Mama Flora's Family: A Novel - Softcover

Haley, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044023543X ISBN 13: 9780440235439

Publisher: Dell, 1999

Synopsis

She vowed to find a better world for her children.  Even if she had to make it herself.

A sweeping epic of contemporary history by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Haley, this magnificent novel weaves an unforgettable story of one family, three generations, and their search for the American dream....

She is the heart and soul of her family who, through faith and courage, drives herself, her children, and her grandchildren onward, determined to propel them to a better place. Mama Flora, born to poor sharecroppers in Tennessee, is forced to raise her children alone after the murder of her husband. But it will not be Willie, her son, who fulfills her ambitions, but Ruthana, the niece she raises as her own. Inspired by her love for the radical poet Ben, Ruthana seeks her soul in Africa even as Willie's son and daughter embrace Black Power and drugs in their embattled coming-of-age. Throughout all the seasons of their lives, it is Mama Flora who prevails, whose quiet determination and love bring them back, as she leads her own quest for justice in tumultuous times.

About this title

About the Author

Alex Haley is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Roots. With Malcolm X, he coauthored the Autobiography of Malcom X. He died in February 1992.

David Stevens is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who coauthored Breaker Morant and directed the Emmy Award-winning miniseries A Town Like Alice. He has written several other miniseries, including Merlin, and his off-Broadway play The Sum of Us was made into a movie. He worked extensively with Alex Haley on the screenplay Queen, and after Alex Haley died, he completed the unfinished book.

From the Back Cover

"Heartwarming...affecting...Mama Flora herself is as memorable a character as Roots' Kunta Kinte."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Powerful and moving."
--The Boston Globe

From the Inside Flap

find a better world for her children. Even if she had to make it herself.

A sweeping epic of contemporary history by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Haley, this magnificent novel weaves an unforgettable story of one family, three generations, and their search for the American dream....

She is the heart and soul of her family who, through faith and courage, drives herself, her children, and her grandchildren onward, determined to propel them to a better place. Mama Flora, born to poor sharecroppers in Tennessee, is forced to raise her children alone after the murder of her husband. But it will not be Willie, her son, who fulfills her ambitions, but Ruthana, the niece she raises as her own. Inspired by her love for the radical poet Ben, Ruthana seeks her soul in Africa even as Willie's son and daughter embrace Black Power and drugs in their embattled coming-of-age. Throughout all the seasons of their lives, it is Mama Flora who prevails, whose quiet determination

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The sun was setting, and young Willie was not yet home.

Flora, his mama, glanced out the window again, and felt an old, familiar knot in her stomach when she could not see him.

She opened the door and called out through the fly screen.

"Willie!"

She counted to ten. The sun disappeared below the horizon.

"Willie!" she called again, and could not keep the fear that disguised itself as anger from her voice. "You hear me callin' you, boy? Willie!"

Still there was no sign of him, but she could see the setting sun, and it was her enemy, the coming of darkness scared her.

Daylight was no friend to her, or to any black she knew, but night was a frightening place. Bad things happened at night. All the woes of Flora's life had happened at night. Her grandparents, who had been slaves, called night the Devil's Time, and told of the many slaves and, later, free blacks who had simply disappeared at night, never to be seen again. In many ways her grandparents thought freedom was worse than slavery, because at least as slaves they had been of value to their massas, if only as livestock.

When freedom came it brought with it the dark riders of the night, who swept down on blacks for slights real or imagined, and carried them away, to burn or hang or drown. Flora's earliest nightmares were of the silent screams of thousands upon thousands of vanished dead crying out from the mighty Mississippi, which had been their watery, unwanted grave. The Delta Lullaby, her gran'ma called it, and it gave Flora a focus for her fear, and it was white.

Raised on this fear, and in the belief that she was safe only among her own kind, she had no armor against Lincoln, who was her own kind, and who had come to her at night. Lincoln had charmed her into giving away her most precious possession, and when the child was born, he had stolen him from her and banished her from home.

The train that took her away from Mississippi left at night. Flora had waited at the depot at midnight, with only her mama and her younger sister, Josie, beside her to wish her farewell. Her pappa was long gone, no one knew where, North, probably, to Chicago or Detroit, and her grandparents were old and infirm.

Flora had grown up in a tiny settlement of less than fifty people, and she could not bear the thought of arriving, alone and friendless, in a big city like Memphis. In the early morning the train pulled into Stockton, in Tennessee, and Flora made her decision. She got off the train and made her way to the church, where the preacher's wife found her a room in a cheap boardinghouse. Flora took what work she could find, cleaning at the hospital, doing laundry and ironing shirts for white folk, or planting and picking cotton in the seasons. The people at the church were friendly, and Flora settled into a semblance of life, but she always locked her door at night.

Because of Lincoln she distrusted men, and for five years she lived without close contact with them, except for Reverend Jackson.

Then she met Booker. A fine, handsome sharecropper, Booker was, if only in golden memory, the man of a young woman's dreams. They married, and for a while Flora was happy.

Night took Booker from her, soon after their son Willie was born. Their tragedy was not of their own making, for no two people could have struggled harder to carve out something from almost nothing, from the wispy, white gold cotton that sustained them at subsistence level. Their tragedy was that they were poor and black in a world ruled by whites, and they had no way to escape from either condition.

