Oakland Again

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 39: Oakland Again

The envelope arrived on the third Wednesday of April. It was on the kitchen table, in the small stack of mail Yvonne had brought in at ten-thirty, when Tiana came over after her unit shift at four o'clock to do the evening visit.

She did not, at first, register the letter. She was peeling off her coat. She was saying hello to Yvonne. She was reaching for the small tea Yvonne always poured for her when she came in after a shift.

Yvonne said, from the stove: "Baby. There is a letter for you in the stack. From Oakland."

Tiana stopped.

"Oakland."

"Yes. I did not open it. It is addressed to you — Tiana Brooks, c/o and then my address. Your name in her hand. I have been staring at it since ten forty-five. I did not want to open it without you. I wanted you to be the one."

"Mom."

"Yes, baby."

"Is it — is it Tamika?"

"Baby, the return address says T. Wells, Oakland. I do not know anyone else in Oakland. It is Tamika."

Tiana sat down at the kitchen table. She set her tea down. She picked up the envelope.

The handwriting was careful and slanted — the same handwriting, Tiana realized after a moment, that had been on the letter that came in last August and that Pamela had driven in from Atlanta to deliver. Tamika had not, in that letter, expected to write again. Tamika had said so plainly. The envelope in Tiana's hand was, by Tamika's own stated promise in August, not supposed to exist.

It existed.

Tiana held it for a moment.

She looked up at her mother.

"Mom."

"Yes, Tiana."

"She wrote."

"I can see, baby."

"She said she would not."

"I know what she said, Tiana. I read the August letter too. Your grandmother read it to us on the porch that afternoon. I know what Tamika promised."

"So why did she write."

Yvonne sat down across from her daughter at the table.

"Baby. The only way to find out is to read the letter. That is the way letters work."

"Yes, Mom."

"I am going to sit here with you while you read. I am not going to read over your shoulder. I am going to sit. You read. You tell me what it says when you are ready. Or you do not tell me. Whatever it says, baby, is between you and Tamika first. You get to decide what you do with it."

"Yes, Mom."

Tiana opened the envelope.

The letter was three pages. The paper was the same lined paper from a school notebook that Patrice had used a year ago and that Tamika had used in August. Tiana wondered, with the small part of her mind that was not bracing for the letter, whether there was some small regional habit of Mississippi-raised women of a certain age using school notebook paper for their hard letters. Her grandmother had, she realized, done the same. The continuity of the paper across three of the important letters of the last year was the small quiet sign Mama Tate would, Tiana thought, have noticed immediately.

She unfolded the letter.

She read.

Dear Tiana,

My name is Tamika Wells. I am the daughter of Vera Wells of Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, and the aunt of your cousin by keeping, Curtis Wells, and the woman your grandmother Mother Tate prayed for every morning for the last twenty-eight years of her own life and the last six months of her life under a second arrangement with my mother. I wrote to your grandmother in August of last year. You have probably read that letter. I said in that letter that I would not write again. I am writing anyway. I want to tell you why.

Pamela's condolence letter for your grandmother arrived in my mailbox on the eighth of January. I let it sit for twelve days before I opened it. When I opened it, I read it once and set it down. That night I went to my closet and I took out the small wooden box where I have been keeping my mother's letters — the ones she wrote me between 1998 and 2013, the ones I never opened. The box had forty-two letters in it. I had not opened any of them in twenty-eight years.

I decided, on the night of the twentieth of January, that I would read one letter per week.

I have read twelve so far.

I am writing you, Tiana, because something has happened while I have been reading, and I want to tell somebody who knew my mother and who would understand what the something is. I cannot tell my partner. Diane is a good woman and she knows my mother in the shape my mother was when I left home. She does not know my mother in the shape my mother became over twenty-eight years of writing letters to a daughter who did not open them. Nobody alive that I know knows that shape, except — I suspect — Pamela, who carried letters back and forth for my mother in the nineties, and who has been a good cousin to me when I have allowed it. And you. You knew your grandmother. Your grandmother prayed with my mother for four decades. Your grandmother knew my mother's inside. I am writing because you are the next person in line of the ones who would understand.

