May dropped her cotton ball on the table and left the room.
I looked at Rosaleen, and she shrugged. June finished cleaning the stitches herself; it was distasteful to her, I could tell by the way she held her mouth, how it drew into a tight buttonhole.
I slipped out to find May. I was going to say, I’ll sing “Oh! Susanna” with you start to finish, but I couldn’t find her.
It was May who taught me the honey song:
Place a beehive on my grave
and let the honey soak through.
When I’m dead and gone,
that’s what I want from you.
The streets of heaven are gold and sunny,
but I’ll stick with my plot and a pot of honey.
Place a beehive on my grave
and let the honey soak through.
I loved the silliness of it. Singing made me feel like a regular person again. May sang the song in the kitchen when she rolled dough or sliced tomatoes, and August hummed it when she pasted labels on the honey jars. It said everything about living here.
We lived for honey. We swallowed a spoonful in the morning to wake us up and one at night to put us to sleep. We took it with every meal to calm the mind, give us stamina, and prevent fatal disease. We swabbed ourselves in it to disinfect cuts or heal chapped lips. It went in our baths, our skin cream, our raspberry tea and biscuits. Nothing was safe from honey. In one week my skinny arms and legs began to plump out and the frizz in my hair turned to silken waves. August said honey was the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses.
I spent my time in the honey house with August while Rosaleen helped May around the house. I learned how to run a steam-heated knife along the super, slicing the wax cap off the combs, how to load them just so into the spinner. I adjusted the flame under the steam generator and changed the nylon stockings August used to filter the honey in the settling tank. I caught on so fast she said I was a marvel. Those were her very words: Lily, you are a marvel.
My favorite thing was pouring beeswax into the candle molds. August used a pound of wax per candle and pressed tiny violets into them, which I collected in the woods. She had a mail-order business to stores in places as far away as Maine and Vermont. People up there bought so many of her candles and jars of honey she couldn’t keep up with it, and there were tins of Black Madonna All-Purpose Beeswax for her special customers. August said it could make your fishing line float, your button thread stronger, your furniture shinier, your stuck window glide, and your irritated skin glow like a baby’s bottom. Beeswax was a miracle cure for everything.
May and Rosaleen hit it off right away. May was simpleminded. I don’t mean retarded, because she was smart in some ways and read cookbooks nonstop. I mean she was naive and unassuming, a grown-up and a child at the same time, plus she was a touch crazy. Rosaleen liked to say May was a bona fide candidate for the nuthouse, but she still took to her. I would come into the kitchen and they would be standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink, holding ears of corn they couldn’t get shucked for talking. Or they’d be dabbing pinecones with peanut butter for the birds.
It was Rosaleen who figured out the mystery of “Oh! Susanna.” She said if you kept things on a happy note, May did fine, but bring up an unpleasant subject—like Rosaleen’s head full of stitches or the tomatoes having rot-bottom—and May would start humming “Oh! Susanna.” It seemed to be her personal way of warding off crying. It worked for things like tomato rot, but not for much else.
A few times she cried so bad, ranting and tearing her hair, that Rosaleen had to come get August from the honey house. August would calmly send May out back to the stone wall. Going out there was about the only thing that could bring her around.
May didn’t allow rat traps in the house, as she couldn’t even bear the thought of a suffering rat. But what really drove Rosaleen crazy was May catching spiders and carrying them out of the house in the dustpan. I liked this about May, since it reminded me of my bug-loving mother. I went around helping May catch granddaddy longlegs, not just because a smashed bug could send her over the edge but because I felt I was being loyal to my mother’s wishes.
May had to have a banana every morning, and this banana absolutely could not have a bruise on it. One morning I watched her peel seven bananas in a row before she found one without a bad place. She kept tons of bananas around the kitchen, stoneware bowls chock-full; next to honey, they were the most plentiful thing in the house. May could go through five or more every morning looking for the ideal, flawless banana, the one that hadn’t gotten banged up by the grocery world.
Rosaleen made banana pudding, banana cream pie, banana Jell-O, and banana slices on lettuce leaf till August told her it was all right, just throw the blooming things away.
The one it was hard to get a fix on was June. She taught history and English at the colored high school, but what she really loved was music. If I got finished early in the honey house, I went to the kitchen and watched May and Rosaleen cook, but really I was there to listen to June play the cello.
She played music for dying people, going to their homes and even to the hospital to serenade them into the next life. I had never heard of such a thing, and I would sit at the table drinking sweet iced tea, wondering if this was the reason June smiled so little. Maybe she was around death too much.
I could tell she was still bristled at the idea of me and Rosaleen staying; it was the one sore point about our being here.
