Mama Day
Gloria Naylor, 1985
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679721819
Summary
On Willow Springs the presiding presence is Mama Day, nearly one hundred years old and still going strong.
Mama Day knows herbal cures and can summon lightning with her walking stick. She knows the true story of "the great, grand Mother" Sapphira Wade, who in 1823 persuaded her master to deed the island to his slaves, "bore him seven sons in just a thousand days" (p. 3), and killed him before she vanished in a burst of flame. Most of all, Mama Day knows that her world—any world—runs on the magic of belief.
These are the truths she will try to impart to her great-niece, Cocoa, a woman almost as formidable as Mama Day herself, and more important, to Cocoa’s New York–bred husband, George.
When George accompanies his wife on a fateful visit to Willow Springs, Naylor’s two worlds—and seemingly opposing realities—are brought together. As Cocoa falls victim to the island’s darker forces, this meticulously rational and self-reliant man discovers that the only way he can save her is by casting reason and self-reliance aside and by submitting to the wisdom of Mama Day, a woman he strongly suspects is crazy.
Mama Day affords the pleasures of both the "classical" novel—an intricately structured plot replete with doublings and foreshadowings—and the folk tale, with its oral rhythms and supernatural events. Unlike much contemporary fiction, it also imparts lessons about how we should live. Students who read this book will come away bearing some of the wisdom of Mama Day herself, perhaps most of all the understanding that "everybody wants to be right in a world where there ain’t no right or wrong to be found" (230). (From the publisher.)