Beginning with Alternative Taglines for Ma (2019)
Octavia Spencer as Sue Ann in Ma, directed by Tate Taylor.
for Lamar
A person who has been trapped in what they need learns to make need a trap.
A person gets trapped in how you need them and refuses to call it a trap, and instead y’all agree to call it love.
In her poem, “I Have a Method of Letting Go,” Khadijah Queen writes of her mother—like mine, a smoker—she is familiar with duty and made me so / I can’t live on that loss.
I think I am a stranger to duty. I recall what many thought they had a duty to teach me about manhood or about malice disguised as intellectualism, and I don’t really want to hear it, can’t help it. But I know what my mother has given—what, because it was a gift to my life, she decided was not loss.
She is familiar with duty and made me, [therefore…]
She is familiar with duty and made me [al]so [familiar with duty.]
She is familiar with duty and made me so [that]
I can’t live on that loss.
·
In a house in South Carolina where for years my family gathered after church, on Easter, for Christmas, for the unofficial family reunions, before and after every funeral, where once my six-year-old mind attempted to comprehend the fact of death from within deep breaths between the folds of an old leather sofa…in that house, the diabetic women who raised us seem to end up netted in need and looking each other in the mouth. Sucking on a Werther’s butterscotch drop summons the sensations of that place as though they were gold deposits in the glands, tongued loose like meat at the hip of a gold tooth. Hips I clung to til I was told clinging weakened me are hips I miss after the twenty years it took to either side-eye that absurdity—how can knowing well the smell of creatures to whom you are most vulnerable kill you?—or acknowledge that, yes, it can. Spiders don’t stare each other down from opposite corners of the same room, but people do and have a funny way of feeding resentment in peace. Perspective takes patience to earn, and I’m only just becoming a patient person.
It’s true, I’ve been away too long from the ones who speak my name’s first syllable so slowly they seem to still be celebrating the moment of my birth in every possible musical note. But it’s worthwhile to be accurate about what easily avails itself to romance—especially that urge toward a kind of small-town idyll that paints your Black momma as everybody’s.
Honestly, it was like a myth of peas—not that exact aroma, but what upholstery pressed daily by the same asses will make of poorly ventilated air. Roaches. Bare feet, white flakes of skin, ankles we’d have to keep an eye on. Snuff tins stacked on dusty dressers, and clutter from which someone with an archivist’s mind for caregiving could keenly declassify the right size of needle-eye in a matter of seconds. That sleeping sewing machine. A framed photograph of a cloud formation that lets you envision almost any face on Jesus. We called my uncle Snake, but his name is Carl. A cousin Pig, his sister Lady Bug. Staggered portraits of graduates and military officers with the gravest, gorgeous faces. Ankles in braces quick as you could look away. Three or four unopened, glazed cakes from the IGA across from the funeral home. Two-liter sodas in bulk against the walls, carbonation sitting in them like the truth of which children my Granny actually raised sat in more mouths than would tell it while she was alive. Thuds of those children’s children’s children threatened new bruises in the sheetrock of the hallway. The convalescent room was cold. After a time, the air conditioner and the breathing machine are distinct to the ear, though interchangeable in function. Always somebody trying not to die. Root beer and witch hazel. We make a diamond with our skinny legs, soles pressed and clammy, and roll the ball back and forth between our knees. Knots on switches from the tree you’re lucky to strip yourself. Some times my people seem to take a season to express a thing they noticed about you; then, they do in full red bloom and possibly with bees. Fullashit n fool as hell.
Fears and ants kept me from climbing the magnolia. Rice froth draped the pot sides like tablecloth. Chicken bog I’d daydream the whole First Sunday service. Esther Mae pulled a plug of chew from her cheek and set it next to her plate; nobody named her disorder all those years, and every one of us was mean enough. Low-thread-count carpet burn. Bulge of what one hopes is air in the linoleum. Rotary phone in the kitchen wall to dial the house across the cabbage patch. Perpetuity of a poinsettia in green foil. Finished false-wood siding on an ancient radio, permanent centerpiece of the shelf of five-by-seven baby pictures. Scrapple pushing out of plastic wrap. Pocketbook thick as a fig with intrigue and chewable peppermint, but you don’t stick your hand in there, just bring it here.
