SOURCE: Whitt, Margaret Earley. “Understanding Gloria Naylor.” In Understanding Gloria Naylor, edited by Margaret Earley Whitt, pp. 1–9. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Whitt provides an overview of Naylor's life and career.]

CAREER

Gloria Naylor's first four novels—The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), and Bailey's Cafe (1992)—constitute her quartet of novels, the books she planned as the foundation of her career.¹ Each of the novels in turn connects with the one to follow; mention of a character or a place in one becomes the central focus of the next. In the ten years that separate the first and fourth novel, Naylor demonstrates an increased sophistication in recasting character and place. In these novels children die, dreams get deferred, and place, whether literal or mythical, becomes a way station in life's journey. In each novel, a community of women emerges—sustaining, enabling, and enriching the lives of one another.

In the late 1970s, in a creative writing class at Brooklyn College, the professor told her students to be bold, send out their creative endeavors, and say that the sample was part of a larger work.² Gloria Naylor, sitting in that class, took this advice and mailed off “A Life on Beekman Place” to Essence. They published the story in March 1980 while Naylor was still an undergraduate; it was an early draft of the “Lucielia Louise Turner” chapter/story in the work-in-progress that was to become her first novel.

In 1982 The Women of Brewster Place was published by Viking Press. Describing the female residents in looks and lifestyles was important to Naylor. As she states in a 1989 interview in Ebony, “One character couldn't be the Black woman in America. So I had seven different women, all in different circumstances, encompassing the complexity of our lives, the richness of our diversity, from skin color on down to religious, political and sexual preferences.”³ The following year the novel won the American Book Award for Best First Novel. From the beginning, reviewers looked at Naylor's work alongside that of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, who published The Color Purple the same year. Naylor, who had herself only recently discovered the existence of a long black literary tradition, was suddenly a part of it. When Ebony touted the reigning black women novelists in 1984, Naylor was the chosen representative of those who “are coming forward to take their place in the sun.”⁴

Her second novel, Linden Hills, was published by Ticknor & Fields in 1985. At Brooklyn College, Naylor had been reading Dante's Inferno in a survey course of great works of western literature when it occurred to her that Dante's structure would work for the neighborhood she had in mind, a place where its inhabitants sell their souls for a piece of the American Dream—a home in the right neighborhood, a marriage partner to enhance an image, and children who would carry on the design. To be successful in Linden Hills meant obtaining an address as close as possible to the lowest circle of this upscale hell.

Three years later, in 1988, Ticknor & Fields published Mama Day. From three perspectives, Naylor delivers the love story of George and Cocoa—from the points of view of George, Cocoa, and the mystical island of Willow Springs, an island off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, which speaks for itself and does not appear on any map. The reader's attention and consciousness must shift from New York City to Willow Springs, from the world of rational, logical thought to a place of otherworldliness, where “across the bridge” thinking does not make sense on an island imbued with the haunting power of Miranda (Mama) Day. This is a large novel in every aspect, one in which Naylor demonstrates that love's power operates in ways the human mind can only begin to fathom. References to Shakespeare abound in this novel and are most apparent in her use of The Tempest.

The way in which life operates on Willow Springs moves this novel into the mythic realm. Suspending belief is paramount to accepting, if not completely understanding, Willow Springs and the conjuring activities of Mama Day. Listening is important in any Naylor novel, and in Mama Day the author gives instructions on how to listen. The reader needs to understand that words will appear which no one speaks, unknown words will have a variety of meanings depending on context, and known words may mean something other than what the reader thinks. A story exists below the surface of the words; to read the story thoughtfully is to listen actively to a world that makes its own sense.

Similar instruction is given at the beginning of Naylor's 1992 Bailey's Cafe when the reader discovers that words are symbols for music: “There's a whole set to be played here if you want to stick around and listen to the music.”⁵ The culminating novel of the quartet, which has also been rewritten and presented as a play, is organized around a jazz set. All the world's a jam, it would seem, and its players merely instruments upon the stage. As in the beginning of Naylor's career, the seven “women” of Brewster Place are now a new seven women who wander into the world of the maestro, a man often called Bailey, who happened to buy a café by that name and never bothers to tell its visitors that Bailey is not his name. The café is introduced in Mama Day, but when it appears in the fourth novel, it is no longer in one specific place; it may exist anywhere. People who need it will always be able to find it. Life has not been kind to the characters assembled here, but their stories, which reflect who these women are, like everything that matters in life, are below the surface (19).

