Damn Fine Sentence #53

"Mama had kept most of her childhood stories locked in her eyes."

Frequently while I’m reading, a sentence grabs me and forces me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

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“Mama had kept most of her childhood stories locked in her eyes.”

———Tananarive Due

———The Reformatory

Most of what I know about Mama is what I don’t know.

I don’t know how it was for her when her white grandmother up and moved back to Ireland. Leaving Mama and Aunt Gerry and Aunt Mabel behind. I wonder if it happened when Mama was too little to notice or after she was too big to care. I hope for Mama’s sake it happened after she was grown. I’ve only had one grandmother, and it would have just killed me if Mon had moved to another country when I was a kid. I have to make up Mama’s feelings, because I just don’t know.

I don’t know if Mama ever tasted the moonshine her father ran.

I don’t know if Mama and Dad kissed like in Life Magazine when he came home from the war. Did she call Mon Mother Downey, Mrs. Downey, or Miss Beaulah? I wonder what she did when she saw her wedding picture framed and hanging in Mon’s guest bedroom, and she wasn’t in the picture, only Dad in his dress blues. How many visits until she noticed?

I don’t know who taught Mama how to cook chitlins.

I don’t know why she wasn’t the one who bought me my first bra. Did she not notice I needed one?

Who was she talking to when she talked out loud to herself? I don’t know what she thought when Dad moved out and married someone else. When he left her in Des Moines and moved all us kids to California. She looked pretty normal waving goodbye from the front door, when our cars pulled away. Was she mad at him? Was she thinking about how to get us back. It’s one of those things I just don’t know.

I don’t know how she met Skeeter, the man everybody says made her happy the rest of her life.

I suppose I could have asked her, but by the time we moved to California when I was fourteen, Mama and I were already strangers.

Did she notice?

Pssst. Here’s a secret about me. Mama died a long, long time ago, but last week my husband saw her standing over me while I slept.