"Challenging generations of authority takes a lot of courage"
Reviewed by Clare O'Beara
Posted February 27, 2015
Fiction | Historical
The 1940s - 50s were a time of challenging conditions.
Living in Ireland, I only heard about the Rosa Parks story
in recent years, so I was interested to read a novel about
what sort of lives people led. Like many social history
stories, MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE focuses on
the women involved.
Hazel comes from a poor farm homestead, but determinedly
improves herself to gain a job. She holds out for a
bright,
conscientious man and Floyd marries her as soon as he has
made money at machinery sales to support a wife. They move
to the Delta where field workers are gradually being
replaced by cotton reapers. Here Floyd sells machinery to
the men and young mother Hazel surprises herself by
learning to drive a Lincoln well, but the wealthy women
scorn her upbringing.
What of the local workers? The labour intensive cotton
work is carried out by people from former slave families,
barely paid and treated without respect. Vida, daughter
of
a respectable preacher Levi, was assaulted by Billy Dean,
a
local swaggering lad who now runs for election to sheriff.
When he lays eyes on Vida's small boy, he knows he's
responsible. The wealthy white folks don't want to know
about a poor girl's troubles. And the last thing they'd
want is for the million or so poor people in the area to
vote.
The middle section of the book reminds me of The Help, as
it focuses on the two stressed women and their gradual
relationship over domestic matters. In the third section,
time has passed and political issues rise to the fore as
Levi declares his intention to register to vote. Hazel
will not be forced into firing his daughter, as Floyd
wishes, and the temperature not just of the Delta but of
the whole nation is rising. Vida is terrified that her
father is being called a civil rights agitator, but she is
determined to get revenge on Sheriff Billy Dean, whether
he
arrests her father or not.
From this point the tension is tight and I held my breath
more than once, waiting to see how a situation would play
out. Like Rosa Parks, the tired worker who refused to give
up her bus seat for a white man, somebody had to make the
first move in this story, and the author Jonathan Odell
interviewed many domestic servants to gain a clear
understanding of who that person would really have been.
MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE echoes a different
time, and tells a memorable tale.
SUMMARY
Set in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi, Miss Hazel and the
Rosa
Parks League is the story of two young mothers, Hazel and
Vida – one wealthy and white and the other poor and black
–
who have only two things in common: the devastating loss
of
their children, and a deep and abiding loathing for one
another. Embittered and distrusting, Vida is harassed by Delphi’s
racist sheriff and haunted by the son she lost to the
world.
Hazel, too, has lost a son and can’t keep a grip on her
fractured life. After drunkenly crashing her car into a
manger scene while gunning for the baby Jesus, Hazel is
sedated and bed-ridden. Hazel’s husband hires Vida to
keep
tabs on his unpredictable wife and to care for his sole
surviving son. Forced to spend time together with no one
else to rely on, the two women find they have more in
common
than they thought, and together they turn the town on its
head. It is the story of a town, a people, and a culture
on
the verge of a great change that begins with small
things,
like unexpected friendship.
ExcerptPrologueIt was up to Vida to save her boy. With Nate in her arms,
she fled through the back door and toward the darkened
field behind the house. If she could get Nate to the
bayou beyond, into the dark stand of cypress, he would be
safe. The two white men must have heard the back screen slap
shut, because the lights of their truck were now cutting
across the field. She turned. It roared toward her,
plowing through rows of cotton, the bumper mowing down
plants half as tall as men. They were almost upon her.
There was no way she could make it to the bayou. Vida
dropped down between two rows, cradling Nate beneath her. The truck braked and she heard a door open. She peeked
above the row. They stood only a few yards away,
listening to the night, the headlights throwing their
shadows long across the field. Nate whimpered and one stumbled off in the direction of
the sound. The old man lurched after him. “Don’t!” he shouted. “You
don’t want to kill nobody, son. Specially not no little
baby. Specially not yore. . .” “Shut your goddamned mouth! He ain’t my nothing,” the
other one slurred. “That boy lives, I lose it all!” The old man called out in a panic, “Gal! Stay down. You
hear me? Don’t raise up.” He reached out and tugged at
the barrel of the gun. Vida leaped up and started off again. Moments later came the first blast, followed quickly by
the second. With blinding force, the searing spray of
buckshot sent Vida and her child tumbling into darkness. As the explosions echoed throughout the quarter, the
lanterns in the shanties dimmed as quickly as they had
come on.
