I was supposed to swipe the backs of both labels with a wet sponge and hand them off to August to position on the jars, but I paused a minute to take in the Black Madonna’s picture, which I’d studied so many times glued onto my mother’s little block of wood. I admired the fancy gold scarf draped over her head, how it was decorated with red stars. Her eyes were mysterious and kind and her skin dark brown with a glow, darker than toast and looking a little like it had been buttered. It always caused a tiny jump start in my chest, me thinking that my own mother had stared at this same picture.
I hated to imagine where I might have ended up if I hadn’t seen the Black Madonna’s picture that day in the Frogmore Stew General Store and Restaurant. Probably sleeping on creek banks all over South Carolina. Drinking pond water with the cows. Peeing behind chinaberry bushes and wishing for the joy of toilet paper.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “But I never thought of the Virgin Mary being colored till I saw this picture.”
“A dark-faced Mary is not as unusual as you think,” August said. “There are hundreds of them over in Europe, places like France and Spain. The one we put on our honey is old as the hills. She’s the Black Madonna of Breznichar in Bohemia.”
“How did you learn about all that?” I asked.
She rested her hands and smiled, like this had dredged up a sweet, long-lost memory. “I guess I would have to say it started with my mother’s prayer cards. She used to collect them, the way good Catholics did back then—you know, those cards with pictures of saints on them. She’d trade for them like little boys traded baseball cards.” August let out a big laugh at that. “I bet she had a dozen Black Madonna cards. I used to love to play with her cards, especially the Black Madonnas. Then, when I went off to school, I read everything I could about them. That’s how I found out about the Black Madonna of Breznichar in Bohemia.”
I tried to say Breznichar, but it didn’t come out right. “Well, I can’t say her name, but I love her picture.” I swiped the back of the label and watched August fix it on the jar, then fasten the second label beneath it, as if she’d done this ten thousand times.
“What else do you love, Lily?”
No one had ever asked me this before. What did I love? Right off the bat I wanted to say I loved the picture of my mother, how she was leaning against the car with her hair looking just like mine, plus her gloves and her picture of the black Mary with the unpronounceable name, but I had to swallow that back.
I said, “Well, I love Rosaleen, and I love writing stories and poems—just give me something to write and I will love it.” After that, I really had to think.
I said, “This may be silly, but after school I love Coca-Cola with salted peanuts poured in the bottle. And when I’m finished with it, I love turning up the bottle to see where it came from.” Once I’d gotten a bottle from Massachusetts, which I kept as a tribute to how far something can go in life.
“And I love the color blue—the real bright blue like the hat May had on at the Daughters of Mary meeting. And since coming here, I’ve learned to love bees and honey.” I wanted to add, And you, I love you, but I felt too awkward.
“Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?” August said. “And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have more ways to say it?”
I nodded, wondering where was the limit of her knowing things. Probably one of those books she’d read after bedtime during the month of August had been about Eskimos.
“I guess we’ll just have to invent more ways to say it,” she said. Then she smiled. “Do you know I love peanuts in my Coke, too? And blue is my favorite color?”
You know that saying, “Birds of a feather flock together”? That’s how I felt.
We were working on the jars of tupelo tree honey, which Zach and I had gathered out there on Clayton Forrest’s land, plus a few jars of purple honey from the hive where the bees had struck it rich on elderberries. It was a nice color coordination the way the Bohemian Madonna’s skin was set off by the golds in the honey. Unfortunately, the purple honey didn’t do a whole lot for her.
“How come you put the Black Madonna on your honey?” I asked. I’d been curious about this from day one. Usually people got in a rut putting honey bears on them.
August grew still, holding a jar in her hand and looking into the distance like she’d gone in search of the answer and that finding it had been the bonus of the day. “I wish you could’ve seen the Daughters of Mary the first time they laid eyes on this label. You know why? Because when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.”
I only wished I’d been there when the Daughters of Mary had made this big discovery. I pictured them whooping it up in their glorious hats. Feathers flying.
Sometimes I would catch myself jiggling my foot till I thought it might fall off my leg bone—“jimmy-leg,” Rosaleen called it—and looking down now, I noticed it was going at high speed. Usually it happened in the evenings when we did our prayers before Our Lady of Chains. Like my feet wanted to get up and march around the room in a conga line.
