I’M WORKING THE CASH REGISTER, getting toward the end of my shift, when my arches ache and my back hurts. Although I took as many extra shifts as I could, it was a bleak and meager Christmas, and Edison spent most of it sullen and moody. He’s been back at school for a week, but there’s been a seismic shift in him—he barely talks to me, grunting out responses to my questions, riding the knife edge of rudeness until I call him on it; he’s stopped doing his homework at the kitchen table and instead vanishes into his room and blares Drake and Kendrick Lamar; his phone buzzes constantly with texts, and when I ask him who needs him so desperately he says it’s nobody I know. I have not received any more calls from the principal, or emails from his teachers telling me he’s slacking on his work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not anticipating them.
And then what will I do? How am I supposed to encourage my son to be better than most people expect him to be? How can I say, with a straight face, you can be anything you want in this world—when I struggled and studied and excelled and still wound up on trial for something I did not do? Every time Edison and I get into it these days, I can see that challenge in his eyes: I dare you. I dare you to say you still believe that lie.
School has let out; I know this because of the influx of teens who explode into the building like a holiday, filling the space with bright ribbons of laughter and teasing. Inevitably they know someone working table and call out, begging for free McNuggets or a sundae. Usually they don’t bother me; I prefer to be busy rather than slow. But today, a girl comes up to me, her blond ponytail swinging, holding her phone while her friends crowd around to read an incoming text with her. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say. “Can I help you?”
There is a line of people behind her, but she looks at her friend. “What should I tell him?”
“That you can’t talk because you’re meeting up with someone,” one of the girls suggests.
Another girl shakes her head. “No, don’t write anything. Keep him waiting.”
Like the customers behind her in line, I am starting to get annoyed. “Excuse me,” I try again, pasting a smile on my face. “Are you ready to order?”
She glances up. She has blush on her cheeks that has glitter in it; it makes her look awfully young, which I’m sure is not what she’s going for. “Do you have onion rings?”
“No, that’s Burger King. Our menu is up there.” I point overhead. “If you’re not ready, maybe you can step aside?”
She looks at her two friends, and her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline as if I’ve said something offensive. “Don’t worry, mama, I was jus’ aksin’…”
I freeze. This girl isn’t Black. She’s about as far from Black as possible. So why is she talking to me like that?
Her friend cuts in front of her and orders a large fries; her other friend has a Diet Coke and a snack wrap. The girl orders a Happy Meal, and as I angrily stuff the items into the box, the irony is not lost on me.
Three customers later, I’m still watching her out of the corner of my eye as she eats her cheeseburger.
I turn to the runner who’s working at the register with me. “I’ll be right back.”
I walk into the dining area where the girl is still holding court with her friends. “…so I said, right to her face, Who lit the fuse on your tampon?—”
“Excuse me,” I interrupt. “I did not appreciate the way you spoke to me at the counter.”
A hot blush burns in her cheeks. “Wow, okay. I’m sorry,” she says, but her lips twitch.
My boss suddenly is standing beside me. Jeff is a former middle manager at a ball bearing plant who got cut when the economy tanked, and he runs the restaurant like we are giving out state secrets and not French fries. “Ruth? Is there a problem?”
There are so many problems. From the fact that I am not this girl’s mama to the fact that she will not remember this conversation an hour from now. But if I choose this particular moment to stand up for myself, I will pay a price. “No, sir,” I tell Jeff, and in silence, I walk back to my register.
MY DAY ONLY gets worse when I leave work and see six missed phone calls from Kennedy. I immediately ring her back. “I thought you agreed that working with Wallace Mercy was a bad idea,” she hammers, without even saying hello.
“What? I did. I do.”
“So you had no idea that he was leading a march in your honor today in front of the courthouse?”
I stop walking, letting the foot traffic funnel around me. “You gotta be kidding. Kennedy, I did not talk to Wallace.”
“Your sister was shoulder to shoulder with him.”
Well, mystery solved. “Adisa tends to do whatever she wants.”
“Can’t you control her?”
“I’ve been trying for forty-four years but it hasn’t worked yet.”
“Try harder,” Kennedy tells me.
Which is how I wind up taking the bus to my sister’s apartment, instead of going right home. When Donté lets me in, Adisa is sitting on the couch playing Candy Crush on her phone, even though it is nearly dinnertime. “Well, look what the cat drug in,” she says. “Where you been?”
“It’s been crazy since New Year’s. Between work, and going over things for trial, I haven’t had a free minute.”
