and between them. Presence and absence, self and other, ordinary spaceand the well are equally acknowledged. Such thinking thus shifts from the traditional Western emphasis on fixed entities and the irreconcilable separations between binary opposites to a blurring of boundaries and an embrace of inclusiveness.³

A similar shift is often advocated by those who have been historically excluded from mainstream Western culture. Feminist theorists, for example, have welcomed the doubled perspective afforded by women's insider/outsider status.⁴ Similarly, the ambiguous status of African Americans within but outside mainstream American culture has necessitated a “double-consciousness,” to use W. E. B. Du Bois' famous term. The doubleness is not only a curse but also a blessing, for it leads to “second-sight”⁵ and a “special perspective,”⁶ which allows for openness, the embrace of contradiction and paradox, and a broad inclusiveness, even of one's deepest fears.⁷ Black feminine theorists have emphasized the unique perspective of black women as the other other in American culture, a perspective that especially enables them to see all other perspectives.⁸

Like Morrison's fiction, Gloria Naylor's novels are empowered by her ability to carry readers into the bitter-sweet conditions of contemporary life. By depicting the complex and paradoxical mixtures of tragedy and joy in African-American characters' lives, Naylor leads her characters and readers into the ambiguous but strangely satisfying realm of the différence, into life not in avoidance of the abyss but at its edge.

In Naylor's fiction, the only literal image of a well is the crucial scene in Mama Day in which Miranda Day overcomes her fears and opens the well where her sister Peace killed herself. As Gary Storhoff asserts, Miranda “ha[d] evaded the symbolic truth of the well,”⁹ fearing to face her family's tragedy. She had only sensed the loss felt by Peace's mother, ignoring the loss and grief also borne by her father. As for Violet Trace, opening the well enables Miranda to reconnect with the past, in her case to identify with her father's pain: “Looking past the losing was to feel for the man who built this house and the one who nailed this well shut.”¹⁰ This opening at the edge of the well gives Miranda access to her paternal ancestry, which heretofore had been overshadowed by her reliance on her female ancestors, especially the Days' legendary foremother, Sapphira Wade. Opening herself to her father's grief not only contributes to the community's ongoing reinterpretations of its history and its identity, but it leads her to an understanding of George's strength of will and to her discovery of the means of saving her niece Cocoa.¹¹

For Miranda, as for Violet, the well symbolizes the tragic familial past and the grief that cannot be borne or even admitted. To prevent future family tragedy, she must accept the past tragedy. She must “look past the pain” (283)—hers as well as her father's. To do so constitutes a reawakening: “She sleeps within her sleep. To wake from one is to be given back ears as the steady heart tells her—look past the pain; to wake from the other is to stare up at the ceiling from the mahogany bed and to know that she must go out and uncover the well where Peace died.” The well itself is an image of death and decay: “a bottomless pit,” full of “foul air,” the surface of the water “slimy and covered with floating pools of fungus” (284). At first Miranda feels nothing, but “refusing to let go of the edge,” she closes her eyes and then viscerally feels the repressed pain: “And when it comes, it comes with a force that almost knocks her on her knees. She wants to run from all that screaming” (284). As in Jazz, the position at the side of the well is essential, for there one comes into significant relationship with the unimaginable. In such proximity, that other is no longer a fixed or original entity inflated out of proportion because of its inaccessibility; instead, one can learn to know it by returning to it, consumed neither by its presence nor by a futile attempt to decree its absence. Instead of a dead end, the well becomes a vehicle for growth, play, serenity, insight, love.

Through a variety of metaphorical wells and well-like images, Naylor's fiction probes the issues associated with wells. Both Brewster Place and Linden Hills, the communities in which her first two novels are set, are like wells: the former is an urban block, closed off from the bustling city by a high brick wall; the latter is a V-shaped hill whose circular drives wend downward to the Nedeed house. As Barbara Christian argues, both communities are “self-enclosed,” cut off from the rest of American society, much like African Americans throughout American history.¹² Life in these well/traps is hellish, in Brewster Place primarily because of the impositions of white power, and in Linden Hills primarily because of the greed, envy, and social ambitions of the residents. In The Women of Brewster Place, there is no outside perspective, but Linden Hills includes the more humane attitudes of Willie and the Andersons, who live not in Linden Hills but just outside it. For them, generosity, empathy, and love far outweigh status and economic success; their perspectives, symbolically on the rim of the well, allow them to nurture their own and others' souls rather than to lose their souls like the residents of Linden Hills.¹³