“So how did you get the black Mary statue in the parlor?” I asked.
“I can’t say, exactly. I only know she came into the family at some point. You remember the story about Obadiah taking the statue to the praise house, and how the slaves believed it was Mary who had come to be among them?”
I nodded. I remembered every detail. I’d seen it a hundred times in my mind since she’d first told it. Obadiah down on his knees in the mud, bent over the washed-up statue. The statue standing proud in the praise house, Our Lady’s fist in the air and all the people coming up one at a time to touch her heart, hoping to find a little strength to go on.
“Well,” August said, going right on with her pasting, “you know, she’s really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.”
I had never thought of it like that, and it gave me a shocked feeling, like maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn’t know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine. I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn’t recognize them.
August arranged the jars she’d labeled so far in a cardboard box and set it on the floor, then dragged out more jars. “I’m just trying to explain to you why the people took such care with Our Lady of Chains, passing her one generation to the next. The best we can figure, sometime after the Civil War she came into the possession of my grandmother’s people.
“When I was younger than you, me and June and May—and April, too, because she was still alive then—all of us would visit our grandmother for the whole summer. We’d sit on the rug in the parlor, and Big Mama—that’s what we called her—would tell us the story. Every time, when she finished, May would say, ‘Big Mama, tell it again,’ and off she’d go, repeating the whole thing. I swear, if you listen to my chest with a stethoscope, what you’d hear is that story going on and on in my Big Mama’s voice.”
I was so caught up in what August was saying I had stopped wetting labels. I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope, and not the story I did have about ending my mother’s life and sort of ending my own at the same time.
“Yo
u can wet the labels and listen,” August said, and smiled. “So, after Big Mama died, Our Lady of Chains was passed to my mother. She stayed in Mother’s bedroom. My father hated her being in there. He wanted to get rid of the statue, but Mother said, ‘If she goes, I go.’ I think the statue was the reason Mother became a Catholic, so she could kneel down before her and not feel like she was doing anything peculiar. We would find her in there talking to Our Lady like they were two neighbors having sweet iced tea. Mother would tease Our Lady; she’d say, ‘You know what? You should’ve had a girl instead.’”
August set down the jar she was working on, and there was a mix of sorrow and amusement and longing across her face, and I thought, She is missing her mother.
I stopped wetting the labels, not wanting to get ahead of her. When she picked up the jar again, I said, “Did you grow up in this house?” I wanted to know everything there was about her.
She shook her head. “No, but my mother did. This is where I spent my summers,” she said. “You see, the house belonged to my grandparents, and all this property around it. Big Mama kept bees, too, right out there in the same spot they’re in today. Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, ’cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. ‘It comes from years of loving children and husbands,’ she’d say.” August laughed, and so did I.
“Was your Big Mama the one who taught you to keep bees?”
August took off her glasses and cleaned them on the scarf at her waist. “She taught me lots more about bees than just how to keep them. She used to tell me one tall bee tale after another.”
I perked up. “Tell me one,” I said.
August thumped her finger on her forehead like she was trying to tap one of them off some back shelf in her head. Then her eyes lit up, and she said, “Well, one time Big Mama told me she went out to the hives on Christmas Eve and heard the bees singing the words of the Christmas story right out of the gospel of Luke.” August started to sing then in a humming sort of way, “‘Mary brought forth her firstborn child and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger.’”
I giggled. “Do you think that really happened?”
“Well, yes and no,” she said. “Some things happen in a literal way, Lily. And then other things, like this one, happen in a not-literal way, but they still happen. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t have a clue. “Not really,” I said.
“What I mean is that the bees weren’t really singing the words from Luke, but still, if you have the right kind of ears, you can listen to a hive and hear the Christmas story somewhere inside yourself. You can hear silent things on the other side of the everyday world that nobody else can. Big Mama had those kind of ears. Now, my mother, she didn’t really have that gift. I think it skipped a generation.”
I was itching to know more about her mother. “I bet your mother kept bees, too,” I said.
She seemed amused at that. “Goodness no, she wasn’t interested at all. She left here as soon as she could and went to live with a cousin up in Richmond. Got a job in a hotel laundry. You remember the first day you got here, I told you I grew up in Richmond? Well, that’s where my father was from. He was the first colored dentist in Richmond. He met my mother when she went to see him with a toothache.”
