By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  And selling the honey isn’t our only goal. Sure, we like being able to provide that here at Miles To Go. But we also like educating people—kids—about bees. About honey. About the similarities between a beehive and this neighborhood and how they’re both equally feared and revered.

  Which brings me to this: Emery’s utter speechlessness at the greatness of Miles To Go. Emery stayed the night at the house, where she took up half my bed and used all the hot water in the shower.

  Those were our only two points of conversation. She tries multiple times to talk to me about what happened with Theo but I shut her down abruptly and harshly.

  It’s only the next morning that we start speaking on something like normal terms, pop-up waffles and cups of tar-black coffee in hand.

  “This place is literally a diamond in the rough, Torr. Starting to get what you see in this beekeeping stuff.”

  Sidebar: I love how “literally” isn’t even a literal term anymore.

  We push through the side gate, which doubles as the entrance to the storage shed and enter the garden. The grounds of the apiary itself aren’t incredibly huge. But what’s there is covered in wildflowers and lavender. The wildflowers are pretty easy to maintain in the LA heat, the lavender takes a little more effort. My favorite recent add is the dome-shaped glass flower box. It’s a nice touch, with its seafoam-colored glass. And with the way the metal bars overlay the top, it looks like honeycomb. It’s excellent for the keeping of our largest hive. Aside from that one, affectionately nicknamed Papi Chulo, there are a dozen other moderately sized bee boxes made of cypress wood (not pine wood, though many people will try to tell you it’s the better option—they don’t know anything, don’t listen to them).

  Considering our location, right in the hood’s congested heart, the grounds are fairly quiet. As quiet as Los Angeles ever gets, I’d say.

  Emery is, naturally, a little skittish as we walk through to the front of the apiary where the shed is. People fear bees because one jackass with an allergy dicked around and got stung, then told us we should shun them.

  “Torrey,” she says, wary.

  I grab her hand. “Don’t trip. I got you.”

  “What if they sting me and I’m allergic and I swell up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon and die?”

  “We’re prepared for that particular scenario, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine.” I could bore you with the specifics and statistics about people who are deathly allergic to bee stings, but I won’t.

  Emery still seems skittish as we walk past and through the slow-blooming flowers along the grounds, so I pause.

  Realistically, bees, especially honeybees, are incredibly fucking cute. With their round, fuzzy little bodies that seem way too heavy to be carried on their thin, gossamer gold wings. I’ve had a lot of time to think about the makeup of bees. Sue me.

  “You wanna harvest some honey?” I ask.

  “Um, yes?”

  “It’s fun, I promise.”

  We head inside the storage shed. It should really be way more organized than it is, but I’m the one who usually handles that and with me gone … well. There’s a laundry list of things that fall apart when I’m not around.

  Lisa’s good at running the large-scale things but organized, she is not. She says it’s “the mark of a good scientist.” I say it’s bullshit.

  Pushing that as far out of mind as possible, I pull two beekeeping suits from a small closet, just inside the shed. It takes longer than usual to get all kitted up into them because I help Emery, step by step, with getting hers on first.

  “Take your shoes off and put on these,” I say. She’s wearing these tiny flats with bows on the back, and the top of her foot is all kinds of exposed, and that’s just no good.

  She takes the rainboots that Lisa usually wears and puts them on slowly, followed by a pair of thick elbow-length gloves and then, finally, the “helmet” of the suit. “Will you take a picture of me?” She laughs. “I wanna post it on Insta.”

  Ridiculous. But of course, I do it. Because if you harvest honey for the first time, and you don’t post it on Insta, did it really even happen?

  She posts it, one glove off, and captions it accordingly.

  @EmeryBoard: BEElieve it or not, I’m doin’ this!

  I stare at her flatly. “That caption just gave me tuberculosis.”

  “Judgy! Shut up and make me some honey.”

