Small Great Things (35 page)

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.

M
AMA'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
Amen
s, 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.

A
FTER 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.