Some needs I never knew in that place because of who shaped it and how, and some needs I would learn. All of it moves now in the room of melancholia, meaning that even as I stand at the door I cannot reenter. Ask me how I ever looked away, and I’ll tell you there were enough holes in it to see out of. Or, paradoxically, I wonder if it provided so well that many of us had the fitness to feel dissatisfied and to pursue fulfillment elsewhere. Folks have to have a measure for success in childrearing; why not this?
·
Not everybody’s momma, my Nana Nana is “Ma” to many people who haven’t seen their mothers in years, whether after death or some specific incapacity grown folks call their business. “Aint no need in me getting depressed,” she tells me she told her doctor. “I’m eighty-five years old. This heart been beating a long time.”
Please hear me: my Nana is not a saint. I don’t believe in saints who live to be eighty-five.
·
Yes, it is indeed a silly film. How dare they insinuate that Juliette Lewis would take care of Octavia’s daughter after what happened in that home, in that tiny Ohio town. And in no fantasy anywhere does veterinarian Allison Janney actually work harder than a Black woman who still has a job. But I don’t think that Sue Ann’s retaining her individual mind—however twisted to vengeance and committed to violence—is an absurd premise. Or that her choosing to burn with the collapse of that mental extension, the terrible house, is unentertainable (though it doesn’t entertain me). If you could not otherwise escape the dilapidation the monster of your desire causes as its criss-crosses its own tracks, how else to hell with it? Maybe I take it too seriously. Tate Taylor wants to tell us about what and who have happened to Black folks in Jackson, Mississippi, that ought to incur nightmares of grotesque vengeance, but the predictable interventions of bad wigs, high drama, madonna-whore drag, and the persistently facetious American Midwest as unaccountable setting become irresistible. Tate Taylor is a white gay Gemini who, after the success of The Help, lives in a plantation house that no one has burned.
I read Sue Ann as drawn and excruciatingly distorted between her duty and her individual mind.
Is this oxymoronic? I’m trying for a basic definition of duty because perhaps, as I said, I don’t understand it. I also don’t want to be caged in it, but I’m beginning to suspect the cage is the thing about it. Outside, for instance, this country crests the planet in both arrogance and illness, the moon sucking on the albumen of U.S. exceptionalism. Entitled to its disapproval, the individual in me wants to say we have distinguished the individual to death, but the collective of voices that bug my sweaty neck know better yet that this is about private property—which time is. Ever since people commodified measurable time, we’ve been owning time, owing time, reclaiming time. And now the people I believe I love want time; they want time I’ve been calling mine. If I believe I love them, then it follows that I’m duty-bound to have time for them. If we love each other, then we share time, we pay it forward, and no one hoards it. This seems to be the ideal.
I have been not an ideal individual. There is no one alive I want to hear from every single day, and every day I assay and assail the resolve to die confidently alone. What if my mother had my mind? What if no one felt obliged to share time or break silence in that convalescent Carolina house? Sue Ann’s individuality resented her duty. That resentment culminated infernally. Something is burning about me.
The most dutiful people are probably the least likely to hem themselves up in such philosophy. Seems like no one who takes good care of their people thinks much about a debt of selfhood because what self would there be in the absence of that care. I am just as probably not the stranger to duty I’d like to be: I envy folks who don’t become phantasms of themselves in the faces of family. Lamar, for me to come to you in the airs of a child is no longer permissible or responsible. That you have never owed me an iota of care but gave because I was there to receive it is a model I’ve acknowledged many times in this life and opted not to make my own devotion. I can see, even as I plead with Jonah to let me never fail at love, that I have done. Naming does not change a thing intrinsically. We, the poets of what is called “witness,” know this.
·
On the day I’m burrowing through Rita Dove’s Collected, after Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale” sent me seeking the poem “Beauty and the Beast,” Nabi is online, on video, making come alive Dove’s “Mother Love.” It begins:
Who can forget the attitude of mothering?
Toss me a baby and without bothering
to blink I’ll catch her, sling him on a hip.
Any woman knows the remedy for grief
is being needed: duty bugles and we’ll
climb out of exhaustion every time,…
A double sonnet, Nabi tells us, so I begin to unriddle its rhyme scheme, which appears at first, like its speaker, to deliver according to its face. Should’ve known some shit was up the second the poem opens with a rhyming couplet, leaving nothing so obvious to signal ending in closure. Surrounded by sweet chiming assonances, grief and need full of teeth, and expected echoes that disappear (what rhymes with mirrors here?), led by the slick hand of curious music, I go blindfolded out of the poem’s generally speaking and into its scene—but I go in meanwhile believing because, I think, I’ve seen this: impulsive maternity, whatever made it possible for mommas and aunties to exchange nights away. Hip to hip, unblinking, slinging us. Yesterday, my mother told me I wouldn’t sleep alone til I was three. Duty bugling eleven hundred nights. Is exhaustion a static altitude, or do its slopes grow steeper? From what depths did she have to stay alert? I’m doting on Dove’s bewitching my ear and only just considering that a young woman learned to listen from the pit of weariness for my distinct repetitions.
