Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  “Woman, ain’t I worked enough today for that no-’count granddaughter of yours? Why didn’t you send by the store for some Bakers?”

  “That old packaged stuff don’t taste the same—and where’s my rosemary?”

  “Lord, Abigail, and I had plenty drying out at the other place. But Bernice came by this morning and it slipped my mind.”

  “I thought that was her car over in your yard. Then she musta come straight here after leaving you—looking for Buzzard.”

  “Now, what she want him for?”

  “You know what she want him for.” Abigail frowns. “I told her I done sent him beyond the bridge to pick up Baby Girl. I don’t know what we gonna do about Bernice.”

  “Bernice is gonna have to do about Bernice, herself. But it’s a bad sign if she starts messing with Buzzard.”

  Inside, Abigail’s living room gleams with lemon oil and a light breeze moves her freshly starched curtains. A bunch of wildflowers—daisies, periwinkles, marsh fern—sits in their mama’s cut-glass vase on the mantelpiece. Off to the right, the spare bedroom has a new rag run on its polished floor which matches the ruffled bedcover and throw pillows. More wildflowers are arranged on the night table and dresser.

  “You’d think the preacher was coming,” Miranda says on their way into the kitchen.

  “Baby Girl probably thought she was gonna sneak up on us,” Abigail says. “But we got a surprise for her.”

  The carved wooden cabinets in Abigail’s kitchen are identical to Miranda’s, but there are three sets that run along the wall to end at the window, where basil, thyme, and sage are growing in clay pots. A fresh pork shoulder is marinating on the counter next to her sink, which is filled with string beans and potatoes.

  “Your sage is holding up fine.” Miranda feels the feathery leaves and sniffs. “Fresh sage tastes good in pork.”

  “Don’t try to get out of forgetting my rosemary.”

  Miranda finally sees the coconuts. “No, Abigail—two of ’em?”

  Abigail ties on an apron, picks up a small hammer, and cracks the shell with a dull thud.

  “Don’t waste the juice. Add it to your cake batter.”

  “Naw, it makes my layers too moist and they falls apart.”

  “’Cause you too heavy-handed with it. Just a little gives it a nice flavor.”

  “I just ain’t got your touch, Miranda.”

  “That ain’t working twice in one day, Abigail. I’m not making up no more cake batter.”

  “Who asked you to?”

  “Well, good then. Where’s the grater?”

  Their cake pans are cooling on the side counter when a car horn begins playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” from the front yard.

  “My baby’s here!” Abigail smooths her hair and dress as she rushes toward the front porch.

  Dr. Buzzard’s pickup truck is missing both fenders and the wheels wobble inward on loose axles; there are so many dents along its side, it’s hard to tell that it was blue at one time. He’s sitting alone behind the wheel, but he’s wearing his beyond-the-bridge clothes: a clean T-shirt under the denim overalls that he usually wears by itself, and a rooster feather stuck in the band of his felt hat. He jumps down out of the truck, and they see that he’s even changed into his good Nike sneakers, but he still ain’t bothered to put any strings into them. He reaches into the back and brings out a cardboard box with six Mason jars of honey.

  Abigail wilts pitifully. “Buzzard, where’s Cocoa?”

  “Cocoa—your grandbaby, Cocoa?”

  “Yes, you addle-brained, slew-footed son-of-a-crow, Cocoa!” Miranda comes to the edge of the steps, and he backs up toward his truck.

  “Now, Mama Day, why you carrying on so? Miss Abigail asked me this very morning would I go beyond the bridge to the airport and pick up her honey. Now, none of that didn’t make too much sense to me, since I had these here jars waiting for y’all out by my hives—ya know I keeps my hives over near Chevy’s Pass, which ain’t no place near the airport—ain’t even beyond the bridge. But I did it just the way she asks—went home, changed my clothes and everything—’cause after all, y’all are Days, and your daddy, John-Paul, was a big man in these parts. Why, your daddy was practically a legend, and so—”

  “Fool!” Miranda’s voice makes both Dr. Buzzard and Abigail jump. “Don’t be standing there talking about no daddys. You ain’t got a daddy—nothing human could have put you on this earth. You mean, you went all the way out to the airport and didn’t wait for the plane?”

