl was born, looking as White as any White child, Hazel decided that maybe there was a God. Her daughter might escape the life that Jim Crow said Hazel’s dark skin consigned her to.
Hazel named her baby Mary Magdalene, believing in the preacher’s words that her daughter was more than a witness—she was the spawn, the magnificent physical manifestation of the worst in the world, one who would one day, Hazel believed, absolve the sin of her creation. Hazel was in fact a vessel, the incubator of a tiny miracle.
Others pointed to the child’s ears. “See that tawny brown? She’s gonna darken.” It was an old wives’ tale that a baby’s skin color would settle to the color of the tips of its ears, but when Hazel looked, she couldn’t tell if Mary Magdalene’s were brown or just a little red.
With each passing month, and then year one and two, Mary Magdalene remained lily white, with straight, reddish-brown hair. Her hazy blue-gray eyes were the only physical marker of her maternity. Peering into her baby’s eyes, Hazel was reminded of the family she’d lost and how hard it would be to keep her daughter safe.
Hazel, two of her siblings, her mother, an aunt, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother had had those same eyes. A striking juxtaposition to their shades of brown skin, the blue-gray irises were a recessive gene and proof of forced miscegenation generations before.
Hazel had left her family home with two valuables wrapped in her waistband: her parents’ five dollars in life savings, and her great-great-grandmother Elizabeth’s gold ball earrings. Family lore said Elizabeth had been a senator’s house slave in Washington and the mother of two of his eight children, one gray-eyed girl and a blue-eyed male. Their births increased the senator’s slave stock to forty-one.
Hazel had kept her arm close to her side during her journey. The earrings were her only physical connection to her lineage, her only inheritance—her only offering of wealth to any offspring.
CHAPTER 4
Hazel
July 1936
Lakes Tobacco, grown and cured for hundreds of years by Negro hands, was the foundation of Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s economy. It cornered the national market and, whether smoked or chewed, it was consumed by everyone in town: poor and rich, Negro and White, young and old, male and female.
The Lakes factory provided paths to management positions for White men and office work for White women. Negro men and women were offered steady hourly and seasonal work.
A half mile’s walk out in any direction, the neighborhood of Cottonwood bordered the wealthiest White neighborhood to the north and the poorest to the south. The Lakes factory was east, next to the railroad tracks, and to the west was downtown. Though Cottonwood was centrally located, allowing Negroes to walk to work, the thick woods that surrounded it made it necessary for them to travel in groups. At night, the tree limbs felt like death threats, pillars upon which they could be staked.
Hazel got there by accident. She’d gotten off her bus to use the bathroom, but because there wasn’t a Colored one in the station, she’d had to walk up the road to find a shady spot under a tree. From a squat, she saw the bus leave. The station was already closed, so she crossed the street toward the sheriff’s station, and steps from the door, an older Negro woman blocked her path. “What you doing?”
“I’m lost. My bus left.”
The woman gripped Hazel’s wrist. “They won’t help you in there. Lock you up and have their way with you until your kin comes.” Most of the woman’s teeth were missing, and the few she had were black, rotted. Oddly, there was a corn kernel stuck on the side of her mouth.
“I don’t have any kin.”
The woman smacked her gums. “Come on, child.”
She slapped Hazel’s hand, meaning for her to mimic the downward posture of her head, shoulders, and back that allowed her to torpedo past the Whites-only shops and restaurants. They had to walk in the street, and Hazel, nervous so close to the cars, struggled with her canvas bag to keep up, careful to step in the woman’s dirt footprints. Hazel’s family hardly ever went to the city because of these rules.
Not until they were among their own kind did the woman’s pace slow and her back straighten. “Don’t tell none of them White folks you don’t have no kin.” She demanded Hazel’s eye contact. “You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Too pretty, you are.” She said it like a warning before knocking on the door of Adelaide and Lefred Bends.
The Bendses had one of the biggest homes in Cottonwood—three bedrooms and one bath—and welcomed overnight guests expecting nothing in return, or perhaps only a barter for food and shelter. Jim Crow prohibited Negroes from lodging establishments, but there wasn’t a Negro community in America where you couldn’t find temporary shelter.
After learning she was an orphan, headed to New York alone, the Bendses wanted Hazel to stay. The decision became easy when their neighbor, Bessie, offered Hazel a job as second cook at the Lakes manor. Bessie had been the Lakeses’ cook for twenty-five years.
“They treat Bessie so good, sometimes she forgets she ain’t really family,” Adelaide joked, setting a plate of turkey necks, rice, and collard greens in front of Lefred. He was in his usual spot at the head of the table, still in his factory coveralls.
“Say what you want, but they’re as loyal as White folks can be.” Bessie kicked off her house shoes then and, after shifting her thick stomach rolls, bent over to touch her feet. Her toes were gray from a lack of circulation. “I get pain in my soles from standing too long and I need to train someone to do things right.”
Bessie’s cooking was loved far and wide—“Nationally,” Adelaide later fumed to Hazel. It was Bessie’s recipes that Mrs. Nora Lakes used to open the famous BabyCakes bakery chain, a fact that bothered Adelaide more than Bessie.