“Mine” From “Bigger Than Bravery”

From Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic

Essay by B. Brian Foster

If you only read the headline, you would barely know she was there: “Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Foster would like to announce the grand opening of foster’s laundry center.” They put the building’s name in big letters and spelled his name all the way out but couldn’t manage to say hers: Minnie. 

I never asked Daddy about the newspaper, but I watched his life long enough to know. He probably didn’t mind which words the headline had and which it skipped. In his world, to be able to touch something was to be able to say it was yours, and if it was yours you could make it how you wanted it — the laundry center, the headline, Momma.

Momma and Daddy met in 1980, six years before they opened the laundry center. They were young. Momma was 22. Daddy was 29. She was widowed, and he was divorced. Then, after a Halloween trip to a North Mississippi courthouse, they were married. 

I have asked Momma more times than I can count why they chose to elope — “It was his wish” — and why they decided to do it on that day instead of any other. “It was his birthday.” She could have stopped after the third word both times.

Momma and Daddy built the laundromat — and the first part of their life together — from nickels and dimes. Daddy was just like his daddy, a carpenter who drank Budweiser and “bumpy face” gin all day. Momma was like all the Black folks in Mississippi, willing to work with her hands to live. She traded factory jobs for factory jobs, then traded all of the money she made from them to help Daddy collect the quarters of Black folks whose factory jobs didn’t pay enough for them to live and have things like washers and dryers at the same time. 

There are four pictures of the laundry center that I know of. One shows the front of the building, the slanted roof reading fos  er’s laundry center. One shows my brother, as a toddler, standing in the parking lot. The other two photos show the laundry center when it was nothing but a concrete slab and matrix of two-by-fours. In one of those pictures, Daddy stands in the main entrance, his body somehow both muscular and indistinct, wearing only a pair of white shorts. His right hand holds his left wrist, looking. In the other of those pictures, Momma is standing in the same entranceway, almost exactly where Daddy was standing but not how. She is wearing a blue floral print dress and sandals. The weight of my unborn older brother pushes her body out and slightly to the left. Her hands cup the king studs that stretch up beside her. The sky looks dusk. The trees look country. She is looking directly into the camera.

“You can count dollars quicker than you count quarters, don’t you think?” Momma had told me, more times than I can count — something a white loan officer at a local bank had said to her and Daddy after the laundry center’s grand opening. The last time she told me that story, we were watching “Columbo” in a small apartment in East Memphis. It was March of 2021, a year after I had gotten sick from something that felt like the flu, except longer and with more coughing and less energy. I did not get tested then. I knew it was COVID-19. There was never a day when I believed I would die, but there were weeks of nights that I felt like it. I wanted my Momma, but not more than I wanted my Momma not to feel what I was feeling. I stayed home.

When Momma and I talked that day in Memphis a year later, so much had changed. COVID-19 had been credited with more than 2.5 million deaths. The world had paused. And Momma had moved.

“It was something about us that that white man liked,” Momma said, proud, talking again about the bank officer. He had signed off on the initial loan for the laundry center and offered to help secure a second loan to convert the laundry center into a rental duplex. Trading quarters for dollars. Momma and Daddy took him up on the offer.

In the five years between 1987 and 1992, Momma and Daddy converted the laundry center into a two-unit duplex, then expanded that two-unit duplex into a six-unit apartment complex, then sold the apartment complex and used the money to help them build a house­ — and the next part of their life together — in a town about forty miles south of where the laundry center stood. We moved into the house in 1994.

“When we first moved in, nothing was done,” Momma said. “Nothing was completed. We had a shell of a house. Concrete floors with no rug. Sheetrock with no paint. No wallpaper. Bathrooms with no plumbing.” Then her voice went from remembering to laughing. “We had a kitchen though. Had a stove in there because I had to cook. I haaaad to cook. Your daddy was gon’ make sure I did that.”

