he said, and she felt the squeeze of his hand, “would you. . .I mean. . .”
She looked into his eyes to find herself, and she liked what she saw. “Floyd Graham, I ain’t budging till you come and get me.”
Floyd hadn’t lied one bit.
On a coolish spring day, Hazel said good-bye to her landlady and stepped onto her broad green porch, a cardboard suitcase in her hand. Her makeup was careful, and she wore bright red earbobs and a cotton print dress splashed with roses so big they threatened to bloom right off the cloth. Her toenails, which were on view for the world to see in a pair of fancy strapped shoes, were like ten rose petals fallen from her dress. When Floyd took her arm to lead her to his car, she noticed he squeezed a little tighter than necessary, seeing as how she wasn’t the least bit inclined to go anyplace but where he led.
After a stop at the justice of the peace, they headed straight west, the Tombigbee Hills to their backs and the Delta in their sights. They were man and wife, muleless, betting their futures on an easy smile and an irresistible tilt of the head.
The farther they drove, the more the geography began to straighten out and lose its rocky ruggedness. “Is this the Delta?” she asked every time she believed things couldn’t get any flatter.
“Not by a long shot,” Floyd kept saying. “Wait till we get to Hopalachie County. That’s where God invented flat.”
When the terrain began to lift once more, Hazel became confused. “Looks like the hills are taking over again.” There was disappointment in her voice. “Did we miss the Delta?”
This time Floyd didn’t say anything. No way he could explain that what they were driving on was not a mountain of rock but a gigantic rim of river silt, windblown and piled over millions of years, and that these fragile bluffs contained the great floodplain like the cliffs contain the ocean. So instead of telling her, Floyd waited for her to see it for herself.
Finally, drawing the car into a shallow curve, Floyd cut the engine. “Let’s go for a little walk. I got something to show you.”
Hazel followed Floyd across a shallow ditch to a locust-post fence entwined with Carolina jasmine. After pulling up one wire strand with his hand and stepping on the bottom one with his foot, Floyd waited patiently for Hazel to gather her skirt and squeeze through. He led her up a rise crowded with oak and hickory, and then told her to shut her eyes. When she did, he reached for her arm and guided her to the top of the bluff. Again Hazel noticed how tight his grip was. Did he think she was going to bolt down the hill without him?
“Now open,” he said.
The sight made Hazel shudder. Spread out below her was the Delta, miles and miles of flatness stretching relentlessly to some foreign horizon, China perhaps. Nothing was hidden from sight. She saw vast open fields of black earth ready for planting and green ribbons of cypress swamps snaking through the terrain and lakes strewn about like pieces of a giant’s broken mirror, and not a single rising or falling to ease the unyielding openness of it all.
The spectacle drew Hazel forward, and she momentarily leaned into it, like someone tempted to step into a painting. Home to Hazel had been a place where nature provided plenty of places to hide. Ridges and hollows and bends. Yet out there the world was laid bare for all to see. “What a wondrous thing,” she whispered reverently, as if God had just finished making it. “You can see everything at once.” Had that revival preacher been right when he said the earth was really as flat as somebody’s front porch? If he was, then the falling-off place must be out there on that very horizon. “How far does this Delta reach, Floyd?”
He pointed. “See where the sun is sinking?”
Hazel shaded her eyes with her hand and looked into the sunset.
“That’s where the mighty Mississippi runs. The sun beds down in the river for the night. In a few minutes, when the sun slips between the levees, you can hear the river sizzle.”
Hazel looked up at Floyd, half believing. “Don’t fun me.”
“For true. At sundown, the river water gets so hot, catfish jump out on the banks already fried and ready to eat. All you need is the hushpuppies.”
“Floyd, you could make me believe about anything.” Hazel reached her arm around her husband. “We going to have us a house down there somewhere and live off catfish and hushpuppies?”
“Nope. We going to live up here in the bluffs with the rich people.” Waving his arm over the vast river basin, he said, “Down there is where the money is made. Nothing but cotton and mules and niggers. More niggers than you can shake a stick at. They outnumber white people four to one.”
Hazel’s gaze swept once more over the landscape. “I swan,” was all she could say, still trying to imagine such a thing as a whole world of niggers, living on the flatbed bottom of the earth.
“I want to see it. Take me down there, Floyd.”
He smiled, pleased at how excited she was getting. They got in the car and Floyd happily aimed it down Redeemer’s Hill. The decline was sharp, and Floyd drove so roller-coaster fast, it made Hazel’s stomach drop. Then all at once the road went as flat as a pancake and straight as the finger of God. With Floyd smiling confidently at the wheel, Hazel gazed out the window, pointing to each new sight. She saw all manner of wondrous things. Mules by the hundreds and work gangs from the penitentiary in striped uniforms and towering cypresses rising from dark and foreboding swamps, and even an alligator staring up at her from a roadside slough. Things that gave her chill bumps. Not to mention all the coloreds. Floyd was right, there were millions of them, working the fields, filing down dirt roads, and crowding plantation stores. And not all looking dirt poor and raggedy as she had expected. When they pulled up for soft drinks at a crossroads grocery, Hazel spotted a colored girl outfitted in an all-white costume, gaily prancing around on the gallery twirling a parasol as snowy white as her shoes. Hazel had never in her life seen anybody dressed so fine, especially not a colored person. She guessed maybe the girl was passing through with a minstrel show or was part of a high-wire circus act. There were countless riddles out there that left Hazel mystified and wanting more.
“Time to take you home now, Hazel,” Floyd said as the dark began to creep up on them.
“Home,” Hazel said, trying out the word, putting an old name to a new world.
Winding back through the bluffs, Floyd topped a ridge and there, nestled in the soft rolling terrain, was Delphi. The town was old even by Mississippi standards, settled long before the giant floodplain below had been tamed from bears and Indians and malaria.
Hazel was struck speechless. Stately homes with expansive lawns and ancient live oaks crowned the hills of Delphi. Homesites were laid out without rhyme or reason, each fine house oriented without consideration of any other. To Hazel, each house gleamed brighter than the next. Until she was eight, she hadn’t known you could put paint on a house. About that time she saw a picture in her history book of Mount Vernon.
“My Lord,” she gasped. “If it don’t look like George Washington went on a tear and built hisself a town.”
Floyd turned onto a down-sloping gravel lane that led up to a little house sitting in the shadow of one of the grander homes. After turning off