In The Men of Brewster Place, her 1998 fifth novel published by Hyperion, Naylor returns to familiar territory. While Brewster Place's women take center stage in her first novel, Naylor shifts her focus to the men that add meaning to the lives of their women. The flat single roles the men played in the first novel are expanded here, giving depth and understanding to their personalities. Man by man, their individual relationships with the women are placed in larger contexts. While no community of men emerges, Naylor ends this novel with hope.

Naylor's writing includes other genres. She has written personal essays for Essence, Life, People, and the New York Times and its magazine. She has edited and written an introduction for Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present.

OVERVIEW

Down deep, there is something inherently southern in Gloria Naylor. It can be seen in the way she tells a story, paying careful attention to the details of her characters' lives, and in the painstaking meticulousness with which she draws the places where those fictional characters dwell. Though she was born in New York City, she was conceived in Robinsonville, Mississippi, the oldest daughter of sharecropping parents who had spent their days in Tunica County in the Mississippi Delta, in the northwest corner of this cotton-growing state. Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor left Mississippi in December 1949 so that their first child could be born in the North, a part of the country that her parents perceived would offer educational opportunities for this unborn child and those that would follow. Her mother loved to read but was denied the use of the public library because of her skin color. It was coming North that provided her parents with the opportunity to become real Americans and to see their children spend their youth dealing “within this society,”⁶ for at mid-century, Mississippi was very much a closed society, as historian James Silver called it, to those other than white Christians.⁷

Naylor has said that it was her “conception in the South that has played the more important role in shaping [her] life as a writer.”⁸ She was born on January 25, 1950, a birthday she shares with Virginia Woolf, who once asked a question which Naylor appears to answer in her writing: “Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”⁹ Naylor's response expands Woolf's statement, suggesting that women can also be more interesting to women.

Naylor was a high school senior honor student at Andrew Jackson High in Queens when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April 1968. Naylor found her response to that event influenced by her mother's conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses and that group's message of a theocratic government. At the time becoming a Jehovah's Witness missionary seemed appropriate, so she got behind the wheel of her Dodge Dart and took to “the dusty byroads leading from I–95 South, just wanting to see whatever the towns looked like wherever that road ended.”¹⁰ She was a missionary for seven years (1968–1975), spreading that message in New York; in and around Dunn, North Carolina; and in Jacksonville, Florida.

When she returned to New York, she enrolled in Medgar Evers College with plans to seek a degree in nursing. When the study of literature began to occupy more of her time, she transferred to Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and graduated with a B.A. in English in 1981. As Naylor relates in her 1985 “Conversation” with Toni Morrison, in her creative writing class she learned that in order to write good literature, one had to read good literature. The list included Tillie Olsen, Henry James, and Toni Morrison, but it was Morrison's The Bluest Eye that had a singular significance: “Time has been swallowed except for the moment I opened that novel because for my memory that semester is now The Bluest Eye, and The Bluest Eye is the beginning. The presence of the work served two vital purposes at that moment in my life. It said to a young poet, struggling to break into prose, that the barriers were flexible; at the core of it all is language, and if you're skilled enough with that, you can create your own genre. And it said to a young black woman, struggling to find a mirror of her worth in this society, not only is your story worth telling but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.”¹¹

A scholarship for graduate work at Yale made it possible for Naylor to pursue her newly discovered awareness of a long and rich black literary tradition. Linden Hills, her second novel, became the creative thesis for an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from Yale in 1983, a manuscript she completed while teaching at George Washington University. In 1985 Naylor won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and served as a cultural exchange lecturer in India for the United States Office of Information. In 1986 she was visiting professor at New York University and wrote several HERS columns for the New York Times on such topics as psychics, dating, and the popularity of the television game show Wheel of Fortune. She also won the Candace Award of the National Coalition of One Hundred Black Women. In “Reflections,” a piece in Centennial, she interviewed her parents, who had by this time been married thirty-six years, about their varying reasons for leaving the South and coming to New York.

Naylor was a visiting lecturer at Princeton in 1987 and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Other universities at which she taught or lectured include the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Brandeis University, and Cornell University. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, in 1992. From 1989 to 1994 she served on the Executive Board of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In order for Naylor to have control over her books as they move into various genres, she formed One Way Productions in 1990.