Here is the something.

I had thought, for twenty-eight years, that my mother never reconsidered the fight we had in 1998. I had thought she was the woman she had been in that kitchen in August of 1998 — hard-mouthed, certain, correct in her own head, unable to make room for the life I was trying to build with a woman she could not accept. I had thought that was who my mother was and who she had always been and who she had continued to be until she died.

That is not true.

The letters are not all apologies. Most of them are not apologies at all. Most of them are just — Tiana, most of them are just my mother's weekly life. The Sunday sermon. The grocery list. The small stories from the Mothers' Board. The small stories from the church. She wrote to me every week for about four years, then less — maybe every month for the next eight years, then every few months until 2013 when she got too sick to hold the pen well. She wrote about the garden. She wrote about the neighbors. She wrote about Pamela. She wrote about the trip to Nashville in 2004 to see my aunt before my aunt died. She wrote about all of it. She wrote as if — this is the part I cannot yet say without crying, Tiana; I am typing this after handwriting it the first time, and I am crying on the keyboard — as if she were keeping me informed about our family from a distance because she believed I would want to be informed, even though I had told her in 1998 that I would not accept her mail.

She did not, in the letters, ask forgiveness once.

She did not once say she was sorry for what she said in 1998.

Not because she was unrepentant. Because she was too proud. She was my mother. She knew herself. She knew that I had not opened the letters. She knew she could not make up for 1998 with an apology on paper that I would not read. She did not try. She did, instead, the only thing she could do. She wrote me into the life of the family as if I were still in it. She kept the writing for fifteen years. Every letter was her saying the same thing without saying it: you are still my daughter. I am still your mother. I am writing to you because that is what mothers do. That was the sentence under all of it.

I did not know, Tiana.

I did not know for twenty-eight years.

I have been reading one letter per week because I cannot take it in faster. My sponsor in AA has been walking me through it. Diane has been walking me through it. I have been going to more meetings. I have been praying — not in the shape your grandmother would have prayed, or my mother would have recognized, but in the small shape I have learned to pray in fourteen years of sobriety, which is a prayer I have not shared with any church and which I will not share now. I am praying.

Tiana. I am writing to you because I want to tell you that your grandmother's keeping worked. It did not work in the shape that any of the women praying for me would have asked for. I am not coming home. I am not, in this life, going to walk into Mt. Calvary. I am not going to kneel at the altar in Orange Mound. I am going to read the thirty more letters in the box over the next thirty weeks. I am going to finish reading them in November. I am going to close the box. I am going to be, at the end of reading, a woman who has finally received what her mother was writing to her for fifteen years.

That is a receipt, I think, of a different shape than your grandmother saw with Calvin Pruitt or Patrice Williamson. I do not know what category to put it in. I am writing because you — the new keeper of the book — should know. The book has been, I suspect, more accurate than any of the women holding it understood. The Lord, whom I do not claim as my daily Lord, has been — by some arrangement I cannot explain with sober reasoning — present in the long reading of my mother's letters in a way that has made me not the daughter I was in 1998, but a woman who is beginning to be my mother's daughter again.

I do not know what happens after November. I do not know what happens after I close the box. I do not want to promise anything. I promised last August that I would not write, and I am breaking the promise now. I will promise only that I am — Tiana, I am being kept. The keeping is real. The keeping has reached. I thought you should know.

There is one more thing. It is small. I want to send you something.

Enclosed in this envelope is a photograph my mother wrote about in the letter I read last Wednesday — the letter dated June 12, 1999. The photograph is of my mother at sixteen, in Memphis, with her sister Lucille who died in 1975. I have had the photograph in a file since my mother sent it to me in 1999 with a three-line note I have since read for the first time. My mother wrote in the note: Mika, this is me and Lucille in 1951. You wrote when you were fifteen that you wished you had more pictures of Aunt Lucy. I found this one. It is yours. I never opened the envelope. The photograph has been in a file in a file cabinet in my office for twenty-six years.