In both novels, other well-like images reinforce the negativity. In The Women of Brewster Place the alley is a dead end within the dead end of Brewster Place. The domain of C. C. Baker's macho gang, it stands in opposition to the female-dominated street. In this novel there is no fusing of the two genders, no accommodations, only dead ends. Hence, when the fragile Lorraine, who had futilely sought accommodation between her lesbian lifestyle and the community of heterosexual women, mistakenly enters the alley, it literally becomes her tomb. In Linden Hills, each house becomes a well/tomb for the African-American inmates, each of whom has given up his or her soul in order to gain supposed status.¹⁴ Laurel Dumont's empty swimming pool is literally her death/trap when she dives into it. But the house as tomb is most graphic for the generations of Nedeed women. Each is trapped, and/or allows herself to be trapped, in the house and obsessions of her husband. The series comes to its macabre conclusion with the last woman, Willa Prescott Nedeed, who, having failed to produce the proper replica of her husband, is locked in the basement with the corpse of her son, too light-skinned to satisfy her husband. In that well, a former morgue, she is “entombed in ‘otherness’” like all black women¹⁵ and like all African Americans. And in that well, Willa discovers traces of the myriad sufferings of the former Mrs. Nedeeds—in their journals, their recipes, their photograph albums. What she finds is not full representations but fragments, suggestive of the fragmented lives to which the women were reduced. According to Margaret Homans, Willa finds “a record simply of effacement and silencing,”¹⁶ not presence but presence of absence, a pattern repeated once again in Willa's own life.¹⁷ Forced in her captivity to confront herself, her history, and the histories of her predecessors, Willa awakens to her responsibilities for her own life (Ward 192). Having descended into the well, she can return to life only momentarily, only long enough to reorder her life, symbolized by her cleaning the kitchen, and to settle accounts with her husband. Despite the brevity of her return, the self-awareness she achieves in her agony indicates the power of such confrontation with the past and the hidden self, power that Miranda Day is able to marshal after she opens the well which her father had sealed shut.

Mama Day is replete with examples of characters' harmful fixations on narrow objectives, obsessions that limit them to the closed unity of the well. The Day family history is marked by former suicides; Frances and Ruby exhaust themselves in their single-minded pursuit of Junior Lee; and George kills himself in his determination to be Cocoa's sole savior. As Meisenhelder argues, characters who try to achieve their purposes in isolation (in a well) always fail, but success comes to those who perceive the quilt-like pattern of life in which everything and everyone is independent—a distinct piece of the fabric—but joined in harmony with all the other pieces.

In this novel, unlike Naylor's first two, the emphasis shifts from narrow failures to integrated successes. In The Women of Brewster Place Mattie mothers other women in her dimly realized sense of compassion but is powerless to prevent Lorraine's death, and the women's ritual attempt to tear down the wall is similarly futile. In Linden Hills, the community's failure is even worse, especially since it is self-imposed, although the momentary awakening of Willa and the potential of Willie suggest promising alternatives. But in Mama Day, Miranda opens the well, thereby augmenting her already prodigious spiritual power. In Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, the settings are again isolated communities, but in both the isolation is more positive that negative. Willow Springs, a place outside real history and geography, allows for a new perspective, not limited to the racial stereotypes and cultural restrictions of ordinary places.¹⁸ Through Miranda, Abigail, Dr. Buzzard, and the whole island, Naylor delineates the therapeutic values of a position outside but adjacent to mainstream America, a position at the rim of the well that enables the characters and the reader to gain insight into the well and to live in harmony with their acceptance of it.

In Bailey's Cafe Naylor sets up a complex dynamic between the crushing stories of the characters who have drifted into the mystical neighborhood itself, presided over by “Bailey” and his wife Nadine, who run the cafe; Eve, who manages the boarding house/bordello; and Gabriel, who owns the pawn shop. The lives of these visitors to the neighborhood of Bailey's Cafe have been marred by their horrific encounters with racial and gender discrimination. That monologic power has been inflicted implacably, brutally, without question or hesitation. It has driven underground—into the well—the sensibilities and the dreams of each visitor. Each visitor tells a life story about his or her encounter with the symbolic well.

Sadie, never desired or loved, “f[e]ll through the cracks of the upswings and downswings.”¹⁹ Innately possessing a sense of beauty, “class” (68), and elegance, she is driven deeper and deeper into her private sorrow by inexorably harsh conditions. She tries to make a home with Daniel, but his drinking and the “trains thundering by” (64) their shack drive her further inward. When all her dreams fail,²⁰ liquor bottles become her personal well, as she finds solace only in the “stars” printed on them (65). The result of her years of psychological deprivation is that she internalizes the well, “the endless space of the black hole waiting to open in her heart” (64). The pathos of Sadie's story is that the brutality of her life has pushed her so deeply into the well that her dreams of a house, a picket fence, geraniums, laughter, Waterford crystal, and a good meal (72–77) are so disconnected from reality that she cannot accept Iceman Jones' offer of a shared life.

