Bayonna "Aunt Bee" Bridges (nee Brackishwater)
Born and raised in Old Bridge, New Jersey, Bayonna was the daughter of a Mennonite
beekeeper and his half Cherokee wife Zipporiah. She married Homer Bridges
four months after he placed an ad in the Newark Star Ledger for a mail-order
bride.
Bayonna soon came to be known to family and friends as the original "Domestic
Goddess". She was renowned for her
delectable honey-nut-cherry buns and gooey honey pies. She had a "come
hither" look in her eye that beckoned many a neighbor and homesick traveler
into her warm, fragrant kitchen for her tasty offerings.
She would often invite the local ladies to join her for tea and buns in order
to organize demonstrations for women's suffrage. Bayonna coined the slogan,
"Don't Be A Goat, Give Us The Vote" which became popular amongst
Richmond County's suffragettes and its two political liberals.
A tragic accident befell Bayonna in her early forties. While at the Bridges'
picnic in Silver Lake Park, she accidentally (and ironically) upset a beehive
with her croquet mallet. They swarmed and chased her through the park for
about twenty minutes. As she was running for her life, she ran smack into
a sycamore tree. . . never to be the same again.
Bayonna developed a strange buzzing in her head, as she described it, which
caused her to perform lewd acts in public, like lifting her skirts and winking
at strange men. The men around the town couldn't contain themselves. Homer
had to keep her indoors for the rest of her days, where she continued to make
large batches of delectable honey-nut-cherry buns and gooey honey pies. Old
Homer, at work from dawn to dusk, never knew that Bayonna kept her "kitchen
door" wide open throughout the day. And, quite strangely, throughout
the town, an unusually large number of men walked the streets. . . salivating.