Before We Were Yours

Avery leaves the nostalgia tinged world of her grandmother behind and tries to get answers from her parents as they commute to a ribbon cutting together in the back of a limo. Honeybee, Avery’s mother, insists she has never heard of this person May Crandall before. She wonders aloud if Avery asked the all-important question of well-bred Southern women: “Do you know who her people are?” (87). Honeybee audibly laughs when she is told that Avery forgot to ask that, wondering how a person could forget such a question.

Avery leaves the company of her parents, who have no information to assist her in her detective work, and decides to make a trip to her grandmother’s old home. It is almost painful for her as she can “almost feel [her]grandmother on the Charleston style piazza” (91), but she realizes she will “never again come back to this place to be greeted by [her] grandmother again” (93). The best she can do is poke around in drawers to recover what she can of her grandmother’s past life.

She finds old letters and diaries hidden away in a drawer. She reads about her grandmother’s meeting of her grandfather, which