Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  Anchoring her rake handle in the grass so she can bend down easy, Miranda spies her hen, digging and pulling at something in the ground. “What are you into, Clarissa?” She gets on her knees, shoos the chicken away with the rake, and drags out what looks like a dirty piece of cloth. The hen had ripped the flannel covering, so when Miranda pries it from the end of her rake it falls apart in her hand. The flannel bag was holding about a tablespoon of dirt mixed up with a few white specks of something, little purplish flowers and a dried sprig. Lord have mercy, look at this. She shakes her head as the black hen runs toward the others in the bushes. Frowning behind Clarissa, she wonders if there was anything to them old wives’ tales about chickens after all. But who coulda been this stupid? Even Buzzard would know better than to give somebody something to put under her steps, no matter how drunk he was.

  Getting up off her knees, she examines the stuff in her hand a little closer. She spits on some of the white grains. They dissolve between her fingers and she licks at them real quick—salt. It don’t take but a minute to see that the dried sprig is a piece of dill and the purplish flowers is from verbena. And she’d lay her life that the rest is graveyard dust—not sandy enough to be from the bluffs, no fishy smell for it to be from The Sound, too poor for garden soil. And it ain’t been there long, ’cause the flannel woulda rotted more. Matter of fact, this flannel almost looked brand-new. Miranda’s about to throw it on the ground so she can rake it up with the rest of her litter when she remembers what verbena’s called by some folks: herb of grace. She stands there so quiet at first it would be hard to tell she was breathing. And what better concoction to use if you’ve singled out the child of Grace?

  She lays her rake against the side of the trailer, goes inside to come out with her walking stick and a empty quart basket before she heads north on the main road up to Ruby’s. Her clapboard house is sitting back off the right side of the road, flanked by rows of peach and empress plum trees. Ruby is in her regular spot up on the porch in that cane-bottom chair. Miranda stops in front of the gate, leaning there on her hickory cane.

  “How do, Ruby.”

  “How do, Mama Day.”

  Ruby don’t make an offer for her to come into the yard and Miranda don’t seem to want to.

  “I come for a favor.” Miranda shifts her weight on the walking stick, her eyes never leaving the porch. “Your peaches over there is riper than the ones I got at the other place. And I’m making up a cobbler for supper tonight. You mind if I took some of yours.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Plenty there.” Ruby nods.

  “I’ll need plenty,” Miranda says. “Cocoa’s coming in today and she’s bringing her new husband. They’ll be four of us for supper instead of three. And with her and him staying two weeks and all, I figure I’d make enough cobbler to last.”

  Miranda puts the flannel bag on the gate post and she watches Ruby watching it as the breeze draws it into her yard. They both talk to the grayish dust and purple flowers spilling out around the foot of the gate.

  “Yeah, with them staying two whole weeks, I’m gonna need plenty.”

  “Plenty there, Mama Day.”

  “Glad to know that, Ruby,” Miranda says before she turns to go home with her basket empty. “’Cause if something unexpected happens and we run out, I’ll know where to come.”

  Ruby watches her back until it disappears down the main road but Miranda is concentrating on the tip of her stick as it scrapes against the blacktop. Last thing she needed was this nonsense, with that boy visiting. Folks had to up and show their color with him not understanding their ways. Didn’t Ruby know who she was messing with? There was a year’s worth of anger here, but she’d bide her time for two weeks. This all boiled down to one thing: it was a fool at work. Fool enough over some man to even think of messing with what was hers, or fool enough to believe that she was too old to do anything about it. Either way, her ninety years done given her more than enough remedies for that. Or had they? The air hangs heavy around her and she’s bearing down on the stick real hard. This was funny, funny weather. It’s tightened up her bones so she needed this cane for a lousy two-mile walk, but look how dry the blacktop was. Heavy air that stays just above the knees. That don’t bode well. She’d have to really concentrate: look and listen. No point in thinking about the time when it would just come to her, that was that time and this is this time. But there was something in the air. And now that heifer up the road would pick this summer, of all summers, to act up. Maybe, she still ain’t too big a fool to understand a warning. I don’t want to tangle with you, Ruby. And I don’t want that boy seeing anything he ain’t got no business seeing. But before I’d let you mess with mine, I’d wrap you up in tissue paper and send you straight to hell.