  Wheelbarrow, smoker, a bit of paper and dried lavender to go inside it, and a gentle brush and a hive tool to help me crack the hive open. Bees are actually pretty brilliant. They like to seal the hives shut nice and tight to protect the honey inside. Smart, right?

  Emery, hyped up on the idea of wearing the harvesting suit but not so much on the actual harvesting itself, gets a little uneasy again.

  I take her hand. “The smoker will make it so that the bees are relaxed enough not to bug you much. They can’t reach you inside your suit.”

  “Yeah. ’Kay. Okay.”

  “You alright?”

  She nods.

  “We can stop.”

  “No, no, no. I already posted the picture. We’re doing it.”

  “Alright.”

  I hand her the smoker. “Squeeze this.”

  She pumps it a few times, and smoke bellows out of it, dry and sweet, paper and lavender.

  While she does this, I remove the closure on top of the hive and then use the hive tool to peel the second closure off.

  She gasps. There’s nothing like watching someone look inside an active hive for the first time.

  Inside the boxed hives are the frames where the honey is stored.

  I pull one out, and it’s dripping with honey.

  “Oh, my God! Look at it!” Emery says and I have to laugh.

  “Grab that soft brush,” I say. And she does. “Okay, so now, gently brush the bees away from the frame. Gently.”

  A kid in a candy shop. Like walking through a chocolate factory and getting to manifest the sweetest thing on Earth, all on your own. That’s its own sort of magic.

  “How often do you do this?” Emery says.

  “Harvest?”

  She nods and continues to brush the stray bees off either side of the frame. “Yeah.”

  “There’s really no set time. My uncle Miles used to say that beekeeping isn’t selfish. You’re only supposed to take the excess honey and nothing more. Bees still need it to survive, and they can’t collect nectar for honey making year round. So, they need reserves for the off months.”

  “Makes sense. I kinda like that.”

  We manage to extract three frames full of ready-to-harvest honey and then wheel them back to the shed after recapping the hives with their crown boards.

  Inside, mostly free of our heavy suits, I hand Emery what looks like—and, honestly, kind of is—a machete.

  “Watch,” I say, and then I begin to scrape off the top layer of wax covering one side of the frame. Emery goes to work on hers.

  What’s funny, but not at all surprising, is that she’s better at this than I am. She was even humming to the bees as she brushed them away from their cells on the frame. My movements are clumsy and too fast and just messy. The product of having done this for too many months of my life. Hers are quick, but also clean and smooth. Looks like art, the wax coming off the top of the cells in the most satisfying of ways. A stark contrast to our next step.

  I grab three of the frames in one arm and Em’s hand on my other side, leading her to the extractor—this oversize metal barrel.

  “What’s this for?” she says, leaning over it to look inside. There are remnants of honey and wax from other extractions.

  “You’ll see.” I hold the stacked frames out toward her. “Slide these in there one by one. Yeah, just along the sides. Mm-hmm, like that.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yep. Here.” I instruct her to grip the handle on the barrel as tight as she can. And then she begins to crank, spinning the handle clumsily,
but with determination that soon turns into finesse. She’s so good at everything.

  Sometimes, when people show promise regarding beekeeping or honey harvesting, I instinctively know and understand that they’re just naturally good at everything. Beekeeping isn’t difficult, but it isn’t easy either. Takes time and understanding and patience. A thing most people don’t come equipped with.

  But Emery? My girl’s a natural. And I have this weird infusion of pride swimming through my veins, watching her. To be the person who shows her this. Who gets to experience her experiencing it—that feels almost as amazing as doing it all myself.

  It’s the thing that gives me the most joy in this place. The teaching. The watching. The way others can find so much joy in this very small, almost unknowable skill.

  Because when I tell people that I keep bees, that I own a farm for beekeeping—they do a double take. They see a six-foot dark-skinned Black kid from east LA, and they see one thing.

  I’ll leave that one thing to your imagination. Which is funny, because that’s my reality.

  As Emery spins the handle, the frames inside start to whir in circles around the extractor.