Esther, another victim of male subjugation, is driven even farther into the psychological well. Directed at age twelve by her older brother to have sex in the dark basement with a man he calls her husband, she develops a psychosis that allows her to exist only in the dark basement of Eve's boarding house. Aside from the johns who must bring her white roses and call her “little sister,” her only companions are the spiders and a radio hero called The Shadow. Because her brother cautioned her that “We won't speak about this, Esther,” silence becomes her mode, as she never has “a word for what happens between us in the cellar” (97). She is at the bottom of the well, isolated in the dark, lacking Willa Nedeed's contacts with any predecessors, and therefore unable, like Willa, to reclaim her life.

For other lost souls, the well takes other forms. For Mary/Peaches it starts as the wall her father builds around their house to keep boys out and becomes the internal wall she builds between her repressed self and her whore self that she sees reflected in every man's lustful eyes. She disfigures her face in a futile attempt to eliminate that lust and thereby to integrate her two selves. For Jesse Bell the well is the alcohol and the heroin that she uses to blot out her history of mistreatment and loss. Her only sustaining hope is to return to her childhood bedroom, which becomes the image she dreams of.

Between these unfortunate visitors to the neighborhood and the four proprietors (Bailey, Nadine, Eve, and Gabe), is Miss Maple. He has experienced the well of prejudice which he encountered at Stanford, during his three years in prison for evading the draft, and then in the humiliation of his unsuccessful job search. But he is spared the extreme brutality that the women experienced and, perhaps as a result, develops a more integrated response characterized by his female persona, his job as Eve's bouncer and janitor, his plans for his own company, and his success in jingle contests. He is the beneficiary of a radically diverse genealogy that includes African-American, Native-American, and Mexican ancestors and a very wise father. That mixed ethnicity translates into his successful mixing of genders when he sensibly yields to sexual aggression in prison and later chooses comfortable female clothing. These accommodations allow Miss Maple to find his identity (to “be my own man” [173]), to be secure in his gender (“I am a man” [212]), and to be free (“And Eve has allowed Miss Maple to be one of the freest men I know” [216]).

Miss Maple thus shares many of the characteristics of the four proprietors of the neighborhood's businesses. They offer acceptance and solace based on a hard-nosed acknowledgement of life's brutalities, on a relativistic incorporation of multiplicity, and on a gritty compromise at the rim of the well.

The neighborhood, in particular the cafe, is a metaphysical crossroads. It exists nowhere and everywhere, “right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility” (76). Like Willow Springs, it is not on any map, and yet “you can find [it] in any town” (112). It is a spiritual “way station” (221), a place “to take a breather for a while” (28), a place you have to already know about in your soul before you can find it: “If they can't figure out we're only here when they need us, they don't need to figure it out” (28). As the epigraph²¹ and the musical terminology in the chapter titles suggest (“The Jam,” “Mary (Take One),” “Miss Maple's Blues,” “The Wrap”), it is an incarnation of the blues.²² Here one is “dammed-if-you-do-and-dammed-if-you-don't” (229), and from here “the choices have always been clear: you eventually go back out and resume your life—hopefully better off than when you found us—or you head to the back of the cafe and end it” (221). The philosophy is tough love—you are neither hassled nor coddled: you follow the “routine” at the cafe or you don't eat; you play by Eve's “house rules” or you don't play (92).

Behind the cafe is the well. It is a “void” (76), an “endless Plunge” (76), “black empty space” (137), where many visitors come to commit suicide (162). But once the well is accepted—that is, once the implacable harshness of life, including death, is accepted—out back is also where dreams come true. Sadie and Jones “dance under the stars” out back (40), and Sadie “smile[s]” and “ha[s] her first kiss” (76). There, Jesse Bell at first sees nothing but upon Eve's insistence looks again and sees her dream of “the simple bedroom she'd had as a girl” (137). There, Eve arranges the dream setting for Mariam: “The void out back produced exactly what [Mariam's] childlike mind called up: endless water” (228). There, Miss Maple, liberated from the confining impossibilities of real life,

steps off boldly into the midst of nothing and is suspended midair by a gentle wind that starts to swirl his cape around his knees. It's a hot, dry wind that could easily have been born in a desert, but it's bringing, of all things, snow. Soft and silent it falls, coating his shoulders, his upturned face. Snow. He holds his glass up and turns to me as a single flake catches on the rim before melting down the side into an amber world where bubbles burst and are born, burst and are born

(216)