Willie was another mouth to feed with food they did not have. In their despair, they imagined a future bleaker than poverty.

Booker was young and strong, ready to turn his muscle to anything that might earn money, but winter in a Southern country town is a mean provider. Booker drifted to the twilight world, and began "snatching cotton," stealing pitiful quantities of the unharvested crop, in dark of night, to buy food for his wife and son.

He was discovered and shot.

He struggled to the little shack that he called home, to Flora, and died in her loving arms. Not knowing what to do, or to whom to turn for help, Flora had crawled to the apple box that was Willie's crib, took him to her bosom, and held him there all night, safe, she hoped, from darkness, beside the body of his dead father.

Willie was ten now, and it was nearly night and he was not home.

Flora banged open the sagging fly screen and went onto the tiny back porch. She put her hands to her mouth, a megaphone.

"You, Willie T. Palmer!" she yelled. "You don't get in this house, I'm gon' take half a tree to you! Wil-lie! Get in this house!"

Across the street, Flora's friend Pearl chuckled to herself, snug in her own little shack.
"That Willie," she said to no one. "He be the death of Flora."

Flora began tidying the already neat back porch, muttering to herself. She took the old galvanized washtub from its nail and put it back again. She moved the frazzled and nearly worn-out mop to a different place. She rearranged the garden produce she offered for sale, the braided tie strings of red onions and dried hot cayenne pepper.

She did all this by rote, without plan or thought, for she was watching the gathering dusk.

"Every day got to hog-call him in here," she told the bunches of sage dried for sausage. "Runnin' with them young 'uns 'til he come in here tired and hungry."

She looked beyond her kitchen garden again. There was no sign of her son.

"Don' wanna study," she complained to drying ears of rainbow-grained Indian corn. "But he gon' get them lessons if'n I have to skin him!"

She banged back into the kitchen. With luck there might be some Pepto-Bismol left for her now raging stomach, or she would have some milk. It was an ulcer, Pearl said, caused by worry, and there was no cure except the thick pink liquid, or a glass of cold milk, and chewing every mouthful of food forty times. But who could remember to do that with all the other chores, and so much else to worry about?

She heard him before she saw him, the approaching panting breath and the slap of running bare feet on the ground. He burst through the screen door, a ten-year-old bundle of energy, in a ferment of apology.

Flora grabbed him before he could speak, fear for his safety totally supplanted by anger for the worry he had caused her.

"Where you been?" she yelled, cuffing him, but not too hard. "Me out there hollerin' my head off all evenin'! Ain't I told you to be in this house afore sundown?"

She cuffed him again, but not too hard, and Willie yelped again.

"Din't hear you, Mama," he cried. "I 'clare I didn't hear you!"

It became a kind of a game, as both knew it must, as it always did, but a game with serious purpose, for it expressed love in the only way that Flora knew how. Willie escaped from her clutches and sought refuge behind furniture while Flora chased after him, cuffing him when she could, but not too hard.

"Look at you! More I wash, dirtier you git!" She pointed accusingly at his grubby knee-length cotton pants and his open-neck shirt, smudged with dirt. "Think I'm playin' with you, don't cha? You git over there an' wash up an' set down an' eat."

Her anger was subsiding, and she turned her attention to the simmering pot of butter beans on the stove.

"Cook for you, then got to hunt you down." She waved the wooden spoon at him. "You hear me now? Where you been at?"

Willie headed to the sink, hugging the wall to avoid the spoon.

"Yes'm, yes'm, I hears ya," Willie said, moving quickly to wash, to calm his mama and to give her good news.

"We was down by the railroad, huntin' scrap iron. Makin' money, Mama?"

He was rewarded by a smack on the butt with the wooden spoon.

"Stealin'," Flora said, "nothin' but stealin' that railroad's iron. Done tol' you about that, boy. I'll tear you to pieces!"

Hands wet, Willie danced away, out of range of the spoon. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a quarter and a nickel.

"Wasn't on the track, Mama, was off to the side. We sold it down at the blacksmith shop. I got thirty cents!"

He threw the money on the table, still dodging the wooden spoon. The chink of the coins calmed Flora somewhat and, in her mind, they went straight into the money jar she kept buried in her garden.

Lord knew they needed it. Times were as tough as any Flora had known. A year earlier some catastrophe had happened in New York, in a place called Wall Street, and since then jobs had become increasingly scarce. Flora did not read newspapers because she couldn't read very well, and couldn't afford them, but rumor was her messenger. She heard of hundreds, thousands thrown out of work in the big cities. She heard of riots and breadlines and soup kitchens. She knew the crisis must be enormous because it even affected the white community of Stockton, whom Flora had thought were all well-off and impervious to financial insecurity. An increasing number of hoboes drifted through town on their way somewhere, anywhere, California most often, where there might be work. That most of these hoboes were white was astonishing to Flora, and sometimes she felt a small sense of satisfaction that these proud and cruel people had been reduced to such awful circumstances.

Yet her heart bled for the blacks of Stockton, who were the ones most affected, Flora thought, by the crisis. The price of cotton had fallen to an all-time low, and dozens of men could not find work. Several of the white people for whom Flora did laundry had cut back on the amount or had canceled her services altogether, and she knew that some white women who had employed her were now doing the unthinkable--wa...

Edition details

• Publisher: Dell
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 044023543X
• ISBN 13: 9780440235439
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 464