Mama Day

Gloria Naylor's third novel, Mama Day (1988) details the lives of the title character, also called Miranda Day, and her great-niece, Cocoa (Ophelia). With sections set in New York City and on Willow Springs—a barrier island that is due east of the border between South Carolina and Georgia and actually in neither state—Naylor creates a magical world set against a background of family history and unique geography.

Following an elaborate map of Willow Springs, a family tree of the Day lineage, and a bill of sale for the most important ancestor, Sapphira Wade, Mama Day begins with a prologue giving the pedigree of the island and its inhabitants, dating back to 1799. Naylor writes the prologue in the conversational, colloquial voice of Willow Springs itself, a narrator that returns later. From its current vantage point of August 1999, the prologue reaches back to 1823, the time that Sapphira Wade seized power from the white landowner, Bascombe Wade (whom she killed). Sapphira also convinced Bascombe Wade to deed all of Willow Springs to his former slaves and her descendants, who still own the land in 1999.

The first main section of Mama Day begins with Cocoa's frustrated job search in New York City just before she returns home to Willow Springs. While interviewing for a clerical position in an engineering firm, Cocoa meets and immediately dislikes George Andrews. However, apparently because of Mama Day's magical intervention, George and Cocoa begin to date. Their courtship starts gradually with George showing Cocoa New York City and also educating her about its ethnic richness. Even after their subsequent marriage, it is not until several years later that Cocoa and George return to Willow Springs together. In the interim Cocoa visits her grandmother Abigail and Mama Day alone each August, and George goes on annual solo vacations following professional football.

When George and Cocoa do go to Willow Springs together, the action that begins part 2 of the novel, the main characters converge, resulting in Mama Day's climax during a violent storm. During this visit, rational George must confront the supernatural elements of the island's force, Mama Day's magical powers, and the idea that Cocoa's sudden desperately ill health comes from conjuring by an enemy. Yet George's upbringing as an urban orphan does not prepare him for the demands of this mythical realm. While his attempts to suspend his disbelief ultimately fail, resulting in his own fatal heart attack, George's sincere efforts help heal Cocoa, and Naylor implies that his sacrifice is necessary for her recovery.

Throughout Mama Day, Naylor presents three different narrators. Much of the novel involves Cocoa and George speaking in passages that occur after his death and within their separate and shared consciousness. Naylor narrates other parts of the novel in the omniscient voice of the island—with special emphasis on Mama Day, whose musings involve her premonitions and attempts to “listen” to the messages of her heritage. At the very end of the work Naylor's all-knowing narrator looks forward to Cocoa assuming the matriarchal role after Mama Day passes on.

Mama Day has received substantial critical acclaim, with praise for its folkloric qualities, its use of magic, its poignant characterizations, its Shakespearean model (The Tempest), and its treatment of gender, especially focused on generational sisterhood. Some critics have especially commended Naylor's positive depiction of men in the novel, particularly when compared to the more negative portrayals in her first work, The Women of Brewster Place (1982).

Bibliography

• G. Michelle Collins, “There Where We Are Not: The Magical Real in Beloved and Mama Day,” Southern Review 24 (1988): 680–685. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds., Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993

Kristine A. Yohe

Gloria Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), made her an overnight success, but her third novel, Mama Day (1988), solidified her reputation as one of the foremost authors of the African-American women's fiction renaissance, along with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and others. Although reviewers were initially confused by the novel's mixture of realism and the supernatural, most readers consider Mama Day a powerful and richly-layered depiction of how the past and the present, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural converge in the lives of African-Americans.

The novel juxtaposes the story of a successful African-American businessman, George, who has grown up in New York City, cut off from any sense of where he or his people came from, with that of a young African-American woman, Cocoa, who must come to terms with her powerful ancestral legacy. Their clash and uneasy union is brought to a head when they visit Cocoa's home, Willow Springs, a magical place that holds the secrets of Cocoa's past and the key to her future.