The abyss is not threatening to Miss Maple or the four proprietors because they are accustomed to it, because they have accepted it and all it represents. They live at the edge of the well, so it is absorbed into their stoic acceptance of anything that life can dish out to them. Collectively, Bailey, Nadine, Eve, and Gabriel provide this perspective, which Naylor strongly privileges. They are clear-sighted, straightforward, and direct: Bailey claims, “I call 'em the way I see 'em” (32) and praises Nadine for the same quality: “Like me, she calls 'em as she sees 'em” (116). Like Miranda and Abigail in Mama Day, they are all realists, not trying to be nice but honest. Despite their sometimes rough exteriors, they are compassionate and tolerant, as their lives exist to help others endure or pass beyond the pain. They have no illusions about life, expecting little from it: Gabe knows that “the world, it still waits to commit suicide” and that “we do nothing here but freeze time” (210), and Bailey accepts that “the brotherhood of man … is a crock of bull” (220), that “people are people” (222), and that “life is [not] supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel” (219).

Also like Miranda and Abigail, these four proprietors all have extraordinary strength of character, which has prevented them from becoming victims. Nadine confines her letters to Bailey to “short short” ones, but with “perfect timing” (13), and unlike most people “doesn't bother” to “translate [her] feelings for the general population” (19). Eve, when confronted with her tyrannical father, escapes, treks through the delta, and eventually establishes her rigidly run boarding house and her beloved garden (92). These characters are larger than life, possessing almost superhuman powers. Gabe is able to rescue Mariam; Bailey “can get inside a lot of heads around here” (165); and Nadine “look[s] like an African goddess” (13). Eve is the most mythical, becoming one with the delta dust (86) and walking across the delta for “a thousand years” (82). She knows the cafe routine before she arrives (80), “already knew” Esther's story (99), and “sets up” Mariam's dreamscape (224). She is a dreammaker, a transcendent heroine, a tough griot, reminiscent of Eva Peace in Toni Morrison's Sula. Like the other three, she is also an exile from ordinary reality: “It seemed there was nowhere on earth for a woman like me” (91). She and Nadine are the kind of women whom Naylor admires, women who have “turned their backs on the world” and who have “been selfish to some degree.”²³ They, like Miranda, Abigail, Bailey, Gabriel, and Naylor, have said, “I am here. That I contains myriad realities—not all of them pretty, but not all of them ugly, either.”²⁴

Through her four presiding figures, and often through Bailey as their principal spokesperson, Naylor creates a worldview that privileges tolerance, open-endedness, and complexity, all of which become possible when one has acknowledged and accepted the abyss, when, like Miranda, one has had the courage to open the well. The neighborhood accepts all comers, all who have suffered and who need relief. Customs from all over the world are welcomed: Miss Maple admires the loose-fitting business clothes of nonwesterners (201), and Bailey enjoys the music of many cultures (162). At the end of the novel, the ritual performance of George's circumcision brings the community together in a celebration of cross-cultural harmony. This valuing of tolerance contrasts sharply with the refrain of intolerance and bigotry recited by the visitors to the neighborhood. As Karen Joy Fowler comments, the book's “abundance plays against the particular pains contained in the various characters' stories.”²⁵

The neighborhood's ethos of tolerance is reinforced by the belief that everything always remains open. Bailey expresses the apparently shared views that life has “more questions than answers” (229) and that “no life is perfect” (228). Instead of having answers or perfection, human beings are caught in endless flux: “If life is truly a song, then what we have here is just snatches of a few melodies. All these folks are in transition; they come mid-way in their stories and go on” (219). Everything remains open partly because everything is more complex than it may appear. Iceman Jones knows “that most things aren't what they seem” (70), and Bailey warns readers, “If you're expecting to get the answer in a few notes, you're mistaken” (4). This insistence on complexity is expressed in the metaphor of going under the surface. Bailey, listening closely to the stereotyped opinions of Sister Carrie and Sugar Man, warns readers not to oversimplify: “If you don't listen below the surface, they're both one-note players” (33). Hearing only that one note is insufficient, for everyone in this novel—and, Naylor implies, every human being—has a complex story: “But nobody comes in here with a simple story. Every one-liner's got a life underneath it. Every point's got a counterpoint” (34). Bailey's advice for readers is that “Anything really worth hearing in this greasy spoon happens under the surface. You need to know that if you plan to stick around here and listen while we play it all out” (35). Readers must learn what the four proprietors have learned and what the victimized visitors are struggling to learn—how to go below the surface, to “take 'em one key down” (34). All must learn not only tolerance for others but tolerance and understanding of the multiple layers of meanings.