  “Faster,” I say. “The faster you go, the easier it is for the honey to drip into the bottom of the barrel. You’ll see less wax in the barrel when it’s all bled out.”

  She’s breaking a sweat now, but the light in her eyes is the same color as the honey, and this is the picture of someone enjoying themselves. She’ll be sore in the morning. All through the arms and shoulders; probably her back, too.

  “Want me to take over?” I shout over the noise of the extractor.

  She shakes her head but doesn’t look up at me. She’s so focused on the honey, the slow drip dancing its way out of the cells.

  “You’d think you’re trying to get this thing to fly.”

  She stops spinning, the crank still moving without her, and stares up at me, deadpan.

  I grab the lever, attempting to conceal my chuckle at the look on her face.

  “Why’re you stopping it?” she says, breathing heavily.

  “Look,” I say and pull out one of the frames. The honey’s completely escaped from the cells, so I open the spigot at the bottom where honey starts to drip into the bucket we place below to catch it and funnel out the larger bits of wax. “We gotta give it time. We’ll go swap out our suits for clothes, and then wash the stickiness off. When we come back, most of that will have separated.”

  I laugh as we’re walking out of the shed; Emery can’t seem to look away. She keeps glancing back at the extractor and the honey dripping out of it, like she’s leaving her child behind or something.

  “Don’t you laugh at me, Torrey McKenzie, this has been a labor of love.”

  I throw my arm around her shoulders. I know the feeling like I know breathing.

  Changed now, and back in only our street clothes, Emery follows me out of the office.

  “Torrence!” Lisa calls. I love the woman but goddamn, she’s loud. Although I don’t complain or tease her about it because she really is doing me such a solid with the farm. It’s really Black women saving me all the time, and I don’t even know what it says about me that I gravitate toward that kind of aid.

  Or the fact that they save me, and I accept it, but I only occasionally wonder who’s saving them.

  “God, I am so glad to have you back on farm grounds, Torr. You’ve no idea.”

  “Emery is like ninety percent of the reason I made it in one piece.”

  Em shrugs, says, “So this is cool as heck. How even do you guys manage to hold something like this down?”

  Lisa runs her hands up into her hair. “By the skin of our teeth lately, it seems.”

  On an exhale, I say, “I come from a long line of ‘How dare you fix your mouth to ask me for blah blah blah …?’”

  “Yeah, and ‘Give it to Jesus, baby. Just give it to Jesus—there ain’t nothing He, capital H, won’t do for you,’” Lisa says.

  “So what you’re saying is, you go it alone?” Emery says. She looks sad. Emery comes from a home where both of her parents are still married. Emery has never had to figure out where her next meal was coming from, what she’d have to pay to get it, or worry about whether the lights would be shut off when she got home from school.

  That’s not necessarily a problem. But … it’s different than what I know. My phone, nestled in my back pocket, buzzes. It’s a call from Gabriel. I hit decline so fast, I just know both the girls saw it. It buzzes again, and Lisa’s eyebrow creeps up her forehead.

  Judgy.

  I think about my mother and our kitchen in Theo’s house with the two orange lights that flickered on and off and on and off, and I wonder if they were a metaphor for the bad habit of love I learned—when you get accustomed to a dimly lit love, a dimly lit room, you forget about what it’s like to be kissed by the sun, to be loved so fully. It’s only when you walk away, when you sell the house, when the sun comes up in the morning, that you realize you deserve the light. You deserve it all. This kiss and this radiance. I wish I could have held myself a long time ago, but now here I am, running in the opposite direction of the light every time my phone sings.

  I mean, the last thing Moms ever gave me was silence and my heart torn open like a pomegranate. She’d made me promises about sobriety I knew she wouldn’t keep. I believed her anyway, because that’s what you do.

  Conversation fades back in. “… And I really think you’d get along with some of them if you ever decided to come up and visit with us for a weekend or something,” Em is saying. “Right, Torrey?”