1947 Chapter One A MAN WHO TAKES CARE OF HIS OWN Hazel was busy arranging a display of Tangee beauty
products at the Rexall where she had been working in
Tupelo when a tall handsome man right off the bus, fresh
from the Navy and still wearing his summer whites, strode
confidently into the drugstore. His eyes were two dark
stars. He grinned at her and tilted his head in a way that set
the butterflies in her stomach to fluttering. “Is the
druggist in? I need to get me a prescription filled for a
root beer float.” He spoke in a voice like a country love
song, tender and true. At first Hazel couldn’t answer,
she could only stare wide-mouthed at him as if she were
waiting for the second verse. “Now, you wouldn’t happen
to know the formula for one, would you?” Blushing, she could only stammer, “I sure do. . .can. .
.will.” By the time she got behind the fountain, she had
calmed herself enough to joke, “I won’t even ask to see
your doctor’s note.” That made him laugh. It was a good laugh, gentle,
seemingly incapable of meanness. Setting the glass before
him, she warned with a wink, “Don’t eat it too fast or
you’ll freeze your goozle.” He said, “I’m sure not in any hurry now.” It was his eyes that really got her attention. Like dark
mirrors of polished iron, they were beautiful to look at,
but they wouldn’t let Hazel in. His eyes seemed to push
back on her, which made her want to come all the closer.
She told him, “I bet you could stare a buzzard out of a
tree.” He blushed and said, “You got the best posture of any
girl I’ve ever met.” Hazel could tell he wanted to say more, but he didn’t
need to. In his mirrored eyes she saw herself as pretty,
as pretty as she’d felt the day that traveling
photographer had snapped her picture. Hazel had been twelve years old when the slick-haired, -
sugar- talking man arrived one hot summer afternoon with
the mysterious black box he swore would show her to be as
pretty as anybody in the movies. Up until then, she had
never seen a photograph of herself. While he set up his
camera and posed each one of her brothers and sisters,
she flirted with him, tossing back her hair and licking
her lips the way she had seen Jean Harlow do. Standing
out in the yard as the man took her picture, she felt her
skin burn at the thought of escaping the Tombigbee Hills. Her mother never had any patience for this full-of-
feelings girl. Each time Hazel asked if the pictures had
arrived, she was warned about getting her hopes up. “Hope
does the plowing in Misery’s field,” her mother said. But
the delicious anticipation of things hoped for had to be
the best sensation Hazel knew of. She didn’t know how she
could live without thinking something good was about to
happen, not in the sweet by-and-by but tomorrow, if not
today. When the photographs finally arrived two months later,
her hands trembled as she opened the envelope. The first
was of her momma and daddy sitting stiffly next to each
other, the way strangers share a bench at the dentist’s
office. The next was of her daddy with his arm around his
mule’s neck. How much more at ease he appeared posing
with a plow mule! Finally she came to the family portrait, twelve of them
in front of the paintless barn. On one end was her daddy
in his white starched shirt and overalls, and on the
other end was her momma, tired and worn, holding baby
Jewel. Bunched between them was the brood of wooden-faced
children, not a size missing between knee-high and full
grown, with two spaces left empty for the boys still off
to war in the Pacific. Something wasn’t right! Hazel touched her finger to each
face in the picture. She could identify her brothers and
sisters, yet her own face was missing. Had the camera
skipped over her? “No!” she gasped. That photographer had played an awful
trick on Hazel! In her place he had put a half-starved
orphan, neglected and bound to die soon. The poor little
girl was stoop-shouldered and had hair the texture of
broom straw. A dingy, hand-me-down dress swallowed the
rail-thin body. The face was gaunt and hollow-eyed. She
had the haggard look of a woman of fifty, not of a girl
of twelve. Hazel’s shock gave way to tears. It was no trick. She
should have known. Her older sisters had told her often
enough. Hazel Ishee was as homely as a wart-headed
chicken. No fancy man with a magic black box or a head
full of hope was going to change that fact of life. Baby Ishee noticed how her daughter moped, and tried to
comfort her. “You’re pretty enough.” Hazel was doubtful. “Enough for what?” “Enough for any man from these parts.” “Were you ever pretty, Momma?” Hazel asked, not meaning
to offend, and biting her lip when she noticed the quick
tensing of her mother’s face. For the first time, Hazel beheld her mother clearly
instead of through the clouded lens of a child’s
familiarity. The hump that rose from her mother’s back.
