Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  “Oh, no. Now what put it in her mind to do that? I never did trust them things—they ain’t natural. If I can get my hands on Buzzard, I’ll have him go pick her up.”

  “If I get my hands on him, I’m gonna wring his scrawny neck. Ain’t seen a speck of that honey he’s supposed to bring me. Having the last in my tea this minute.”

  “Sister, waiting on Buzzard is like waiting on Judgment Day. How Old Arthur doing you this morning?”

  “Now, he’s dependable as ever. Only man I been able to roll out of bed with since I passed my seventies.”

  “Stop your badness. I got another poultice for you, found some black cohosh growing down by Ruby’s. Soon as it’s dry good, I’ll make you up a nice plaster.”

  “Hope it ain’t like that other mess that burns so.”

  “Miranda, you gotta feel it if it’s gonna help.”

  “Felt Old Arthur this morning, and he sure don’t help. Just a poking me in my back, poking in my left hip. You think he gonna get it right one day and start poking in my—”

  “Uh, uh—let me get off this line before I lose my religion. Listen, bring me over a batch of that dried rosemary you got out at the other place to season this pork shoulder—Baby Girl loves herself some roast pork. And a good half-dozen eggs—I’ll do up one jelly and one coconut cake. We only got two weeks to fatten her up—know she gonna come dragging in here puny as the law allows—’less you wanna make the jelly and I’ll do two coconuts. Your jelly cakes always turn out better than mine.”

  “I ain’t making her nothing, ’cause she’s too fresh. You go spend all day over a hot stove in this heat—and all my eggs is for setting now.”

  “A good half dozen now, Miranda. And did you know it’s almost nine o’clock?”

  “Dear Lord, let me get off this phone. See you in the by-and-by.”

  “The by-and-by.”

  She hurries real quick to turn on that ancient Motorola of hers with aluminum foil balled on each antenna. She finds channel six, and seeing that the commercials are still playing before her favorite program comes on, she turns down the volume and goes into the kitchen to warm up the stove. By the time she’s checked the levels of her sugar and flour cans and found two jars of apple jelly in the back of her pantry, the television camera has swept over the back of the audience to a close-up of Phil Donahue’s thick gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses. She turns up the volume just as he’s about to introduce the people sitting up on the stage. He’s brung somebody in from Kansas, Oregon, and Secaucus, New Jersey, all of who got photographs and claim they spotted UFOs. The fourth fellow is an astronomer from Palo Alto, and the fifth is an official from NASA.

  “Is there intelligent life in outer space?” Phil looks dead serious, staring right into the cameras. “And are they trying to get in touch with us? If so, for what purpose? We’ll be right back after this message to explore this fascinating topic.”

  Miranda’s never been much on television, but she started watching this show religiously once she found out it was based in Chicago. It gave her an idea of the kind of people Cocoa was living around since she’d moved north. Even the folks in Atlanta were different from the folks in Willow Springs, and when you started talking Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, they were way different again. And this show gave the audience a chance to speak, and what they had to say was always of more interest to her than the people on the stage who were running off at the mouth about being male strippers, lesbian nuns, or talking about some new book they just wrote, showing folks who lived in apartments how to turn their bathrooms into fallout shelters. On all of these “fascinating topics” she had one opinion and that could be summed up in two words: white folks. And when they found a colored somebody to act the fool—like the man from New Jersey, holding up a snapshot of his cousin posing with a family of Martians—she expanded it to three words: honorary white folks.

  But at least the faces out in the audience keep changing with each new program, and she wants them faces. Sometimes, she’ll keep the volume turned off for the entire hour, knowing well that what’s being said by the audience don’t matter a whit to how it’s being said. Laughter before or after a mouth opens to speak, the number of times a throat swallows, the curve of the lips, the thrust of the neck, the slump of the shoulders. And always, always the eyes. She can pick out which ladies in the audience have secretly given up their babies for adoption, which fathers have daughters making pornographic movies, exactly which homes been shattered by Vietnam, drugs, or “the alarming rise of divorce.” What she finally settled on about Chicago—and, by guilt of association, New York—was that it’s no worse or better than other places Baby Girl could have chosen to live in.

