Mama Day by Gloria Naylor essay AFAS 342

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor is a novel that relies on Magical Realism to construct a narrative that weaves together folklore and contemporary literature. Focusing on the relationship between George, who was raised in a white-thinking, patriarchal orphanage, and Cocoa, raised by two emphatically African-American culture and lore oriented mother figures, the novel comes to a head with the intersection of a logical, “real” world and a mythical one. Ultimately, Cocoa is so tied to the South (and thus Willow Springs) due to strong folkloric traditions. It is these traditions that epitomize the gap of understanding between her and George--and ultimately leads to his death.

From the beginning eight pages of the book, written in third person, Naylor established what author Trudier Harris calls a “porch connection” in her book The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Harris argues that this “porch voice” is what invokes a “Southerness” in the novel. This porch voice allows Naylor’s novel to transcend normal literature and transform into an imitation of folklore by positioning itself within a mythical place with a rich history and placing itself among the audience. Placing its narrative outside of the real world, this porch voice challenges the audience to accept myth and magic in a world outside of white parameters, even challenging the audience to question the setting of its own narrative, “Think about it: ain’t nobody really talking to you. We’re sitting here in Willow Springs, and you’re God-knows-where. It’s August 1999--Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Sapphira Wade, though nobody here breathes her name. You done heard about it the way we know it, sitting on our porches and shelling June peas, quieting the midnight cough of a baby, taking apart the engine of a car--you done heard it without a single living soul really saying a word.” (Naylor, 10).

It is only with this voice of Southern oral tradition established that we can then examine the complex, reverse reality that exists within Willow Springs. In Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day: Magical Realism as the Site of Black Female Agency and Empowerment, Nesrin Yavis explains this reverse reality exists to “affect black female agency and empowerment with which black women can give voice to the silences and gaps in official history writing. The co-existence of two distant narrative discourses in the novel's very structure, one magical and mythical, the other rational, deconstructs Western systems of knowledge and representation, replacing them with a matrilineal, mythical/magical system of signification, with which black women can re historicize and articulate their communal histories by drawing upon myths, legends, orality, folklore, and other non-Western practices.” By presenting a world outside of the logical parameters of the white American culture, Yavis argues that African-based myths and cultural practices are able to coexist with contemporary realities within black communities. Much like the porch voice transforms the narrative for the reader, this subverting of reality allows a more complex understanding of the narrative.

Folklore is meant to be passed down orally from generation to generation, changing along with the socioeconomic realities of those who are passing it. This constant conversion is represented by Willow Springs and its inhabitants attitudes towards oral tradition as ever present and ever changing. Although their history is deeply rooted in the legend of Sapphira Wade and the year 1823, the discourse surrounding these ideas is always changing with 18 & 23 meaning several different things based on the context of a situation. It is also worth noting that while Mama Day does notice the subtle changes in sacred traditions, she is never resistant to it. For example, she takes notice in how the Candle Walk changes little by little with each generation, and although she find nostalgia in these thoughts she is not trapped in them, accepting the change as it comes. Mama Day herself is an excellent example of this folkloric attitude. In being a healer and conjurer she exists to mediate between myth and reality, constantly creating new ways to view relationships, history, myth, and reality. A further example of this is her relationship with her sister Abigail, “two peas in a pod, but… two peas still the same.” (153 Naylor). By looking past what is apparent and existent she is constantly reimagining complexities between community and self, past and present, joy and pain, and despair and triumph.

In thinking how she can never translate this constant re-articulation to her logical and scientific husband George, Cocoa describes a two-dimensional image--typical of white ways of understanding experiences--could never do Willow Springs justice, "Four pictures would just about do it, one for each season one needs a different kind of vision to understand Willow Springs: ... here you'd have to look real close to see a gray hair or so inching around some temples, a little extra roll starting over some belt buckles. But slow, real slow. So slow it's like it's not happening at all. Until it happens. Overnight, some say" (161 Naylor). In “The Whole Picture” in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (Woman’s Culture Issue), Susan Meisenhelder reflects this sentiment in saying, “The white world’s maps, picture, movies and myths are depicted as inadequate to express the black experience.” From the beginning up until the very end George struggles with this concept, frustrated he can’t find maps of the island or that he can’t apply his scientific knowledge to the storm or the lightning. Indoctrinated by sentiments of American individualism, toxic masculinity, and a western male sense of self (“Only the present has potential, sir.” (23 Naylor) being a continuing theme from the moment he hears it in his orphanage) he is unable to step into this liminal space in which the present interacts with the past.

