Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  I didn’t have the heart to bring up the drugs and twelve-year-old prostitutes in Times Square, the dark subway corridors where she could have gotten her throat cut for the spare change in her pocketbook, the filthy shelters that made her opera singer prefer the rainy streets. But I should have known that Mama Day had taken all of that into account as well. I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t stay up in New York—and I say it each time, don’t I—but I know how much that city meant to you. And because it meant so much, it was a constant reminder that you weren’t with me. It was a relief to leave for good.

  Another Candle Walk. This one’s gonna be a bit sparse, there being more than our share of troubles this year, what with the hurricane and losing crops, some even losing their jobs beyond the bridge. And it ain’t ever easy watching the young pass on, the life that Little Caesar never started or Cocoa’s husband finished. Still, it ain’t about chalking up 1985, just jotting it down in a ledger to be tallied with the times before and the times after. We figure it’ll all even out in the end. And to get on to the end means going through this Candle Walk night. Rainy and drizzly, a fog creeping in from the marsh that’s just downright cold. More sniffling and coughing than talk and laughter out on the main road—but folks is on the main road, if it’s only with kerosene lamps, flashlights, here and there a sparkler.

  Most everybody stops by Miss Abigail’s to leave a little something for Cocoa, been a long while since she been home for the holiday. Looking kinda drawn and tired, but she’s out on the porch with a candle in her hand. Rainy or clear, the Days always use candles and they always walk a stretch of the road, at least to the bridge junction. Inside the house Miranda and Abigail are gathering up their gifts and umbrellas. Miranda done taken red ribbon and tied little packets of ginger cookies around them souvenirs she brought back from the city. Folks lucky enough to get one will be sure to prize ’em. It ain’t often you’re able to display a genuine product from a place like New York. She’s got a nice paperweight for Bernice and Ambush; when you shake it up snowflakes fall all over the Empire State Building. And when you stand on top of that building, she tells Abigail, you kinda see the world the way God must see it—everything’s able to be cupped into the palm of your hand. Them big cities should have big buildings, with all that plenty around them—it gives folks a chance to keep things in perspective. Too much plenty for some, Miranda says, and not enough for others. Did she tell her about that street that’s got nothing but rows and rows of movie houses? She done told Abigail a dozen times, but now she lets her know that she actually went into one.

  “Them sinful places?”

  “It ain’t all that way, Abigail. In some of ’em they show the same kind of movies that they do in the theater beyond the bridge. And with the others, no one’s begging you to go in. It wasn’t their fault I thought something called The Milkman and the Old Maid was gonna be an innocent picture. I figured, what could an old spinster like me be doing? Well, Lord, she used that sour cream for everything under the sun.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t. I sat through the darn thing twice just to be sure I could believe my own eyes.”

  “Miranda, are you always gonna be wicked? Let’s get on out here for Candle Walk. Baby Girl is waiting.” Sighing, she gathers up the rest of her gifts and looks at the door like she can’t bring herself to start.

  “She’s gonna make it, Abigail.”

  “I wasn’t just thinking about tonight.”

  “But tonight is all any of us got.”

  It’s the three of them under two umbrellas with Cocoa in the middle as they take the stretch toward the bridge junction. Bunched together, so it’s hard to say who’s holding who up when one stumbles in the fog. But it’s Cocoa who keeps the matches dry in her coat pocket to relight the candles that the cold wind keeps blowing out. Not much talk between ’em, and the echoes of “Lead on with light” from the passing figures in the dense night get a muffled return behind their raised coat collars.

  “I want to go back,” Cocoa says, hands trembling from a little more than the chill as she stops to relight the candles.

  “Then we’ll all go back,” Miranda says.

  “No, don’t let me spoil your fun.”

  “Ain’t none here to spoil on a night like this,” Abigail says. “We’ll go make up a pot of ginger toddy to warm folks without as much sense as we got.”

  “It’s called Candle Walk,” Miranda says, “so we done got a candle and we done walked. Tradition is fine, but you gotta know when to stop being a fool.”

  “You don’t have to do this for me …”

  “Unless your name is rheumatism, we ain’t doing it for you.”

  When they get to the house, Miranda tells ’em to go on in, she’ll be there shortly, it’s something she wants from her trailer. Only Abigail notices that she keeps her candle with her, and when she looks over her shoulder, Miranda and the umbrella done disappeared through the trees at the mouth of the west woods. Abigail starts to call out—this year she had it in her heart to go with her—but the mist closes quickly over her sister’s back.

