When Hazel Ishee is 12 years old, a travelling photographer takes a portrait of her family. The photographer tells her the snap will show her to be as pretty as any girl in the movies and Hazel believes him, desperate to escape her 10 siblings and their grinding poverty.
However, when the photo arrives, Hazel is horrified. She looks gaunt, with stooped shoulders and hair the colour of broom straw – and she decides to improve herself. So Hazel steals eggs (to make hair treatments), learns how to apply cosmetics (from the undertaker) and straps on an old mule harness (to force her stooped shoulders back). Before long, she catches the eye of Floyd, and soon finds herself the wife of a successful car salesman living in Delphi, Mississippi. But Hazel constantly fears she’s not good enough.
Across town, Vida is a beautiful black girl, full of anger and hate. Her little boy has been murdered by his father, Billy Dean – a man desperate to get rid of the evidence of his paternity and willing to marry the senator’s ugly daughter, just so that he can take up the job of town sheriff. In need of a position herself, Vida agrees to become Hazel’s housekeeper, primarily so that she can keep tabs on Billy.
Set against the backdrop of America’s Civil Rights movement, Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League tells the tale of two women, both desperate to escape the constraints of their lives, who discover that they have more in common than they think. And that women can change the world if they just stick together.
