LBExcerpt

Excerpt from Lady Bird by Sheryl Mebane

     A harmonica moaned, reaching deep inside. Down-home bass throbbed from the radio to her chest. Honey locked into the steady pulse, released into its space, exhaled. She mouthed the song title, reclaimed her thoughts.
     In time, she would have loved him best. He wrote otherwise in the parting note on their kitchen table, but he did not understand.
     She smoothed her dark hair and returned to wiping clean the table that had held the sad news and her scant tears two months earlier. Fat circles over the smooth surface turned to the rhythm of the backbeat behind low-down blues from Muddy Waters.
     Honey would mourn her loss no longer. She faced a simple choice: give music the free rein it demanded or carve room in her heart for some changeable rival. The decision came instantly, touching souls over generations like the blues that she loved, like the jazz she effortlessly sang.
                                                       5

First Set: Living

My Funny Valentine

     Honey Shaker was a small four-year-old brimming with sunshine. She liked to stare at the green buds growing on the dogwood tree that held one side of the laundry line when clothes time came. In the spring of 1944, Honey learned to do her first chore: helping her mother put wet clothes on the line in their yard. When she could finally do the job right, handing her mother enough pins for the shirts, and saving socks until the end to put up with the sheets, she felt important and her mother’s eyes smiled like rose petals held up close.
     One day soon after the big laundry victory, her father got a letter that made him angry, made his face scrunch in a way Honey hadn’t seen before. Honey
almost cried, but didn’t, fearing that her mother would scold her. Just before bedtime, Honey could hear her crying in the kitchen. But when she came to check that Honey’s covers were tucked in tight, she still said nothing.
     The next day, Honey woke up without anyone calling her and put on a dress her mother liked. At the breakfast table, her father told her that Chance, her only sibling, and one she couldn’t remember, had died, explaining that they wouldn’t see him again in this life. Honey stayed quiet and tried to guess why Chance would not be coming home anymore.

     When the preacher returned to Graham Chapel from his weekends at other county churches, a long black car came with him, bearing a huge wooden box with a flag on top. All the cousins and Honey wore dark colors the next day. Even the grown-acting relations from Wilmington, who were only a few years older but wearing lip gloss and talking about some war, acted nice to her. The balance for the curious new events was that her mother ignored Honey until she wanted to boss her and did not answer any of her questions about Chance.
     As Honey grew older, learning to carry water to her parents and other folk as they worked the tobacco fields, to cook ham after her mother cleaned the meat, to snap green beans faster than her mother, to read and do her math homework quickly and fairly well, and to behave in front of strange whites and the important people of Duplin County, she lost joy for any chore and mastered her first true skill, the craft of dealing with her mother.
     Honey awoke early one day in the autumn following her tenth birthday. The air was too crisp and still. She stayed in her room near the kitchen, kept still, and waited to catch the morning laughter that had always chased an angry night like her parents had fought through hours before when Honey had tried to force her ears and eyes closed.

     Feet sliding on the floor drug a heavy and dry lament. The scrape-song stopped. That was her father. Punctuating his silence came rapid clanks of pots pushed too hard, yet with control, to the point of noisemaking and not damage. Her mother was making breakfast.
     Eggs or bacon hissed as they hit a hot pan. Honey froze every muscle and breathed without stirring the air. She needed to hear something said before she could get up, something nice, maybe something grown and private. Then she would know the yelling last night was not as piercing and deadly as it had sounded.
     Her father asked for water.
     "You got legs," her mother snipped.
     "Connie, come on, girl," he cooed. A roar followed, chair legs grinding wooden floor, then his heavy tread for two steps. "How long I gotta be in de cold wi you?"
     "Huh." She snorted. "Man, you might can’t get no warmer, ever."
     "Woman, you know I can light a fire," he teased. The sound of cloth being rubbed emerged, then stopped. Another pot banged. "Connie, ya can’t stay dis
way forever."
     "What you tellin me I can’t do, fo? Ya bossin lost me a son, an damn if I ain’t gonna recall dat till I die."
     "Don’t you start dat stuff again. Chance was a strong-headed boy when he left. Neither one of us told him nothin. Ya know I miss him. But he gone.

     He been gone a long time an I’m still here."
     "You ain’t tellin me somethin I don’t know. I know he’s gone. I ain’t gon let him be forgotten."
     "Damn, Connie. Why you think I brought out them records? We can hear him, baby. We got his music still, an we can . . . "
     "That ain’t de way I’m gon remember him. An we not gon let dat girl larn her brother by listenin to all dat got him kilt."
     "You crazy woman. A bullet kilt him, not no music."
     "I know what I know. Sit down and mind to yoself from now on. You ain’t costin me another baby."
     "Connie, what you think? I fight to feed ’em just to send ’em to dey death? What, to spite you? Oh girl, you got to hear yoself."
     "I hear myself. Now you better listen. We ain’t playin those records. We ain’t losin another one to dat music."
     Her father’s heavy tread punctuated his deep sigh. Chair legs groaned. Honey waited.