A Matter of Souls Read online

  “This was last Saturday night,” he said carefully. Hazel nodded.

  “These White men were having a party. They had some gambling and they were all liquored up and we played till two in the morning. The thing is, we weren’t the only … uh … entertainment. Hazel, there was women there, women they hired to come. Jurdine was one of the women.” He took a breath. “I saw her leave with one of ’em.”

  Hazel’s knees went numb, and she felt herself drifting from the great height of truth down to the hard reality of lies. Last Saturday night. When Jurdine had worn perfume to the night shift.

  “Hey, baby! Are you okay? I knew I shouldn’t have said anything … Hazel, I’m sorry!” She was in his arms, but it wasn’t the way she’d dreamed it would be. Her heart was racing, and she could barely speak.

  “Hazel! Doggone it, I shoulda kept my big mouth—”

  “It’s all right … ” she forced the words out, though her stomach was fluttering and she was about to throw up. JC held onto her. She fought to get control over her body and her mind, which had seemed to go blank. “… Just … just don’t tell nobody else. No one else, please?” She was weak, but she struggled to get to her feet. JC lifted her.

  “Whatever you say, Hazel. I only thought that somebody in the family should know, in case …” he faltered. Hazel turned to look at him.

  “In case what?” she asked, still unable to put all the information together and accept the real facts he had presented.

  “In case something happens to her.” JC had lowered his voice, and Hazel was suddenly alert. Jurdine was living dangerously. “I don’t think you’re in the shape to go to the grocery by yourself,” he said. “Let me walk you over there and back. Maybe you ought to go home.”

  Hazel shook her head vigorously, and the twist of hair at her neck fell. Waves cascaded against her skin, making her feel feverish. She couldn’t go home. There would be questions, nosy questions. And she couldn’t leave Miss Clotille’s without putting things in order—there would be questions in that quarter, too.

  “No, I can make it if you help me. When I get back to Miss Clotille’s I can sit a while and get myself together. I have to figure out what to do with what you told me … I know you did what you thought was best, JC.” She managed to smile.

  He lightly touched her hair. “Excuse me, Hazel Mozella Reed, but you are awfully beautiful with your hair down.”

  An orange school bus swung around the nearest corner and surrounded them with screeches and screams. Hazel straightened her back and started to walk.

  “You’re excused, Johnson Caesar Johnson,” she said, reaching for his hand.

  When Hazel stepped back into her house later that afternoon, she remembered that on Tuesdays, Mama and Daddy went straight from work to their deacon and deaconess board meetings at the church. So she took a deep breath of relief as she crossed the threshold. Laughter and girls’ gossip floated from the kitchen to meet her, and the air was heavy with the smell of sizzling Royal Crown Hair Dressing. Hazel untied her shoes near the door and carried them toward the back of the house.

  “Ouch! You singed me!” Baby George’s complaint was muffled by the fact that her chin was pushed down against her chest. Velma Jean sat on a high stool over her sister; one hand grasped a shock of tightly curled hair, the other was raised and holding the smoking hot comb. Miriam sat at the table, flipping the pages of one of Hazel’s borrowed Half-Century magazines.

  Hazel shook her head and laughed, for a moment forgetting the awful news that she was holding. “What are y’all doing in here, messing up Mama’s kitchen?” She pulled out a chair and dropped into it.

  “Trying to make a woman out of this sister thing we got.” Violet appeared with an armful of dresses, sucking her teeth. “George, have you ever worn a decent dress?”

  George mumbled and scrunched even further down into the chair.

  “I’ma hit you in the head if you don’t sit still!” Velma Jean warned.

  “Hazel, how come you got the words in this advertisement underlined with an ink pen?” Miriam was bending close over a page in the back of the magazine. Hazel swiftly snatched it away, but Violet’s keen eyes had already seen.

  “You using bleaching cream?” Violet shrieked.

  The hot comb clinked onto the burner, and Velma Jean actually jerked George Ann’s head up. All eyes were on Hazel.

  Suddenly she felt accused and defensive. Her throat went dry.

  “Oh no, Hazel.” Velma Jean’s eyes teared.

  “That’s just crazy!” Baby George shook her head, and the smooth, already pressed waves moved like a black curtain.