  Miranda gets to the patch of dogwoods beside her trailer and leans on the stick, feeling the throbbing moving up her legs into the hip joints. She could go on through the woods to the other place and get herself some fresh peaches or she could use that bag of frozen dewberries in the trailer. While it’s true a berry cobbler would be a nice change for him since it ain’t no secret Baby Girl can’t cook worth a spit, it’s also true she’d be settling for second best ’cause her legs are aching. And something tells her to push her way on through this small inconvenience. It ain’t gonna be a easy two weeks no way you look at it, so don’t start getting used to cutting corners now.

  But it’s not her legs, it’s the heavy air in the woods that finally makes Miranda turn around. It’s like the air ain’t willing to be breathed: the birds are motionless on the pine branches, the katydids can hardly be heard, and there ain’t a butterfly in view. The sound of the twigs breaking under her feet is hollow and the echo can’t move up through the haze. Miranda stands still and listens. Funny. There’s something funny going on. The graveyard is just up at the turn, but she won’t go past it today. Tomorrow maybe or the day after. She heaves a deep sigh. I ain’t up to all this, Lord. I’m an old woman. And I’m tired, tired of knowing things I can’t do nothing about. Whatever is waiting in here today, I just ain’t ready to face.

  It’s hard to know what to expect from a place when you can’t find it on the map. Preparing for Willow Springs upset my normal agenda: a few minutes with an atlas always helped me to decide what clothes to pack, whether a raincoat would be in order or not, a light pullover for the evenings. Your insisting that the place was exactly on the border between South Carolina and Georgia wasn’t terribly reassuring. What if it was like Seattle? That was the city closest to Alaska and you’d think it would be cold, but that’s not taking the mountain shelters and the balmy air currents from Puget Sound into account. And look at Palo Alto, California. If my atlas hadn’t forewarned me, I’d have gone up there to the games expecting it to be warm. But where was Willow Springs? Nowhere. At least not on any map I had found. I had even gone out and bought road maps just for South Carolina and Georgia and it was missing from among all those islands dotting the coastline. What county claimed it? Where was the nearest interstate highway, the nearest byroad?

  My questions annoyed you because you thought I was working up excuses to stay in New York. I really did want to go, but I wanted to know exactly where I was going. In the end I just threw up my hands and depended on you to make the arrangements. We would be flying into Savannah, which was the nearest airport, and a friend would be picking us up. You waited until the plane had landed to tell me that the man who would be waiting for us at the gate was a little strange. And since your “little strange” turned out to be chicken feathers in his hat, a string of white bones around his neck, and a name like Dr. Buzzard, I spent that half hour in his truck with a growing suspicion of your “pretty little island.”

  My suspicions were confirmed when we drove over that shaky wooden bridge: you had not prepared me for paradise. And to be fair, I realized that there was nothing you could have said that would have made any sense to me. I had to be there and see—no, feel—that I was entering another world. Where eve
n the word paradise failed once I crossed over The Sound. Sure, I can describe what I saw: a sleepy little section of wooden storefronts, then sporadic houses of stucco, brick, and clapboard all framed by palmettos, live oaks, and flowering bushes; every now and then a span of marshland, a patch of woods. But how do I describe air that thickens so that it seems as solid as the water, causing colors and sounds and textures to actually float in it? So as that old blue truck crept along, there was no choice but to breathe in lungfuls of oaks dripping with silvery gray moss, the high leaning pines. My nose and mouth were coated with the various shades of greens, browns, and golds in the muddy flatlands. And if someone had asked me about the fragrance from the whisperings of the palmettos, or the distant rush of the surf, I would have said that it all smelled like forever.