  “Oh, the plane come in all right, but—”

  Abigail turns to Miranda. “Maybe, you were wrong—she wasn’t on that plane.”

  “Yes, she was.” Miranda picks up the broom laying against the house and whacks it down on the porch railing with each word. “But this out-and-out miserable excuse for something that should be living and breathing ain’t had enough sense to—”

  “But Miss Abigail said to bring back her honey,” Dr. Buzzard wails. “And that’s just what I did. And you oughta be glad, Mama Day, ’cause you been after me for two weeks to fetch you some too. Now”—he places the box gingerly near the porch steps—“if that ain’t the honey you meant, maybe you meant this honey.” He yanks the canvas off the truck bed, and Cocoa sits up laughing.

  “We did it, Dr. Buzzard.”

  As Abigail runs toward the truck, Miranda shakes her head, showing all her gums.

  “I ain’t did a bit of vaudeville in my time for nothing.” Dr. Buzzard takes out a handkerchief and wipes his grizzled head. “But things was getting mighty tight here.”

  “Buzzard, I oughta kill you.” Abigail hugs her granddaughter. “My heart almost stopped.”

  “And I still oughta take this broom to you.” Miranda grins as he carries the suitcases from the back of the truck.

  “Now, don’t you all go blaming Dr. Buzzard. I was determined to get my surprise in—one way or the other.”

  Miranda watches Cocoa approach with her grandmother’s arms tightly around her waist. She thinks for a moment that the sun musta come from beneath the clouds again and actually glances up. When did it happen—this kind of blooming from pale to gold? She remembers the little girl running home crying and almost taking off her middle finger with a butcher knife, fearing she really had the white blood she was teased about at school—she wanted red blood like everybody else. And now she strides so proud, a sunflower against the brown arms over hers, the sweat flowing from the reddish gold hair and absorbing every bit of available light to fling it back against those high cheekbones, down the collarbone, on to the line of the pelvis, pressing against the thin summer cotton. The lean thighs, tight hips, the long strides flashing light between the blur of strong legs—pure black. Me and Abigail, we take after the sons, Miranda thinks. The earth men who formed the line of Days, hard and dark brown. But the Baby Girl brings back the great, grand Mother. We ain’t seen 18 & 23 black from that time till now. The black that can soak up all the light in the universe, can even swallow the sun. Them silly children didn’t know that it’s the white in us that reflects all these shades of brown running around Willow Springs. But pure black woulda sucked it all in—and it’s only an ancient mother of pure black that one day spits out this kinda gold.

  “I knowed you were coming,” Miranda says, hands on hips.

  “You know too much, Mama Day.” Cocoa mimics her stand and winks. “That’s why I took you down a peg this afternoon.”

  “Bring your fresh self here.” She draws the girl’s body into her own. “I’m sure glad you’re home.”

  Home. Folks call it different things, think of it in different ways. For Cocoa it’s being around living mirrors with the power to show a woman that she’s still carrying scarred knees, a runny nose, and socks that get walked down into the heels of her shoes.

  “Your resistance is always been low.”

  “I told you, I never intend to put another spoonful of that horrible stuff into my mouth.”

&
nbsp; “You wanna go back up there and catch pneumonia? This agueweed will clean you out and get your system right.”

  “Grandma, it gives me the runs.”

  “How else them nasty city germs coming out your body?”

  “I’m tired of spending my first two days here sitting on the toilet.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “You gave up pretty easy.”

  “Well, you grown—and you can’t tell grown folks what to do.”

  “Give it here. If I don’t take it, you’ll just mix it in my food.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the last two times I’ve been home.”

  “It weren’t me, it was them raw sweet potatoes you insist on eating.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  Home. It’s being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places. Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

  “You going by to visit Miss Ruby?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “But she said she ain’t seen you any last week. You know Ruby can’t get around so well.”

  “If she lost some of that weight, she could.”

  “Nasty, nasty.”

  “It’s true, Mama Day, she’s humongous. And all she wants to do is fool with my hair.”

  “You didn’t mind, you fresh heifer, when she got them cockleburs out your scalp.”

  “I was ten years old! And we’ve both gotten too big for me to still be sitting between her knees.”

