The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Everybody’s Mama, Nobody’s Slave: Reinscribing the Legend of Sapphira Wade

3 Finding Peace in the Middle: Mama Day Everybody’s Mama, Nobody’s Slave: Reinscribing the Legend of Sapphira Wade Since her appearance in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Sapphira Wade has been the unwitting subject of varied and, at times, competing critical readings drawn from African as well as European points of view. Dorothy Perry Thompson regards the island matriarch as “the conflation of the need for a new woman-centered spirituality and ancient African ancestor worship.”1 Susan Meisenhelder refers to her as “Naylor’s ideal black woman.”2 More recently, in an interrogation of the Africana mythological and spiritual nexus out of which Sapphira evolves, Teresa Washington suggests the figure as “the tutelary Orisha of Willow Springs and the center around which the text and textual lives revolve and evolve” (116–17). The range of critical perspectives brought to bear upon the Willow Springs matriarch enhances her mystique even as it purports to illuminate Sapphira and the novel that has immortalized her. Viewing her is much like gazing at an object through a kaleidoscopic lens: She remains static but is seemingly ever changing, defying reductive attempts at naming, labeling, and, hence, circumscription. Her presence lends a rich complexity to the novel—a work that is as intricate as the double-ring quilt pattern that Miranda and Abigail stitch—and she draws the reader into the text, engaging us in the myth making surrounding Willow Springs’ most famous, or, more aptly, infamous, resident. If there is one aspect of Mama Day that critics agree upon, it has to do with the relative dimensions of truth in a novel evolving 38 Finding Peace in the Middle | Mama Day out of the fluid lore emanating from Sea Island culture. Truth is never fixed; rather, like Sapphira herself, objective reality is as dynamic as the uncertain boundaries demarcating the Willow Springs community. The story of the island matriarch “ain’t about right or wrong, truth or lies,” the communal narrator reminds the reader.3 Mama Day points out that “everybody wants to be right in a world where ain’t no right or wrong to be found” (230). She tells George, prior to his journey to the chicken coop, that “ain’t about a right way or wrong way—just two ways” (295). Finally, after George’s untimely death, Cocoa concedes regarding their courtship and marriage , “[T]here are just too many sides to the whole story” (311). The vibrant lore of the indigenous population subverts predetermined meaning encoded in institutionalized discourse, linguistic fact, or, to interject a term especially germane to Naylor’s authorial strategy , master narrative of white, patriarchal dominance. Established truth becomes a fiction at the hands of the author who, in the case of Naylor’s imaginative rendering of the legend of Sapphira Wade, privileges cultural memory as a site of resistance against the imposition of colonial rule. In Naylor’s fictional cosmology as in oral tradition, the power to recall is an enabling mnemonic practice among those denied access to the written word and printed text. Remembering thus allows for the creation of an alternate reality, a counterhegemonic discourse that critiques, undermines, and subverts cultural paradigms of the dominant society. Willow Springs closely resembles what Homi Bhabha describes as a Third Space of cultural fluidity and transnational identity (The Location of Culture). The restrictive bounds circumscribing the upper-middle-class neighborhood in Linden Hills give way to a uniquely maternal island paradise that defies geographic limits. An examination of Mama Day’s intermediate locale not only sheds light on the postcolonial search for a utopian home that transcends artificially imposed boundaries but also encourages the reader to foreground that quest within the larger geographic and discursive framework of the middle passage. Naylor’s reliance upon a range of 39 Finding Peace in the Middle | Mama Day vernacular sources results in the creation of a multifaceted text in which oral lore encodes the circuitous route to home. If there is a persona that is emblematic of this journey, it is the trickster, a transatlantic figure whose subtle modus operandi is to disrupt and subvert. Susan Meisenhelder, Lindsey Tucker, Teresa Washington, and Daphne Lamothe have read Sapphira, Miranda, and even Willow Springs residents as figurations of the elusive folkloric persona.4 What remains to be done in an interrogation of Mama Day, Naylor’s critically most acclaimed work and a novel demonstrating her dependence upon myth...