“I came by the other day, did Edison tell you?”
I kick her feet off the couch so there’s room for me to sit. “Did you come over to tell me your new best friend is Wallace Mercy?”
Adisa’s eyes light up. “You see me on the news today? It was just my elbow and up to here on my neck, but you can tell it’s me by the coat. I wore the one with the leopard collar—”
“I want you to stop,” I say. “I don’t need Wallace Mercy.”
“Your white lawyer tell you that?”
“Adisa,” I sigh. “I never wanted to be someone’s poster child.”
“You didn’t even give Reverend Mercy a chance. You know how many of our people have had experiences like yours? How many times they been told no because of their skin color? This is bigger than just your story, and if some good can come out of what happened to you, why not let it?” Adisa sits up. “All he wants is a chance to sit down with us, Ruth. On national television.”
Alarm bells ring in my head. “Us,” I repeat.
Adisa’s gaze slides away. “Well,” she admits, “I indicated that I might be able to change your mind.”
“So this isn’t even about helping me move forward. It’s about you getting recognition. Jesus, Adisa. This is a new low, even for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She gets to her feet and stares down at me, her hands balanced on her hips. “You really think I’d use my baby sister like that?”
I challenge her. “You really gonna stand here drenched to the bone and tell me it’s not raining?”
Before she can answer there is a loud crash as a door falls back on its hinges and slams into the wall. Tabari swaggers out from one of the bedrooms with a friend. “You rob a trucker fuh that hat, yo?” He laughs. They are amped up, loud, their pants riding so low I don’t know why they even bother to wear them. All I can think is that I’d never let Edison out of the house like that, like he was looking to intimidate.
Then Tabari’s friend turns around and I realize it’s my son.
“Edison?”
“Ain’t it nice,” Adisa says, smiling. “The cousins hanging?”
“What are you doing here?” Edison says, in a tone that lets me know this is not a pleasant surprise.
“Don’t you have homework to do?”
“Did it.”
“College applications?”
He looks at me, his eyes hooded. “They ain’t due for another week.”
Ain’t?
“What’s the problem?” he asks. “You’re always telling me how important family is.” He says that word as if it is a swear.
“Where exactly are you and Tabari going?”
Tabari looks up. “The movies, Auntie,” he says.
“The movies.” Like hell, I think. “What film are you seeing?”
He and Edison exchange a look and start laughing. “We gonna pick when we get there,” Tabari says.
Adisa steps forward, arms crossed. “You got a problem with that, Ruth?”
“Yes. Yes I do,” I explode. “Because I think it’s a lot more likely that your son is going to take Edison down by the basketball court to smoke weed than to see the next Oscar nominee.”
My sister’s jaw drops. “You judging my family,” she hisses, “when you on trial for murder?”
I grab Edison’s arm. “You’re coming with me,” I announce, and then I turn to Adisa. “Have fun doing your interview with Wallace Mercy. Just make sure you tell him, and the adoring public, that you and your sister are no longer on speaking terms.”
With that, I drag my son out of her home. I rip the hat off his head when we get downstairs and tell him to pull up his pants. We are halfway to the bus station before he says a word. “I’m sorry,” Edison begins.
“You better be,” I answer, rounding on him. “You lost your damn mind? I didn’t raise you to be like this.”
“Tabari’s not as bad as his friends.”
I start walking, and I don’t look back. “Tabari is not my son,” I say.
WHEN I WAS pregnant with Edison, all I knew was that I didn’t want the experience of giving birth to be anything like Adisa’s—who claimed to not even realize she was pregnant for six months when she had her first baby, and who practically had her second on the subway. Me, I wanted the best care I could get, the finest doctors. Since Wesley was on a tour of duty, I enlisted Mama as my birthing coach. When it was time, we took a taxi to Mercy–West Haven because Mama couldn’t drive and I was in no state to. I had planned for a natural birth, because as a labor and delivery nurse I’d written this moment in my head a thousand times, but just like any well-laid plan, that wasn’t in the cards for me. As I was being wheeled into the OR for a C-section, Mama was singing Baptist hymns, and when I came to after the procedure, she was holding my son.
“Ruth,” she said to me, her eyes so full of pride they were a color I’d never seen before. “Ruth, look at what God made for you.”
She held the baby out to me, and I suddenly realized that although I’d planned my first birth down to the minute, I hadn’t organized a single second of what might come afterward. I had no idea how to be a mother. My son was stiff in my arms, and then he opened his mouth and started wailing, like this world was an affront to him.