  “Huh? Oh! What? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I definitely think you should.”

  Lisa laughs. “We’ll see. I might be too old to try and keep pace with y’all.”

  “Oh, my God. You are not old!” Emery is really laying it on.

  And Aunt Lisa knows, too. “Torrey, if you got this, baby, I’ll catch up with you two at the house.” But Emery’s already wandered off.

  She’s walking through the section of the farm where we’ve recently started to grow sunflowers. The lavender and wildflowers are great, but the sunflowers remind me of LA. Better for nothing other than looking at how big, demanding, and gorgeous they are.

  I laugh quietly as Emery bends to dramatically press her entire face into one of the shorter sunflowers, smiling this huge I’m-an-American-Girl smile into it as though this single, horrible-smelling sunflower holds the secret to finding her next relationship. She does a little twirl, and that’s when I fucking lose it.

  “Ready to go jar up your honey?” I can barely get the sentence out, I’m laughing so hard.

  She turns around sharply. “How long have you been standing there watching me—”

  “Pretending to be in a Taylor Swift music video? Not too long.”

  Her arm around my shoulders now, she says, “Shut up. I was going for Kelly Clarkson.”

  “Nailed it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. Now, let’s go get you some honey, honey.”

  Emery groans. “I was waiting for you to make that shit joke, and you folded much sooner than I thought you would.”

  “Shut up, I’ve seen your Instagram captions.”

  Back inside the shed, I pull out three large jars for filling. One for Emery, one for Lisa who likes to drop a little on a petri dish and look at it under a microscope, and one for Gabe.

  I’m holding the bucket over the last of the three jars, watching honey spool into itself like a thick ribbon, when Emery says, “I can see why you love this. See why you do what you do. I can only imagine having spent most of my life surrounded by bees and honey and this atmosphere and this process. I’d probably be tethered, too.”

  I don’t say anything. She’s right. It’s bees I’m tethered to. Bees and honey and preservation of a good thing in a quickly deteriorating space.

  Right?

  Or, okay. Yeah.

  That, and guilt. I guess.


  If I’m being honest.

  Guilt c/o Uncle Miles.

  Suits tucked away, selfies taken, and jars of honey in hand, Emery and I leave Miles To Go.

  The real work starts here.

  19.

  I’m up at the ass-crack of dawn, shooting off an email to another somewhat local apiary—the Addie Rose Apiary—just outside San Francisco county. They’ve always been a well of support to us at Miles To Go.

  We spend the better part of the day, as well as the worse part of it, driving around for signatures. Half of downtown Los Angeles is tourist attractions like Chinatown, and the other half is traffic. But after living here, after knowing the hood better than I know myself or anything else, Emery and I make our way around the quieter streets. We drive around the neighborhoods and watch kids half our age shoot dice, some adults twice our age join in. We drive through La Cienega and back through 54th, too. As we approach each storefront, we lower the music out of respect and self-preservation.

  Some streets out here are loud and exuberant. Expressions of who we’ve been as Black folk and who we damn near killed ourselves to be. Those are the neighborhoods that have not a damn thing left to lose. Those are what the mainstream media calls “the ghettos.”

  Those are the streets I was made on.

  But this area, just up and east a few blocks, is quieter, muted in a desperate attempt to blend in.

  The formula goes something like this:

  Black folks + Quiet, law-abiding residents = No police interference.

  Although, in reality, it really looks more like:

  Black folks + Any volume, activity, or breath exhaled = Police and a bullet.

  We spend six hours driving around the neighborhood, only two of which did we spend sitting in traffic (this is a success, I’m telling you), before heading back to Theo’s. We set up shop upstairs in my old room and start making phone calls (Emery’s idea) to some of our local honey buyers and suppliers, as well as a few of the LAUSD elementary schools that arrange annual tours of the apiary for their students.

  The goal, according to Ryan Q, is that we need to make them see how valuable we are. How much the neighborhood and its residents depend on us.