In several respects the form of this novel exhibits these values of openness and depth. The musical metaphors around which the narrative is structured push the written medium toward a nondiscursive, nonprescriptive mode, a mode that suggests rather than defines, that opens rather than narrows. Similarly, the point of view is not restricted to one voice or one perspective. Although Bailey is the principal narrator, usually introducing and concluding each character's story, his voice is not sufficient. Maxine Lavon Montgomery argues that this multiplicity is necessary because “the male voice is severely limited in its ability to decode the very private experiences the women relate.”²⁶ But the larger point that Naylor implies is that no single voice is adequate to convey the characters' experiences. A single voice would metaphorically place the text in the well, in a confining monologism; therefore, a multiplicity of voices is necessary to convey the multiplicity of life, to ensure that life and the novel keep their play. For this reason, when Bailey's voice is insufficient to narrate Mariam's story, both Nadine's and Eve's voices are required.

To avoid the constrictions of a single perspective, Naylor includes the voices of nearly every character: direct transcription of Sadie's thoughts alternate with Bailey's narration (72–78); Eve (81–91), Mary/Peaches (102–12), Esther (95–99), and Miss Maple (165–213) take over the telling of their stories; Jesse Bell's first-person narration is interpolated into Bailey's narration (137–41); and Nadine and Eve narrate Mariam's lifestory (143–60). To emphasize the plural narration, Naylor even includes the direct words of minor characters, such as the anonymous soldiers and their officer who shout their determination to “kill Japs” (21), the unnamed customers with whom Bailey argues (31), the stereotyped religious zealot Sister Carrie and the equally stereotyped hipster Sugar Man (32–34 passim), the miscellaneous customers who visit Esther in the basement (95), Esther's brother, who makes his repeated admonition (“We won't speak about this, Esther” [95 passim]), and Miss Maple's father, who declares his principles (185). Naylor also underscores and extends the plural narration by unexpectedly shifting one character's indirect discourse to another character's point of view; for example, Miss Maple's narration is interrupted by a direct transcription of the Gatlin boys' direct thought: “What they couldn't tear apart, they stomped—My God, look, it ain't got a tail after all” (180, emphasis added), and Bailey's narration is similarly interrupted by Gabe's thought: “And banging down old radios and flinging used overcoats into boxes and sweeping up a dust storm. Puppy, cover your ears, a goy shouldn't be hearing these things” (221, emphasis added).

In addition to creating a communal narration that implies the need for all perspectives to be heard, Naylor's narrative technique tends to transform the written text into oral performance. On one level, the entire text carries the sense of being spoken directly to the reader. From beginning to end, Bailey's language sounds more spoken than written, with its contractions, its informality, its casualness: the novel starts with “I can't say I've had much education. Book education” (3) and ends with “And that's how we wrap it, folks” (229). As in the latter sentence, Bailey frequently addresses readers directly: we are customers at his cafe (“And if you've got a problem with how I feel, well, there are other cafes” [12]); we are recipients of his lessons (“If you don't listen below the surface, they're both one-note players” [33]); we are taken under his wing (“But I think you've got the drift” [35]); we hear his complaints (“I want you to know right off that Nadine lied on me” [161]); and we receive his hints (“And what I heard is too ignorant to believe. And just guess who I heard it from? [Sister Carrie and Sugar Man, in case you need a hint]” [223]). The sense that readers are listening directly to the novel is sustained when both Nadine and Miss Maple also address us. Nadine begins her narration with “You already know that my name is Nadine” (143), and Miss Maples interjects a “dialogue” with readers in which the latter's presumed questions are posed and then answered by Miss Maple: “And now I'm going to hold a conversation with what I assume are some of your more troubling thoughts about this whole endeavor” (203).

On another level, the language of the text is addressed to and heard by the other characters. Several times Bailey directs asides to Nadine, implying that she is listening to his narration: “(Nadine, nobody asked you” [4]), (“Just let me make this one last point, Nadine,” [11]), and (“I told you I'd be getting to you, darling” [12–13]). Nadine acknowledges that she has heard Bailey's long address to the reader: “You already know that my name is Nadine, and my husband's told you that I don't like to talk” (143). This mutual participation in the narrative peaks during the community's involvement in the circumcision of the new infant, George. Everyone is there, even Esther, who, “wonder of wonders … smiled” (225). Peaches begins to sing a spiritual and soon everyone is singing: “One voice joined in. Another voice joined. And another” (22). They sing of the harmony of human beings and God, that each one is “a child of God,” and that there is “Peace on earth” (226). The joyful singing makes them forget about the baby: “You see, folks, that's why almost a whole hour passed without it dawning on us that we had not found out if it was a boy or a girl” (226). The three males share the male roles appropriate for the ritual: Gabriel is the father and rabbi, Bailey is the godfather, and Miss Maple “took the role of the other male guests to help [Bailey] respond to the blessing” (226). The text then includes the call of the rabbi and the response of the other males (227). As Bailey comments, “it was really touching.”