  The candle don’t light nothing but Miranda’s face as she makes her way by touch to the circle of oaks surrounding the family plot. She reaches up for just a tad of damp moss to put in her shoes. And then she makes her way by smell toward the wind coming off The Sound to pass them graves and get to a little rise where the water is visible on clear days. George done made it possible for all her Candle Walks to end right here from now on; the other place holds no more secrets that’s left for her to find. The rest will lay in the hands of the Baby Girl—once she learns how to listen. But she’s grieving for herself too much now to hear, ’cause she thinks that boy done left her. He’s gone, but he ain’t left her. Naw, another one who broke his heart ’cause he couldn’t let her go. So she’s gotta get past the grieving for what she lost, to go on to the grieving for what was lost, before the child of Grace lives up to her name.

  Miranda holds her candle in the direction of the waters that carry his ashes: I can tell you now about this here night. You done opened that memory for us. My daddy said that his daddy said when he was young, Candle Walk was different still. It weren’t about no candles, was about a light that burned in a man’s heart. And folks would go out and look up at the stars—they figured his spirit had to be there, it was the highest place they knew. And what took him that high was his belief in right, while what buried him in the ground was the lingering taste of ginger from the lips of a woman. He had freed ’em all but her, ’cause, see, she’d never been a slave. And what she gave of her own will, she took away. I can’t tell you her name, ’cause it was never opened to me. That’s a door for the child of Grace to walk through. And how many, if any, of them seven sons were his? Well, that’s also left for her to find. And you’ll help her, won’t you? she says to George. One day she’ll hear you, like you’re hearing me. And there’ll be another time—that I won’t be here for—when she’ll learn about the beginning of the Days. But she’s gotta go away to come back to that kind of knowledge. And I came to tell you not to worry: whatever roads take her from here, they’ll always lead her back to you.

  You’re never free from such a loss. It sits permanently in your middle, but it gets less weighty as time goes on and becomes endurable. So there were days I wasn’t even aware that it was there until it might highlight or deepen my understanding of some moment in the life I was still privileged to be living. I found it one of those twisted ironies that the New England Patriots did get to the Super Bowl that season. I watched the game to celebrate for you, finally understanding that the outcome wouldn’t have meant as much as the event.

  I couldn’t hide in Willow Springs forever. But I knew New York was out of the question. It was easier in Charleston: we’d never been there together, and I drew strength from moving in the midst of familiar ground. Enough strength to build around—and on—that vacant center in me. You left it so I’d never have to work, but
I did. And I didn’t have to reach out again, but after three years, I did. And he’s really a decent guy. I think you would like him. Mama Day even likes him. A good second-best, she said. And she’s not wrong, any man would have to come in second to you. There were some mistakes I didn’t repeat. I allowed myself to see him for exactly what he was—no chance of being the best, but he’s all that he can be. You wouldn’t have asked any more of him than that. And he’s never said a word about my coming here to see you, or even about my naming the youngest boy after you. But you know me—it wouldn’t matter a damn if he did. I have two fine sons, George, and that was the least I could do to thank you for them.

  And I worry sometimes because the youngest one is just like me. A quick temper and so flip at the mouth—I’ve had to backhand him a few times. And stubborn. I guess you’d call it poetic justice that I’m getting from your namesake a good measure of what you had to put up with. But he’s a smart kid and more sensitive than his brother, who’s the quieter one. When little George was hardly five years old, he asked me about his name. I told him that I had been married once before his father, to another special man. And he wanted to know if he’d been given your name because he looked like you. I told the poor kid no, he would have to go through life looking like his mother. That inevitably led to questions about what you did look like. And since we were in a shopping mall, I glanced around to find someone to point out to him. And it struck me—and I mean, struck me—that there was nothing about you that would have stood out in a crowd. And getting no answer, like any child, he kept pressing. Well, were you chocolate-skinned like his daddy? Or tall like his schoolteacher, Mr. Benjamin? Did you have big muscles? What color were your eyes? I was so confused, I told him that I would show him your picture when we got home.