The best example of the contrast between George’s possessive love and the symbolic relationship between self, time, emotion, and others is the wedding quilt. The quilt incorporates many pieces of fabric, but at the same time, it is one piece. It incorporates fabric from past and present that hold both joyful and painful memories. As Miranda sews it she decides to keep a piece of her mother’s fabric in it even though it holds painful memories. The quilt is a way of keeping a piece of history that no postcard or document ever could, “This notion of history as a quilt, more than simply a way of chronicling the past, is a complex weaving of past, present, and future. The quilt Mama Day stitches is, for instance, not just a historical "document" of a dead past, but a tangible bridge between herself, Abigail, and the children of Cocoa's that neither will live to see.” (Meisenhelder). Unfortunately, George is unable to piece together the happy and sad memories, always relying on empirical data rather than emotion and feeling. When he looks at the quilt he sees something that looks stained or ghostly.

This inability to see past what is in front of him summarizes his greatest flaw, as told by Harris, “For all the tales of otherworldly phenomena, the novel is based upon belief. It is because George cannot believe beyond what he is able to sense, reason, or experience that he comes to his fateful end in this novel.” (56). The greatest alienation George makes from this folkloric way of life is through his comparison of himself to Shakespeare, and Cocoa as a Harold Robbins figure. In being unable to connect him and Cocoa to figures other than the anglo-saxon dogma he was taught in New York, he is unable to connect with the history and way of being of Southern, African American communities. In a similar way that he makes preconceived notions about romance and his own life based on Western mainstream ideologies, he also had several false preconceived notions about women. Unable to view the story of Saphirra Wade from the perspective of a black woman being liberated and empowered, he views Saphirra as greedy and violent. By understanding the history and independence of black women through white context, George only trivializes the sacred legend.

In understanding his own role as that of a romantic hero, deriving from traditional macho white European male figures in the literature he reads, George is unable to let go of his preconceived notions in order to save Cocoa. In trying to finally integrate Geroge into this new way of being, Mama Day supplies him with rituals and tasks that existed within an entirely different context to that which he was used to living in, “Sent with Bascombe Wade's receipt for the purchase of Sapphira and John-Paul's walking stick carved with water lilies, both emblems of male failure to be everything for women, symbols of their futile hopes "that the work of their hands could wipe away all that had gone before” (285 Naylor), George embarks on a quest designed not to acquire a symbol of his individual prowess but to transcend those very values.” (Meisenhelder).

Being described as only having experienced “miracles” and “immortality” within football, his only experiences of letting down the heroic bravado were within contexts of hyper masculinity and patriarchal values. In crossing over the bridge into Willow Springs, he truly traverses a cultural chasm. Unfortunately, experiencing the stories of Sapphira and even his own wife’s near death George is still unable to transcend the burdens placed on him by a culture that fails to value aggressive individualism, rigid empirical data, and hyper masculinity.

Works Cited
Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria

           Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens: U of Georgia, 1997. Print.
Meisenhelder, Susan. ""The Whole Picture" in Gloria Naylor's 'Mama Day.' (Women's Culture

            Issue)." The Free Library. African American Review, n.d. Web. 11 May 2017.
Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 2002. Print.
Yavas, Nesrin. "Gloria Naylor's Mama Day: Magical Realism as the Site of Black Female    

Agency and Empowerment☆." Gloria Naylor's Mama Day: Magical Realism as the Site  

of Black Female Agency and Empowerment - ScienceDirect. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 May  2017.