“Look, Granny,” she cried one morning. “I’ve found an egg!” and she held up her treasure.
“You has, sugar, sure enough. I just naturally overlooked that egg this morning. That white hen always done find a new place to hide from me.”
“Perhaps I can find more eggs,” Hazel thought, and hunted assiduously, but without success. She grew fond, however, of the clucking creatures, and often fed them from the food left on her plate.
Her grandmother had a flock of turkeys, and their wanderings lead Hazel on many a pleasant walk. She did not like to go out of sight of her home, but when the turkeys turned to the pines across the road she loved to follow them over the pine-cones among the trees. Here she would sit and watch the smoke as it curled from Granny’s chimney, and would listen to the monotonous soughing of the wind among the pines.
But there was a serpent in this garden; it went on four legs and grunted and was dirty and disgusting. Hazel had seen pigs in a pig-pen in Massachusetts, but here in Alabama they had the freedom of the road. She soon realized why the garden was fenced in. In the North you imprisoned your live stock; but in the South you let them loose and enclosed with picket-fence your house and garden. This was very nice for the animals but not so nice for timid little girls. Hens, turkeys, cows, pigs, all roamed at will. The few cows that Hazel met were thin and spiritless, and she did not fear them much; but when the inquisitive pig came near to where she sat, she jumped up and scurried away. Such great ugly creatures, rightly called hogs! So out-of-doors, save in the narrow garden enclosure, had its drawbacks.
Granny, Hazel found, was an important person in the neighborhood. No one went by her porch without a word of welcome. If she were about, Granny would call to her, and ask her to come and meet Uncle Silas, or Aunt Harriet, or whoever the visitor might be. She was not especially attracted by these people who took a long time to say that the weather was fine, or to ask how Granny’s hens were laying. She answered their questions, but she did not volunteer any information.
One day two white ladies, for whom Granny sometimes did laundry work, stopped as they drove by in their buggy. They saw Hazel, and at once began to question her. They wanted to know why she had come to Alabama, how she got there, and asked her many details of her life at home. When they left Hazel turned somewhat excitedly to her grandmother.
“Why do they say such things to me?” she asked. “My mother, if she went to see them, wouldn’t ask about every teenty thing they did.
“‘Is your pa living?’
“‘What does your ma do?’