Mama Flora's Family

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

"Powerful and moving."
--The Boston Globe

Autorentext
Alex Haley

Klappentext
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.

Zusammenfassung
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.

Leseprobe
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…

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