  Those big cities ain’t changed in the years since she’d visited her folks up there, so there weren’t no need to go again. She’d been north a few times when Hope was alive and her girl, Willa, was small. Hope had been her favorite niece—always something funny to say. Married a nice man, too, that Benjamin Prescott, though he never made too much of himself—gambling took a lot of it away. Still, no reason for little Willa to carry on like she did, setting herself off from the family and breaking her mama’s heart. She knew that high-society marriage was all bound to come to no good. Just before Hope passed, she’d sent them little Willa’s wedding picture. Miranda remembers the face on Willa’s husband—like a bottomless pit—and shudders. There’s more to that Christmas Eve fire than meets the eye—much more. Miranda frowns and refuses to think into the flames that dance at the back of her head. Little Willa didn’t deserve that kind of end; she was a good enough child if not a whit of courage. So unlike Grace’s child. That Ophelia came into the world kicking and screaming—kicked her right in the eye as she brought her up to her lips to suck the blood and mucous out of her nose. A little raw demon from the start. Miranda smiles. Under five pounds and being kept alive on nothing but sugar tits and will. It was touch-and-go many a day with that one.

  We ain’t had much luck with the girls in this family, Miranda thinks, and I begged Abigail not to name her first baby Peace. She didn’t live long enough to get a crib name. No, not much luck at all. It was peculiar when she thought on it, and she didn’t think on it much. Most all of the boys had thrived: her own daddy being the youngest of seven boys, and his daddy the youngest of seven. But coming on down to them, it was just her, Abigail, and Peace. And out of them just another three girls, and out of them, two. Three generations of nothing but girls, and only one left alive in this last generation to keep the Days going—the child of Grace.

  At least Abigail had the presence of mind to give Grace’s baby a proper crib name. Miranda would have done it herself and had fixed it in her mind to crib name her No—this was one girl they would not let get away. But it had to be the mama’s mama, and Miranda was so afraid with the baby failing as she was, and Grace carrying on so after the daddy, drying up her milk with hate, that Abigail, nervous as she gets, would do it wrong. But that little ball of pale fire, spitting up practically every ounce of goat’s milk she could finally take, pulling Mother’s china knickknacks off the curio before she could barely crawl, running before she could walk—she was the baby girl. They dropped the “the” when they were sure she was gonna stay, and after Ophelia got to be five years old, she refused to answer to Baby Girl, thinking it meant just that. So they gave her the pet name Cocoa. “It’ll put color on her somewhere,” Miranda had said, but she and Abigail kept calling her exactly what she was between themselves, and where it counted most of all—in their minds. She’ll answer to Baby Girl again when she’s a mama in her own right—there’ll be no need to explain to the silly thing what she’s been knowing all along.

  Just as a woman on the TV gets up to ask why is it that all the visitations from outer space have been friendly, carrying warnings and advice for the planet Earth—ain’t it possible that if there’s other intelligent life, some of it must be warlike, hoping to conquer us?—Miranda decides to turn the program off. The man from Ore
gon had just bent over to respond, but he did not really answer that woman’s need. Her husband beats her, Miranda thinks, having seen the slight twitch around her mouth, and that’s what she wants explained. She fears her dreams. Pain comes hurling down from the space outside her pillow, and she wakes to find a stranger has left her with a twisted arm or a split lip. Tell me how to sleep at night, she’s asking. Now the NASA person was holding up a chart as the woman sat back down, clutching her handbag beneath her breast.

  Miranda shakes her head as the audience and all of Chicago disappears into a dot of flashing light. She pushes down the television’s antennas and goes into the kitchen. All she needs is to get herself a little shame weed and bake it up in something sweet. The bowls come out, the flour, the butter—she’d sleep tonight, sure enough. She sets the square of butter into the bowl to soften, takes an old shoe box and candle from beneath her cabinets, and goes out her back door. She was gonna need at least six fresh eggs for her two cakes, and then six for Abigail’s—a good dozen, and Baby Girl ain’t worth a one. The chickens that run loose around her trailer flock to her feet as she nears the wired-in coop.