Panicked, I looked up at my mama. I was a straight-A student; I was an overachiever. I had never imagined that this—the most natural of all relationships—would make me feel so incompetent. I jiggled the baby in my arms, but that only made him cry louder. His feet kicked like he was traveling on an imaginary bicycle; his arms flailed, each tiny finger flexed and rigid. His screams grew tighter and tighter, an uneven seam of anger punctuated by the tiny knots of his hiccups. His cheeks were red with effort, as he tried to tell me something I was not equipped to understand.
“Mama?” I begged. “What do I do?”
I held out my arms to her, hoping she would take him and calm him down. But she just shook her head. “You tell him who you are to him,” she instructed, and she took a step back, as if to remind me I was in this by myself.
So I bent my face close to his. I pressed his spine up under my heart, where it had been for so many months. “Your name is Edison Wesley Jefferson,” I whispered. “I am your mama, and I’m going to give you the best life I can.”
Edison blinked. He stared up at me through his dark eyes, as if I were a shadow he had to distinguish from the rest of this new, strange world. His cries hitched twice, a train headed off its track, and then crashed into silence.
I could tell you the exact minute my son relaxed into his new surroundings. I know this detail because it was the moment I did the same.
“See,” Mama said, from somewhere behind me, somewhere outside the circle of just us two. “I told you so.”
KENNEDY AND I meet every two weeks, even when there’s no new information. Sometimes she’ll text me, or stop by McDonald’s to say hello. At one of these visits she invites me and Edison over for dinner.
Before going to Kennedy’s home, I change three times. Finally Edison knocks on the bathroom door. “We going to your lawyer’s,” he asks, “or to meet the queen?”
He’s right. I don’t know why I’m nervous. Except that this feels like crossing a line. It’s one thing to have her here to review information about my case, but this invitation didn’t have any work attached to it. This invitation was more like…a social call.
Edison is dressed in a button-down shirt and khaki pants and has been told on penalty of death that he will behave like the gentleman I know him to be, or I will whup him when he gets home. When we ring the doorbell, the husband—Micah, that’s his name—answers, with a girl tucked under his arm like a rag doll. “You must be Ruth,” he says, taking the bouquet I offer and shaking my hand warmly, then shaking Edison’s. He pivots, then turns the other way. “My daughter, Violet, is around here somewhere…I just saw her…I’m sure she’ll want to say hello.” As he twists, the little girl whips around, her hair flying, her giggles falling over my feet like bubbles.
She slips out of her dad’s arm, and I kneel down. Violet McQuarrie looks like a tiny version of her mama, albeit dressed in a Princess Tiana costume. I hold out a Mason jar that is filled with miniature white lights, and flip the switch so that it illuminates. “This is for you,” I tell her. “It’s a fairy jar.”
Her eyes widen. “Wow,” Violet breathes, and she takes it and runs off.
I get to my feet. “It also doubles as an excellent night-light,” I tell Micah, as Kennedy comes out of the kitchen, wearing jeans and a sweater and an apron.
“You made it!” she says, smiling. She has spaghetti sauce on her chin.
“Yes,” I answer. “I must have driven past your place a hundred times. I just didn’t know, you know, that you lived here.”
And still wouldn’t, had I not been indicted for murder. I know she’s thinking it, too, but Micah saves the moment. “Drink? Can I get you something, Ruth? We have wine, beer, gin and tonic…”
“Wine would be nice.”
We sit down in the living room. There is already a cheese plate on the coffee table. “Look at that,” Edison murmurs to me. “A basketful of crackers.”
I shoot him a look that could make a bird fall from the sky.
“It’s so nice of you to invite us into your home,” I say politely.
“Well, don’t thank me yet,” Kennedy replies. “Dinner with a four-year-old is not exactly a gourmet dining experience.” She smiles at Violet, who is coloring on the other side of the coffee table. “Needless to say we don’t entertain much these days.”
“I remember when Edison was that age. I am pretty sure we ate a variation of macaroni and cheese every night for a full year.”
Micah crosses his legs. “Edison, my wife tells me you’re quite the student.”
Yes. Because I neglected to mention to Kennedy that of late, he’s been suspended.
“Thank you, sir,” Edison replies. “I’ve been applying to colleges.”
“Oh yeah? That’s great. What do you want to study?”
“History, maybe. Or politics.”