The tiny foot that had not grown since her mother was a
child and had turned inward, causing the hobble Hazel had
accepted as being as natural as hair color. Before this,
Hazel hadn’t thought of her mother in terms of “pretty”
or “not pretty.” Now the hump appeared freakish and the
crippled foot grotesque. She became aware of other things, too. Her mother’s
nickname, Baby, had not been given to her out of
affection or devotion, but because of a deformed foot,
like one would call a person Stump or Gimp. Hazel was
suddenly ashamed for her mother. As if reading her daughter’s thoughts, Baby scowled at
herself in the mirror. Then she wiped a trickle of snuff
from her chin with the corner of her apron. “Pretty don’t
mean much. Men are like hawgs,” she said. “Ever seen an
ol’ hawg wearing spectacles?” “No ma’am,” Hazel answered, running her toe along a crack
in the floor. “Course not.” Her mother spit into the Calumet can she
always carried. “Old hawg don’t care what he gobbling up.
Pretty ain’t worth doodly squat to no hawg.” With that,
Baby Ishee turned and left the room, her little foot
sweeping the floor as she walked. Hazel told herself that her mother had been right. She
was a fool to hope. She tried resigning herself to her
ugliness, taking to her fate like a Christian martyr. As
her mother had done, she would become the wife of some
man who didn’t care how she looked and who was more
flattered at having his picture taken with a mule than
with her. She would have a brood of children, each year
pushing the last baby out of her lap to make room for the
next. Her older sister, the pretty one, had little patience for
Hazel’s sulking. “What’s the matter with you?” Onareen
asked as she poured a bucket of water into the horse
trough. “I’m ugly!” Hazel snapped. “Ain’t you noticed?” Her sister’s face softened to pity. “You know, Hazel,
having beauty to lose is much worse a burden than never
having it to begin with. God was looking out for you by
making you plain.” Hazel’s mouth dropped. “You saying He did it on purpose?
You saying me being homely is God’s will?” “That’s right, Hazel. Take it as a blessing.” Hazel pushed Onareen into the horse trough. Then and there Hazel decided to come down whole hog on
the side of hope. She was going to be pretty if it killed
her. By thirteen, she was well on her way to becoming a self-
made expert on beauty. She began by relentlessly working
to change her appearance. At the risk of getting a
whipping, she snatched eggs from under laying hens and
concocted a hair remedy of fresh yolks and mineral oil.
