Stella Honeycutt was raising a colored child and everyone around here knew it.
Her, with all the la-tee-da airs, though she came from trash. Living in that blue Queen Anne on Front Street, spending money like water and showing off those old war medals. Every penny she had stemmed from the family inheritance and army pension of Warrant Officer Aloysius Honeycutt Sr., 117th Regiment, 3rd Tennessee Infantry. Stella had married Old Man Honeycutt near about on his deathbed. She was soon a young widow with a baby in her belly, a pretty piece of property, and a nice bit of bank his grown children had been expecting to inherit.
Yes, that Stella Honeycutt. I reckon only one woman by that name lives on Front Street with a child she pretends is White, though where the girl came from was nobody’s secret.
Francie Mae Thierry, still in bobby socks and barely out of grade school, had been hired that summer to look after Stella’s mother, Annabelle McNabb. When she could still speak for herself, Miss Annabelle told anyone who asked she came from Natchez since no one had heard of Church Hill. The old lady wasn’t all that old but she’d gotten right feeble, bless her heart. Her mind was sharp as ever, though a stroke had taken half her body and all her powers of speech.
She and Francie Mae had grown quite fond of one other, despite the obvious difference in complexion. Which wasn’t even that obvious at a casual glance, Francie Mae being biscuit brown and freckle-faced. If Miss Annabelle squinted her eyes just so, she could blur out the pug- nose and kinky curls and pretend Francie Mae was a grandchild with a summer tan.
She’d encourage the girl to dress in outdated finery from 1920s New Orleans, where Miss Annabelle had led quite a different life. Francie Mae had heavy hips and thighs, so that beaded flapper gown fit tight across the knees. She’d rouge her cheeks and paint her lips, fasten on Miss Annabelle’s gaudy paste jewelry and a headdress with an ostrich feather that curled beneath her chin. Then Francie Mae would sashay back and forth before Miss Annabelle’s wheelchair, singing along with a Memphis Minnie blues record playing on the old Victrola.
“I got a bumble bee (don’t sting nobody but me).”
Annabelle didn’t speak, but Lord, she could laugh. Francie Mae would have her tee-heeing so hard the old lady would slip sideways in her wheelchair, the tears just rolling down her left cheek. For some reason, maybe the stroke, she couldn’t seem to cry from that right eye.
Later that summer Stella Honeycutt’s red-haired son Aloysius Jr., familiarly known as Lou, returned from his first tour of duty in Vietnam. When he saw Francie Mae swishing around in costume jewelry and a clingy dress, she seemed close enough to the sporting ladies he patronized on a semi-regular basis.
Lou stepped out onto the sun porch calling “hey, gal,” because he couldn’t remember her name. “Come go with me. I got something in my room needs cleaning.”
Francie Mae was young but not stupid. She had been hired to babysit the old lady, not to clean anybody’s bedroom. She looked at the lurid tattoos up and down Lou’s arms, the leering grin on his face, and moved slowly but decisively towards the back door. Then she banged through the screen door and took off running.
Miss Annabelle knew from childhood not to turn your back and run from any wild thing. Her daddy taught her that, God rest his soul. One day she went to climb a tree out back of the shotgun cabin her family sharecropped from. A promising peach dangled from a high branch and Annabelle wanted to get it before the crows did. She hoisted herself up into the crotch of the tree when she saw two glittery green eyes staring down at her.
You can hardly find a panther nowadays, but they had a-plenty down in Jefferson County when Annabelle was a girl. When she jumped to the ground the panther jumped down after her. Her heart was beating in her ears, but Annabelle didn’t turn and run. She slowly backed away. When the panther screamed, she screamed right back at it, stomping her feet and flinging her arms like someone with the St. Vitus Dance. After a while, the big cat turned and slunk off through the cotton.
Her hollering caught the attention of their old mutt, Beauregard, who came snuffling by when the danger was over. Annabelle was so relieved to see something furry and friendly, she collapsed to her knees, wiping her tears against his mangy fur. “Never turn your back and run from no wild thing, Beau.”
She would have told Francie Mae the same if only she could speak. The best she could do was grunt as the girl dodged wet laundry on the clothesline, headed for the backyard fence. Francie Mae might have made it, too, if not for that flapper dress tight around her knees.
Lou caught up to her, grabbed the dress by the hem, and snatched Francie Mae down from the fence she was trying to climb. Black bugle beads went scattering like they, too, were trying to escape.
Lou had his way with her beneath his mama’s hedge rosebush, the clean white bedsheets above them snapping in the wind. Right in the open where his granny could see him, not even a closed door to hide his sin.
When it was over, Francie Mae staggered back to the sunporch, shed the shreds of her borrowed finery, and stepped into the clothes she’d come to work in. She left the Queen Anne cottage without a word, never to work there again.
Seven months later, her irate father dragged her up the front steps, not bothering to go around back the way Coloreds were supposed to enter a White person’s house. He hollered for Aloysius Jr. to come out and face him like a man, but Lou never answered. He had signed up for a second tour of duty and was now stationed in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
Stella rushed in from the kitchen, putting on her reading glasses like she needed to see him better. “Uncle Bunny, what are you on about? Don’t come in here starting no trouble.”
His real name was Boniface, though no one called him that. A Catholic Colored boy born somewhere across the bay, Bunny was nobody’s model of saintliness. He’d fought over in Europe in the big war and came back “smelling himself,” as the old folks say.
“Uncle Bunny nothing!” he shouted. “Where’s that no-count son of yours that’s ruined my baby girl? I’m fixing to kick his ass.”