  “Don’t tell me you takin’ Mama Vee and Jurdine seriously!” Violet exploded, dropping her frown to the magazine. “Everybody knows how colorstruck they are!”

  “Mama says a woman who tries to change her natural beauty is a fool! But you’re smart, Hazel!” Miriam said. “You could be a teacher, you could be just like Miss Clotille.”

  Miriam’s little-girl remarks hit just too close to the truth. Hazel clutched the magazine in her sweating hands. She wanted to leave the room, but her legs were weak again. Yes, their mother said that. Mama worked hard and mothered hard and prayed hard, and still had her looks and her devoted husband. Miss Clotille had money and creamy skin and respect. Hazel coveted all that. But what were her chances? She was milk chocolate in a world where that was the same as mud.

  “It—it’s just a beauty treatment. That’s all it is.”

  “Beauty, my ass.” Violet hissed.

  “Hazel, you’re already beautiful!” said Miriam.

  Hazel gave her a shaky smile in return.

  “Could we get off Hazel and get back to beautifying me?” George Ann pleaded, wagging her half-straight, half-braided head. Violet held up the two dresses she’d been wrinkling in her arms. Both were Jurdine’s. Both were expensive.

  Hazel shook her head, guessing how her sister had paid for them. Baby George’s first social occasion couldn’t be tainted with that.

  “Don’t nobody want to hear Jurdine ranting over those scraps of material. I have a nice seersucker, George, that I only wore one time. I know it would fit you. Let me pull it out.” Hazel dragged herself up from the table.

  “Thanks, Hazey!” George Ann said.

  Violet followed Hazel into the hallway toward their bedroom. She gripped Hazel’s elbow once they were out of earshot of the kitchen.

  “I saw that advertisement. You’d better stop messing with that shit. It’ll kill you.”

  Hazel gently pulled her arm away. “When did you get such a nasty mouth?”

  On Thursday evening, Hazel locked herself in the bathroom after dinner. She sat on the closed toilet and turned the glass jar in her hands, reading the label aloud softly. “Beauty Queen Complexion Clarifier … Guaranteed to brighten, lighten, and heighten your natural beauty!” What was so wrong with that? She wondered. “Manufactured by the Emerson Beauty Company, Emerson, Georgia.” But nowhere inside the pretty scrollwork border did the label tell what, exactly, this miracle-working product was manufactured with. Her mind wandered back to her sisters’ reactions. Everybody called it bleaching cream … but did it really have bleach in it?

  She blinked at the jugs and containers of cleaning products lined neatly under the sink. Too much bleach could eat through linens and clothes. Surely they couldn’t have put something like that into a skin cream, could they?

  She thought of the smelly but fascinating experiments she had done in chemistry class. She could ask Mr. Goodman, the teacher. She had once confided in him about her self-invented cleaning formula, and he had gotten all excited, talking about how she had a head for science! She had laughed at the notion, knowing that her lab grades had always been only fair to middling.

  She had never read as many books as Miriam did. She read all sorts of magazines though, including that National Geographic when she could get her hands on it. She loved the feeling it gave her of traveling all over the world. A
nd Daddy brought home his boss’s stack of newspapers at the end of every week. Hazel pored over them. It never mattered to her that the news was several days late.

  She was sometimes bothered that she didn’t always speak the way educated people did; none of the Reeds did. In fact, it was Miss Clotille who’d pointed that out.

  Miss Clotille had always been helpful in pointing out those small things that separated the Reeds from the most cultivated, ideal Colored class. At every turn she had a little idea, or suggestion or correction. Miss Clotille had taken Hazel under her wing, brought her to work in her home to…

  To what?

  It occurred to her that as long as Hazel felt too brown and far from correct, Miss Clotille’s tiny person stayed lofty, light, and proud.

  Sudden, urgent tapping on the door interrupted Hazel’s discoveries.

  “Hazel! I need to get in there!” Without thinking, Hazel leaned to open the door.

  Jurdine rushed to the mirror. In silence, Hazel watched her older sister, conscious for the first time of how much Jurdine and Miss Clotille were alike.