I overheard her talking to August one night on the back porch as I was coming across the yard to go to the bathroom in the pink house. Their voices stopped me beside the hydrangea bush.
“You know she’s lying,” said June.
“I know,” August told her. “But they’re in some kind of trouble and need a place to stay. Who’s gonna take them in if we don’t—a white girl and a Negro woman? Nobody around here.”
For a second neither spoke. I heard the moths landing against the porch lightbulb.
June said, “We can’t keep a runaway girl here without letting somebody know.”
August turned toward the screen and looked out, causing me to step deeper into the shadows and press my back against the house. “Let who know?” she said. “The police? They would only haul her off someplace. Maybe her father really did die. If so, who better is she gonna stay with for the time being than us?”
“What about this aunt she mentioned?”
“There’s no aunt and you know it,” said August.
June’s voice sounded exasperated. “What if her father didn’t die in this so-called tractor accident? Won’t he be looking for her?”
A pause followed. I crept closer to the edge of the porch. “I just have a feeling about this, June. Something tells me not to send her back to some place she doesn’t want to be. Not yet, at least. She has some reason for leaving. Maybe he mistreated her. I believe we can help her.”
“Why don’t you just ask her point-blank what kind of trouble she’s in?”
“Everything in time,” August said. “The last thing I want is to scare her off with a lot of questions. She’ll tell us when she’s ready. Let’s be patient.”
“But she’s white, August.”
This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being white. A hot wave passed through my body. “Righteous indignation” is what Brother Gerald called it. Jesus had righteous indignation when he turned over the tables in the temple and drove out the thieving moneychangers. I wanted to march up there, flip a couple of tables over, and say, Excuse me, June Boatwright, but you don’t even know me!
“Let’s see if we can help her,” August said as June disappeared from my line of sight. “We owe her that.”
“I don’t see that we owe her anything,” June said. A door slammed. August flipped off the light and let out a sigh that floated into the darkness.
I wal
ked back toward the honey house, feeling ashamed that August had seen through my hoax but relieved, too, that she wasn’t planning on calling the police or sending me back—yet. Yet, she’d said.
Mostly I felt resentment at June’s attitude. As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched it puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June’s. That’s what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss.
Every evening after supper we sat in their tiny den around the television set with the ceramic bee planter on top. You could hardly see the screen for the philodendron vines that dangled around the news pictures.
I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.
He filled us in on an integration parade in St. Augustine that got attacked by a mob of white people, about white vigilante groups, fire hoses, and teargas. We got all the totals. Three civil rights workers killed. Two bomb blasts. Three Negro students chased with ax handles.
Since Mr. Johnson signed that law, it was like somebody had ripped the side seams out of American life. We watched the lineup of governors coming on the TV screen asking for “calm and reason.” August said she was afraid it was only a matter of time before we saw things like that happen right here in Tiburon.
I felt white and self-conscious sitting there, especially with June in the room. Self-conscious and ashamed.
Usually May didn’t watch, but one night she joined us, and midway through she started to hum “Oh! Susanna.” She was upset over a Negro man named Mr. Raines, who was killed by a shotgun from a passing car in Georgia. They showed a picture of his widow, holding her children, and suddenly May started to sob. Of course everybody jumped up like she was an unpinned grenade and tried to quiet her, but it was too late.
May rocked back and forth, slapping her arms and scratching at her face. She tore open her blouse so the pale yellow buttons went flying like popped corn. I had never seen her like this, and it frightened me.
August and June each took one of May’s elbows and guided her through the door in a movement so smooth it was plain they’d done it before. A few moments later I heard water filling the claw-footed tub where twice I’d bathed in honey water. One of the sisters had put a pair of red socks on two of the tub’s feet—who knows why. I supposed it was May, who didn’t need a reason.
Rosaleen and I crept to the door of the bathroom. It was cracked open enough for us to see May sitting in the tub in a little cloud of steam, hugging her knees. June scooped up handfuls of water and drizzled them slowly across May’s back. Her crying had eased off now into sniffling.
August’s voice came from behind the door. “That’s right, May. Let all that misery slide right off you. Just let it go.”
Each night after the news, we all knelt down on the rug in the parlor before black Mary and said prayers to her, or rather the three sisters and I knelt and Rosaleen sat on a chair. August, June, and May called the statue “Our Lady of Chains,” for no reason that I could see.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…
The sisters held strands of wooden beads and moved them in their fingers. In the beginning Rosaleen refused to join in, but soon she was going right along with the rest of us. I had the words memorized after the first evening. That’s because we said the same thing over and over till it went on repeating itself in my head long after I stopped mouthing it.
