Before We Were Yours

Dutiful daughter Avery Stafford accompanies her father, Senator Wells Stafford, to a nursing home in Aiken, South Carolina. The two ride alone but quietly together in their limo, Senator Stafford’s omnipresent assistant, Lesley, having been sent to ride in a separate vehicle. Avery finds herself wishing she could fuss over her father. Observing his static shocked gray hair, she wants “to smooth if down for him” (7) but she doesn’t, realizing that he is a prideful man.

Avery’s protective feelings are intensified as she thinks about her father’s health, a source of grave concern for her. Still, she tells herself cancer “can be beaten” (8). It is with that thought in mind that she and her father disembark from their car and walk into the nursing home where a crowd of photographers and reporters are at the ready. Today is the 100th birthday of a married couple residing in the home, two individuals who have been Senator Stafford’s “supporters since his days in South Carolina’s state government” (10). They have reached the age of 100 with their faculties about them, unlike Avery’s grandmother who is in a different home, being cared for as a patient with advancing dementia.

Avery and her father watch the elderly couple enjoy their birthday cake and festivities, Avery struggling to remain dry-eyed. Leslie, her father’s assistant, prompts her to remain poised and attentive but Avery finds it difficult. She is anxious about her father and can’t stop scrutinizing his motions. She also finds herself accosted suddenly by a random elderly patient in the home, a woman referred to as May. A nurse tries to pull May away from Avery but May lingers, searching Avery’s face and whispering, “Fern?” (13).

May Crandall is overcome with reminiscences after seeing the face of the woman she called Fern, realizing that it is not Fern that she is thinking about. Instead, she delves deep into a childhood memory about her mother whom she called Queenie. In this memory, May is “twelve years old, still thin and knobby as a front porch post” (14). She is leaning over the edge of her family’s shantyboat, in the company of her younger siblings. They search the waters of the Mississippi for “a gator’s eye to catch the amber flicker of lantern light” (15). The children are trying to distract themselves from the noise inside the boat, the screaming of Queenie attempting to give birth to twins. She is the company of an African American midwife, who leaves the childbirthing quarters to plead with Briny, May’s father. The midwife tells Briny that he needs to get his wife to a doctor right away. If he doesn’t do so quickly, she and the babies will die.

May watches the father she only calls Daddy when “something’s real wrong” (18) as it is in this moment. Her father slams his fists against the walls while the midwife begs him to take action. May looks through the window into the bedroom and sees her mother’s hands gripping “the curtains and she screams and tugs, arching up off the bed” (18). May looks at the crucifix that Briny’s pounding has knocked to the ground and wishes she could mutter Polish words to the tin man on the cross like her mother does. Instead, May does the bidding of the midwife. She tells her father: “Briny, you gotta carry her off in the skiff now” (20).

Avery is needed for a host of official photos and appearances. The first obligation involves taking the family Christmas photo in July because Avery’s mother is worried about her husband losing his hair to chemotherapy. Avery figures that “if she says Daddy’s hair will thin, it probably will” (24). So even though Avery’s fiancé Elliot laughs about it to her over the phone, Avery and her sisters pose with their parents for an arranged photograph.

After that, Avery and her father whisk off, in the company of Leslie, the Senator’s assistant, to the halls of the State Capitol. Avery and her father listen “to the details of the […] topics that should be covered and the issues that must be spun” (26). The main issue that Avery knows will be a bone of contention between the press and her father is an ongoing nursing home scandal. Mistreated patients and their stories fill the news and the Senator has to distance himself from this professionally damaging issue. It will not be easy, Avery realizes, as she “can hear the commotion out front and a squad car sits at the end of the alleyway” (28) in case the crowd gets out of control.

Avery’s father does well, only having one small lapse in which he is silent too long as angry protestors yell, “Honor thy father and mother!” and “No concentration camps for seniors!” (29). Avery thinks it is unlike the Senator to not be poised and ready to respond with tact and considers that maybe his health slowing him down. They get through the press conference unscathed, however. Afterwards, Avery is approached by Leslie who tells her that the nursing home called in response to their visit yesterday. They believe Avery lost a bracelet there. It was found in the hands of May Crandall, the old woman who called Avery by the name of Fern and stared at her searchingly. Avery is informed that May was “found two weeks ago in a house along the river with her dead sister’s body” (32), and horror stricken, Avery decides she will go see May and reclaim the bracelet in person.

Rill Floss holds her mother, Queenie, in her arms as best she can while her mother thrashes and screams. The midwife is no help, angry “because Briny wouldn’t pay her cash money. Briny says she promised to deliver a baby and she didn’t” (34). So instead the midwife sullenly accepts two fat catfish as payment. This leaves no dinner left for the rest of the family. Meanwhile, everyone waits to see if Briny can return with a doctor. The younger siblings are afraid and ask questions about what’s happening. Camellia bites the midwife when the midwife grabs Queenie’s feather hat. The midwife hangs on to the hat until Camellia yells, “They’ll hang you up a tree, they will” (36). Rill inwardly reflects on a lynched man they saw dangling from a tree on the side of the river “just two Wednesdays ago” (36).

At last, after worrying the Briny might’ve been “snatched” (36) by the police, his outlaw hustling history catching up with him, Rill’s father and Zede, the doctor, arrive. Rill feels a sense of relief, realizing that “if anyone can make things right, it’s Old Zede” (37). He tells Queenie and the children that he needs to take Queenie off the boat and to the hospital, and that it will be all right because Briny, Queenie, and the babies will be back. In the meantime, Rill is in charge. After the doctor and her parents leave, Rill gets “the dinner ready and [the children] all sit in a circle, all five of us, because it doesn’t seem right to be at the table with two empty spots at the end” (39). After she gets the littler ones off to bed, Rill “whisper[s] every word of Polish” (41) she knows, praying for Queenie’s safety.