  “Well, it’ll break her heart, you don’t get by there.”

  “I said, I will—I just haven’t found the time.”

  “You found the time to be gallivanting all over the place with Bernice—to them juke joints beyond the bridge. Spending money you ain’t got.”

  “They’re called clubs.”

  “I don’t care what they’re called. Bernice is a married woman now, and instead of that rubbing off on you, she acts up something terrible when you come home. Ambush oughta take a stick to both of you.”

  “But he’s with us most of the time.”

  “Then for the times he’s not.”

  “Mama Day, did you know Bernice is talking about seeing Dr. Buzzard?”

  “I know.”

  “She wants children very badly.”

  “That ain’t the way to get ’em. All Buzzard’s gonna do is take her money.”

  “But she needs help, Mama Day, and you really could … I mean …”

  “You best leave Bernice and that business alone. You got plenty to worry about your own self. At least she done found herself a husband.”

  “I don’t need a man right now, I need a job.”

  “A place like New York got plenty of men—and jobs—for the taking.”

  “I’ve been trying, but that’s easier said than done.”

  “Not if you know how to do it.”

  “Well, then you tell me how to do it. I interviewed for a job I could do with my eyes closed just before I came, and the guy was this close to giving it to me—I could see it in his face. But they needed someone right away and I had to come home.”

  “No, you didn’t have to, but it speaks right well of you that you did. You the only one Abigail’s got left now, with Hope’s child gone.”

  “I told him all that.”

  “So how you know they didn’t hold the job for you?”

  “Because there were a dozen people who could do it if I didn’t.”

  “That don’t mean nothing. You should write and ask.”

  “I can just call when I get back to New York, but …”

  “No, I think you should get in touch with them from right here—in your own handwriting. You remember the man’s name?”

  “Andrews. George Andrews, but he …”

  “Yeah, go on in the house now and use some of Abigail’s yellow writing paper, the one with the little flowers at the bottom. Tell him that you really are looking forward to that job, and you hope it’s waiting for ya—things like that.”

  “Mama Day, that won’t help.”

  “Can it hurt?”

  “Well, no.”

  “And Miss C …”

  “What?”

  “When you done—make sure you let me mail it.”

  Home. You can move away from it, but you never leave it. Not as long as it holds something to be missed.

  “All right, Buzzard, you drive carefully with my baby, now.”

  Abigail holds a young woman on her front porch who moves different now. It only took a little while for her body to remember how to flow in time with the warm air and the swaying limbs of the oaks. She is deeper in color and rounder in her face and hips. Cocoa’s got to carry back twice what she brought: a hand-stitched counterpane, jars of canned preserves, a basket of potpourri, and a boxful of paper bags marked chest cold, fever, headache, and monthly. Miranda follows Dr. Buzzard to his truck, carrying the counterpane folded up in a plastic bag.

  “Buzzard, I hear that Bernice is planning to come round your way.”

  “Bernice Duvall? Now what she want?”

  “You know what she wants, and make sure she don’t find it.”

  “Now, Mama Day, when folks come to me seeking help, my conscience don’t allow me to turn ’em away.”

  “Your conscience ain’t got nothing to do with it, Buzzard—it’s the money. And if you really had a conscience, you wouldn’t be selling them hoodoo bits of rags and sticks—and that watered-down moonshine as medicine, passing yourself off as a—”

  “I am just what I say I am. You do things your way and I do ’em mine. And it hurts my feelings no end that you won’t call me Doctor Buzzard—I gives you respect.”

  “There ain’t but one Dr. Buzzard, and he ain’t you. That man is up in Beaufort County, South Carolina, and he’s real. You may fool these folks in Willow Springs, but ain’t nobody here older than me, and I remember when your name was Rainbow Simpson. And you can change that all you want, but you can’t change the fact that you still nothing but an out-and-out bootlegger and con man. But what you do ain’t none of my business …”

  “If Bernice comes to me for help, I’m helping her.” He throws the suitcases into the back of the truck real hard. “And in all due respects, like you said, it ain’t none of your business.”