It was some kind of Catholic saying, but when I asked August if they were Catholic, she said, “Well, yes and no. My mother was a good Catholic—she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary’s in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”
I had no idea what sort of denomination Orthodox Eclectic was, but I nodded like we had a big group of them back in Sylvan.
She said, “May and June and I take our mother’s Catholicism and mix in our own ingredients. I’m not sure what you call it, but it suits us.”
When we finished saying Hail Mary about three hundred times, we said our personal prayers silently, which was kept to a minimum, since our knees would be killing us by then. I shouldn’t complain, since it was nothing compared to kneeling on the Martha Whites. Finally the sisters would cross themselves from their foreheads to their navels, and it would be over.
One evening, after they had crossed themselves and everyone had left the room but me and August, she said, “Lily, if you ask Mary’s help, she’ll give it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shrugged.
She motioned me to sit next to her in the rocking chair. “I want to tell you a story,” she said. “It’s a story our mother used to tell us when we got tired of our chores or out of sorts with our lives.”
“I’m not tired of my chores,” I said.
“I know, but it’s a good story. Just listen.”
I situated myself in the chair and rocked back and forth, listening to the creaking sounds that rocking chairs are famous for.
“A long time ago, across the world in Germany, there was a young nun named Beatrix who loved Mary. She got sick and tired of being a nun, though, what with all the chores she had to do and the rules she had to go by. So one night when it got too much for her, she took off her nun outfit, folded it up, and laid it on her bed. Then she crawled out the convent window and ran away.”
Okay, I could see where we were headed.
“She thought she was in for a wonderful time,” August said. “But life wasn’t what she thought it’d be for a runaway nun. She roamed around feeling lost, begging in the streets. After a while she wished she could return to the convent, but she knew they’d never take her back.”
We weren’t talking about Beatrix the nun, that was plain as day. We were talking about me.
“What happened to her?” I asked, trying to sound interested.
“Well, one day, after years of wandering and suffering, she disguised herself and went back to her old convent, wanting to visit one last time. She went into the chapel and asked one of her old sisters, ‘Do you remember the nun Beatrix, who ran away?’ ‘What do you mean?’ the sister said. ‘The nun Beatrix didn’t run away. Why, there she is over near the altar, sweeping.’ Well, you can imagine how this floored the real Beatrix. She marched over to the sweeping woman to get a look at her and discovered it was none other than Mary. Mary smiled at Beatrix, then led her back to her room and gave her back her nun outfit. You see, Lily, all that time Mary had been standing in for her.”
The creaking in my rocker died away as I slowed to a stop. Just what was August trying to say? That Mary would stand in for me back home in Sylvan so T. Ray wouldn’t notice I was gone? That was too outlandish even for the Catholics. I think she was telling me, I know you’ve run away—everybody gets the urge to do that sometime—but sooner or later you’ll want to go home. Just ask Mary for help.
I excused myself, glad to be out of the spotlight. After that I started asking Mary for her special help—not to take me home, though, like the poor nun Beatrix. No, I asked her to see to it that I never went back. I asked her to draw a curtain around the pink house so no one would ever find us. I asked this daily, and I sure couldn’t get over that it seemed to be working. No one knocked on the door and dragged us off to jail. Mary had made us a curtain of protection.
On our first Friday evening there, after prayers were finished and orange and pink swirls still hung in the sky from sunset, I went with August to the bee yard.
I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called “bee yard etiquette.” She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; we
ar long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.
August had been stung so many times she had immunity. They barely hurt her. In fact, she said, stings helped her arthritis, but since I didn’t have arthritis, I should cover up. She made me put on one of her long-sleeved white shirts, then placed one of the white helmets on my head and adjusted the netting.
If this was a man’s world, a veil took the rough beard right off it. Everything appeared softer, nicer. When I walked behind August in my bee veil, I felt like a moon floating behind a night cloud.
She kept 48 hives strewn through the woods around the pink house, and another 280 were parceled out on various farms, in river yards and upland swamps. The farmers loved her bees, thanks to all the pollinating they did, how they made the watermelons redder and the cucumbers bigger. They would have welcomed her bees for free, but August paid every one of them with five gallons of honey.
She was constantly checking on her hives, driving her old flatbed truck from one end of the county to the other. The “honey wagon” was what she called it. Bee patrol was what she did in it.
I watched her load the red wagon, the one I’d seen in the backyard, with brood frames, those little slats that slip down in the hives for the bees to deposit honey on.
“We have to make sure the queen has plenty of room to lay her eggs, or else we’ll get a swarm,” she said.
“What does that mean, a swarm?”
“Well, if you have a queen and a group of independent-minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you’ve got a swarm. They usually cluster on a limb somewhere.”
It was clear she didn’t like swarms.