The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

In Search of Eve’s Garden

4 Mapping the New World Order: Bailey’s Café In Search of Eve’s Garden Last in a tetralogy, Bailey’s Café foregrounds the subversive gestures that are to empower mid-twentieth-century African Americans in the quest for wholeness, freedom, and self-identity. What is new to Naylor’s evolving canon is a focus on the universal dimensions of oppression and the necessity of mounting a strategy of resistance that globalizes the struggle for positive sociopolitical change. Such a strategy involves the construction of a unifying myth that challenges colonialist inscriptions of nationhood and places of origin. In order to locate a narrative of beginnings that can offer a buffer against the larger society and its repressive ideologies, one need look no further than the collective memories of a global community of outcasts. Naylor thus assembles a transnational group of storytellers spinning tales of trauma, displacement, and maternal loss that point to the existence of a black goddess whose healing, redemptive presence joins individuals across time and space as one collective body. The novel’s vernacular roots in black music and oral lore offer a clue to understanding figurations of a prototypical maternal figure and her close association with a radically transformed domestic space. Reminiscent of the prefatory map at the beginning of Mama Day, the cryptic epigraph in Bailey’s Café charts the trajectory leading to the unscripted space serving as a habitation for this elusive figure: 54 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café hush now can you hear it can’t be far away needing the blues to get there look and you can hear it look and you can hear the blues open a place never closing: Bailey’s Café.1 The epigraph is an interstitial text—one that harks back to the novel’s antecedent beginnings in oral tradition and anticipates the discrete linguistic patterns in the narrative proper. The ambiguous admonition to look and thus hear recalls a similar urging in Mama Day where the communal narrator encourages the reader-audience to “really listen” in a reification of intuitive thinking or the alternate ways of knowing. One must abandon essentialist thought before entering the intensely feminine world that Naylor constructs—a liminal space where the meaning associated with an established linguistic order loses all validity. In this regard, Bailey’s Café, way station for a multinational group of citizens in transit, and Eve’s place, domicile for a largely female assembly, serve as institutional sites positioned along a path leading to freedom from imposed limits. It is Bailey, the fatherly war veteran and café proprietor, who gives a clue to the vernacular and its role in allowing access to the places through which Naylor’s fictional characters must pass in the journey toward self-identity. He informs the reader, “Anything really worth hearing in this greasy spoon happens under the surface. You need to know that if you plan to stick around here and listen while we play it all out” (35). Naylor’s revisioniststrategypromptsareconfigurationofgeographicboundaries demarcating the magically real café. In Mama Day, George Andrews claims that he is able to see the restaurant when he is in New York. In Bailey’s Café, however, the author undermines George’s rationalist perspective and that of the reader when pointing out that “ . . . the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the 55 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café world and infinite possibility . . .” (76). Later the omniscient narrator reveals that “one can find Bailey’s Café in any town” (112). The path mapping the journey to the café leads through the vernacular and reveals the presence of fluid, increasingly expanding boundaries that allow access to a blueslike space of dynamic potentiality. Figured by the dark expanse behind the restaurant, itself situated at the liminal crossroads, this place can yield either hope or despair. It is in a site of intermediacy that the characters encounter Eve, the culmination of a long line of central mother figures in Naylor’s canon and the woman who best represents the enriching complexity associated with black maternity. “Mood Indigo,” Sadie’s narrative of her frustrating search for belonging in the urban Midwest, underscores the collective need for the sense of stability that a connection with maternal origins can bring. The desire for belonging propels Sadie forward in life as she attempts to find the unconditional love and acceptance she does not receive...