  Jurdine wasn’t small, but she was perfect in figure, curving exactly where she should. She had lovely ankles. Her creamy skin had to be some kind of throwback to Mama Vee’s White grandfather, and the blood mix had straightened every curl out of Jurdine’s shoulder-length black hair even when it was wet. She had the full lips and wide dark eyes of their father, and the only thing of Mama’s that Jurdine had gotten was the husky tone of her words.

  The ideal Colored woman.

  Jurdine must have felt her sister’s stare, because she paused and narrowed her eyes. She spun around, smoothing the lines of her tight black skirt. The white explosion of ruffles she wore to top it fell away neatly from her ample cleavage, which she shook in Hazel’s stunned direction.

  “What?” she breathed arrogantly.

  “Where are you going this time of night?”

  “Not to any dance with a piss-poor piano player!” Jurdine smacked her ruby lips together to even her lipstick. She had just the right hint of rouge on her cheeks.

  Hazel set her jaw. She didn’t want to be provoked, and it was so easy for Jurdine, who had learned from the mistress of provocation in this house, their grandmother.

  “Does he know you’re secretly trying to make yourself light, bright, and damned near White—like me?”

  Hazel tried to grip the jar tightly, but it slipped from her fingers and rolled to the floor. Jurdine bent to pick it up.

  “You are what you are, Hazey,” she said, throwing the words out as if Hazel’s being anything wasn’t important in the scheme of life.

  “And what are you, Jurdine Marie? Johnson C. Johnson gets paid to play the piano. What you get paid to do, Jurdine?”

  Jurdine blanched.

  “How many chickens are you gonna pluck tonight when you sneak out?”

  The pride slumped out of her shoulders. Her luscious lips parted and closed, but she couldn’t seem to manage even a quick drop of meanness.

  Hazel stood up, lightheaded—so much had changed, so much was changing—and opened the bathroom door. “You better be careful, Jurdine.” Hazel pulled the door closed behind her with a soft click and made her way to the bedroom, where she collapsed across the bed she would share with Jurdine whenever she came home. If she came home.

  Hazel didn’t sleep. Later, in the last humid hours of night, she felt Jurdine’s presence in the room, felt the mattress move as she sat to peel off her clothes and push them carelessly underneath the bed. Hazel heard the soft crying and knew she wasn’t meant to. She almost got up to give comfort.

  But she didn’t. She curled away from the pain to dream.

  The next morning Hazel felt terrible when she woke. While she’d dreamed, a sadness about Jurdine and Miss Clotille had somehow settled in her bones. Even thinking of getting up seemed too much effort. She blinked in surprise at the empty, quiet room.

  Jurdine was long gone, and so were Velma Jean and Violet. Miriam and George Ann’s cots were already closed and rolled into the corner. Hazel pushed herself up onto an elbow. What time was it?

  “Chile, lay back in that bed!” Mama Vee bustled in with a tin mug of what smelled like peppermint tea. Hazel obeyed, because her head and stomach had jiggled in time with each other when she moved. She lay back on the pillow as her grandmother came around.

  “Jurdine said you tossed and turned all night, and Evelyn came in here and said she felt a fever on you. I don’t have time to do no coddling, just here’s this tea to settle your stomach.”

  Mama Vee was wearing her starched black uniform, and her smooth silver hair was sleek under a hairnet. She put the cup on the small bedside table and stood over Hazel like a doctor who could examine with x-ray eyes.

  “‘Course, I don’t believe it’s your stomach that needs settling—I believe it’s your hard, kinky head!”

  Hazel closed her eyes. It was no use trying to point out to Mama Vee that her hair had never been crinkly or kinky; just as it would never be any use trying to convince her the truth was that being any shade of brown was simply being Black to the folks Mama Vee wanted to impress. Hazel rolled away from her grandmother, pulling her knees up to meet her chin as she lay on her side. Her joints ached.

  “You surly wench! I’ll send word round to the school and Miss Clotille that you won’t be comin’ to work today.” Mama Vee’s voice receded as she marched away. “Seems to me, somebody in your position would take her job more serious …”

  Hazel wanted to holler that Jurdine took her job real serious, but she didn’t have it in her. Jurdine was only trying in her own way to do the same thing as Hazel. She wanted more out of her life than an ordinary Colored one—or Negro or Black one—was likely to provide.

