“My goodness, Mother. To think that you didn’t even approve of the first Kennedy in the White House, back in the day.”
“Now, why would you say a thing like that?”
“You said it. ‘A Roman Catholic running for president? What is this world coming to? Next thing you know, we’ll have . . .’”
A colored candidate.
Melody can’t bear to utter the remainder of the sentence.
“I never said any such thing,” Honeybee says with a brisk, dismissive wave. “I just adored John Kennedy, and Jacqueline and those sweet children. Why, little Caroline looked so much like . . .”
“I know.”
During those Camelot years that Ellie hadn’t lived to see, the impish yet ladylike First Daughter, with that shy smile and her blond bobbed hair clipped with pretty bows and barrettes, had born a remarkable resemblance to Ellie’s childhood portraits.
Honeybee rises abruptly and carries her half-finished plate over to the sink. She stands for a moment, back turned, before turning on the tap and pulling on dish gloves.
She knows her mother hadn’t been in her right mind during that election season. Autumn, 1960. She remembers the occasion well because it had been the first time a grieving Honeybee had agreed to socialize. Daddy had talked her into hosting her club, but when the time came, she was in her room, crying. He went up to talk to her while Melody helped Raelene in the kitchen, spreading deviled ham on crackers as the housekeeper separated egg whites for a batch of pink lady cocktails.
“I’m just prayin’ your mama can pull herself together before the ladies arrive,” Raelene said, adding extra gin to the silver shaker.
When the doorbell rang, Honeybee floated down the stairs on a cloud of Evening in Paris and apricot silk chiffon. Melody had been reassured to hear her playing the charming hostess just as she always had. But as the evening wore on, she’d become uncharacteristically outspoken for a woman who’d taught her daughters that it wasn’t polite to discuss religion or politics in a social setting.
“Your mama’s just not herself,” Raelene said, brewing strong black coffee as Melody sliced pineapple upside down cake, Honeybee’s too-raucous laughter filtering in from the dining room. “Going to be a long time before she’s back to normal.”
Melody had convinced herself that her mother—so proudly descended from the man who’d brought down the Union army at Bull Run—isn’t intolerant. Just old-fashioned, with traditional values.
But what about her friends? They’d prayed with the Abernathys through Ellie’s illness, brought casseroles after her death, and buoyed and coaxed her throughout the painstaking return to normalcy. But Melody believes there are plenty of people in this small Southern town, those women included, who’d ostracize her parents over a scandalous affair and mixed-race grandbaby.
It’s just the way things are, perhaps the way they’ll always be. It’s why she has to leave.
“Well, I declare! There’s not a cloud in the sky,” Honeybee chirps over at the sink, pointing with a sudsy finger. “What a glorious spring day for a baby to come into this beautiful world.”
The child in Melody’s womb offers a sharp kick in response, and Melody fills her mouth with yet another bite of biscuit, though there’s barely room in her stomach, what with the two she already ate.
Honeybee just goes on talking as always, keeping up a steady stream of conversation, insisting that Melody stay off her feet as she tidies the kitchen and mops the floor.
When she pours herself a glass of sweet tea and seems to be settling in to spend the day, Melody clears her throat. “Mother, I’m sorry, but I really need some quiet time.”
“That sounds lovely. We can sit in the living room and be quiet together.”
“Some quiet time alone.”
“You don’t want to be alone when you go into labor,” Honeybee says in her “Honeybee knows best” way.
Maybe I do, Melody thinks, and wonders if her mother is ever going to allow her to be alone again.
“I’m not going into labor. Today is just the due date, Mother. You always said you went weeks past yours with Ellie and me.”
“Weeks? Heavens, no. It was just a few days.”
“Well, you can’t stay here for a few days.”
Honeybee doesn’t reply, but her expression says that she can, indeed.
“Mother!”
“I just don’t want to miss a moment of the happiest day of my life.” At Melody’s look she elaborates, “The day I become a grandma!”
“Well, what about the day I was born? And Ellie? And your wedding day? You waited so long for Daddy to come home from the war.”
“But I was terrified of being a wife and a mother. I wasn’t sure I was capable of any of it.”
“I find it hard to believe that you ever doubted yourself, Mother, in anything at all.”
“I was young. We all have our insecurities in our youth. I’m afraid I wasted a lot of time fretting back in those days, and singing was the only thing I’d ever done well. Now I get to live vicariously through my beautiful daughter. I want all your dreams to come true, Melody.”
“But just last year, you talked me out of taking music courses at Jacksonville University.”
“Because . . . why would you ever want to do that?” Honeybee’s eyes are wide, as if Melody had suggested that she planned to run off with a rock and roll band.
“To finish my education, and . . . and pursue my dream. Isn’t that what you just said you wanted me to do?”
“I meant your dream of having a husband and children . . . a family, a home of your own.”
Oh. That dream.
“Melody, I’ve never regretted giving up my music to marry and raise a family. And I’m sure you’ll find that you have more than enough to keep you busy, too.”
“It’s not about being busy, Mother. It’s about doing something that I love to do. My music made me happy. Why did I have to give it up?”
