The Blueberry Queen of Wiscasset
In the end, we felt it safest to hide the whole business under as many sequins and feathers and tiaras as we could find. These days, folk are so eager to judge. But Wiscasset has been around since ‘63—that’s 1663 to you—and we do things the way we’ve always done them. The advantage of having four hundred years under the municipal belt is continuity; we play the parts we were born to play.
The thing is, Salem was sloppy. They got over excited, girls screaming in the street, beating their breasts, accusations flying like broomsticks. Goody Osborne this, Goody Proctor that. Once you get a civic body throwing a tantrum like that it’s hard to back off. You have to save face. The other towns will know you’re weak. Towns in New England are gossipy things, and they’ll shun a village for a bad harvest and an ugly memorial bell, let alone business like Salem got herself messed up in. No one knew what to say about Salem. It wasn’t decent, I can tell you that. It would be at least a century before the place was invited to the fashionable commonwealths again.
And we all learned a lesson about discretion.
The girls line up in the spring, right after the last frost. Down by the lovely old clock tower in the town square. Beautiful Wiscasset girls, all in purple. They have their dresses made down in Portland, every shade of violet: indigo, midnight, grape, lilac, amaranthine, mulberry, wine, ink, lavender, heliotrope, plum. Some of them wear lovely amethyst and diamond earrings, pendants, rings, fascinators to set off the deeper shades of their hair: golden or fiery or black as the depths of a well. The local shoemaker does a brisk business in purple slingbacks. They’re all between the ages of sixteen and nineteen—the prime years of temptation. Sometimes the noon sun hits them just right and you’d think they were just made of light.
But they’re not, and that’s the trouble.
One year, some reality TV folks came up from New York to document our little pageant. Good kids—a little skinny, always wearing sunglasses and smoking, hair slicked up like it was 1950 and them ready for a drag race down by the river. The world is what it is. And the world likes to gawk—small town Maine holds their annual alpha female finding mission, claws come out, horns sprout from the brows of the eligible county maidens. We understand—if it weren’t compelling, we’d have found another way. We’ve had a long time to sort it all out.
We don’t hold with anything too immodest, even in the Blossom of the Deep competition. No bikinis, purple or otherwise. The girls have to make their costumes themselves, with needle and hook and glue. They knot seashells in their belts and stick rhinestones in the corners of their eyes. Polished crab claws holding back their braids. Painted fish, all in a row along their long arms, turning and turning like a silvery school glimpsed beneath a wave. I remember back in ‘74, Annie Gandham made her mermaid tail out of silk and bits of sea glass—she sparkled in the sun, strands of black pearls hanging in long loops from her neck to her knees.
Oh, Annie, not till the century changed did we see a candidate as sure as you. We had such hopes.
The film kids said this was all a metaphor for the sacred marriage between the earth and the sea. They said primitive cultures practiced it all over the world in one form or another. They said we wouldn’t know on a conscious level what this was all about, but that down deep, where folklore lives, it was this old story playing out in Wiscasset every May. Give someone a camera and they think they know everything.
The Blueberry Bride portion of the pageant takes place at the American Legion on a Sunday afternoon. The girls show their love of our wild blueberries in the form of pies and tarts and ice creams, cakes and tortes and cupcakes thick with lavender buttercream icing, muffins dusted with violet sugar, pancakes piled up like pyramids, syrups and compotes and jams. In ‘88, Cora Brackett brought blueberry liquor in a crystal bottle half as long as her arm. Some debate ensued as to the morality of allowing spirits into the competition. Doesn’t that decide the whole thing then and there—the girl who’d distill alcohol from the innocent berry more or less inculpates herself. But in the end the mayor and his assistant judges had to recuse themselves on account of rather overdoing their enjoyment of the fruits of the Blueberry Brides, and, insensate with pie and liquor, napped through the rest of the afternoon.