Micah nods, interested. “Are you a big fan of Obama?”
Why do white people always assume that?
“I was kind of young when he was running,” Edison says. “But I went around with my mom campaigning for Hillary, when she was running against him. I guess because of my dad I’m sensitive to military issues, and her position on the Iraq War made more sense at the time; she was vocally in favor of invasion and Obama was opposed from the start.”
I puff up with pride. “Well,” Micah says, impressed. “I look forward to seeing your name on a ticket one day.”
Violet, clearly bored by this conversation, steps over my legs to hold out a crayon to Edison. “Wanna color?” she asks.
“Um, yeah, okay,” Edison replies. He sinks down to his knees, shoulder to shoulder with Kennedy’s girl, so that he can reach the coloring book. He starts making Cinderella’s dress green.
“No,” Violet interrupts, a tiny despot. “That’s supposed to be blue.” She points to Cinderella’s dress in the coloring book, half hidden beneath Edison’s broad palm.
“Violet,” Kennedy says, “we let our guests make their own choices, remember?”
“That’s okay, Mrs. McQuarrie. I wouldn’t want to mess with Cinderella,” Edison answers.
The little girl proudly hands him the right color crayon, a blue one. Edison bends his head and starts to scribble again.
“Next week you start jury selection?” I ask. “Should I be worried about that?”
“No, of course not. It’s just—”
“Edison?” Violet asks. “Is that a chain?”
He touches the necklace he’s been wearing lately, ever since he started hanging with his cousin. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So that means you’re a slave,” she states matter-of-factly.
“Violet!” Both Micah and Kennedy shout her name simultaneously.
“Oh my God, Edison. Ruth. I’m so sorry,” Kennedy blusters. “I don’t know where she would have heard that—”
“In school,” Violet announces. “Josiah told Taisha that people who look like her used to wear chains and their history was that they were slaves.”
“We’ll discuss this later,” Micah says. “Okay, Vi? It’s not something to talk about now.”
“It’s okay,” I say, even though I can feel the unease in the room, as if someone has taken away all the oxygen. “Do you know what a slave is?”
Violet shakes her head.
“It’s when someone owns someone else.”
I watch the little girl turn this over in her head. “Like a pet?”
Kennedy puts her hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this,” she says quietly.
“Don’t you think I already had to, once?” I glance at her daughter again. “Kind of like a pet, but also different. A long time ago, people who looked like you and your mama and daddy found a place in the world where people looked like me, and like Edison, and like Taisha. And we were doing things so fine there—building homes, and cooking food, making something out of nothing—that they wanted it in their country too. So they brought over the people who looked like me, without asking our permission. We didn’t have a choice. So a slave—that’s just someone who doesn’t have a choice in what they do, or what’s done to them.”
Violet sets down her crayon. Her face is twisted in thought.
“We weren’t the first slaves,” I tell her. “There are stories in a book I like, called the Bible. The Egyptians made Jewish people slaves who would build temples for them that looked like huge triangles, and were made out of bricks. They were able to make the Jewish people slaves because the Egyptians were the ones with the power.”
Then, like any other four-year-old, Violet bounces back to her spot beside my son. “Let’s color Rapunzel instead,” she announces—but then she hesitates. “I mean,” she corrects, “do you want to color Rapunzel?”
“Okay,” Edison says.
I may be the only person who notices, but while I’ve been explaining, he has taken off that chain from his neck and slipped it into his pocket.
“Thank you,” Micah says, sincere. “That was a really perfect Black history lesson.”
“Slavery isn’t Black history,” I point out. “It’s everyone’s history.”
A timer goes off, and Kennedy stands up. When she goes into the kitchen, I murmur something about wanting to help her and follow her. Immediately, she turns, her cheeks burning. “I am so, so sorry for that, Ruth.”
“Don’t be. She’s a baby. She doesn’t know any better yet.”
“Well, you did a much better job explaining than I ever would have.”
I watch her reach into the oven for a lasagne. “When Edison came home from school and asked if we were slaves, he was about the same age as Violet. And the last thing I wanted was to have that talk and leave him feeling like a victim.”
“Violet told me last week she wished she could be just like Taisha, because she gets to wear beads in her hair.”
“What did you say?”
Kennedy hesitates. “I don’t know. I probably bungled it. I said something about how everyone’s different and that’s what makes the world great. I swear, when she asks me things about race I turn into a freaking Coke commercial.”
I laugh. “In your defense, you probably don’t talk about it quite as much as I do. Practice makes perfect.”
