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