Just as Bailey is impressed with the Jewish communal ritual (“And that's what I like the most about Gabe's faith; nothing important can happen unless they're all in it together as a community”), Naylor structures her novel so that this most important event—the first birth on the block—brings this community together. Individuals may—and will—be trapped in their well-like tragedies, but communities, as in the brick-throwing celebration in The Women of Brewster Place and in the annual candle walk in Mama Day, can gain at least momentary relief by singing, by performing time-honored rituals, by telling and hearing each other's stories, and by embracing each other and each other's cultures. Multiple voices create communities and thereby help characters avoid the isolation of the well.

As the novel's multiple narrations and its orality increase the connections among the characters and readers, the shifts in point of view often enact the principle of going beneath the surface. Bailey uses the metaphor of going “one key down” (34) to indicate the deeper layer(s) of meaning beneath the surface meaning. He illustrates this strategy in his transcriptions of Sister Carrie's and Sugar Man's actual words and then in his translations of what the two really mean (33–35). First he presents their actual words, but then, in italics, tells us what they are really saying “one key down” and on “even a lower key” (34). Through Bailey, Naylor thus creates an explicit model for the reader: the stories of Naylor's characters must be read as Bailey reads the words of Sister Carrie and Sugar Man, not merely for their surface meaning but for the layers of deeper meanings. Naylor structures her stories of the novel's characters to encourage such a reading strategy. In “Mood: Indigo,” the narration of Sadie's story goes one key down when it shifts from Bailey's point of view to the italicized paragraphs that directly depict Sadie's dream of middle-class comfort with Jones (72–22). Similarly, the narration goes beneath the surface when it shifts from Bailey's voice to the voices of Eve (81–91), Esther (95–99), Mary/Peaches (102–12), Jesse Bell (117–32), and Miss Maple (165–213).

In “Jesse Bell” the narration descends even lower when Sister Carrie and Eve duel with contrasting Biblical passages (134–36) as commentaries on Jesse. During this exchange Eve sarcastically signifies on Carrie when she calls out, “Somebody in here likes Ezekiel. Somebody even likes the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel” (135). Eve subdues Carrie with this and similar counter-passages that emphasize divine love for the fallen. Naylor invites the reader to play the Biblical game by quoting Ezekiel 16:6 without identifying it, letting it stand as a concluding, and tolerating, comment on Jesse: “And when I passed by thee, and saw polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou was in thy blood, Live” (136).

The narration continues to push the usual limits when Jesse's indirect discourse is frequently interpolated, without warnings or transitions, into Bailey's narration. For example, when Bailey narrates, “Jesse didn't quite know what it meant, but this weird mama-jama was beginning to scare her” (137), “weird mama-jama” is Jesse's term for Eve, not Bailey's. The technique is most obvious in the following paragraph, in which the first person shifts abruptly from Bailey to Jesse: “Jesse has never tried to describe for me what it was like that second time around. She says there are no words for the experience. I can only tell you this, Bailey, I sincerely prayed to die” (142).

Besides drawing characters and readers closer together, the multiple, shifting narration of this novel reinforces the connections among the participants and, by extension, among all human beings. Since the point of view can flow back and forth among the characters, and since the characters can overhear each other's narrations to the reader, the physical and psychological distances among them are metaphorically eliminated. All can join in each other's dream fantasies; all can participate in the celebration of George's birth. One passage in particular, a “one key down” passage, suggests such metaphysical interconnections among people. In Bailey's introduction, as he recalls his experiences in World War II, his identity expands to coincide with all American soldiers in the Pacific. This merger begins cryptically with the refrain, “We weren't getting into Tokyo (21–23), and develops into a full-blown monologue within Bailey's narration. As The Soldier, Bailey has been present at every Pacific battle, imagines that “the end of the world is blue” (23 passim), feels the horror of Japanese civilians caught in the war, participates in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and worries about the “unborn children” and the “new age” (26) to follow. Bailey encompasses not only every soldier but also every victim and even unborn victims because he transcends the barriers that usually isolate individuals. He floats free of his well-like isolation, just as the novel's narration allows the characters and its readers to escape theirs.