  I searched everywhere. There were none, George. And what I thought had become a light, airy space turned into an abyss opening up within me. All the painful adjustment during those eleven years had been for my life without you—the emphasis on my loss, my life—while a missing photograph shifted it over to a loss that was more than me, more than even you. I remembered that Mama Day had kept our photographs, and I simply phoned her to send me one of your pictures. Little George was curious about it, I said. And when she hesitated, saying she wasn’t sure where she’d put them after all this time, that eternal emptiness yawned in front of me. My voice steadily rose. Couldn’t she just look? Couldn’t she just try? And to think of what was lost brought on the final tears. They were, as she had warned me, the most bitter. And with all I had built around me, I felt that I was in danger of being swallowed up inside the pain of the growing awareness that it was no more.

  She listened patiently as I cried—no reasoning to anything I was saying—about how desperately I needed a picture of you. Not for myself, I had to show my son. And she still listened as I went on to accuse her of being neglectful of my things—I had trusted her. And if my grandmother were still alive, this wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t have anything, now that my grandmother was gone. Grandma always took care of my things. Oh, I went on and on—bitter tears. All the more so because they had been holding eleven years to come out. And when I was through, her voice was quiet and gentle. Cocoa, if the child wants to know what George looked like, the easiest thing to do is to tell him. And remember, children need the simple truth.

  So after washing my face and making myself a cup of mint tea, I called my son inside. I put him on my lap and told him that he was named after a man who looked just like love. He frowned for a moment, tucking in his bottom lip in that peculiar way he has, and said, That’s all? I couldn’t trust myself to do anything but nod. Well, he loved the center of marshmallows, and he loved it when his daddy took him up high on the Ferris wheel, and when it got to be summer, he loved the way the water and sand felt between his toes—did you look like that? Yes, I told him, all of that.

  Would you believe it—I’ll be forty-seven next year. And I still don’t have a photograph of you. It’s a lot better this way, because you change as I change. And each time I go back over what happened, there’s some new development, some forgotten corner that puts you in a slightly different light. I guess one of the reasons I’ve been here so much is that I felt if we kept retracing our steps, we’d find out exactly what brought us to this slope near The Sound. But when I see you again, our versions will be different still. All of that would have been too complicated to tell a child. Mama Day was right—give him the simple truth. And it’s the one truth about you that I hold on to. Because what really happened to us, George? You see, that’s what I mean—there are just too many sides to the whole story.

  Some things stay the same. August is August. The hot wind blowing through the palmettos coulda been coming in 1899 when she remembers her first taste of the sweet juices from an icy slice of honeydew. The quivering green slivers melt in a mouth that’s a hundred years older, while the pleasure is fresh and new. The last time you’re doing something—knowing you’re doing it for the last—makes it even more alive than the first. It’s her last slice of honeydew on any August twenty-first in that silver trailer, so she enjoys it slow. She lets the juices linger in the corner of her mouth before taking the paper napkin to wipe ’em away—her last time for doing that. It’s with a deep satisfaction that she finally gets down to the rind. She don’t scrape till the flesh becomes bitter, leave a little of the sweetness. She’s had more than her share of enough.

  Some things change. Taking up her walking stick, she hobbles out to the front yard and looks over at the yellow bungalow. No need to cross that road anymore, so she turns her face up into the warm air—You there, Sister?—to listen for the rustling of the trees. There’s never a day so still that at least one leaf ain’t moving. The circle of oaks is as far as she can make it, and it’s abiding comfort that she can make it that far. She stops by a grave, here and there, to move aside a stray weed with the tip of her cane. She’s always liked things neat, and when she’s tied up the twentieth century, she’ll take a little peek into the other side—for pure devilment and curiosity—and then leave for a rest that she deserves.

  And some things are yet to be. She always finds her in the same place, sitting on the rise over The Sound. It’s a slender body, but the hair is streaked with gray. And when she turns around, there are fine lines marking off the character of her face—the firm mouth, high cheekbones, and clear brown eyes. It’s a face that’s been given the meaning of peace. A face ready to go in search of answers, so at last there ain’t no need for words as they lock eyes over the distance. Under a sky so blue it’s stopped being sky, one is closer to the circle of oaks than the other. But both can hear clearly that on the east side of the island and on the west side, the waters were still.

  About the Author

  Gloria Naylor (1950–2016) grew up in New York City. She received her bachelor of arts in English from Brooklyn College and her master of arts in Afro-American Studies from Yale University. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award. She is also the author of Linden Hills, Mama Day, Bailey’s Cafe, The Men of Brewster Place, and the fictionalized memoir 1996.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Gloria Naylor

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4315-1

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  GLORIA NAYLOR


  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Find a full list of our authors and

  titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US

  @OpenRoadMedia