Another wonderful book. I quickly came to love and care for the main character, Magnolia.
When the book opens, she is crawling around on the sticky floor of a restaurant in a mall in Miami to avoid being shot by a young man intent on destroying as many people as possible. She and the others in the restaurant hear more gunfire, then instructions by police getting them out of the building. She is able to go directly to her car without seeing anyone, so she decides to carry on with her day without telling anyone, including family.
Magnolia, called Ma by family, had moved to Miami from Albany when her daughter Zoë was four years old, along with Zoë’s father. They had been college friends, and without having been a committed romantic couple, found themselves to be loving parents. She and Harrison were from Haitian families and the book is full of references to those connections. Not long before the mall shooting, she had asked Harrison to move out and they amicably and comfortably cared for Zoë. Harrison had been regularly asking her to marry him over the years, but she had declined. She acknowledged that she missed their routine conversations.
It was her hope she could pretend this shooting didn’t happen to her, “Maybe I’m not wrong to try to ignore the shooting. Perhaps it was not a big deal after all, in the general scheme of things.” And that day she did go on with her real estate showings scheduled for the afternoon, was concerned about her mother in Haiti being operated on for appendicitis, and had dinner with Harrison and Zoë. But as weeks go by, she finds herself looking at news of those who died and those who survived. At Zoë’s birthday party, when family members shoot Ma with a super-soaker, she becomes hysterical and others are alerted that something is up.
After she eventually tells Harrison what happened, he is initially in distress that she hadn’t been able to tell him, but later: “I wish I could have been there with you, ” he says. “I wish I could have been there for you.” Later when he gave her the bag she had abandoned in the restaurant that he had retrieved, she touched his flushed cheek and they have a silent but emotional moment while Zoë watched them. Ma needed the love and support of her mother and Harrison’s mother and found she could sleep when the three of them cuddled in bed. This is the story of Ma’s journey from thinking she could pretend this did not happen to her connections to other victims to the eventually acknowledgement that she needed the support of those she loved.
I loved the pleasant ordinariness of Ma’s life with Zoë and Harrison, their funny interactions, Zoë’s soccer games, the difficulties of changes in Little Haiti with small beloved businesses being bought out by real estate owners, and her trials with her troubled mother. Though most Haitian references escaped me, I enjoyed becoming conscious of a different world.
Edwidge Danticat, Dèy, Alfred A. Knopf, 2026, 233 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.