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.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1950
• Born—New York, New York, USA
• Died—September 28, 2016
• Where—Christiansted, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands
• Education—B.A., Brooklyn College; M.A. Yale University
• Awards—National Book Award
Gloria Naylor was was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988). She was born in New York, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin.
Background and early years
The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City. Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal. Before her teen years, Gloria began writing prodigiously, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short stories.
In 1963, Naylor's family moved to Queens and her mother joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. An outstanding student who read voraciously, Naylor was placed into advanced classes in high school, where she immersed herself in the work of nineteenth century British novelists.
Education
Naylor's educational aspirations were delayed by the shock of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her senior year. She decided to postpone her college education, becoming a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida instead. She left seven years later as "things weren't getting better, but worse."
From 1975 to 1981 Naylor attended Medgar Evers College and then Brooklyn College while working as a telephone operator, majoring in nursing before switching to English.
It was at that time that she read Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, which was a pivotal experience for her. She began to avidly read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and other black women novelists, none of which she had been exposed to previously. She went on to earn an M.A. in African-American studies at Yale University; her thesis eventually became her second published novel, Linden Hills.
Career
Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, was published in 1982 and won the 1983 National Book Award in the category First Novel. It was adapted as a 1989 television miniseries of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.
Naylor went on to publish Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1987), and Bailey's Cafe (1992). Each of these novels garnered much attention for their exploration of the modern black American experience.
Naylor's work is featured in such anthologies as Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (1990), Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (1992) and Daughters of Africa (1992).
During her career as a professor, Naylor taught writing and literature at several universities, including George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, and Cornell University.
Death
Naylor died of a heart attack on September 28, 2016, while visiting St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. She was 66. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/8/2018.)
Book Reviews
Resonates with genuine excitement.… [A] big, strong admirable novel.
New York Times Book Review
This is a wonderful novel, full of spirit and sass and wisdom, and completely realized.
Washington Post
Naylor has a dazzling sense of humour, rich comic observation and that indefinable quality we call "art."
Rita Mae Brown - Los Angeles Times
The beauty of Naylor's prose is its plainness, and the secret power of her third novel is that she does not simply tell a story but brings you face to face with human beings living through the complexity, pain and mystery of real life.
Publishers Weekly
[Mama Day] showcases Naylor's talent for descriptive prose. Though the novel as a whole fairly breathes with life, it is marred by the unintentionally comic death of a major character, who is attacked by a vicious chicken. This farm boy was not convinced. —Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. On page 10 we are told that people on Willow Springs know the story of Sapphira Wade "without a single living soul really telling a word." How can a community know its history if that history remains untold? What distinction does this book make between spoken and unspoken truth? Which kind of wisdom does it value more highly?
2. In what way is Mama Day a book about people’s perceptions and misperceptions—not only of each other, but of reality itself?
3. Mama Day possesses a number of powers that might be called supernatural: she knows the secrets of people she sees on television; she can turn flowers into butterflies and cure a woman’s infertility by magic. Yet she also describes what she does as "mother-wit disguised with hocus pocus" (97) and maintains that "she ain’t never tried to get over nature" (262). How can both of these things be true? How does Mama Day view her powers? Compare her "magic" to the magic practiced by Ruby and Dr. Buzzard.
4. On page 61 George observes, "My city was a network of small towns." What does he mean by this? How does George’s New York compare to Willow Springs? In what ways is Mama Day a book about small towns and their inhabitants and histories?
5. The sections of Mama Day that are set in Willow Springs contain a great deal of gossip. What sorts of information does the gossip of Willow Springs impart? What does gossip tell us about the community in which it circulates? In what ways is Mama Day a book about "the oral tradition"—about the kind of knowledge that is not imparted by books but by people’s gossip, stories, and folklore?
6. George and Cocoa fall in love reluctantly. And, even after they fall in love, they often seem to punish each other for it. Contrast their fear of emotional connection with the attitudes of Miranda and Abigail, who, like George and Cocoa, have suffered because of love. In addition, the two sisters know a secret that George and Cocoa do not: that each of the preceding Day women has broken the heart of the man who loved her. How does Naylor develop the theme of love—between man and woman, mother and child, grandmother and granddaughter, and sister and sister—in this book? What connections does she draw between love and heartbreak?
