The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Being around Living Mirrors

49 Finding Peace in the Middle | Mama Day Being around Living Mirrors In fictionalizing the legend of Sapphira, Naylor mediates between a range of texts as she seeks to create an interstitial reality where individuals are allowed to realize their unlimited identity and potential. Unlike Linden Hills, with its account of Willa the beleaguered housewife whose discovery of the documents that her maternal forebears author culminates in death, narrative action in Mama Day leads to an idealized home that refigures not only the centuries-old patriarchal Nedeed mansion in Naylor’s second novel but also the nineteenth-century Wade-Sapphira estate with its history of domestic strife. Mama Day’s identity as New World trickster underscores the place of the vernacular in the recovery of this space. As the mediating transatlantic figure uniting black cultures across the AfricanDiasporaandaguardianofcrossroadsandentrances,Mama Day embodies a reconciliation of the dialectical tension between masculine and feminine, self and other, sacred and profane. She fulfills the role that Henry Louis Gates Jr. ascribes to Esu-Elegbara, divine trickster of Yoruba mythology, offering individuals in transit a pathway leading through oral expression (6). Although Susan Meisenhelder asserts that the world view in Mama Day is not tragic, her reading of George as someone whose ignorance of and disdain for the feminine results in “his recapitulating the tragic love stories of Bascombe Wade and John-Paul” fails to take into account the complexity of Mama Day’s logic in sending George to the chicken coop.15 Daphne Lamothe offers a more accurate assessment of George’sperilousriteofpassagewhenshesuggeststhatMamaDay’s words stem from an awareness of the ways that the gendered difference that George embodies is “just as vital as her own strength and resources to the salvation of her niece.”16 Indeed, the veiled words that the daughter of Legba proffers are as much a test of George’s willingness to cross over—that is, enter into a realm where one is able to mediate between aspects of difference—as much as they are a coded map leading away from the danger associated with Western 50 Finding Peace in the Middle | Mama Day rational thought. She therefore offers the cryptic advice George is to follow if he is to ensure Cocoa’s recovery: “There are two ways anybody can go when they come to certain roads in life,” she tells George. “ . . . [A]in’t about a right way or a wrong way—just two ways. And here we getting down to my way or yours. Now, I got a way for us to help Baby Girl. And I’m hoping it’s the one you’ll use” (295). Naylor points out that George is to join hands with Mama Day in a symbolic display of communal solidarity rather than depend own his own ability in rebuilding the bridge destroyed during the storm.17 Because the literal-minded engineer is either unable or unwilling to follow Mama Day’s cryptic instructions, death is the penalty exacted for the outsider’s failure to decipher the trickster’s lore. Ironically, as if to underscore the enriching duality often associated with the trickster’s words, George’s journey leads to Mama Day’s desired goal: a return on the part of both George and Cocoa to a place that is neither linguistically coded nor geographically marked. The fact that Mama Day is unable (or perhaps unwilling) to locate a picture of George is consistent with Naylor’s emphasis on the unreliability of artificial attempts to mark blackness. George is not to be imaged, an inadequate medium for recording the black subject , but re-imagined, in mnemonic fashion, in dynamic re-creation of a hybrid self not enclosed by national boundaries. Cocoa’s declaration that her son “was named after a man who looked just like love” (310) recalls both the meaning Naylor ascribes to “the other place” as another narrative plane where love and magic prevail18 and the terms inscribed on the fading bill of sale: “love,” “tender,” and “kind” (280). After undergoing her crucible, Cocoa finds peace in the middle with Mama Day as a guide along a path leading to a New World Order of domestic harmony—a metaphysical site recalling both Naylor’s remembrance of her grandmother’s “down-home” Harlem residence and the middle passage—where dialectical tensions cease. That Mama Day uncovers the century-old well where Peace dies is a symbolic act paving the way for an end to the conflicted [3.144.172.115] Project MUSE (2024...