I do not want the photograph, Tiana. I want it to go to Pamela. Pamela's children should see their grandmother at sixteen. Pamela was closer to Aunt Lucille than I was. The photograph belongs in Pamela's house. But I am not yet ready to write to Pamela directly. I am asking you to forward it. You can include this letter or not — your choice. I leave it with you.

I am not expecting a response. I am not asking for one. I am telling you what the keeping has done in Oakland. That is enough for this letter. Please give Pamela my love. Please tell her the box has thirty letters left in it. I will let her know when I finish.

With thanks to a keeper I have never met,

Tamika Wells

April 18, 2027

P.S. My mother wrote, in the letter of November 1999, that there was a woman in Orange Mound who would outlive her and who would pray for me after she was gone. My mother never named her. I suspect now — knowing how my mother did things — that she meant your grandmother. My mother, in 1999, was arranging things. The arrangement worked. I am a receipt of that arrangement. Tell your mother I said so.

Tiana folded the letter.

She did not, for a moment, move.

There was, as Tamika had said, a small folded photograph in the envelope. Tiana did not take it out yet. She set the envelope back on the table beside the letter.

She looked up at her mother.

Yvonne had been watching her. Yvonne had not, during the reading, said anything.

Tiana said: "Mom."

"Yes, Tiana."

"She wrote."

"I see, baby."

"She is — Mom, she is reading her mother's letters. She has been reading one a week since January. She has read twelve. She says — Mom, she says her mother wrote to her for fifteen years and never asked forgiveness because asking forgiveness would have made her try to make up for 1998 on paper her daughter would not read. Her mother wrote instead as if Tamika were still in the family. Mother Wells did it for fifteen years. She is reading the letters now. She says — she says the keeping has worked."

Yvonne did not, for a long moment, speak.

"Tiana."

"Yes, Mom."

"Read me the letter."

"I — yes, Mom."

Tiana read it.

She read it aloud slowly. Her voice caught twice — once at the passage about Mother Wells writing as if Tamika were still in the family, and once at the P.S. Yvonne did not interrupt.

When Tiana finished, Yvonne had her hand over her mouth.

She said, after a long pause: "Baby. Mama arranged that one too."

"Mom?"

"Mother Wells told your grandmother in the side room on the first Sunday of June last year that Tamika would read when she was gone. Mama told me the morning after. I forgot until Tiana read the P.S. I remember now."

"Mom."

"Mother Wells set that in motion from her sickbed. Mama kept the line on this side."

"Yes, Mom."

"Baby. Hand me the photograph."

Tiana opened the envelope. She took out the small folded photograph Tamika had included. She unfolded it.

The photograph was black and white, four by five inches, slightly creased. It showed two young Black women, maybe sixteen and twelve, in summer dresses, standing in front of a small wooden porch in Memphis. The older of the two had Mother Wells's face unmistakably — younger, softer, but unmistakably — and the younger had a small bright smile.

On the back of the photograph, in pencil, in a hand Tiana did not recognize: Vera and Lucille, Orange Mound, summer 1951.

Yvonne held the photograph a long time.

Then she said: "Pamela."

"Yes, Mom."

"Pamela needs this."

"Mom. Tamika wants me to forward it. She is not ready to write Pamela herself. She asked me to send it."

"You send it, baby. You send it tomorrow. You write Pamela a short note. Not — Tiana, not a long one. You tell her the photograph came through Oakland, by way of you. You tell her Tamika sends love. You leave the rest for Tamika to do when Tamika is ready. You understand?"

"Yes, Mom."

"The Lord is still at work, baby."

"He is, Mom."

That evening Tiana sat at her own kitchen table at her apartment and wrote two short letters.