“But you know what? When I was her age, I had a Taisha in my class too—except her name was Lesley. And God, I wanted to be her. I used to dream that I’d wake up Black. No joke.”
I raise my brows in mock horror. “And give up your winning lottery ticket? No way.”
She looks at me, and we both laugh, and in that instant we are merely two women, standing over a lasagne, telling the truth. In that instant, with our flaws and confessions trailing like a slip from a dress, we have more in common than we have differences.
I smile, and Kennedy smiles, and for that moment, at least, we really, really see each other. It’s a start.
Suddenly Edison comes into the kitchen holding out my cellphone. “What’s the matter?” I tease. “Don’t tell me you were fired because you made Ariel a brunette?”
“Mama, it’s Ms. Mina,” he says. “I think you better take it.”
ONE CHRISTMAS, WHEN I was ten, I got a Black Barbie. Her name was Christie, and she was just like the dolls Christina had, except for the skin color, and except for the fact that Christina had a whole shoe box full of Barbie clothes and my mama couldn’t afford those. Instead, she made Christie a wardrobe out of old socks and dish towels. She glued me a dream house out of shoe boxes. I was over the moon. This was even better than Christina’s collection, I told Mama, because I was the only person in the world who had it. My sister, Rachel, who was twelve, made fun of me. “Call them what you want,” she told me. “But they’re just knockoffs.”
Rachel’s friends were mostly the same age as her, but they acted like they were sixteen. I didn’t hang out with them very often, because they went to school in Harlem and I commuted to Dalton. But on weekends, if they came over, they made fun of me because I had wavy hair, instead of kinks like theirs, and because my skin was light. “You think you all that,” they’d say, and then they’d giggle into each other’s shoulders as if this were the punch line to a secret joke. When my mother made Rachel babysit me on weekends, and we would take the bus to a shopping center, I sat in the front while they all sat in the back. They called me Afrosaxon, instead of by my name. They sang along to music I didn’t know. When I told Rachel that I didn’t like her friends making fun of me, she told me to stop being so sensitive. “They just crackin’ on you,” she said. “Maybe if you let it slide a little, they’d like you more.”
One day, I ran into her friends when I was on my way home from school. This time, though, Rachel wasn’t with them. “Ooh, look what we got here,” said the tallest one, Fantasee. She yanked at my French braid, which was how the girls in my school were wearing their hair those days. “You think you so fancy,” she said, and the three of them surrounded me. “What? Can’t you talk for yourself? You need your sister to do it for you?”
“Stop,” I said. “Leave me alone. Please.”
“I think someone needs to remember where she from.” They grabbed at my backpack, unzipping it, throwing my schoolwork into the puddles on the ground, shoving me into the mud. Fantasee grabbed my Christie doll and dismembered her. Suddenly, like an avenging angel, Rachel arrived. She pulled Fantasee away and smacked her across the face. She tripped one of the other girls and pummeled the third. When they were all flattened, she stood over them with her fist. They crawled away, crabs in the gutter, and then scrambled to their feet and ran. I crouched down next to my broken Christie, and Rachel knelt beside me. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you…you hurt your friends.”
“I got other friends,” Rachel answered. “You’re my only sister.” She tugged me to my feet. “C’mon, let’s get you clean.”
We walked home in silence. Mama took one look at my hair and my ripped tights and hustled me into a bath. She put ice on Rachel’s knuckles.
Mama glued Christie back together, but her arm kept popping out and there was a permanent dent in the back of her head. Later that night, Rachel crawled into my bed. She’d done that when we were little, during thunderstorms. She handed me a chair that was made out of an empty cigarette pack, a yogurt cup, and some newspaper. Trash, that she had glued and taped together. “I thought Christie could use this,” she said.
I nodded, turning it over in my hands. Probably it would break apart when Christie first sat in it, but that wasn’t the point. I lifted up the covers and Rachel fitted herself to me, her front to my back. We rode out the night like that, like we were Siamese twins, sharing a heart that beat between us.
MY MOTHER SUFFERED her first stroke while she was vacuuming. Ms. Mina heard the crash of her body falling down, and found her lying on the edge of the Persian rug with her face pressed up against the tassel, as if she was inspecting it. She suffers her second stroke in the ambulance en route to the hospital. She is dead on arrival when we get there. I find Ms. Mina waiting for us, sobbing and overwrought. Edison stays with her, while I go to see Mama.