  “You missed being breakfast this morning, Clarissa, but don’t get too sure of yourself. There’s worms and bugs out here aplenty—go find ’em.”

  The old black hen fixes Miranda with an unblinking bright eye as she enters the wire fence gate and fastens it securely behind her. Placing her shoe box and candle on a post, she runs fresh water into the trough, clearing out the loose feathers and dust. Calling the chickens to her, she spreads their mash. This yard needs cleaning and so does the inside of that coop, but she has no time for that today. Baby Girl would have a way to make herself useful in the next two weeks. While the chickens eat, she goes into their coop. Having to bend to get through the door, she can stand upright once inside. The rafters are a good two feet above her head, and the cloudy sunlight that’s filtering in through the windows shows the little specks of fluff that’s swirling among the beams in the musty air. Two setting hens, having refused food and water, are wedged into a corner nest and she knows not to go anywhere near them. Rummaging through abandoned nests, she holds each egg she finds up to her lighted candle. She moves them around in her fingers gently, tip down, and can see straight through the shells as she searches for clear, firm yolks. The candlelight flickers across her face, the flesh stretched like tight leather against her cheeks and temple bones, and the light gives a kinda mellow edge to skin the color of brown parchment. She pushes her lips up in concentration as she squints at a tiny blood spot—but this one is good. If life is being formed, breaking the shell means a double loss: it can’t be eaten and the chick won’t be made. Her fingers curl gently around a warm egg that shows a deepening spot with tiny veins running out from it.

  “Well, well, well.” Candlelight makes the shadowy life within her wrinkled hand seem to breathe as she rotates it real careful. The setting hens in the corner flutter and let out sounds like muted groans.

  “Uh, huh.” She places the egg back into the pile of straw. “You know, don’t you.”

  Outside, she blinks her eyes rapidly in the strong light and flexes her back. The scent of pine and grass burst out as the sun moves for a minute from behind a group of clouds.

  “Peek is all you gonna be doing today.” Miranda looks up at the sky.

  When she’s unfastening the gate to her hen yard, a young rooster tries to sneak in and she pushes him back with her foot as she juggles the full box of eggs.

  “Now, Cicero, you ain’t got no business in there and you know it. Stay out here and earn your keep. Clarissa, what good are you if you can’t keep this boy of yours in line? He woulda gone into the pot long along if he weren’t one of yours.”

  She was sorry that she had kept Cicero. Two roosters were a problem she didn’t need. And this one couldn’t get it into his head that those hens inside weren’t for him.

  Bernice Duvall’s dark green Chevrolet pulls into her front yard just as she’s ready to step into her trailer, and Miranda sighs. Here was another problem she didn’t need right now.

  “Morning, Mama Day.” Bernice leaps out the car as if she’s been pushed.

  “How you keeping, Bernice?”

  “Fair to middling.”

  Bernice has been the same way from a child: thin as a stick and always in motion. It’s nerve-racking sometimes just to watch her. Her hands play with the buttons on her blouse, the ends of her sleeves, run across her collarbone. When she’s sitting, the muscles in her calf and knees move with a will of their own, and the moment she stands up, she’ll start shifting from one foot to the next. She was always good to run an errand: it seems she was at the store before finding out why she was sent. She stands by the car, her hands making little fluttering motions from the door handle to the hollow under her breasts, waiting for Miranda’s next question to find out if she’s welcome.

  “You on your way to work now?”

  Bernice nods and moves a step closer.

  “And Ambush, he doing well?”

  “Well as can be expected. He got up early to take a load of tomatoes beyond the bridge. He takes care of most of the fresh produce for the big supermarket now. So we’re doing real well—on that end. He wants me to give up cashiering at the drug store. Says it tires me out too much, and that’s why we can’t—”

  “You only go in half a day, don’t you? That little bit ain’t doing nothing to you—it’s not like you lifting or something.”