(What rhymes with mirrors slides inside the line: girls peer into as their fledgling heroes slip. Nothing as perfectly representative as literal reflection belongs in this poem, nothing so fake. The mirrors are one-way.) Another woman, urged by her “bouquet of daughters,” comes to Dove’s speaker, hoping she will nurse the woman’s only son—the way the kids in Ma corral around Sue Ann, thirsty for her chill and her yield, expecting Octavia to play Octavia’s role. Considering its form inversely as the opening suggests, here’s the final octet of “Mother Love.”
I decided to save him. Each night
I laid him on the smoldering embers,
sealing his juices in slowly so he might
be cured to perfection. Oh, I know it
looked damning: at the hearth a muttering crone
bent over a baby sizzling on a spit
as neat as a Virginia ham. Poor human—
to scream like that, to make me remember.
She finishes, as she started, in the problem of memory. If this is an American problem, there’s some idea who can forget and what’s to remember. If this is a personal problem, it is still American. I imagine the speaker remembers like my mother’s cesarian scars did the third time. “Slowly so” “Oh, I know,” the speaker coos. In the context of perfections, crone either merely or must slant-rhyme with human.
·
A plot summary: Demented in the aftermath of other people’s malice, a mother endangers her daughter in a deluded attempt to protect her from the yet indelible dangers beyond their doors.
Or plot keyword: Racial pathology.
Or scholarly review: “Bad Mammy Drama: Imagining Black Mothers Somehow Having Time to Toy with White Folks’ Lives from Chloe, Love Is Calling You (1934) to Little Fires Everywhere (2020).”
·
Queen’s “Afterlight Erasure” begins
The pain is willing &
I suffer—
A good mother does what it takes.
My people are not by any nature harder to show up for. By unnatural imposition, their lives are profuse with occasions that require presence. There are succinct mutilations and removals that the word disparity obliterates. Signifying is insufficient. My grandmother died of an aneurysm. My mother was nine years old. My mother’s first husband died of thrombosis. He was twenty-two.
I am cooking canned salmon with sweet onions and rice. I am thinking of Momma working nights at Bingo-Rama. Overtime Saturday mornings in gray cubicles away from the grace of natural light. Associate’s degree she pursued in night school, briefly. The long catalog of things we had that were not free, beginning with a bucket of rice beneath the kitchen sink. Her collection of elephant statuettes—especially the one handmade of hundreds of frosted shells, tiny cockles and whelks—and what moment opens in the bloom of Newport smoke exhaled in pursuit of the falsetto in “Bennie and the Jets” before it escapes through the cracked driver-side window: These were places she knew she could always be found, I see that now. Either I’m quiet during Elton and Prince or only as loud as she. Her aesthetic attraction to these flamboyances versus the loop she believes my loving another boy threw her for.
—What’s to forgive? I couldn’t “get [my] crooked ass straight,” but I wasn’t kicked out. I never knew hunger in her house unless I chose it. But suddenly, “this act of profound generosity that created being” had encountered its limit. Why am I attached to our detachment, the singular scene of her lapse in unselfishness? Because it has been my only occasion to reciprocate discipline. Because it was the preeminent instance in which I was looked in the eyes and refused childhood. From the pressure of that moment, over seventeen years, I have effused and cooled like an island. I am rooted to it. And perhaps because she is not God and could not erase her failure but persists in contending as author with the narrative in which that failure lives, my love for her is terrible and absolute.
But first—after I had declared a need, had broken open my face like a tree nut to mutter “I love him,” but meaning “will you still imagine me, maker of me?” and was left lacking but alive in the consolation of her duty—for a while, I was an absolute terror. Things that were not free: therapists, psychiatrists, nutritionists, George W. Bush-era gasoline, Seroquel, Geodon, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Prozac, and what it takes to meet the continuity of individual nights in which your child might bleed himself, kill himself, or further disappear. I became the shape with knives and eyes in the dark, the room with a knob best left unturned. And I was hers. I suffered a good mother.