Some kind nurse has left the body for me. I go into the small curtained cubicle and sit down beside her. I take her hand; it’s still warm. “Why didn’t I call you last night?” I murmur. “Why didn’t I go visit you this past weekend?”
I sit on the edge of the bed, then tuck myself under her arm for a moment, lying with my ear against her still chest. This is the last chance I will have to be her baby.
It is a strange thing, being suddenly motherless. It’s like losing a rudder that was keeping me on course, one that I never paid much mind to before now. Who will teach me how to parent, how to deal with the unkindness of strangers, how to be humble?
You already did, I realize.
In silence, I cross to the sink. I fill a basin with warm, soapy water, and I place it beside my mama. I pull down the sheet that was left on her, after emergency intervention failed. I have not seen my mama naked in ages, but it is like looking in a mirror that distorts by years. This is what my breasts will look like, my belly. These are the stretch marks by which she remembered me. This is the curve of a spine that has worked hard to make her useful. These are the laugh lines that fan from her eyes.
I begin to wash her, the way I would wash a newborn. I run the cloth up the length of her arms and down her legs. I wipe between her toes. I sit her up, leaning her against the strength of my chest. She weighs next to nothing. As the water drips down her back, I rest my head on her shoulder, a one-sided embrace. She brought me into this world. I will help her leave it.
When I am finished, I cradle her in my arms, setting her back gently against the pillow. I pull the sheet up and tuck it beneath her chin. “I love you, Mama,” I whisper.
The curtain is yanked open, and Adisa stands there. In counterpoint to my quiet grief, she is wailing, sobbing loudly. She throws herself on Mama, clutching fistfuls of the sheet.
Like any fire, I know she’ll burn out. So I wait until her cries become hiccups. When she turns and sees me standing there, I truly think it’s the first time she realizes that I’m even in the room.
I don’t know if she holds out her arms to me or I hold out my arms to her, but we hold on for dear life. We talk over each other—Did Mina call you? Had she been feeling poorly? When was the last time you spoke to her? Shock and anguish run in loop, from me to her and back again.
Adisa hugs me tight. My hand tangles in her braids. “I told Wallace Mercy to find himself a new interview subject,” she whispers.
I draw away just long enough to meet her eye.
Adisa shrugs, as if I’ve asked a question. “You’re my only sister,” she says.
MAMA’S FUNERAL IS an Affair with a capital A, which is exactly how she’d want it. Her longtime church in Harlem is packed with parishioners who have known her for years. I sit in the front row beside Adisa, staring at the giant wooden cross hanging on the chancel wall, between two massive panes of stained glass, with a fountain beneath. On the altar is Mama’s casket—we got the fanciest one money could buy, which is what Ms. Mina insisted on, and she’s the one who is paying for the funeral. Edison stands near Pastor Harold, looking shell-shocked, wearing a black suit that is too short at his wrists and ankles, and his basketball sneakers. He is wearing reflective sunglasses, although we are inside. At first I thought that was disrespectful, but then I realized why. As a nurse, I see death visit all the time, but this is his first experience; he was too little to remember his daddy being sent home in a flag-draped coffin.
A long snake of folks shuffles down the aisle, a macabre dance to look in Mama’s open casket. She is wearing her favorite purple dress with sequins at the shoulders, and the black patent pumps that made her feet hurt, and the diamond studs that Ms. Mina and Mr. Sam gave her one year for Christmas that she never wore because she was so afraid one would fall out and she would lose it. I wanted to bury her in her lucky scarf, but in spite of turning her apartment upside down, I could not find it to bring to the undertaker. “She looks like she’s at peace,” I hear, over and over. Or “She looks just like herself, don’t she?” Neither one of these is true. She looks like an illustration in a book, two-dimensional, when she ought to be leaping off the page.
When everyone has had a chance to file by, Pastor Harold starts the service. “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters…this is not a sad day,” he says. He smiles gently at my niece Tyana, who’s sobbing into little Zhanice’s tiny Bantu knots. “This is a happy day, for we are here to celebrate our beloved friend and mother and grandmother, Louanne Brooks, who is finally at peace and walking beside the Lord. Let us begin with prayer.”
I bow my head, but sneak a glance around the church, which groans at the seams with well-wishers. They all look like us, except for Ms. Mina and Christina, and in the back, Kennedy McQuarrie and an older woman.
It surprises me to see her here, but then, of course she knows about Mama. I was at her house when I heard.