Naylor sees herself as a filter through which her characters come to life.¹² She has expressed disappointment, for example, that George in Mama Day turned out to be a football fan, which required of Naylor hours of research on a sport that did not interest her.¹³ Also, she was not pleased that in Linden Hills Willa Prescott Nedeed came out of that basement with her dead child prepared to clean the house: “What that woman finally came to, after that whole travail, was that she was a good wife and a good mother and that she could go upstairs and claim that identity. That is not what I thought Willa would do, but Willa was Willa.”¹⁴ In what she calls her psychic revelations, her characters assert themselves, and she feels obliged to honor those images. Characters in a book not yet written appear to her, and it is only later that she knows what to do with them. As an example she tells this story: “One image that kept haunting me from even before I finished Linden Hills: a woman carrying a dead male baby through the woods to this old woman. I didn't know why she was carrying the dead baby, but I knew her name because the old lady said, ‘Go home, Bernice. Go home and bury your child.’”¹⁵ Several years later when she was working on Mama Day, it occurred to Naylor that Bernice's baby, the one she had gone to such extremes to conceive, was going to die. Naylor acknowledges that while she is not slave to those images, she does feel compelled to honor them.

Naylor conceived her quartet in the late 1970s, knowing that the composition could begin after she had her titles, dedications, and the last lines in mind. Writing about the black community in all its multivocality and displaying her characters in colors she describes as nutmeg, ebony, saffron, cinnamon red, gold, nut brown, smoky caramel, to list a few, were of paramount importance to her in a time when many black writers were expected to depict the black experience. Each of the four novels was to be a voice representing some part of the black community: The Women of Brewster Place was meant to “celebrate the female spirit and the ability to transcend and also to give a microcosm of Black women in America—Black women who are faced by a wall of racism and sexism.”¹⁶ In this quartet Naylor provides stories in octaves, themes in refrain, and characters in repetition. With the addition of her fifth novel, Naylor's pattern of character and geographical connection continues.

In The Women of Brewster Place Naylor uses the seven different notes of a musical scale to convey seven different stories. Linden Hills also has seven stories; the grace notes of shorter, quicker stories attached sound the various alarms—losses, one by one, of everything that was once held most dear: love, food, religion, music, athletic endeavor, family, and the connection with the past. As a celebration of love and magic, Mama Day explores a “brave new world that has such people in it,” as Shakespeare reminds the reader in The Tempest. For here, characters who are dead talk without words to characters who are alive and listening. The romantic love story is embraced within a familial love that resonates with magic, orchestrated by Mama Day's hands that move to and with a tempo which she alone hears. In the final novel of the quartet, Bailey's Cafe, Naylor presents its seven stories of female sexuality through the blues, best delivered by jazz. Each character is a living embodiment of pain so deep that movement away from its source, a recurring motif in the blues, is an urgent necessity. The café as way station is all that is left in this world for a moment of rest. The black man's blues is the pulse of The Men of Brewster Place, and the novel's last line offers a possible prediction of Naylor's future direction: “the music plays on … and on …” (173).

Notes

1. “Gloria Naylor,” I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, ed. Rebecca Carroll (New York: Crown, 1994) 160.

2. Donna Perry, ed., “Gloria Naylor,” Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993) 222.

3. “Women of Brewster Place,” Ebony 44 (Mar. 1989): 123.

4. “Black Women Novelists: New Generation Raises Provocative Issues,” Ebony 40 (Nov. 1984): 64.

5. Naylor, Bailey's Cafe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) 4. All parenthetical citations from Bailey's Cafe are from this edition.

6. Naylor, “Reflections,” Centennial, ed. Michael Rosenthal (New York: Pindar Press, 1986) 71.

7. James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) 6–10.

8. “Gloria Naylor,” World Authors 1980–1985, ed. Vineta Colby (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1991) 636.

9. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929) 27.

10. “Graceful Passages,” Essence 21 (May 1990): 136.

11. Naylor and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Review 21 (July 1985): 568.

12. Perry, Backtalk 225.

13. J. R. Moehringer, “Keeping Up with the Characters,” New York Times Book Review 21 Feb. 1988: 7.

14. Perry, Backtalk 230.

15. Perry, Backtalk 225.

16. Pearl Cleage, “Gloria Naylor,” Catalyst Summer 1988: 57.