After everyone had gone to bed, she boiled a flour sack
and wrapped it around her treated hair. In a few weeks,
the texture softened. For her arms, which were as spotted as turkey eggs, she
stole pennies from the collection plate and sent away for
jars of freckle cream advertised in the almanac. The toughest challenge was her stooped shoulders. The
effects of dragging a cotton sack from the time she was
six, and years of hunching so as not to tower over the
boys at school, could not be fixed with cosmetics. After
much deliberation, Hazel hit upon the solution. Salvaging
a discarded mule harness from the barn, she constructed a
halter to wear. Though the straps bit into her skin, it
forced her shoulders back. For hours she practiced
walking like Jean Harlow, one foot directly in front of
the other. It took her a few years, but Hazel’s looks began to take
a slow turn for the better. Her hair turned a lustrous
auburn, her eyes blued brighter than robins’ eggs, and
she had grown lovely, round breasts, finer even than
Onareen’s. Still she wasn’t satisfied. Hazel decided she
needed cosmetic assistance. Knowing of only one person
who used makeup, she cornered the undertaker at church
and begged a supply of lipstick, rouge, and powder. After a week of clandestine practice, the day came when
she was ready to surprise her family with the new, made-
up Hazel. The reaction was swift. Her brothers called her
Little Miss Sow’s Ear. Her sisters called her worse. Her
father made her go wash her face in the horse trough. She
might have given up out of pure humiliation if not for
the dark, brooding look she caught on her mother’s face.
That’s when Hazel knew she was onto something good. It wasn’t long before Hazel discovered there were other
types of men in the world besides farmers and sons of
farmers. There were men with routes—men who drove
automobiles from farm to farm, never getting their hands
dirty on any of them, who looked you directly in the eyes
and weren’t afraid to laugh at nothing at all. These were
men who talked for the same reason other people sang, for
the pure, simple sound of it. They looked at her with
smiling eyes and told her she belonged in California. Or
Jackson, maybe. Hazel thought nothing of skipping school to make day
trips into Tupelo with the Watkins Flavoring man and into
Corinth with the Standard Coffee man and into Iuka with
the man who had the rolling store. Hazel would catch a
ride from any man with a route who was going her way. They would drop her off and she would spend the day at
the soda fountain counter studying the fashions and poses
of those picture-perfect women in the movie magazines.
Poring over the color photographs, enveloped by the
smells emanating from the cosmetics displays, she felt
more at home than she ever did on the farm. She spent so
much time at the Rexall in Tupelo, the druggist took a
shine to her and offered her a job. She right away took
her own room in town, the first she didn’t have to share
with five siblings. From all the romance stories she had been reading in the
movie magazines, Hazel gathered that finding the right
man and living off true love was the key to everlasting
happiness. Yet she was not foolish enough to believe that
just any man would do. You needed someone special, a man
you could lay your best hopes on, one who would love you
enough to see you got everything you wanted, even before
you knew you wanted it yourself. If you had to ask, it
didn’t count. What worried Hazel the most was the
impermanence of good feelings in general. From what she
could tell, they tended to melt away as surely as ice
cream in the bottom of a Dixie cup. Was love going to be
the same way? The magazines didn’t tell her that. When
she asked her mother, Baby said, “Feelings come and go
like morning dew on a pasture. They ain’t anything to
build a future on.” Hazel frowned, yet her mother went on. “Hazelene, there
ain’t but two kind of men in the world. Them that take
care of their own, and them that don’t. Now, the first
kind of man will stay on out of duty. The other?” Her
mother flicked her wrist as if she were shooing a noisome
insect. “Why, as soon as there’s a dry spell, the other
kind has jumped the fence and is looking for fresh dew.
If you know what I mean.” Hazel hadn’t been partial to the dewy part, but she did
like the piece about a man taking care of his own. That
sure sounded right enough. Hazel took her mother’s advice
to heart, never forgetting her words, using them to
measure all comers. And there was a host of them. Men dropped by the
drugstore all the time, flirting and asking her out.
Their hungry eyes and grinning, greedy mouths frightened
her, and she remembered what her mother had said. Hazel
could tell that all they had an appetite for was the dewy
part. But the minute Floyd walked into the store, she began
hoping he was the one she’d been waiting for. She
wondered, is this how true love shows itself? Can a
complete stranger walk into your life on a fine Indian
summer afternoon while you are stacking tubes of
lipstick, and then, just like that—in the twinkle of a
mirrored eye and the flash of a toothy smile—all your
hoping suddenly pays off, and life is never the same? Is
that the way it’s supposed to work? Can something that
happens so quickly be counted on to last a lifetime?
What do you think about this review?
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