Mama by Terry McMillan

First published: 1987

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1964-1984

Locale: Point Haven, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Mildred Peacock, a black mother of five
• Freda, Mildred’s oldest daughter
• Curly Mae, Mildred’s sister-in-law and best friend

The Novel

Mama presents the social, communal, psychological, and individual story of Mildred Peacock and her struggles to achieve a satisfying life for herself and her children. Mildred is a resident of Point Haven, Michigan, an industrial town about ninety miles from Detroit. The novel details Mildred’s financial, romantic, and parental problems as she rears five children to adulthood. Though titled Mama, the novel is more concerned with showing one woman trying to be the best mother she can be while also trying to be the best person she can be. The opposition of these roles (mother and individual) fuels much of the tension, conflict, humor, and character development that make Mama such a success.

Set when the Civil Rights, Black Power, student protest, anti-Vietnam War, and feminist movements made their most significant cultural gains, Mama positions its protagonist’s struggle within the larger context of a rapidly changing America. Everybody is a little off balance. The setting emphasizes the turbulence and chaos that mark Mildred’s life.

Mildred’s children are relatively young during the beginning of the novel, and this period is dominated by Mildred’s finding ways to keep a roof over their heads, put food on the table, and keep utilities from being disconnected. Being sole breadwinner is difficult. She works at various times during the 1960’s as a waitress, domestic, unskilled laborer, and, with reluctance, briefly as a prostitute. Eventually, she goes on welfare. Motherhood consumes much energy, and Mildred needs diversions; although Mildred is a mother, McMillan insists that she is also an individual, an individual who needs sexual expression and romantic love. Mildred has several sexual affairs. She even marries two more times, but her heart is never quite with the men she marries, so she divorces them.

The 1970’s find Mildred living in Los Angeles, where she is able, because of a new government program, to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley. Her daughters continue to do well in school and in their personal lives. Her son Money still uses drugs and returns to Point Haven, where he is arrested and is in and out of jail for a few years. Mildred likes her house with its pool, but she is largely unhappy, continues to drink too much, and has relationships with men that are only temporarily fulfilling. Her financial troubles—the mortgage, the utilities, money for her daughter’s wedding—continue to plague her, and, in a remarkable sense, she is no better off than when she lived in Point Haven. Her move to Los Angeles on a personal level is a failure, but on a maternal level it is a good one: Angel and Doll go to college and develop into intelligent, independent, and productive young women.

It is only when Los Angeles overwhelms her that Mildred decides to return to Point Haven for good. She reasons that who she is and what she wants out of life have little to do with geographical location. In the 1980’s, with her children grown and apparently successful (she does not know the mess Freda has made of her life), Mildred has more than enough time to reflect on her life, her choices, and the many problems she has had to face, often alone. She is disturbed by physical changes: her sagging breasts, her weak health. The alcohol and cigarettes diminish her health so much that she has little choice but to give them up. While recovering her health, she rediscovers her self. Most important, Mildred discovers that she has worked exceptionally well within the limits of the role of mother, and she decides that, though she is older (forty-eight at novel’s end), her life is not over. She makes plans to enter a community college and make a career for herself, for she knows that, having reared her children into successful adults under sometimes horrible conditions, she can do other equally satisfying tasks as well.

The Characters

McMillan ties her development and articulation of major characters in the novel to her protagonist, Mildred Peacock. Mildred’s personality, conflicts, defeats, and triumphs influence her children and Curly Mae and announce as well as advance the novel’s most significant themes and issues. In this regard, McMillan treats character development as an outgrowth of Mildred’s pervasive presence in the novel.

As a mother, Mildred is both conventional and a rebel. Her conventional mothering is seen in her struggles to provide the necessities for her children. Mildred provides for her children in conventional ways when she is married to Crook. Though her husband is abusive and has extramarital relationships, Mildred is usually home making sure that her children eat well, are clothed properly, and do their homework. Although Mildred drinks and goes out to nightclubs, she is usually available to her children.

When, however, Mildred divorces Crook, she begins to provide for her children in less conventional ways. She works inside the system at first. She works at an automobile factory until she is laid off, works as a waitress, and, for a brief period, works as a prostitute. She even, with reluctance, goes on welfare.

In Mildred’s struggle to keep a roof over her children’s heads and to find some space for herself, McMillan shows Mildred’s willingness to make even more daring choices, such as taking in male boarders who have risky or unknown pasts or marrying men she does not love to have financial security. Mildred often rationalizes that, since she has little access to power or even a decent job, it is acceptable for her to operate outside the system to secure her children’s comforts.

