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Patience Honey
Benjamin Honey is a formerly enslaved Black man who, along with his wife, Patience, is the first settler on Apple Island off the coast of Maine. He works hard for many years to get apple trees growing on the island, only to see them all wash away in a moment during a giant flood. Stories of Benjamin’s life become as important and familiar to his descendants as the Bible. His marriage to Patience symbolizes how people of different races can find common ground, particularly in an isolated place like Apple Island.
Benjamin Honey Quotes in This Other Eden
The This Other Eden quotes below are all either spoken by Benjamin Honey or refer to Benjamin Honey. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Benjamin Honey—American, Bantu, Igbo—born enslaved—freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew—ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, née Raferty, Galway girl, in 1793.
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[…] I held that foolish flag as high as I could, and the water rose up my shoulder, and the water rose up to my raised elbow, and the water rose up my forearm, and the water reached my wrist, and so there was just my one hand holding that motley little tattered flag sticking up above the surface of the flood, and the waters rose up my fingers, and just as my hand was about to disappear and that flag and all us Honeys be swallowed up in the catastrophe, the water stopped rising.
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Zachary worked by the light of a candle. As the carvings rose higher up the tree, he made them narrower and more convoluted in order to draw out the composition of each figure and scene so he would not run out of space before he ran out of mortal time, so that he would not complete a work at which he felt more and more he should finish his days laboring, dying as he etched the most elegant possible toes for a barefoot mother weeping for her child.
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Get the entire This Other Eden LitChart as a printable PDF.
Benjamin Honey Quotes in This Other Eden
The This Other Eden quotes below are all either spoken by Benjamin Honey or refer to Benjamin Honey. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 1
Quotes
Benjamin Honey—American, Bantu, Igbo—born enslaved—freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew—ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, née Raferty, Galway girl, in 1793.
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Explanation and Analysis:
[…] I held that foolish flag as high as I could, and the water rose up my shoulder, and the water rose up to my raised elbow, and the water rose up my forearm, and the water reached my wrist, and so there was just my one hand holding that motley little tattered flag sticking up above the surface of the flood, and the waters rose up my fingers, and just as my hand was about to disappear and that flag and all us Honeys be swallowed up in the catastrophe, the water stopped rising.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Zachary worked by the light of a candle. As the carvings rose higher up the tree, he made them narrower and more convoluted in order to draw out the composition of each figure and scene so he would not run out of space before he ran out of mortal time, so that he would not complete a work at which he felt more and more he should finish his days laboring, dying as he etched the most elegant possible toes for a barefoot mother weeping for her child.
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