Hazeline

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, 1937. Hazeline Morrison is a widow who lost her husband, Joshua, two years earlier. She lives in a small house on a cotton farm, where the tenant families work the land for the owner. To bring in money, she sews and does laundry for the landowner's household, boiling the clothes in iron pots over an open fire. Electric lines are being strung through the north end of the county, but only the landowner, Mister Robbins, will be connected. The sharecroppers will not. Hazeline worries that he will buy an electric washing machine and that its wringer will catch her hand.

Her greater fear is that Robbins will move another family into her little house, leaving her with no home and nowhere to go.

Barbara Kidd Lawing lives in North Carolina on land next to where her grandparents once ran a cotton farm, back when cotton drove the economy of the South. She returned to her family's farm in the 1990s and regularly walked the old fields, passing a small, collapsing sharecropper's house that still stood there. Hazeline is a work of fiction. The Author's Note explains the interviews and research Lawing carried out to keep the novel historically accurate.