  With all of that, I was still surprised by the two women waiting on the porch steps of that small yellow bungalow. It’s not that I had always associated old age with infirmity, but when you get to be eighty-eight and ninety—and that’s what you swore your grandmother and great-aunt were—I was reasonable in expecting wrinkles, sagging skin, some trembling of the limbs. It must have taken me ten minutes to regain my equilibrium. Looking like this, how could these women ever die? It’s an awful thought, but it’s the first one that came into my mind. I later found out your grandmother had false teeth, but at that point it was easy to believe that she hadn’t lost one of her own. She certainly hadn’t lost her looks: the thick head of flashing silver hair complemented the olive tones in her smooth face. A few laugh lines around the eyes and mouth, but then I had some around mine. The veins were knotted in the hand that grasped mine—if you ain’t ready to call me Grandma, call me Miss Abigail—but the palms were soft and the grip firm. And then there was the little one: I don’t know why I thought your Mama Day would be a big, tall woman. From the stories you told about your clashes with her, she had loomed that way in my mind. Hard. Strong. Yes, it definitely showed in the set of her shoulders. But she was barely five feet and could have been snapped in the middle with one good-sized hand. On second thought, I wondered: the dark brown skin stretched tight over those high cheekbones and fine frame glinted like it was covering steel—I’m Mama Day to some, Miss Miranda to others. You decide what I’ll be to you. That type of straightforward honesty would cheapen anyone returning less than the same. So I was glad to have finally met them, and said it. But I thought they’d be old, and said that too.

  Their laughter had been waiting for me, and as it circled around us, I could finally tell that they were sisters. The heads thrown back in similar angles to let out a matching pitch of flowing sound. Miss Abigail put her hands up on each side of my face—Well, bless your heart, child—and a lump formed in my throat at their gentle pressure. Up until that moment, no woman had ever called me her child. Did they see it in my eyes? The intense envy for all that you had and the gratitude for their being willing to let me belong? I couldn’t have summoned up something light to say even if my life depended on it, but Miss Miranda came to my rescue. We’re showing off for you today. We done left our age in the house. Without her glasses Abby can’t see more than two feet in front of her, and I can’t walk more than two without my cane. You winked at me as if to say, George, don’t believe a word of it. And as they led me up the porch steps, I thought of something you had actually said when we pulled into the yard: Relax, we’re coming home.

  The whole place seemed so different with you there with me. And I was much more nervous than I let on. Regardless of how well you thought you knew me, it was only one part of me. The rest of me—the whole of me—was here. And I wondered how you would take the transformation, beginning with something as basic as my name. Outside of my family, no one else in Willow Springs knew who in the hell Ophelia was. And even if you were a more flexible type of man, it was too late for you to start calling me Cocoa. But it was Cocoa’s bedroom that we were going to share, and as I watched Ophelia’s husband carefully unpacking his clothes and hanging his shirts on one side of the closet, his underwear stacked into one set of drawers, his toiletries arranged neatly on one side of the dresser, I felt as if we were going to have an illicit affair. I had never slept with a man in my grandmother’s house. It was going to be a new experience in an old bed, and the thought of doing something that was sanctioned but not quite right brought on a nervous excitement. As we got the room in order, it actually made us a little awkward with each other.

