A Matter of Souls Read online

  “Haaazelll? Is that postman late again?”

  Miss Clotille was the only person Hazel had ever heard say “postman” instead of “mailman,” “etiquette” instead of “manners,” and “despise” instead of “hate.” Miss Clotille often described herself as “unique,” and Hazel agreed. “One-of-a-kind crazy,” Hazel’s sister Jurdine called Miss Clotille. But Jurdine was just jealous that she wasn’t getting culture and wisdom on her job plucking chickens out at Garrett’s Farm.

  “No, ma’am, he was on time. I’m coming!”

  Hazel didn’t rush, but she moved quickly. Her bare feet made no sound on the gleaming wood floor that she had polished yesterday. Miss Clotille kept telling her that it was unseemly for a young woman to go around without shoes in public, but Hazel differed with her on that point: she felt it was unseemly for a housekeeper to scuff her own floors on purpose.

  At the door of Miss Clotille’s bedroom Hazel paused to organize the various magazines and bills and invitations by size, and then she waited.

  “Oh! There you are.” The faint dust of rouge rose up from the dressing table as Miss Clotille replaced her powder puff and turned to Hazel expectantly.

  They always had their little ceremonies. Hazel supposed these were Miss Clotille’s attempts—having no husband, no children, and no sisters or brothers—to mimic a regular family’s routines. And though there were so many things about Miss Clotille that Hazel not only admired but worked with great concentration to emulate, Hazel firmly believed she would hear a Mrs. and a Mama in her own near future.

  Hazel handed over the mail and smiled.

  “Thank you, dear,” Miss Clotille said sweetly. “And would you call for Mr. Tom to bring the car for me at twelve thirty?”

  Hazel crossed the room to open the huge mahogany chifferobe.

  “Yes, ma’am. Now, I don’t directly recall … you wearing the green or the purple to your luncheon?”

  “Oh, Hazel! Are you wearing! Are you! And they’re teal and magenta, my dear. I’ll be wearing the magenta. It matches my lipstick.”

  Hazel smiled again and took out the mentioned dress. She didn’t mind being corrected. Working for somebody like Miss Clotille might be the best education she would ever get, since the chances were slim to none that her family could send her to college.

  “I think the magenta is perfect, Miss Clotille.”

  Mama Vee always claimed Clotille Henderson had been a woman when she was a girl, but Miss Clotille was well-preserved and determined, even if she was nearly sixty. She was tiny—the tips of her pink silk mules barely touched the floor when she sat at her dressing table. But what Miss Clotille lacked in stature had never held her back in any of the classrooms where she’d taught countless corn-fed country girls and rough, cotton-picking boys. Hazel fervently believed that Miss Clotille prevailed because she had the power of that flawless almond skin.

  Her light skin commanded the right kind of attention. It spoke of her easy membership in societies and organizations and committees that would never dare ask her to suffer their paper-bag entrance tests. Her pale, sometimes pink, but never tan cheeks practically shouted down the word Colored on her birth certificate. The way Miss Clotille held her pointy chin high, peering boldly at everyone and anyone her path crossed, told the world that she was a female force. Everything about her combined to make Miss Clotille ideal in Hazel’s estimation.

  “Since I’ll be gone for the afternoon, Hazel, you may leave early. That is, I’m assuming that you have everything in order.” Miss Clotille raised her pencil-thin brows, but her expression was amused.

  Hazel never left anything out of order. Mama Vee had worked as a maid and housekeeper for White people—people far richer than Miss Clotille could ever be—for forty-five years. Violet Jenkins’s standards in “her” houses where she worked for pay were the same as they were in the tight but impeccably clean little bungalow where she and Hazel’s mother, father, and sisters lived. Miss Clotille didn’t know or understand that Mama Vee had already been to her house to test Hazel’s cleaning ability. Hazel had passed muster for her grandmother a full year ago.

  “You’ll be assuming correct,” she grinned.

  “Correctly. Yes, I really thought so.”

  “Correctly,” Hazel repeated, and then paused. “Miss Clotille … You think it would seem proper if I was to step out with JC?”