  When Mama Vee was long gone, Hazel slept fitfully. Thoughts skittered in her semiconscious mind between stretches of nothing.

  “Hazel! Hazel!” Was that Jurdine? Couldn’t be … Hazel slowly forced her heavy eyelids open. The light filtering underneath the half-pulled shade was different. She was overwhelmed by the scent of chicken feathers and sweet perfume. Her stomach turned and cramped. Yes, Jurdine.

  Hazel blinked up at the pale face.

  “W-What?”

  “I brought you a surprise. Wake up!” Jurdine was grinning. Hazel took a deep breath. She still felt something awful.

  “Come on, girl. Sit up, now. Let me smooth your hair. And this gown …” Jurdine looked around quickly and grabbed a blouse from the twins’ bed. She threw it over Hazel’s shoulders and arranged it like a bed jacket.

  “What in the world are you doing?” Hazel asked, wanting to resist her sister’s out-of-character fussing and concern.

  “There!” Jurdine stood back for a moment. “Now, close your eyes.”

  Hazel sucked her teeth in irritation. “For real, Hazel! It’s a big surprise, but I have to give it to you in a hurry, before anybody gets home!”

  Hazel frowned and obeyed.

  “Don’t make that ugly face!” Jurdine said. “You’ll be sorry!”

  “Jurdine—”

  “Okay, open your eyes. Surprise!”

  Hazel turned in the direction of her sister’s voice, and there in the bedroom doorway stood Johnson C. Johnson. He had on his crisp khaki uniform, but he had topped it with a cocky straw Panama. He swept off his hat with one hand; with the other he held out a bunch of roses from Reverend Clark’s yard. Hazel’s physical and mental agitation eased, and she managed to smile.

  “Excuse me for imposing, Hazel Mozella Reed. But your sister here found me and said you were laid up, and I knew it must be serious because I never heard of you missing school or work or anything. And I thought … maybe you might not be up for tomorrow night, so—”

  Hazel wanted to say “No!” but a wave of nausea shook her. As she watched JC’s expression change from simple caring to worry, someone else banged into the house and Jurdine’s voice was soon in argument with Baby George’s.


  “How come I can’t …” George almost knocked JC down shouldering her way into the bedroom. “Oh. Hey, JC,” she said, plopping onto the bed.

  “Hazel! I just happened to mention to Mr. Goodman about the bleaching cream, and—”

  “What?” Hazel moaned.

  “George Ann, one day your mouth is gonna write a check your ass can’t cover!” Jurdine fumed.

  “Bleaching cream?” JC walked around the bed and sat so close that Hazel could look straight into his questioning eyes. There was no blame there, only love. Love! She couldn’t speak.

  George, however, had words bursting out. “Yes! And no wonder you’re down. Do you know what Mr. Goodman said is in that mess? Mercury! Mercury, Hazel!”

  Hazel couldn’t answer. A pain seized her and she jerked her knees up, dry heaving. She felt George take her hand, and she heard Jurdine screaming in the background. But closest to her ear was JC’s strong authority.

  “Hazel, we’re takin’ you to the hospital.”

  She passed clean out.

  “Oh, Hazel, you look so peaked.” Hazel found it strange that Daddy didn’t use his regular nickname for her. If she was dreaming again …

  She was not. She woke up feeling very weak, and her father was really standing over her. She wasn’t at home anymore. The smell of medicines and cleaning products made her nose tingle. There was a bright white curtain curving around the narrow bed.

  “I’m in the hospital, Daddy?” she asked. Her voice sounded small and far away.

  “Yes, baby, yes,” Mama answered.

  Hazel turned her head on the pillow. Her mother’s face was strained. And scared. Hazel tried to reach out to her and realized that the bottom half of her body was numb. Her eyes widened.

  “What happened?” was all she could get out. Was she paralyzed? How? What?

  The metal rings holding the curtain suddenly slid back noisily. A white-coated, white-haired White man frowned at Hazel. When he moved, she saw a black-haired ghost cowering behind him, trembling in an ugly work smock. Jurdine.