Mama sits on a green couch in the back corner, her bare feet resting on a coffee table, head tilted upward in a laugh that doesn’t even seem to produce sound at this point, just a jaw opening and shaking slightly. I watch her: this woman whose skin I crawled out of.
Her body has blown up, so now Mama is soft where she used to be all collarbone. The woman seated next to her, Miranda, is a dwarf of Mama with gray jumbo box braids and lips that curl straight down into a pout. She is huddled on the couch, resting her head on its edge when she sees me. Mama’s face erupts outward from her mouth, quivering around her tongue. Then her eyebrows twitch. Then Mama lets out a single shriek that sounds more like a gurgle and stands.
“Kiara,” she shouts across the room. The sound gets lost somewhere in the muddle of the room’s noise. I walk toward Mama until we are close enough to touch and then she pulls me into her arms and squeezes. For such a familiar voice, her arms could not feel like less of a home, the way the flesh cushions me. I don’t remember Mama ever feeling this safe, like a barrier to the sound.
When the embrace ends, Mama drags me back to the couch and plops me into the green of it, right in between her and Miranda, who seems to sink into the cushions. Mama keeps hold of my hands and fiddles with my fingers, moving the tips of hers along the base of each of my nails. I can’t help but look at her, just fixate my eyes on that face I’ve been trying to remember for so many years. Something is strange about it, like her skin has a purple tint beneath the surface, like she is glowing.
Mama don’t even pause to really look at me. She’s got things to say, always got things to say. “So happy to see my baby’s face all grown up. How old you now, nineteen? Twenty? So grown. You know I looked just like you at that age, pretty and shit. Time really do fly, child, just like your grandma used to say. Where my Marcus? You tell him like I said you gotta tell him?”
I don’t know how she keeps on talking, how she’s got enough breath for that.
I blink a couple times and try to remember all the things she asked. “I’m seventeen, eighteen in a couple months. And yeah I told him, but I don’t got control of him, so I don’t think he’s coming. Listen, I came down here ’cause I need Uncle Ty’s number and I know you wanted Marcus too, but I’m what you got. Okay?” I’m still staring at her, at her cheeks, at the purple underneath.
Mama’s smile doesn’t waver and she goes on like I didn’t say nothing at all. “I’m getting outta here soon. I’m comin’ home, just a couple more months—year at the most—and I’ll be cleared.”
Mama home. The thought never even crossed my mind, her back in our apartment.
Miranda speaks for the first time. “Yeah, Chey got real lucky her parole officer likes her ass.”
“That’s nice, Mama. I really gotta get Uncle Ty’s number though—”
“You know yo uncle always had a thing for me? Yo daddy didn’t wanna see it, but that man sure did want me.”
I shake my head, fuzzy from what could be heat or noise or the way Mama’s voice seeps into every canal of my body. “No, you not listening, Mama, I—”
“Nah, don’t you tell me I’m not listening, chile. All I ever done is listen to you. You ain’t got no ground to stand on, baby. We talked about this when I first went in there—Mama made a mistake. When I was just trying to support you, feed that mouth. Don’t mean I ain’t still yo mama.” Mama takes her thumb and pats my bottom lip.
I open my mouth again to talk, but Mama has stood, pulling me up with her and through the maze. As Mama leads me out of the room, my feet buzz in their shoes and I realize I might just be a little scared of my mother. As a child, I was never scared of Mama. She was a sacred figure and even when she was about to give us a spanking, I knew she’d rub our red skin after.
We head out into a hallway, up a stairwell, and into a room that must be hers because there are Prince posters lining the walls, and if there is one thing that could never change about my mama it would be her love for Prince. She used to break out into his songs on our Sunday morning walks to church and even though she’d go off on runs and belts that made them unrecognizable, I didn’t want Mama to stop, wanted to worship her voice.
“You sit on the bed.” Mama lets go of my hand and I stumble toward the twin-size bed, feet still buzzing. There are three other beds in the room, one in each corner, and each section of the room has been fingerprinted in portraits and photos and posters. It looks kind of like a child’s bedroom, but I can tell Mama is proud. She stands at a dresser now, rummaging through drawers, finally pulling out a hairbrush and spray bottle full of something that isn’t water.
“Remember Mama’s special potion?”
I didn’t. I do now, though, almost the moment she says it, memories of sitting on the floor, scalp bruises, Mama saying she’s putting a spell on my head gonna make me so pretty. Or maybe I don’t remember any of this because Mama is reciting these stories and memory is really just the things we trust to be ours and I guess I want this to be a story of Mama and me, so it is.
I expect Mama to come sit next to me on the bed and ask to brush my hair, but instead she sits on the ground right in front of my feet and hands me the brush and bottle.
“Got so many knots in there, thought you might wanna help me while we catch up.” Mama leans her head down so her neck is visible. Mama’s neck is five different shades of brown and black and purple and I can’t tell whether it looks like she been beat up or like her body is a whole galaxy.
Spraying her hair, I’m hit with the concoction’s scent of lavender and shea butter. When we were little, Mama would take us into the shower with her and soap us up with soap she said she made, but neither of us never saw her making it. Her soap smelled like a mix of new shoes and forest.
When we got out of the shower, she’d rub her entire body in shea butter that she bought from the West African shop down the street and then she’d sit us in her lap one at a time, her naked, smooth thighs a sweet comfort even in her boniness, and rub us down in it too, so we were soft, shining babies. Sometimes we’d dance to Prince or Mama would let us listen to Daddy’s old CDs and we’d be nothing but skin. We stopped all that after Daddy came home and I think Marcus never let Mama close to him again, blamed her for Daddy’s return and his death, for Uncle Ty, for what she did. I blamed her too, for some of it at least, but I also needed her. She was the only one who knew what it felt like to watch Daddy dissolve from our lives, and I didn’t have an Uncle Ty to take me away. I only had Mama’s hums.
“Now how ’bout you tell Mama what’s going on?” Her voice is so smooth, lulls me back into all the lullabies she used to sing.
I sniff. “They raising our rent so high and I didn’t have no choice, so I been out on the streets and, I don’t know, Mama, I’m just scared.”
Mama reaches back and rubs my knee with her fingers. “And now you want Mama to help you.”
I can hear how hopeful this whole thing makes her, giddy to be needed.
“Thought with Uncle Ty’s number and everything, you might be able to.” My voice is so small now, it gets swallowed by the sound of her breathing. Mama’s hair still looks the same as it always did and, watching each curl soak in potion, I don’t understand how my mama could have done what she did and still kept her hair, kept her voice. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what, baby?”
“Fuck over our whole family.”
Mama doesn’t pause, says, “No point in losing sleep over something none of us can change. Like I said, was survival.”
I pull the brush once through her hair, knowing how it’s gonna hurt. Mama don’t make a sound.
“We been trying to survive every day since then and I ain’t been locked up.”