The first was to Pamela. She wrote:

Pamela,

Your aunt Tamika sent me a letter this week from Oakland. She is reading your grandmother's letters — one a week since January. She has read twelve. She sent an enclosure for you. It is a photograph of your grandmother and her sister Lucille in Memphis in 1951. Your aunt had the photograph in a file for twenty-six years and she has decided, this month, that it belongs in your house. She asks me to forward it. I am forwarding it.

She sends love. She is not ready to write you directly. She says to tell you she will let you know when she finishes the box.

I love you, cousin. The Lord has been kind this April.

Tiana

The second was to Tamika. She wrote:

Tamika,

Thank you for the letter. It has been received. I have read it once aloud to my mother at her kitchen table, and I will read it again in private tonight. My mother asked me to tell you that my grandmother was told, by your mother in the side room at Mt. Calvary on the first Sunday of June last year, that your mother was arranging the reading of the letters from the cloud. My mother had forgotten. She remembered this afternoon when I read your P.S. I am passing it on because I think you should know. Your mother arranged this reading. The Lord did the rest. My grandmother was one of the small instruments.

I am forwarding the photograph to Pamela by tomorrow's mail with a short note. Nothing more, as you asked.

I am not asking for a response. I will write to you again only if you write first. I will keep you in the book. The Lord be with you through the next thirty letters.

Tiana Brooks

She sealed both envelopes. She put stamps on them. She set them by her door to mail in the morning.

She sat at her kitchen table for a long time after.

The small April evening had gone to full dark outside her window. She could hear, faintly, her upstairs neighbor moving through his apartment. Her own apartment was quiet. The composition book was on the table in front of her.

She opened it to Tamika's entry in the back of the book.

She had not touched the entry since her grandmother had moved Tamika to the back pages in July. The entry was where it had been — Tamika Wells of Oakland. Daughter of Mother Wells. Held by the next. Sober since March 9, 2012. Loved by a woman named Diane. Alive in Oakland. Confirmed by letter, August 12, 2026. Keeping continues.

Tiana took the pen.

She added, in a small careful line below:

April 22, 2027. Wrote a second letter. Reading her mother's letters. One a week through November. The keeping is working.

She underlined The keeping is working.

She closed the book.

She set her hand on the cover.

She said, in her own kitchen, in the small way her grandmother had taught her:

Lord. Thank You for this long quiet turn. Keep me careful with it.

She went to bed.

In Oakland, at seven-twelve in the evening on the twenty-second of April, Tamika Wells was at her own kitchen table with the thirteenth letter from her mother open in front of her. The letter was dated September 4, 1999. The letter was about the first week of that school year at Mt. Calvary, where Mother Wells had, as she did every year, helped organize the back-to-school lunch for the children of the congregation. The letter described, in her mother's careful hand, the small events of a Sunday-afternoon lunch twenty-six years ago that had no drama, no confession, no plea — only the small steady narration of a mother telling her daughter the shape of the week.

Tamika, at the table, read the letter twice.

She closed it. She refolded it. She put it in the small pile of the twelve letters already read.

Diane, at the stove, stirred soup.

Tamika, in her chair, did not, tonight, cry. She had cried over five of the twelve letters already read. The thirteenth had not made her cry. The thirteenth had made her nod — the small quiet nod of a woman receiving.

She said, to the kitchen: Mama. I see you.

Diane did not ask what she meant. Diane had, for three months, been present to the small sentences Tamika said to the kitchen during the letter readings. Diane had learned that the sentences were between Tamika and her mother and did not require response.

Diane stirred the soup.

In Memphis, three thousand miles east, two letters sat by the door of a small apartment waiting for the morning mail. One was to Atlanta. One was to Oakland.

In Orange Mound, the pecan tree was just past full leaf. The small green hands were coming in again. They would, in October, be pecans. Naomi — who was five now and who had been, since February, practicing for the sixth birthday party Marcus had promised her at Park Avenue in twenty twenty-eight — would come in October to count them.