The Kudzu Review: Issue No. 61

Mummy, being up here; I work, and I go to class and s-sometimes I forget where all the time has gone. Especially with all the tests they’ve been giving us here.”

“You been testin’ for two months, girl?” the suck of her teeth. “No one go be so foolish to think you ah go test for two months. I not here to hear yuh foolishness. I here to see my child.”

“But you didn’t call or text – “ “You nah reply.”

“I-I…” “Ahh, silence! I no care, Medea.” She had thrown up her hands, not in defeat but in exasperation. There was never any truth between us, but she knew that I was tired, just as I knew that what lay behind her fury was simply worry. It had seized her like a possession after I had stopped calling, after she had not heard from me in one, two, three weeks; one month; two months; I had taken to relying on Jason to tell her that I was still living and breathing but eventually, she must’ve gotten it into her head that my friend might be lying, and in a strange land where she did not know or trust many who spoke or looked like her, she could not trust her child’s life only to what another girl might be telling her. So, of course, she had taken it upon herself – as presumptuous as a mother hen – to come see for herself. I knew her chastising was more relief than it was actual fury, but behind my eyes I could only be relieved that no man had asked to spend the night with me with her sudden arrival.

She had placed her hands back on her knees, glancing suspiciously around the dimly lit apartment which she had chosen for me. “I come for you and I see you alive, but filthy, and uncared for! I no send she up here to be pig. I send she here for learning.

You go be foul like the lot that run ‘round here? I no want you schooling thinking that you go be dirty girl like how they raise them here!”

She had fixed her glare back upon me and my head crawled with the old childhood fear that she could see through me, down to my core, down to the spot where I hid myself from her the best.

But she only sighed, rose to her feet, and came to me, gathering me in her strong and brown arms, saying softly. “Dee-dee, cheri.” It was the longest since she had coddled me and longer still since my name had not been used like a weapon. Her words were falling more and more into the language which she had raised me on. “I birth a good girl. Go send yuh Mummy into a fright, send she all the way here for why? Yell at yuh?

No, she no come here to yell at foolish girl-child. Medea, my doux-doux, yuh need yuh Mummy.”

And I did.

But in that night, I could not understand her very clearly and I could not have conveyed what was becoming of me. Her hug and her words brought me back to when I had been a girl, browned and cooked by the sun. The water had been blue and my Mummy’s figure had always loomed at the edge of my sight, a black woman built like a statue, lean with little fat and muscled on her arms and her back with strength that raised my little body up, up in the air, high above her broad and handsome face, smiling at me and speaking in my mother tongue which I had known as a baby, but had forgotten as I grew up and the waters turned into dirty rivulets which ran down storage drains in a crowded city far from the sun. I had hugged her back, that night, and some part of me knew that she was not the spry young woman that she once been – but if my Mummy could lift me up like she had near the blue waters where we had come from, perhaps then I would not be so jumbled and mixed up, perhaps my spine would connect back to my pelvis, and I would be whole again and I would not stink.

But she did not lift me up, not into the air, not up and out of my own misery, and I could not tell her the truth. Moving away from that bright sun and those blue waters had claimed my ability to speak to her like she spoke to me. I had thought, that night, that she could not possibly understand me in the language which I now spoke.

So, I did what I knew was best for the both of us and complied into silent obedience,