“For Travis! And because it was time to grow up. Other things are more important now. You’ll see.” She heads for the door. “I’ll let you get your rest, but I’m just a hop, skip, and jump away if you need me, you hear?”
“Loud and clear.”
“I’ll come on back with supper. Raelene is making chicken à la King.”
“Well, all right. But not until at least seven o’clock.”
“How about five—”
“Seven! And not a moment sooner!”
Melody closes the door after her and waits a few minutes to make sure Honeybee doesn’t boomerang. Then she hurries into the bedroom and changes from her dungarees and smock top to a turquoise maternity dress with a white Peter Pan collar and bow.
“You look purty as a picture in that color,” Cyril had said when she’d worn it to visit him a few weeks back, the compliment like a rainbow illuminating the gray March day.
His eyes are perpetually glad to see her, yet he never wants her to stay long. Too dangerous for her there, he says. No married, pregnant white woman would have any business visiting a Black man on Barrow.
He’s been increasingly grim lately, brooding about the war, wrapped up in the looming presidential election and his crusade to educate and register Black voters, all the while working and saving money for their escape.
It won’t be long now, but there are so many details to work out. Cyril hasn’t yet told his own mother they’re going, or written to ask his cousin if they can stay.
“I don’t want word to get out,” he told Melody recently. “If it ever got back to Travis Hunter . . .”
“For all we know, he’s dead.”
Melody grabs her car keys and heads out the door, not wanting to remember what Cyril had said in response.
“Or he’s one step ahead of us, plotting revenge.”
The Bronx
“Miss Matthews? Can you tell us?”
Gypsy looks up from the notebook page where she’d been doodling peace signs to see the teacher, Mr. Dixon, wearin
g the same expression as Wile E. Coyote when he’s about to catch the Road Runner.
On the blackboard behind him, a chalk-scrawled timeline depicts genetic milestones leading up to the present day. She notes a series of dusty white dots alongside December 1967, where Dixon had staccato tapped in an effort to rouse an answer from this drowsy last period classroom.
“Stanford professor Arthur Kornberg synthesized deoxyribonucleic acid in a test tube,” she says, “and President Johnson congratulated him for unlocking a fundamental secret of life.”
She resists the urge to punctuate that with a smug “beep, beep.”
Her competent reply crushes Dixon’s expectant smile like a cartoon anvil. “Uh . . . that’s right. Take notes. This will be on Monday’s test.”
He turns back to the board, droning on about DNA and genetics as Gypsy jots the Kornberg information in her notebook.
Beneath it, for her own amusement, she writes, “April, 1968: Science teacher Alfred Dixon transforms a fascinating subject into diethyl ether.”
She stares at the word ether.
Something weighty and frightening nudges her brain, even as the girl behind her taps her shoulder.
She swivels to see a folded piece of notebook paper with her own name on it.
Opening it, she sees a pencil-written note.
Can I walk you home after school? G.M.
She folds the note, shoves it into her textbook, and rests her chin on her fist.
Greg Martinez has been going steady with Carol-Ann Ellis since February. He had, indeed, presented her with a red rose in class on Valentine’s Day and asked her to the dance. Gypsy hadn’t been there to witness it.
That was the day after her father had surprised her with a heart-shaped box of chocolates. The day she’d slept through her alarm clock. She remembers dragging herself out of bed late that morning to try to get ready for school, feeling as though she was sleepwalking, her head pounding, stomach queasy, mouth dry. She’d crawled back into bed, thinking she must be coming down with something. But when she awakened again midafternoon, the stupor and symptoms had lifted, and she’d forgotten all about it until—
The girl behind her pokes her again, and gestures at Greg when Gypsy glances back. He’s sprawled in his usual seat in the back of the room, alongside a couple of his buddies.
He catches her eye, raises his brows and opens his hands palms up in a silent Well?
Gypsy shrugs and faces forward again.
One Saturday last month, her father had come home with chocolate cream eggs.
“Easter’s almost a month away,” she’d protested, “and we don’t celebrate it.”
Once, she’d asked him why not. Oran’s long-winded response about shunning the so-called resurrection of a false prophet had meant little to a child coveting other little girls’ frilly dresses and baskets filled with candy.
“These aren’t Easter eggs,” he’d told her last month, offering her the package. “They’re for your birthday.”
“That was yesterday.” He doesn’t believe in celebrating mortal birthdays, either. She’d peered inside. “Where’d you get these? They’re all smushed.”
“I’ll take them back if you don’t want them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She’d eaten them all and fallen into bed soon after. Had it been a school night, she’d probably have slept right through her alarm clock as she had in February.
The girl behind her delivers another note from the back row.
I broke up with Carol-Ann. G.M.
Good for him.
She has other things to ponder right now, like that March Sunday when she’d awakened to find that it was midafternoon, and she felt shrouded in a strange fog once again. Again, she had a headache, upset stomach, parched throat. Again, she wondered if she’d caught some kind of flu bug.
The bell rings.
Gypsy grabs her things and is halfway out the door when Greg catches up to her, touching her arm. “Hey, I thought we could—”
“Sorry, I have to go.”