BEYOND THE BOOK
1. In describing the peculiar logic that prevails on Willow Springs, Naylor’s narrator says: "Being we was brought here as slaves, we had no choice but to look at everything upside-down" (8). In what ways do people on Willow Springs see things "upside-down"? In what ways is Willow Springs an upside-down or mirror image of New York? What other reversals and inversions occur in this book?
2. Each of the major characters in Mama Day has a key phrase that sums up his character and world-view:
- Cocoa: "Nothing stays put" (63);
- George: "Only the present has potential" (23);
- Mama Day’s: "Folks see what they want to see. And for them to see what’s really happening… they gotta be ready to believe" (97).
Talk about how these phrases reflect Cocoa, George, and Mama Day? How do these people’s characters and beliefs clash in the course of the book? How do they change?
3. Mama Day is full of aphorisms that tell large truths about the world inside and outside the book. Discuss some of the following, what they mean and what role they might play in the book as a whole:
- "I had what I could see" (27)
- "The only miracle is life itself" (43)
- "Every blessing hides a curse, and every curse a blessing" (78)
- "Lead on with light" (110)
- "A man dies from a broken heart" (118)
- "I was losing you because of my fear of losing you" (129)
- "Ain’t no hoodoo anywhere as powerful as hate" (157)
- ."It’s all happened before, and it’ll happen again with a different set of faces" (163)
- "A woman shouldn’t have to fight her man to be what she [is]; he should be fighting that battle for her" ( 203)
- "You were entering a part of my existence that you were powerless in. Your maps were no good here." (177)
- "I can tell you the truth, which you won’t believe, or I can invent a lie, which you would" (266)
- "There’s only the sense of being. Daughter" (283) m."She needs his hand in hers—his very hand—so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before" (285).
4. Discuss the legend of Sapphira Wade—"the great, grand Mother" who began the Day lineage. What role does this myth play in Willow Springs? How is Sapphira’s half-remembered story echoed by the stories of her female descendants? What role, in general, do mothers play in Willow Springs and in Mama Day?
5. One of the techniques that Gloria Naylor uses to great effect in this novel is foreshadowing—hinting at themes and events that will gradually become more explicit and meaningful in her story. Discuss how Naylor uses foreshadowing to develop one of the following:
- the theme of the mother
- men with broken hearts
- mistrust and belief
- "the other place"
- magic, good and evil, true and false
- the storm
- G. the relationship between Abigail and Miranda Day,
- the theme of the sacrificed child.
6. In the fictional Willow Springs, Gloria Naylor has constructed an alternate world, populated exclusively by African-Americans and exempt from many of the crueler turns of America’s racial history: for example, Willow Springs may be the only place in the American South where blacks have been able to vote uninterruptedly since the nineteenth century.
Yet Willow Springs also embodies—and in some ways magnifies—the history of black Americans, beginning with the fact of slavery itself. In what ways does Naylor use her invented world to comment on America’s racial history? What does she accomplish by creating a world in which the races are wholly separate?
7. Mama Day makes use of many traditional African-American customs and beliefs, like Candle Walk, conjure women, working roots, and the use of brooms as symbolic barriers. Find out about a tradition in your own family, community, or ethnic group, perhaps by consulting grandparents or other older relatives. What are the origins of this tradition? How has it changed over the generations? How is it observed today?
8. Mama Day’s given name is Miranda and Cocoa’s is Ophelia. Both of these names appear in Shakespeare’s plays; Miranda in The Tempest and Ophelia in Hamlet. Do a little research into the two plays and then discuss how Shakespeare's heroines compare with their namesakes in this novel. Why might Gloria Naylor have chosen these names for her characters?
9. Gloria Naylor has written other novels set in self-contained communities: the inner-city of The Women of Brewster Place and the mythical diner of Bailey’s Cafe. Talk about the worlds of these books and Mama Day. Why do you think she has chosen to set these books in such highly compressed "universes"?
10. Mama Day employs the literary technique called "magical realism," in which elements of dreams, fairy-tales, and mythology are combined with recognizable everyday reality. Which characters, settings, or events in this novel are "realistic"? Which ones are "magical"? What role does magic play on Willow Springs?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)