  Hazel had tried to ask the question without the edge of hesitation in her voice, but failed. She sucked in her bottom lip and blinked in Miss Clotille’s direction, knowing that Miss Clotille was fully aware of her own power.

  “If you were to step out?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is that Johnson Johnson you’re speaking of?” Miss Clotille asked. “The boy who cuts my grass?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Hazel answered quickly. “But JC only does that part-time. He’s a full-time janitor over at the Normal College, and he’s a fine piano player!”

  Miss Clotille blinked just once. “Not in a juke joint, I hope!”

  Hazel shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no! He plays both services over at Galilee Baptist Church. His mama is choir director!” Hazel thought, then added, “He is a very upstanding gentleman.”

  “Well, then, if you know that, dear, you certainly don’t need any permission from me. What do your parents think of him?”

  Hazel didn’t exactly want to say that, though her mother was lukewarm over it, her father was pleased as punch over possibly having one of his girls walk down the aisle—even though Hazel had never done as much as sing a solo to JC’s accompaniment at nine o’clock service.

  “They don’t have no complaints,” she said honestly.

  “Any complaints. Good. He has asked you out, I suppose? Where to?”

  “Er … to the movies next weekend,” Hazel lied. The dance was at the juke joint.

  “You have a good time.”

  Hazel smiled as she hooked the back of Miss Clotille’s magenta chiffon. She floated out of the room, lifted by expectation and filled with imaginative plans.

  “Girl, what in the devil are you still doing in there? I gotta work a night shift!” Jurdine’s whine was more shrill than usual. She hated the night shift, she said, because by then the chickens’ stink had turned into a vapor that seeped into her hair and skin.

  Hazel was thankful to God that she didn’t have that job, though it allowed her sister to own two pairs of fancy dress shoes and get her hats custom made.

  “Hazel Mozella, if you don’t come out of there, I’m gonna call Daddy!”

  Hazel smirked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and continued to rub the skin cream slathered onto her face in slow, circular movements. The instructions said to coat the skin evenly for best effects. And so far, the product had worked beautifully; she wasn’t going to mess it up now!

  “MAAAMMMAAA!” Jurdine was banging harder.

  Hazel ran the cold water and splashed it up, reaching for a clean facecloth. Her fingers tingled as they grabbed the dry square. Mama Vee must have used too much bleach again, she thought, patting her cheeks dry.

  There was a swift clicking of heels on the linoleum outside the door, and Hazel hurried to push the glass jar back inside its box and shove the box into a brown paper bag. She checked herself in the mirror and turned on the faucet to rinse the sink.

  “Gal, you hold your sister up from making money and I’ma take it out of your black behind!” Mama Vee barked, and Hazel’s bones rattled along with the window. She tossed the bag into the half-full laundry hamper and quickly fluffed up her father’s dirty work pants on top. Taking a deep breath, she flushed the toilet and opened the door.

  Jurdine huffed and pushed past. Hazel noticed curiously that she was wearing perfume. She didn’t bother to comment, though. Mama Vee’s stern gray-green eyes were burning in her yellow face.

  “Why you stay up in that mirror, I do not know,” she said, narrowing those eyes at Hazel. “Lookin’ won’t make you no lighter!”<
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  Long ago, Hazel had taught herself not to wince. She smiled and said “No ma’am” so sweetly that Mama Vee’s breath seemed suddenly sucked away, and the wide-hipped queen of the house stood angrily rooted to her spot as Hazel sashayed away.

  Hazel knew that save for her dark skin, she was the spitting image of Mama Vee. Did her father’s mother resent her as some kind of bitter reflection?

  Hazel was turning that surprising idea over in her mind when she entered the kitchen and slipped into her chair. Her mother gave her a quick, harried nod from the stove, and sisters buzzed everywhere, distracting her from her grandmother’s whys and wherefores.

  Velma Jean was their mother’s shadow, stirring with the same long nut-brown hands; easing out and around their mother as they placed serving dishes on the table in a perfect rhythm. It was their supper dance.

  Violet, whose attitudes were in every way the same as her namesake’s, shook her mane of thick brown curls, sucked her teeth impatiently, and began instantly to rearrange the plates her twin had only just set down. They used to be identical, but no one understood how Violet had become so skinny and sour over barely seventeen years.

