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waves moved like a black curtain.
    â€œDon’t tell me you takin’ Mama Vee and Jurdine seriously!” Violet exploded, dropping her frown to the magazine. “Everybody knows how colorstruck they are!”
    â€œMama 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.
    â€œIt—it’s just a beauty treatment. That’s all it is.”
    â€œBeauty, my ass.” Violet hissed.
    â€œHazel, you’re already beautiful!” said Miriam.
    Hazel gave her a shaky smile in return.
    â€œCould 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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œThanks, 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.
    â€œI 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! Shehad 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. And 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