McMillan makes clear that being poor and a single mother is difficult. Mildred often escapes her financial struggle by excessive drinking and smoking; she is not always aware of what is really happening to her children. The irony in McMillan’s presentation of Mildred’s unfolding character is clear: The mother who struggles to do so much for her children neglects them in more important ways. It is Mildred’s unintentional neglect that helps McMillan to define and shape the portrayals of Mildred’s children.

As the oldest child, Freda is more sensitive to her mother’s struggles and feels the pain that Mildred is experiencing. At the same time, she does not approve of the ways in which Mildred chooses to meet the family’s financial problems. Mildred, for example, has too many barely known adult men coming and going in her house. One of these men almost rapes the teenaged Freda, a fact Freda does not tell her mother. A child who understands her mother’s struggle and pain, Freda is also a child who needs her mother’s love and does not always feel that she has it. As a consequence of Mildred’s struggles to make ends meet, Freda becomes determined to live differently. As soon as she gets the chance, she leaves her hometown in search of a career and love in Los Angeles and, later, New York.

Mildred’s other children also have scars from their mother’s unintended neglect. Once Crook leaves, Money, as the only boy, feels it is his responsibility to help his mother alleviate her financial woes. He begins stealing, then smoking, drinking, and eventually using heroin. Like Mildred, he lives and operates outside the system, and his illegal activities land him in jail. He tells his sisters that he has always felt alone in the family, which he believes centers around the girls.

Bootsey, like Freda, silently disapproves of Mildred’s parenting. She rebels against her mother’s choices by becoming extremely conventional. She marries right out of high school to a stable man who works at the local Ford plant, and she begins a life that is financially secure but boring. She spends her time acquiring the right clothes, the right house, and the right appliances for her house.

Angel and Doll, the two youngest daughters, also create lifestyles that oppose their mother’s. They go to college, marry successful men, and essentially live the suburban experience.

As much as Mildred’s daughters deliberately try to live life differently from Mildred, they all have a number of relationships with men that are similar to many of Mildred’s. As they grow older and begin having children of their own, moreover, Mildred’s daughters come to understand that their mother did the best she could with the little her environment offered.

Critical Context

Mama fits into two major African American literary traditions: social realism and black women’s writing. One hallmark of African American literature is its attention to portrayals of real African American life. Often social, political, and economic institutions that oppress African Americans are scrutinized, and how African Americans respond to oppressive conditions can be the focus of a literary work or a major part of the work’s backdrop. McMillan presents with sensitivity and knowledge the hardships that a number of African Americans experienced during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time when America promised much for African Americans but offered little.

Mama shows one family’s attempts to better itself while adapting to social change. The Peacock family learns that, regardless of what oppressions lurk outside the home, the family is the point of reference. McMillan’s ability to capture the full scope of African American life—the pain, the humor, the triumphs, the earthy and poetic language—dominated initial responses to the novel.

Mama, in giving expression to a number of women characters, articulates and extends the literary tradition of black women. McMillan details Mildred’s inside and outside story, the private self and the public self. In this sense, Mama looks back to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and its theme of a woman’s journey of self-discovery and self-definition in a world that does not value black women. This theme of a black woman searching for self while trying to fulfill some other role, such as mother or wife, also informs McMillan’s Disappearing Acts (1989). McMillan’s first two novels reveal the beautiful and complex stories of those who live in urban black America.

Bibliography

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Emphasizes how black female subjectivity helps to structure many texts in the black women’s literary tradition. Sees Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a paradigm for other black women writers.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Maternal Narratives: ‘Cruel Enough to Stop Blood.’” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Argues that the presentation of black mothers in contemporary black women’s fiction is best understood by analyzing the interactions of daughters in relation to a complicated maternal history.

McMillan, Terry. “Terry McMillan: The Novelist Explores African American Life from the Point of View of a New Generation.” Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 239 (May 11, 1992): 50-51. McMillan discusses Mama, her other fiction, and her place in the publishing industry.

Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. A collection of interviews with African American women writers.

Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984. Chapter 4, “The Halo and the Hardships: Black Women as Mothers and Sometimes as Wives,” discusses black women writers’ creation of mothers. Pays attention to the contrary impulses or allegiances that dominate black mothers’ lives: allegiances to family and to self. An acceptance of one may mean the other suffers or is neglected.