It seemed like everybody these days was kowtowing to some rabble-rousing Georgia preacher, from the carpet-bagging Yankees to that nigra- loving Texas president, right down to the lily-livered Congress. Our local Coloreds were getting mighty uppity behind it. They went around trying to vote, eat in the cafeteria downtown, use restrooms that weren’t meant for them, and drink from the White folk’s water fountains.
The Klansmen and good old boys weren’t as busy as they used to be. Otherwise, Uncle Bunny would surely have been lynched by now, the way he mouthed off to White folks, Coloreds, Mulattoes, and anybody who got on the wrong side of his temper.
“How dare you!” Stella protested. “Lou had nothing at-all to do with getting that gal in the family way.”
But she said it without conviction. Stella Honeycutt hadn’t gotten back the same boy she saw off to boot camp three years before. Aloysius Jr. hadn’t turned out to be the man his daddy was, God rest Old Man Honeycutt’s soul. Lou came home rough and ruddy, covered with tattoos. And Lord, the language from out his mouth would make a sinner blush. It was like someone took a choir boy and buffed off the shine with coarse-grit sandpaper.
That same day Francie Mae up and quit without a by-your-leave, Lou had come down for Friday night dinner. He sat beside Miss Annabelle’s wheelchair and leaned over to help spoon up her red rice and Conecuh sausage. “Open the kisser, old gal.”
The old lady tightened her lips and kept them shut.
“I’m surprised she’s not hungry,” Stella observed. “That gal ran out of here without giving Mama her lunch.”
Annabelle blinked her left eye and turned away from them both. “Rragruff,” she grumbled. Nobody knew what she was saying but it seemed none too friendly.
The day he left for duty, Lou leaned down to hug Miss Annabelle. She snarled and pounded his chest with tiny hands, the right one withered and curved in like a claw.
“Granny Belle, I’m leaving for overseas.” Lou took both her weak hands into his two strong ones. “Don’t you want a kiss goodbye? Come give me some sugar.”
When he got close enough, she hawked up a stream of phlegm and spit in his face. Stella had to practically jump on his back to keep Lou from slapping the mess out of Granny Belle.
Who knows why the old lady carried on so? It was only a Colored girl, after all. Maybe her mind was failing and she thought Francie Mae really was family. Maybe she learned her father’s lesson a little too late in life.
Had someone else demanded, “Come give me some sugar?” Some girls on those backwoods sharecrops got forced against their will. It could be anybody—a landlord, a preacher, a fieldhand. Sometimes even a relative. It was rarely, if ever, a stranger or God forbid, a nigra.
The shock of it all must have broken the old lady’s heart. A massive coronary two months later finished off what the stroke had started. Miss Annabelle, rest her soul, now resides in Magnolia Fields beneath a carved headstone with an angel perched on top. “The body may perish but a mother’s love never dies. Annabelle Swanson McNabb, 1899-1966.
The second, and the last time Francie Mae darkened Stella Honeycutt’s doorstep happened one month after the funeral, three months from the time Boniface Thierry came looking for Lou, leaving only when Stella threatened to call the law.
Francie banged the doorknocker until Stella answered, then refused to come inside when she did. The girl stood on the porch in a blue peacoat buttoned up to her chin, looking tired and older than her fifteen years. A battered cardboard suitcase sat at her feet, and a gray bundle in her arms.
“Your devilish son gave me something I didn’t want. I’m here to give it back.” Though Francie Mae had hissed it under her breath, Stella looked around nervously to see if the neighbors were listening.
“Now, Francie Mae, don’t sass. You come inside and we’ll talk this over civil.”
“It’s too late for civil, Miss Stella.” This time she spoke more boldly. “I ain’t coming in nowhere. Here now, you take her.”
Francie thrust the bundle into her arms. Stella was so shocked to find it warm that she almost dropped it.
“That’s your son’s baby. I brung her for you to look after.”
Stella held the bundle out like a sack of flour, handing her back to the girl. “Francie Mae, you get this child. I can’t take no baby.”
By now Francie Mae had learned not to turn your back and run from a wild thing. She picked up her suitcase and backed away, taking the four porch steps in reverse.
“Just where do you think you’re going, Francie Mae Thierry? And when’re you coming back?”
“That’s for me to know, not you.”
It wasn’t until she got past the front gate that Francie Mae turned and called over her left shoulder.
“Her name is . . .” A wind coming up from the river ripped the words from her mouth.
“What?” Stella called. “What did you say?”
“Lucinda Aloysius Honeycutt!” she shouted loud enough for the whole street to hear. “We call her Cindy Lou.”
How in the world, Stella sighed, does this child have my family name when nobody gave permission?
She collapsed on the wingback chair in the foyer, peeling back the gray blanket from the child’s head. A few wisps of auburn hair were plastered to her scalp. “Your silly little mama got you bundled fit to suffocate.”
The baby gave a weak bleat, like a kid goat. God in glory, this young one’s face! Stella Honeycutt might have been looking right at Aloysius Jr., her only child born twenty-two years before. If anything, the infant was a shade pinker, plenty light enough to pass for White.
The child was no more than a few days old. Yet her eyes of cloudy bluish-gray were wide open, staring up at Stella. Small, red lips pulsed in a sucking motion. Stella unthinkingly gave the child her pinky to suck, though she’d been digging in her backyard garden.
“Cindy Lou Honeycutt,” Stella patted the sweaty little head. “Well, I’ll be.”
If Miss Annabelle had only lived, she’d have a real grandchild to get dressed up like a New Orleans sporting lady, sashay across the sun porch of a Queen Anne cottage, and sing about bumblebees.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s novels include The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him. Her debut cozy mystery will be published in 2025. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced. Professional recognition includes a Pushcart Prize nomination, a James Baldwin Fellowship, the American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, and the Malice Minotaur Award for Best Mystery Novel.