  I saw that room as you must have seen it and each flaw stood out: the slope in the wooden floor leading to the bathroom, the constantly dripping shower head that left a blue-green stain in the base of the tub. There were two doors into the bathroom, the other belonging to my grandmother’s room. Unpainted plywood doors with inside hooks for privacy—I had never thought about those hooks before and rarely used them. The crack in the corner of the dresser mirror had spread over the years since my fight with Mama Day. A vase of fresh wild-flowers sat in front of the crack, and I smiled remembering that night and Cocoa’s temper tantrum. No, my temper was nothing new to you but, try as I might, I became a child again in this house. You respected Ophelia’s anger just as she respected yours. How would you react seeing that Cocoa’s anger, whether coddled or dismissed, was never taken seriously here? My bond with them was such that even if hate and rage were to tear us totally apart, they knew I was always theirs. And I sensed that knowledge dawning on you from the moment we crossed over the bridge: you were entering a part of my existence that you were powerless in. Your maps were no good here, but you still came, willing to share this with me. And from another perspective, that room was now a place my family couldn’t touch. Our presence together transformed it into a world where only Ophelia and George belonged. Placing my combs and brush on the dresser and watching you testing the mattress through the cracked mirror, I could smile. I knew you and I knew that mattress—it would be firm enough for your back. It hit me then that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. I was a very fortunate woman, belonging to you and belonging to them. Ophelia and Cocoa could both live in that house with you. And we’d leave Willow Springs none the worse for the wear.

  Miranda brings over her berry cobbler a little bit before suppertime and it seems to her that Abigail done tried to give Cocoa and George a wedding feast single-handed. There’s hardly no place on that table for the eating plates with all them platters of God-knows-everything. Abigail looks real cross-eyed at the pan in Miranda’s hand, saying that she had baked up and frozen some decent cakes, figuring she’d do something poor-mouth like that. And couldn’t she at least have managed to wear a Sunday dress to supper? Miranda says there ain’t no point in stuffing them to death the first night, it was gonna take the two weeks they’d be here just to finish up the food on that table. And why put on airs? Ain’t the boy showed right off that he was real? Stepped straight out of Buzzard’s truck and said he thought he was gonna be meeting two old farts. Abigail manages to find space to slap down some knives and forks—he ain’t said no such thing, said they looked a lot younger than he thought. Miranda switches the silverware around as noisily as Abigail put ’em down—You’re going deaf as well as blind. But once they all sit down to supper, the butter Abigail’s got somewhere on that table would melt in their mouths.

  Miranda knows her sister loves a lot of fluff and feathers and tonight she lets her have her way. All that bustling to put George at the head of the table—“It’s good to have a man in the family again”—and he’s pleased as can be while a little bit embarrassed from all her attention. And as her sister does everything but chew his food for him, Miranda thinks it’s a pity that Abigail never remarried. She glows when she’s got a man to do for. But she better stop doing too much ’cause Baby Girl don’t like it a bit. She done rolled her eyes twenty times with all her grandma’s goings-on, and remarks that nobody’s bothered to fill her plate again. For all they know, she could be eating for two.

  “You’re so puny, you’ll show your first half hour,” Miranda says. “I
hear happiness is supposed to put flesh on a woman, and I know he can’t help but make you happy.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “’Cause he ain’t followed my advice and taken a hickory stick to you.”

  Everybody laughs but Cocoa as she kicks her husband under the table. “Don’t encourage her.”

  “I’m not doing anything but enjoying—”

  “Here, baby,” Abigail says, “can I give you some more greens?”

  “Thank-you-Grandma.” She says the words as if she’s stuck her tongue out at Miranda.

  Miranda shakes her head. “A grown woman acting like this. If you can’t be the center of attention, you’re gonna pout. Spoiled rotten from day one. I don’t know how he puts up with you.”

  “I’ve got strong arms.”

  “Two weeks go by quick, George.”

  “Don’t be threatening that boy. Now, tell us, what y’all got planned—for every day except this Friday.”

  “Why Friday?” Cocoa asks.

  “’Cause me and Abigail thought we’d throw a little party.”

  “Oh, you mean like the wedding parties Ophelia’s told me about?”

  “Oh, no, nothing fancy like a wedding feast,” Abigail says to him, straightening up and using her best English. “You’ve been married too long for that. But some of the neighbors are anxious to meet you and a few of our close family friends—the minister, the school principal, and Dr. Smithfield and all. We’d just bake a little something, fix up a bowl of punch …”