Still, it feels like a blurred line, like wine and cheese at her home was. Like I am trying to put her in a box and she keeps escaping the confines.
“Our friend Louanne was born in 1940,” the pastor says, “to Jermaine and Maddie Brooks, the youngest of four. She had two daughters, and made the best of her life after their daddy left, raising them to be good, strong women. She devoted her life to serving others, creating a happy home for the family that employed her for over fifty years. She won more ribbons at our church fair for her pies and cakes than anyone else in this congregation, and I do believe that at least ten pounds around my middle can be credited to Lou’s sweets. She loved gospel music and The View and baking and Jesus, and is survived by her daughters and her six beloved grandchildren.”
The choir sings Mama’s favorite hymns: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and “I’ll Fly Away.” Then the pastor returns to the podium. He lifts his eyes to the congregation. “God is good!” he calls.
“All the time!” everyone responds.
“And He has called His angel home to glory!”
After a round of Amens, he invites those so moved to stand and witness the impact Mama made on their lives. I watch some of her friends get up, moving slowly, as if they know they might be next. She helped me through breast cancer, one says. She taught me how to sew a hem. She never lost at bingo. It is illuminating—I knew Mama in one way, but to them, she was something different—a teacher, a confidante, a partner in crime. As their stories shape who Mama used to be, people are crying, rocking, calling out their praise.
Adisa squeezes my hand, and takes to the podium. “My mama,” she says, “was strict.” The crowd laughs at this truth. “She was strict about manners, and homework, and dating, and how much bare skin we could show when we went out in public. There was a ratio, right, Ruth? It changed depending on the season, but it cramped my style year-round.” Adisa smiles faintly, turning in to herself. “I remember how once, she put out a place setting at the dinner table for my attitude, and she told me, Girl, when you leave the table, that can stay behind.”
Oh yes she did, I hear behind me.
“The thing is, I was a wild child. Maybe I still am. And Mama rode us on things that other parents never seemed to care about. At the time, it seemed so unfair. I asked her what difference it would make in God’s grand scheme if I wore a red pleather miniskirt, and she said something I will never forget. Rachel, she told me, I got precious little time for you to belong to me. I’m gonna make sure it isn’t any shorter than it has to be. I was too young, and too much of a rabble-rouser, to understand what she meant. But now I do. See, what I didn’t realize back then was the flip side of that coin: I had precious little time for her to be my mama.”
Teary, she steps down, and I stand up. To be honest, I didn’t know Adisa could be such a good speaker, but then again, she has always been the brave one. Me, I recede into the background. I had not wanted to talk at the funeral, but Adisa said people would be expecting it, and so I did. Tell a story, she suggested. So I take the podium, clearing my throat, and grip the edge of the wood with overwhelming panic. “Thank you,” I say, and the microphone squeals. I step back. “Thank you for coming out to say goodbye to Mama. She would have loved knowing you all cared, and if you hadn’t come you know she’d be up in Heaven throwing shade about your manners.” I glance out—that was supposed to be a joke, but no one is really laughing.
Swallowing, I forge on. “Mama always put herself last. You all know that she’d feed anyone and everyone—God forbid you ever left our home hungry. Like Pastor Harold, I bet all of you have had her blue-ribbon pies and cakes. Once, she was baking a Black Forest cake for a church contest, and I insisted on helping. I was of the age where I was no help at all, of course. At some point, I dropped the measuring spoon into the batter and was too embarrassed to tell her, so it got baked into the cake. When the judge at the contest cut into the cake, and found the spoon, Mama knew exactly what had happened. But instead of getting mad at me, she told the judge it was a special trick she used to make the cake moist. You probably remember how the next year, several of the cakes entered in the contest had metal measuring spoons baked inside them—well, now you know why.” There is a titter of laughter, and I let out a breath I had not even realized I’d been holding. “I heard people say Mama was proud of her ribbons, of her baking, but you know, that isn’t true. She worked hard at that. She worked hard at everything. Pride, she would tell us, is a sin. And in fact the only thing I ever saw her take pride in was me and my sister.”
As I say the words, I remember the look on her face when I told her about the indictment. Ruth, she had said, when I came home from jail and she wanted to see me face-to-face, to make sure I was all right, how could this happen to you? I knew what she meant. I was her golden child. I had escaped the cycle. I had achieved. I had busted through the ceiling she spent her life butting her head against. “She was so proud of me,” I repeat, but the words are viscous, balloons that pop when they hit the air, that leave a faint stench of disappointment.