Characters in this novel are able to cross such boundaries because, unlike Naylor's first three novels, here the characters are not enmeshed in limiting stereotypes. The residents of Linden Hills are trapped by their own conformity to white values of economic success and social status. George and Cocoa in Mama Day must struggle with their preconceived, white values of love, courtship, and life. In all three previous novels, Naylor sets her characters against Shakespearean models and, in Linden Hills, Dante's Inferno.²⁷ By contrast, in Bailey's Cafe, the last of Naylor's tetralogy, Naylor eschews such exterior literary models, and, as Peter Erickson notes, an elaborately bound set of Shakespeare's works is trashed in “a riddance ritual that announces the end of Naylor's artistic apprenticeship.”²⁸

This novel of Naylor's literary independence fittingly ends with the cross-cultural, communal celebration of the birth of Mariam's son.²⁹ This birth is the occasion for the neighborhood's coming together, but in keeping with Naylor's and the privileged characters' tough realism, it will not change the world: “Life will go on. Still, I do understand the point this little fella is making as he wakes up in the basket: When you have to face it with more questions than answers, it can be a crying shame” (229). For Naylor to end this novel with a birth is also significant because throughout her fiction births are rare and associated with extreme hardship. In The Women of Brewster Place, Lucielia's first child is electrocuted and her second one aborted. In Linden Hills Willa Nedeed must watch the corpse of her son as he struggles toward her own psychic rebirth and physical death. In Mama Day Bernice Duvall first develops cysts instead of a baby and then her baby dies, and pregnancy for Cocoa Day occurs simultaneously with the nearly fatal spell under which she is placed.

Given this context of difficult pregnancies and births in Naylor's novels, the birth of George at the end of Bailey's Cafe is especially miraculous. Not only is he the first child born in this neighborhood, but he is born to a woman whose vagina has been ritually sewn shut. His conception is thus a mystery and a miracle, which strengthens the sense that he is a Christ figure. Mariam's sealed vagina is another well image, in this case a closed well, a well like a tomb, but a well of death transformed into a source of life. With George's birth, Naylor seems to be announcing not only her literary independence but also her literary rebirth.

At the other end of life, deaths in Naylor's novels are also traumatic. Many characters meet violent deaths: Serena, Lorraine, and Ben in The Women of Brewster Place; Laurel Dumont and the three Nedeeds in Linden Hills; Little Ceasar and George in Mama Day; and numerous, unnamed suicides in Bailey's Cafe.

That birth and death should be so difficult is predicted by the image of the well, which suggests both womb and tomb. Well, birth, and death are mysterious and unavoidable. As Derrida, Morrison, and Naylor intimate, the temptation to ignore such abysses must be resisted and their inevitability acknowledged. In Bailey's Cafe Naylor establishes a community of privileged characters who have done just that, who are comfortable with the abysses of a devastating world and therefore are secure in their identities and roles. They endure because they have learned to accept the brutality of African-American life in a racialized society and because they have transformed their double-consciousness into an advantage. To that community she brings an assortment of persecuted refugees, each of whom has struggled in vain in his or her well of torment. Together, the privileged proprietors and these waifs transcend their narrow confinements and, along with the novel itself, celebrate a broader community based on openness, tolerance, psychic interconnections, and telling and hearing their life stories. By so doing, they all learn to survive at the rim of the well.

The characters' desire to achieve this social and spiritual community and Naylor's progression in her first four novels toward such an achievement reflect broader cultural concerns. The synthesis of cultures, individuals, genders, and generations at the end of Bailey's Cafe embodies an attempt to reestablish the cosmic harmony that characterizes West African religions and philosophies. This worldview, in contrast to the Euro-American emphasis on differences and “dissent” as Miss Maple calls it (192), stresses the integration of individual, community, nature, and the supernatural.³⁰ This novel and the celebration in which it culminates also depict the founding, acceptance of, and consecration of a meaningful African-American place and time. The search for place, both literal and figurative, has marked African-American experience since the first Africans were brought to Virginia in the seventeenth century. African Americans' assigned places have been in the well at the bottom of American society; as Houston Baker, Jr., contends, they have been consigned to the holds of slavers, then rural cabins, and later urban kitchenettes (136–41). The refugees in Bailey's Cafe have been denied not only a place but any meaningful past, just as African Americans have historically been denied a past, since their African past was repudiated by white Americans and since their slave past has often been too shameful to be remembered. As a result of such difficulties, the characters and African Americans are plagued by the problem of establishing and maintaining viable identities: Ellison contends that “Negro Americans are in desperate search for identity,”³¹ and Barbara Christian urges black women “to define and express [their] totality rather than being defined by others.”³²

The occasion of George's birth restores a sense of cosmic harmony to the novel's characters, establishes for them a living and livable African-American space, thereby restores a sense of the past and provides hope for the present if not the future, and at the same time strengthens the secure identities of the four privileged characters and offers a basis for positive identity formation for the others. All this can happen because all the characters, as well now as the participating reader, have learned to accept the abyss. Like the inhabitants of the Bottom in Morrison's Sula, they have learned that “the presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”³³

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1992) 102. Hereafter cited in the text by page reference only.

2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978) 279. Hereafter cited in the text by page reference only.

3. Elsewhere, I have discussed some connections between deconstruction and African-American culture (Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels [Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1996] 3–25) and some relationships between Derrida and Morrison (Dangerous 55–56, 159–76, and “Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's Jazz,” African American Review 29 [1955]: 55–66).