She pulls away and pushes through the throng of students in the corridor, lost in the past and those damned chocolates that were Easter eggs no matter what Oran wanted to say about celebrating her birthday.
Ether eggs . . .
Barrow Island
Cyril is in the bedroom stripping off his Morrison’s Meat Market uniform when he hears Otis yap out on the porch. He figures a squirrel must have ventured into the yard, or a female dog is out there in the night. He’d long-ago learned to differentiate between wary barks and excited barks. But commotion escalates into canine jubilation that can only mean one thing.
He rebuttons his trousers and looks around for a clean shirt. Finding none, he goes shirtless into the front room.
Beyond the screen door, Melody is climbing out of her red convertible wearing a short A-line dress the same shade as a summer sea, and he reckons she smells even sweeter than the wisteria blooms tumbling from the gnarled porch vine.
She pauses to steady herself on her feet, resting a hand on the small of her back. Face without a hint of makeup, blond hair unteased and hanging loose, a few inches shorter than usual in white patent leather flats with buckles, she looks younger than her years, and more vulnerable than she is.
After giving Otis an affectionate pat, she straightens and smiles when she sees Cyril watching her.
“You want to come in?” he asks.
“I like it out here, with everything in bloom. It smells heavenly.”
“That time of year.”
He steps outside and they settle into rockers.
“My mother’s wisteria blossomed for the first time,” Melody says. “She thinks it’s a sign.”
“That spring is here?”
“That the baby is about to be, but . . .” She sighs, leaning her head back and staring at the porch ceiling. “She’s had that plant forever, and it never flowered. She made it happen through sheer will. She’s a force of nature. You never met a woman like my mother.”
“She sounds a lot like mine. If Marceline LeBlanc sets her mind to something, she doesn’t let anything get in her way, and she doesn’t wait around for someone else to fix things for her. Not many women are like that. She is. You are.”
“Me?”
“You. That’s how I know you’re going to be just fine, no matter what happens.”
She digests that comment. He stares at the horses out on the grass, listening to their chairs creaking back and forth and marsh birds singing in the thicket.
“The only thing that’s going to happen,” she says, “is you and me and our baby and dayclean.”
“Dayclean?”
“A fresh start.”
He smiles. “Well, our money’s adding up, slowly but surely.”
“Will it be enough? Because maybe I can ask my parents if—”
“Melody! You can’t ask your parents—”
“They love me. I keep thinking maybe if they knew, they could—”
“Put that thought right out of your head. If you tell anyone, our lives will be in jeopardy! Our baby’s life!” His tone is hushed, harsh.
He sees her arms go to her stomach, cradling it. He turns to survey the dirt lane leading back out to the road, imagining spies in the verdant shadows at the property’s perimeter. Nothing to see but wild horses grazing beneath wooly swirls of Spanish moss, but rumors of white mainland trespassers persist.
“I know,” she says softly. “It’s just hard.”
He turns back to her, brushing a blond strand out of her eyes. She meets his gaze head-on, and lifts her chin.
No delicate Southern belle, his Melody. Even eight months into her pregnancy, the woman is about as fragile as the ancient live oak throwing shade over half the yard. It’s the reason—one of the reasons—he’d been drawn to her. She isn’t afraid to think deeply about things, or to challenge what she’s always thought, or to feel. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
But right
now, she should be.
“Don’t worry, Cyril. I won’t tell a soul and I don’t need help from anyone except you.”
“Not even your mother? Because in your condition you must be—”
“Not even my mother,” she tells him. “I promise.”
Waiting at the intersection outside the school, Gypsy sees purple crocuses poking up in the tiny garden across the street. The old woman is out there with a watering can.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .
Just the other day, Gypsy had mentioned her to Oran, who’d launched a lengthy tirade about metaphorical religious significance in the nursery rhyme.
Psycho lunatic, she’d thought. But then, in the next breath, he was warning her to be careful crossing streets after school because there’d been a fatal hit and run a few blocks away, on Webster Avenue.
“Was it a student?”
“Nah, some old coot.”
“Well, I’m not an old coot,” she’d shot back, and he’d laughed.
He’d laughed, too, on that March Sunday when she’d told him that she’d slept most of the day.
“Guess you ate too many sweets last night.”
“Chocolate wakes you up. It doesn’t put you to sleep.”
“Listen to Miss Smarty-Pants.”
Troubling thoughts stall in her brain as she skirts around ambling pedestrians: strung out flower children wearing Nehru jackets and headbands, chatty young mothers pushing baby buggies, herds of schoolchildren fluttering Crayola drawings.
Last Halloween, she’d heard about unsuspecting trick-or-treaters getting Halloween candy laced with LSD. Had someone done the same to her Valentine’s and Easter chocolate? Where had her father bought it?
At Webster Avenue, she watches traffic zoom past, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, anxiously waiting for a light to change. She needs to get home and tell him what happened, and he has to report it—though the thought of Oran getting involved with “the fuzz” on the right side of the law is laughable.
But acid doesn’t knock you out. It makes you feel groovy and happy.
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