It’s all right, baby, I hear, from the crowd. And: Mm-hmm, you okay.
My mother never said as much, but was she still proud of me? Was it enough that I was her daughter? Or was the fact that I was on trial for a murder I didn’t commit like one of those stains she worked so hard to get out?
There is more to my speech, but it is gone. The words on my little index card might as well be written in hieroglyphs. I stare at them, but nothing makes sense anymore. I can’t imagine a world where I might go to prison for years. I can’t imagine a world where my mother isn’t.
Then I remember something she told me once, the night I went to Christina’s slumber party. When you’re ready for us, we’ll be waiting on you. At that moment, I feel another presence I haven’t felt before. Or maybe one I never noticed. It’s solid as a wall, and warm to the skin. It’s a community of people who know my name, even when I don’t always remember theirs. It’s a congregation that never stopped praying for me, even when I flew from the nest. It’s friends I did not know I had, who have memories of me that I’ve pushed so far to the back of my mind, I’ve forgotten.
I hear the flow of the fountain behind me, and I think about water, how it might rise above its station as mist, flirt at being a cloud, and return as rain. Would you call that falling? Or coming home?
I don’t know how long I stand there, weeping. Adisa comes to me, her shawl open like the great black wings of a heron. She wraps me in the feathers of unconditional love. She bears me away.
AFTER THE CHOIR sings “Soon and Very Soon,” as the casket is carried from the church and we file out behind it; after the graveside ceremony, where the pastor speaks yet again, we reconvene at my mother’s apartment—the small space where I grew up. The church ladies have done their duty; there are giant bowls of potato salad and coleslaw and platters of fried chicken set out on pretty pink tablecloths. There are silk flowers on almost every horizontal space, and someone has thought to bring folding chairs, although there isn’t nearly enough room for everyone to sit.
I take refuge in the kitchen. I look over the stacked plates of brownies and lemon squares, and then walk to a tiny bookshelf above the sink. There’s a small black and white composition book there, and I open it, nearly brought to my knees by the spiky hills and valleys of Mama’s handwriting. Sweet potato pie, I read. Coconut dreams. Chocolate Cake to Break a Man. I smile at that last recipe—it was what I had cooked for Wesley, before he proposed, to which Mama only said, I told you so.
“Ruth,” I hear, and I turn around to find Kennedy and the other white woman she brought with her looking awkward and out of place in my mama’s kitchen.
I reach into the abyss and find my manners. “Thank you for coming. It means a lot.”
Kennedy takes a step forward. “I’d like you to meet my mother. Ava.”
The older woman holds out her hand in that southern way, like a limp fish, pressing just the tips of her fingers to the tips of mine. “My condolences. It was a lovely service.”
I nod. Really, what is there to say?
“How are you holding up?” Kennedy asks.
“I keep thinking Mama’s going to tell me to go tell Pastor Harold to use a coaster on her good coffee table.” I don’t have the words to tell her what it really feels like, seeing her with her own mother, knowing I don’t have that option. What it’s like being the balloon, when someone lets go of the string.
Kennedy glances down at the open book in my hands. “What’s that?”
“A recipe book. It’s only half finished. Mama kept telling me she was going to write down all her best ones for me, but she was always too busy cooking for someone else.” I realize how bitter I sound. “She wasted her life, slaving away for someone else. Polishing silver and cooking three meals a day and scrubbing toilets so her skin was always raw. Taking care of someone else’s baby.”
My voice breaks on that last bit. Falls off the cliff.
Kennedy’s mother, Ava, reaches into her purse. “I asked to come here today, with Kennedy,” she says. “I didn’t know your mom, but I knew someone like her. Someone I cared for very much.”
She holds out an old photo, the kind with scalloped edges. It is a picture of a Black woman wearing a maid’s uniform, holding a little girl in her arms. The girl has hair as light as snow, and her hand is pressed against her caregiver’s cheek in shocking contrast. There’s more than just duty between them. There’s pride. There’s love. “I didn’t know your mother. But, Ruth—she didn’t waste her life.”
Tears fill my eyes. I hand the photo back to Ava, and Kennedy pulls me into an embrace. Unlike the stiff hugs I remember from white women like Ms. Mina or my high school principal, this one does not feel forced, smug, inauthentic.
She lets go of me, so that we are eye to eye. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Kennedy says, and something crackles between us: a promise, a hope that when we go to trial, those same words will not cross her lips.