In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1449-1463



[Access article in PDF]

Extending the Line:
From Sula to Mama Day

Cheryl A. Wall


Lyrical, seductive, and justly celebrated, the prologue of Gloria Naylor's 1988 novel, Mama Day invites the reader into a fictive world that in its location, history, customs, and beliefs is a world elsewhere. Belonging to the United States, but part of no state, Willow Springs can be located only on the map that the front matter of the book helpfully provides. A place that has been black owned and self sufficient since 1823 when an enslaved conjure woman compelled her master to deed the land to her and her descendants, its existence is anomalous in the extreme. What renders this unfamiliar world accessible to many readers is the narrator's language. The use of black vernacular English and the direct address to the reader create an illusion of intimacy that is reinforced by the narrator's invitation to include readers in on a joke that is told at the expense of a resident of Willow Springs. "Reema's boy" is mocked as a classic example of an educated fool. Schooled on the mainland, Reema's boy, in the only identity the narrator grants him, has returned with a tape recorder and an addled brain. He has subsequently published his ethnography of Willow Springs in which he identified the island's "unique speech patterns" and specified examples of "cultural preservation." His "extensive field work" has yielded what seems to those on the island who read even the introduction of his book an inane conclusion. The "18 & 23s," the all purpose phrase that encodes something both of the island's history and its philosophy, he has determined, is actually an inversion of the lines of longitude and latitude on which Willow Springs was once located on maps. From this observation, Reema's boy has extrapolated the conclusion that inversion is the key to the worldview of Willow Springs, a place where in order to assert their cultural identity, people had "no choice but to look at everything upside-down" (8). Such a conclusion may impress his fellow academics, but the people of Willow Springs dismiss him and his findings. They wonder "if the boy wanted to know what 18 & 23 means, why didn't he just ask?" (8). Then they go on to admit that they would not or could not have told him. Had he learned to "listen," however, he would have found out for himself. 1

Reema's boy is not the only butt of this joke. The buzz words that the narrator attributes to the ethnographer are at least as common among literary critics. Indeed, the narrator's words might be taken less as a joke and more as a warning to those who would reduce the complexity of the author's vision to catch phrases. But, just as the residents of Willow Springs have had fun with Reema's boy, misleading him as often as telling him "the God-honest truth," Naylor seems to be having some fun of her own. Critics have been attentive to the many allusions in Mama Day to The Tempest, Hamlet, [End Page 1449] and King Lear; they have discerned as well intertextual connections to William Faulkner's "The Bear," Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tar Baby. 2 Indeed, Henry Louis Gates asserts that, "in the history of the African-American literary tradition, perhaps no other author has been more immersed in the formal history of that tradition than Gloria Naylor" (ix). Like all of Naylor's novels, Mama Day is studded with allusions. A primary intertext that has seldom been cited is Morrison's Sula.

Sula is more than "a point of reference," as one critic terms it, that suggests a first name for two of the dead daughters of the Days ("Peace") as well as a female centered family structure. Not only its characters but its sense of place, its perspective on history, its representation of ritual and its language are in sustained dialogue...

pdf

Share