4. For example, Luce Irigaray exults in women's “disruptive excess” (The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991] 6), and Rachel DuPlessis celebrates the “both/and vision” of the female aesthetic (“For the Etruscans,” The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter [New York: Pantheon, 1985] 276).

5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989) 5.

6. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972) 131.

7. Examples of such formulations by African-American male theorists include Robert Stepto, who praises African-American culture for espousing the both/and, or what he calls “modal,” perspective (From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative [Urbana: Illinois UP, 1979] xiii), and Houston Baker, Jr., who attests that “This historic condition outside the mainstream American culture forced African Americans to deconstruct, defamiliarize, and signify within the master discourse” (“There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing,” Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Baker and Patricia Redmond [Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989] 136–41).

8. For example, Mae Henderson welcomes “the deconstructive function of black women's writing” and the black woman writer's ability “to see the other, but also to see what the other cannot see” (“Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition,” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [New York: Meridian, 1990] 135, 137). Valerie Smith argues that black feminists are ideally situated to insure that the radical discourses of blacks and feminists are not diluted (“Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989] 40–43). Hereafter cited by page reference only.

9. Gary Storhoff, “‘The Only Voice Is Your Own’”: Gloria Naylor's Revision of The Tempest,” African American Review 29 (1955): 42.

10. Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (New York: Vintage, 1989) 285. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

11. Susan Meisenhelder points out that Miranda's contribution to the community's ongoing, quilt-like, multiple interpretations of itself is to appreciate the male perspective of Sapphira's owner, Bascombe Wade (“The ‘Whole Picture’ in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day,” African American Review 27 [1993]: 415). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and notes.

12. Barbara Christian, “Gloria Naylor's Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills,” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990) 352.

13. Catherine C. Ward emphasizes that Ruth Anderson represents a perspective characterized by pure human love, (“Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno,” Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah [New York: Amistad, 1993] 186). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and notes.

14. As Ward puts it, the residents “have turned away from their past and from their deepest sense of who they are” (Ward 182).

15. Craig Werner, “Minstrel Nightmares and Black Dreams of Faulkner's Dreams of Blacks,” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1986, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1987) 51.

16. Margaret Homans, “The Woman in the Cave,” Critical Perspectives 159.

17. Homans, in Critical Perspectives 160.

18. Meisenhelder demonstrates that George as well as Cocoa try unsuccessfully to understand each other and Willow Springs in terms of white myths (405–12).

19. Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe (New York: Vintage, 1992) 41. Hereafter cited in the text by page reference only.

20. Naylor's epigraph for The Women of Brewster Place applies equally well to Sadie: “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?”

21. The epigraph is “hush now can you hear it can't be far away. / needing the blues to get there / look and you can hear it / look and you can hear / the blues open / a place never / closing: / Bailey's / Cafe.”

22. Maxine Lavon Montgomery, “Authority, Multivocality, and the New World Order in Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe,” African American Review 29 (1995): 30.

23. Gloria Naylor, “Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison: A Conversation,” Southern Review n.s. 21 (1985): 572.

24. Gloria Naylor, “Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel,” Yale Review 78 (1988–89): 31.

25. Karen Joy Fowler, rev. of Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor, Chicago Tribune 4 Oct. 1992, rpt. in Critical Perspectives 27.

26. Montgomery 28.

27. For discussions of the Shakespearean models, see Michael Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 110; Peter Erickson, “Shakespeare's Black?: The Role of Shakespeare in Naylor's Novels,” in Critical Perspectives 231–48; Helen Fidenment Levy, “Lead on with Light,” in Critical Perspectives 264; Meisenhelder 412; James Robert Saunders, “The Ornamentation of Old Ideas: Naylor's First Three Novels,” in Critical Perspectives 242–62; Storhoff 35–45; and Valerie Traub, “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Work of Gloria Naylor and Zora Neale Hurston,” Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women's Revisions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1993) 150–64. For analyses of the Inferno parallel, see Gloria Naylor, “Gloria” 582; and Ward, in Critical Perspectives 182–94.

28. Peter Erickson, rev. of Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor, Kenyon Review 15 (1993), rpt. in Critical Perspectives 34.

29. Readers who are reading one key down will recognize that this child, George, is the same George who marries Cocoa in Mama Day (see Mama Day 22, 131, and Bailey's Cafe 228).

30. For commentaries on traditional West African worldviews, see Bonnie J. Barthold, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981); Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture, trans. Marjorie Grene (New York: Grove, 1961); John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989); John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1989); and Geneva Smitherman, Talkin' and Testifyin': The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986).

31. Ellison 297.

32. Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985) 159.

33. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1975) 118.