I sat there a minute and thought about the odd ways of life. If it wasn’t for a toothache, August wouldn’t be here. Or May or June, or Black Madonna Honey, and I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to her.
“I loved Richmond, but my heart was always right here,” she said. “Growing up, I couldn’t wait to get here and spend the summers, and when Big Mama died, she left all this property to me, June, and May. I’ve been here keeping bees nearly eighteen years now.”
Sunlight gleamed against the honey-house window, flickering now and then with a shifting cloud. We sat in the yellowish quiet for a while and worked without talking. I was afraid I’d tire her out with all my questions. Finally I couldn’t hold myself back. I said, “So what did you do in Virginia before you came here?”
She gave me a teasing look that seemed to say, My goodness, you sure do wanna know a lot of things, but then she dived right in, her hands not slowing down one bit pasting labels.
“I studied at a Negro teachers’ college in Maryland. June did, too, but it was hard to get a job, since there weren’t that many places for Negroes to teach. I ended up working nine years as a housekeeper. Eventually I got a job teaching history. It lasted six years, till we moved down here.”
“What about June?”
She laughed. “June—you wouldn’t catch her keeping house for white people. She went to work at a colored funeral home, dressing the bodies and doing their hair.”
That seemed like the perfect job for her. It would be easy for her to get along with dead people.
“May said June almost got married one time.”
“That’s right. About ten years ago.”
“I was wondering—” I stopped, looking for a way to ask her.
“You were wondering if there was ever a time when I almost got married.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I was.”
“I decided against marrying altogether. There were enough restrictions in my life without someone expecting me to wait on him hand and foot. Not that I’m against marrying, Lily. I’m just against how it’s set up.”
I was thinking, Well, it’s not just marriage that’s set up like that. What about me waiting on T. Ray hand and foot, and we were just father and daughter? Pour me some more tea, Lily. Polish my shoes, Lily. Go get the truck keys, Lily. I sincerely hoped she didn’t mean this sort of thing went on in a marriage.
“Weren’t you ever in love?” I asked.
“Being in love and getting married, now, that’s two different things. I was in love once, of course I was. Nobody should go through life without falling in love.”
“But you didn’t love him enough to marry him?”
She smiled at me. “I loved him enough,” she said. “I just loved my freedom more.”
We glued labels till we ran out of jars. Then, for the heck of it, I moistened the back of one more and pressed it onto my T-shirt, in the gully between my breasts.
August looked at the clock, announcing we’d done so good with our time we had a whole hour left before lunch.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s do bee patrol.”
Though I’d done bee patrol with Zach, I hadn’t been back to the hives with August since that first time. I pulled on long cotton pants that used to be June’s and August’s white shirt, which needed the sleeves rolled up about ten turns. Then I placed the jungle helmet on my head, letting the veil fall down over my face.
We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.
“There is one thing I don’t get,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”
She laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”
“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.
She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—”
“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for do
ing so.
“I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”
I couldn’t locate a stray bee anywhere. The hives looked like an abandoned neighborhood, the air groggy with heat. You got the impression the bees were inside having a big siesta. Maybe all that excessive work had finally caught up with them.
“Where are they?” I said.
August placed her finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. She lifted off her helmet and laid the side of her face flat against the top of the hive box. “Come listen,” she whispered.
I removed my hat, tucking it under my arm, and placed my face next to hers so that we were practically nose to nose.
“You hear that?” she said.
A sound rushed up. A perfect hum, high-pitched and swollen, like someone had put the teakettle on and it had come to a boil.
“They’re cooling the hives down,” she said, and her breath broke over my face with the smell of spearmint. “That’s the sound of one hundred thousand bee wings fanning the air.”
She closed her eyes and soaked it in the way you imagine people at a fancy orchestra concert drinking up highbrow music. I hope it’s not too backward to say that I felt like I had never heard anything on my hi-fi back home that came out that good. You would have to hear it yourself to believe the perfect pitch, the harmony parts, how the volume rolled up and down. We had our ears pressed to a giant music box.
Then the whole side of my face started to vibrate as if the music had rushed into my pores. I could see August’s skin pulsating the tiniest bit. When we stood back up, my cheek prickled and itched.
“You were listening to bee air-conditioning,” August said. “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.”