  Miriam had already scrunched her small self into her chair at the far end of the crowded table. She smiled her round, suntanned face up at Hazel from some library book that she was deep into reading. And from the back porch, everyone could hear Baby George slamming and stomping off her basketball and boy scents before she came in and boldly denied both.

  My happy family, Hazel thought. Someday I will have my own and love it as much as this one. Me and Johnson Caesar Johnson. Mrs. Hazel Mozella Reed-Johnson …

  “Hey, Brown Sugar!” Daddy shared his gap-toothed grin with her, and she felt her shoulders relax.

  “Hey, Daddy.” Hazel raised herself to give him a peck on the cheek. He looked tired, the way any man who worked three jobs to support all his women would. As Hazel sat back down, she wondered for a fleeting moment if JC would look tired too, one day. He already had as many jobs as her daddy did, and she wanted a magazine-perfect house and two or three children with it!

  “Guess what?” Baby George came breathless beside Hazel, swinging her chair around backward to perch on it. Her face was glowing golden with a pink hint of excitement, and the fat black braids she had wound up tight around her head looked like the crown of some wild, happy queen—or king.

  “We beat the pants off them Garret Farm boys, fifty-five to thirty-two!”

  “I hope you don’t really mean that!” Hazel laughed and poured her father a full glass of sweet tea. She still wasn’t sure if her sister—who wasn’t actually the baby—carried on this sports craziness because she wanted to be around the boys, or because she wanted to be a boy. As Velma Jean often whispered, the jury was still out on that.

  “Lord, girl! Set that chair straight!” Mama Vee had made her way into the room. She shook her head and turned to set the big platter of chicken in front of Daddy.

  “Good thing Jurdine has to work tonight!” Miriam said, eyeing the chicken cheerfully and sliding her closed book onto her lap.

  “If it wasn’t for Jurdine, we wouldn’t be having no chicken,” Violet murmured. Hazel couldn’t tell if her sister thought that was a good or bad thing, but she didn’t ask her to clarify. Nobody wanted Violet to get started. “Pontificating” was what Miss Clotille called it.

  Daddy motioned to Baby George without speaking, and she sheepishly rearranged her chair and herself, giving him a one-sided grin that was gapped like his. Whether their mother had known it or not, she had certainly marked what she’d thought was her last baby and hoped-for son. When another girl had popped out into Daddy’s hands on the kitchen floor, Mama called her George anyway. And Daddy, proud as ever, was the one who’d decided they better soften it with “Ann.” The “Baby” part had stuck, even after Miriam had surprised them all ten years ago. Any way it worked out, George was her father’s child more than any of the others.

  And once again, when Hazel looked under her eyes at them while Daddy said a long grace, she wondered for the hundredth time how the blood had mixed up to make her so different from everybody else. Well, look so different. It shouldn’t matter in a family, and mostly it didn’t. But to Mama Vee, Hazel was the stain she couldn’t clean away.

  “Amen,” their voices united to end the prayer. Glasses and plates and forks clinked.

  “Oh! Hazel!” Baby George speared a tomato and looked at her sister with bright gray-green eyes. “Lucky Johnson asked me to the dance next Saturday. Didn’t JC ask you?”

  Everything clattered to a stop, and Hazel found herself almost choking. First of all, a boy had asked Baby George to a dance, and she was happy about it? And secondly, JC had discussed his plans with his brother, and now her sister—her whole family—knew?

  Mama’s head whipped from one side to the other, and all she could get out was sputter.

  “Unbelievable!” Velma Jean and Violet were so surprised that their twin-speak flared up and they said the exact same word at the exact same time.

  “I declare, these girls are so fast! Evelyn, you need to do something about your fast girls,” Mama Vee muttered with a frown at her rice and gravy.

  Only Daddy didn’t seem to need to recover from anything.

  “Why, ain’t this nice?” He nodded slowly at Hazel first, then Baby George in turn. “They call that a double date, and how ’bout it’s two brothers and two sisters? Brown Sugar and Baby George is growin’ up into women!”

  Mama coughed. “Now, George, I don’t know about all that. Hazel, maybe … but George Ann’s only fifteen!”