  “It ain’t, Buzzard, it really ain’t. And that’s why it would cause me no end of sorrow to make it so. ’Cause the way I see it, you been walking round on this earth a long time and got just as much right as the next fella to keep walking around, healthy and all—living out your natural life.”

  “I believe you’re threatening me, Mama Day.”

  “Now, how could I do something like that? What could a tired old woman like me do to a powerful hoodoo doctor? Why, that little mess I got out at the other place wouldn’t hold a candle to—”

  “Ain’t nobody talking about the other place. Ain’t nobody mentioned—”

  “That’s right, we ain’t said a word about nothing—but Bernice.”

  It’s one happy man who sees Abigail and Cocoa finally coming toward the truck. “I do believe Cocoa is ready now, ain’t you, honey?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. But I sure hate to go.”

  “Now why?” Miranda says. “All them good things waiting for you up in New York—jobs and husbands and what-all.”

  Cocoa laughs. “They sure weren’t waiting when I left.”

  “A lot can happen between your leaving and getting back to a place.”

  “It did—seven pounds on me, and about seventy pounds in overweight baggage.”

  They’re gonna stand and watch until the tail lights of the truck disappear over the horizon. It’s a pretty evening, the kind that comes with a blending of reds and purples with the mist rising off The Sound. The parting ain’t easy. But we are old, old women, Miranda thinks, and if we let you go now, we can see th
e road you set out on before it gets to be too late for us.

  I had, to be truthful, almost forgotten about you until the letter came. A new office manager was hired the day after your interview, and my partner went on vacation, having promised to wait only until the moment we got someone. I couldn’t protest being left with a new manager and the groundwork for implementing Ray Hopewell’s new piping system—Bruce had done more than his share that year for our first big account. Andrews & Stein was a production and design company—Stein thought up the impossible and Andrews made it work. So Bruce reminded me that he had given up the opening of the trout season that spring, dumped his lousy blueprints on my desk, said, Now it’s your turn, and left for the Catskills.

  There wasn’t much I could say, knowing that if the tables were turned, nothing short of an account from God to mechanize the Pearly Gates would have gotten me to give up my winter vacations. If I didn’t get two weeks during the playoff season, we were guaranteed a miserable year together. Just that January I had been sprinting between Tampa, Pittsburgh, and Pasadena while he handled the moving and painting of our new offices with only his wife’s niece for a stand-in receptionist, who couldn’t spell her own name without chewing a wad of Juicy Fruit, which inevitably landed between our files. He was good-natured enough to say her gum helped somewhat, because that way he was certain of having the B’s follow the A’s. Hopewell got one look at her, realized that we didn’t squander money on receptionists with the smarts to demand more than minimum wage, and gave us a chance with his apartment complex. And Bruce, who wouldn’t know a football from a nymph fly at the end of his reel, actually congratulated me that the AFC—if not my beloved Patriots—stormed Pasadena that year. It would have taken a lesser man than I was to complain about his desertion, with our quarterly taxes due in mid-September, the inherent tension of two projects nearing completion and Hopewell’s to get going, as well as an overzealous office manager whose motto was, Ask before you do (even in ordering paper clips) so the blame won’t be laid on your doorstep. Dwight was terrific at his job, but hardly what you’d call an original thinker.

  With all of that, and no time for lunch and sometimes dinner unless I had it after ten-thirty, there was definitely no time for Shawn. And we probably could have saved five good years with something as simple as a few quiet evenings together. Our relationship had reached the pouting stage earlier that year, a winter and spring of stony silences that replaced the rational debates or even battles over small bones of contentions we had tried to work out once before. Now, those small irritations just sat between us as each tried to figure out if this silence should actually be a conversation or screaming match—we’d had them all—about what ultimately couldn’t bring me to marry her when the obvious differences no longer applied. She had stopped being a redhead with freckles a long time ago and had become just Shawn. But we had come to the point where I was afraid to touch her, not knowing if I’d be unrightly accused through her silence of using her—or worse, be accepted into her body with a plaintive sadness that made me question silently whether I was or not. It was a relief not to have to worry about that for those hectic three weeks and bitter to realize that she took my apologies for canceled dinners and needing the space to sleep alone just a bit too quickly—the parting “miss you” and “miss you too”s ringing hollow between us after we put the receivers down.