The house was big enough to hold all of our things: furniture, memories, Daddy’s dreams and nightmares. We filled it up until we emptied out. In 2005, my brother graduated high school and decided to go to college in Tacoma, Washington, more than two thousand miles away. A couple of years later, I graduated high school and decided to go to college in St. Paul, Minnesota, more than a thousand miles away. The year after that, Daddy died of liver cancer. The house became Momma’s house then. Her world became her world again. The stuff too.

“That’s what my mind just kept coming back to,” Momma said, reflecting on why it took years after Daddy’s death to decide to sell the house. “All that stuff.” Neither of us could remember whose idea it was. I thought the idea was mine. She knew it was hers. Maybe it was neither of ours. Maybe the idea came home one day by itself and just waited for Momma to find it. “This would have been in 2016.” Her words trailed off and stayed a murmur for a while. Eventually I could hear her again. “I would look up and see all the stuff I would have to try and go through and get rid of it, or figure out what I’mma do with it. That’s why I didn’t sell it then.”

“Two lifes take up a lot of room,” I said. We were still watching “Columbo,” both knowing what would eventually happen. The detective would figure it all out, and even the stuff that didn’t make sense would.

There was a heavy, blue living room set that I can only remember sitting on one time, the day of Daddy’s funeral. Momma said it was her favorite. There was something Momma called a hutch and another heavy piece of furniture with a knob and a hinged top that we both agreed to call a record player. The house had gotten both of those, and other things, from Grandma’s house when she died, two weeks after Daddy, her son, did. Momma and Daddy had picked up other pieces of stuff too, all in pairs and sets in their early years together. A round kitchen table with a black marble top. A love seat. A sectional. Later on, Momma replaced the stuff my brother and I had taken from the house with her own touches, her own taste­, using the imagination that Daddy had tried to take from her. She made everything how she wanted. She filled the rooms with bright colors and Bobby Womack, closets with wigs and purses, Saturday nights with champagne and Barry White. There were pictures everywhere too, framed and scaling the walls, folded and tucked into things not meant to hold them, in drawers and on countertops. And flowers, planted and growing around the house and out near the mailbox, and always on Mother’s Day.

In the backyard, there was the storage building that Daddy built, where he used to get high and fix stuff. Further out, there was the shed that Daddy made my brother and me build. It was beside the fence he made us lay around the land, land that he made us cut and keep for the cows, cows that he made us watch, feed, sell, and chase for the money. It always seemed to come back to that.

It took four years — from 2016 to the seventh month of the pandemic — for Momma to want to sell the house at the same time somebody else wanted to buy it; and it took five months for us all to agree on what should happen to all the stuff inside. 

I want to say I helped Momma. That’s why I took a job that brought me back to Mississippi in 2016 — to help. I want to say I went every weekend and moved things from upstairs to downstairs, from inside to a burn pile out back by the clothesline that Daddy used to grow his grapes. I want to say I lifted the heavy things for her and organized the important ones for us. I want to say I was there. But the pandemic made things go in reverse. A year seemed like ten. A week felt like it stretched on for months. One day was all the others. The best thing you could do for the people you wanted to be closest to was stay away. 

I helped when I could, but Momma moved that house, just like she helped build the laundromat and a world for my brother and me to live in. She lifted and pushed. She piled and hauled. She packed and loaded. She climbed. “I did,” she said, at sixty-one years old, “and when I finished, I went through every room, every single room, and stood or sat, and said I can’t believe it. You did it. I told myself. I did it.” 

“And I touched everything. I touched the walls. I went over the closet doors. I talked as I was going through. I touched everything to let it know I was there. Then I laid down in the kitchen floor — Bruce’s kitchen,” she said, smiling. “My kitchen; and I remembered.”

“Mine” from Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, edited by Valerie Boyd (Lookout Books, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by B. Brian Foster. Reprinted here with the permission of Lookout Books, University of North Carolina Wilmington, lookout.org. 

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