  Baby George opened her mouth to protest, turning beet red, but no words came out and she looked helplessly at Hazel. She really wanted this! Hazel was shocked at George’s moment of weakness, but she wasn’t going to let her down. “It’s all right, Mama. Lucky and JC are real respectable boys. And you always say George Ann ought to be involved in more ladylike activities. Besides, I’ll be right there. I’ll be her chaperone.”

  In some strange way, Miss Clotille had come to the Reed dinner table. Hazel ran a glance past her grandmother’s slow boil, over the twins’ open-mouthed stares, and Miriam’s giggles to look at her parents.

  “Well!” Mama breathed. Something like a twinkle sparkled behind the rims of her black eyeglasses. “I guess Miss Clotille has sunk a whole lot of the fine points of culture into you after all, Hazel. I—I don’t know what I’ll make of you if she gets you off to some college …” her words trailed off, almost wistfully.

  Hazel had once spoken to Miss Clotille about the possibility of training at the Colored Normal College, maybe following her footsteps to a classroom somewhere, but Miss Clotille had declined to give advice, saying she didn’t want her to have false hopes. Now Hazel’s hopes weren’t certain, and she wasn’t sure where any college money would come from. Still, a little bit of her had wished for a different kind of reaction.

  So she said nothing to Mama.

  “That’s fine. Just fine,” Daddy said, looking at Hazel hard. “You a girl with natural smarts, Sugar. If life takes you along the school way, that’s all right. And if you have an honest working life, that’s all right too. You got good sense, and that’s what counts. George Ann couldn’t have a better one to look up to.” He said that last sentence with finality and then proceeded to sprinkle hot sauce onto his field peas before he stirred them into the mound of rice covering his plate.

  Hazel swallowed. “Thank you, Daddy.” She reached for Baby George’s hand under the table and squeezed it; her sister squeezed back.

  “Girl, I’m the luckiest man on God’s green Earth!” JC grabbed both of Hazel’s hands and swung her around as if they were already on the dance floor. Hazel felt warm inside and flushed outside. She didn’t resist when JC looped one of his long arms inside hers.

  “I gotta get to the grocery and back before Miss Clotille comes home!” she protested feebly.

  “Let me walk you piece of the
way,” he crooned into her ear.

  Hazel slowed down enough to let him fall in step with her. On Tuesdays Miss Clotille had her teacher’s meeting and some committee meetings, so Hazel had plenty of time to pick up the few items for her refrigerator.

  For now, she could pay attention to how solid JC’s shoulder was against hers, and how pleasantly manly he smelled, even though he’d been clipping hedges when he saw her. They strolled. Hazel wished she could be seen, but this was a working neighborhood and it was only three o’clock. Even the old people were still inside listening to their radio programs or dozing at this time of day.

  “Hazel, I gotta tell you something.”

  “What is it?” Hazel didn’t know him as well as she planned to, but she heard the romance creep out of his voice. She looked up sharply.

  There wasn’t a trace of dishonesty in his face. He stopped and swallowed. Hazel watched his Adam’s apple slide up and down. He tightened his grip on her hand the same way she’d done to Baby George, and that was comforting.

  “I took on another job.”

  “That’s all? I have to tell you, JC, that I do like a hardworking man.” She squinted up at him. His chiseled cheekbones glistened in the afternoon sun. “I’m glad. But what I mean to tell you is that—well, I know you’re a real upright kinda girl—and—”

  “You haven’t broken the law, have you?”

  “No! No! I joined a band, Hazel. A jazz band.”

  Hazel sighed and smiled. “Well, honey, I know you’re a musician! That seems natural to me.”

  He grinned. His teeth were the straightest, whitest teeth Hazel had ever seen on a man. She figured they had never seen tobacco, those pretty teeth. But it was clear that JC wasn’t through talking. Hazel waited patiently, and she could tell that he appreciated her calmness.

  “I’m glad. The thing is, I worked last weekend. We did this gig, you know—that’s what we call a performance—and it was at a private club.”

  Hazel knew what that meant. It meant a restricted club. A White club. Why would she take exception to that? The money was still green, wasn’t it? She kept listening. JC cocked his head to one side, almost like he wanted to see her better.