- Every morning, Mama would take her rent receipts, their marriage license, and her passbooks, and would go seek a job at the superintendent's office.
- But she never had any luck.
- Demoralized, she would come home and face the many chores of a poor housewife – cooking, cleaning, and fixing the "rags" that the children wore.
- Yet she still found time to share folklore from her people, the Tsonga, enthralling Mark, Florah, George, and Maria with her stories.
- She was teaching them that "memory to us black folks is like a book that one can read over and over again for an entire lifetime" (12.7).
- They would dance, sing, and listen to the stories.
- Mark calls those stories a sort of library, a time when he learned the values and virtues that he needed to last him a lifetime.