  “But ain’t nothing happening, Mama Day!” Bernice shrinks back at the sound of her own outburst.

  “These things take time, Bernice. All in good time.”

  “It’s been a long time.” Her voice gets real low, hesitant. “And I’ve done everything you’ve told me—everything everybody’s told me and—”

  “What I told you first of all is to wait—and you ain’t doing that, Bernice.”

  “There’s a new fertility drug they carry over at the store. It’s supposed to work miracles.”

  “The only miracle is life itself. And when it comes, it comes.”

  “Two of our customers already got pregnant from it.”

  Miranda sighs. “Then go to the clinic and see if Dr. Smithfield will get it for you.”

  “I tried, but he said he don’t believe in them things.”

  “Well, I agree with him—it ain’t natural. And your constitution can’t handle them strong drugs. I told you that long ago. Ain’t you better be getting on to work? And I got cakes to bake—Cocoa is coming in today.”

  “That’s right, it’s mid-August already. I bet Miss Abigail is real happy. Tell Cocoa I’ll be over to see her—hear what’s happening up in the city. She got any babies yet?”

  “She better get herself a husband first, and she’s been slow as molasses about that. You done beat her out long ago on that score.”

  “To what end, if I can’t keep him.” Her hands start fluttering again. Miranda puts down her egg box, takes Bernice’s hands in her own, and forces them to be still.

  “Any man—and I say, any man—who would leave you just because of something like that is well worth the going. And I’ve known Ambush before he knew himself—I brought his mama into the world—and he ain’t that kind of man. So if that’s what’s on your mind, lay it to rest.”

  The fingers that grip Miranda’s feel like ice and the fine bones tremble under the skin.

  “Maybe we could go to the other place, Mama Day?”

  Miranda pretends that she don’t hear her. “You still got plenty of star grass? You taking them teas?”

  “Morning and night.”

  “Then just give it time. And next week, I’ll make you up some ground raspberry to take along with it—and a little something for your nerves.”

  “At the other place, Mama—”

  “No.” She pats Bernice’s hand and turns to go into her trailer.

  “But there’s a new moon tonight.”

  “I know,” Miranda says w
ithout turning around. She hears the car’s engine start up and the wheels bite into the grass, flinging gravel as Bernice backs out of her yard.

  In the kitchen she creams the sugar into the softened butter until no grains are felt beneath her spoon. Real careful, she breaks a fresh egg so that the yolk stays whole. Cupping the shell in her hand, she watches for a while as the bloated yellow swims in the thick mucous—not this month. She breaks another egg—nor the next. The third yolk is slipped into the sugar and butter—nor the next. She shakes her head. But she would still make up the ground raspberry for Bernice—tones the insides, strengthens the blood.

  Abigail is sweeping her front porch when Miranda crosses the main road between their places, loaded down with two foil-wrapped cakes and a paper bag of eggs. Abigail’s full head of silvery hair is pinned up with those mother-of-pearl combs she usually wears only to church, their rosy tints matching the fine pink lines in her new sundress. She is still a beautiful woman, and able to turn a few heads yet in front of the barbershop when she’s done up right. Her body’s grown plump but not loose like some. Age done only softened the olive brown flesh of her upper arms, neck, and jaw line, giving the sense that one day it’ll all just melt away into the surrounding air. Her false teeth gleam when she sees Miranda, who’s wearing the same old house dress she put on that morning, with flour powdering her stomach.

  “You there, Sister?” Miranda calls.

  “Uh, huh.”

  Miranda stops at the foot of the porch. “Somebody sure don’t want me and my cakes in their house today if they sweeping straight toward me.”

  “Not you I don’t want, it’s this here dust.” Abigail laughs. “And I ain’t sweeping salt, am I?”

  She puts the broom aside so Miranda can climb the porch steps and takes one of the cakes from her. “Ummm, I can smell that jelly right through this foil.”

  “Let ’em sit for a few days to let the flavor soak in and they may be worth eating. We can have one of your coconuts for supper.”

  “You gonna help me grate?”