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.)