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Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day was a small homecoming, a spiritual event, a celebration of black women and their power, a love story, and a lesson in being your better self. About a woman, the descendent of descendants of seven sons of seven sons before them born to an emancipated slave, who finds love and brings him home to visit, this book has all the comfort of down home folks, and all the darkness that can lurk inside and outside of memory, and the outcomes of acts so tempestuous they are like hurricanes in the small island community that belongs to no state and no man. This book was a mood. It made me miss my granny and her sisters who are holed up in another city, and it made me want to spend more time immersed in my own damn self. Naylor is a powerhouse, and her stories dig deep into what we know, what we suspect, and what we could never guess. My one beef with this book, and it is a big one, is the toxic homophobia and transphobia that is woven throughout, a blight in a book that was otherwise electric with life, and something that I wish newer editions could edit out - we don’t need that in our communities or on our pages, and I wish that authors could reflect back and grow their books and their minds over time.