SOURCE: Thompson, Dorothy Perry. “Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe.” In Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, edited by Margot Anne Kelley, pp. 89–111. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In their attempts to analyze the texts in Gloria Naylor's complicated tetralogy—The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Cafe—critics have often appropriated Eurocentric approaches that run the gamut from finding Chaucerian and Shakespearean analogues to employing Derridean theories of absence. Feminists have seized Naylor's oeuvre eagerly, exploring its dense symbology for delineations of oppressed women prevalent in the texts, especially Linden Hills and Bailey's Cafe. Given Naylor's personal history, as it informs her work, such discursive authorities, or sites of meaning, seem valid. She's an American female with an ivy league education—a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College and an M.A. from Yale in African-American studies. She knows deconstruction and the tenets of feminism as well as she knows the Eurocentric canon, which revolves on its Shakespearean-and-the-like axis. However, in Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, Naylor continues her efforts at an intertextuality that mandates consideration of how both novels participate in the discursive practices of an “Other” culture and a gendered ideology that does not separate itself from that culture so that it can be dubbed simply “feminist.”

Jacquelyn de Weever notes that the voice of the African-American female writer changes the “traditional double-voicedness of the Black American experience into a triple-voiced enterprise, one based on a triangular culture” (1991, 26). Concluding that no writer in this century can escape prior texts, de Weever claims that this fact is especially true of the African-Americans whose work must include the dualities of this heritage (1991, 25). As “expressive culture texts,” to use Houston Baker's term, that add the dimension of woman to race, Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe embody codes and modes of signification and figurations that must be examined in terms of a praxis that includes the identifying elements of race and gender.

In interviews, presentations, and most importantly, in her literary oeuvre, Naylor has aligned herself with what can be described best as Africana womanism.¹ She gives us figurations that are distinctly African in origin (especially in Mama Day), and female characters who are more womanish (to recapitulate the origin of Alice Walker's coinage) than their sisters/cousins in The Color Purple, the novel that spawned the genre of contemporary womanist fiction. Shug, for example, is outrageous and audacious, and Sofia, in her actions, is courageous and willful, all characteristics identified by Walker in her definition of womanist.² But Walker's women in the novel ultimately recede, somewhat, from the reactionary stances that make them womanish as they settle into traditional roles as mates for their men.³ Celie and Shug end their lesbian relationship; Nettie marries Adam; and Celie gives Albert some notice in her last letters, as she sees that he is changing. Also, these women are more American in their construction than some of Naylor's women. Even Celie's self-development, for example, is rooted in Western materialism. Her discovery of self is equated with her emergence as property owner and business woman. Also, except for the connections that Nettie insinuates when she discovers similarities between African and African-American folktales, and the unusual spirituality that Shug intuits (reminiscent of African animism), these women are cut off from their cultural past. However, because the novel does culminate in a happy celebration of all of the selves of the text, Walker does succeed in presenting womanists, who, through their own methods of sisterly support, can promote healing, showing, to return again to Walker's definition, love of the folk.

I mention spirituality, distance from the cultural past, and materialism to mark them as iconic signposts—elements of consideration in Africana womanism. Additionally, other significant elements and methods appear that have what I call a spiralytic relationship with Walker's original definition. That is, they wind around that definition as a center or source; second, in their cyclical movement, they also move away from the center, becoming more inclusive/expansive; third, they move upward, attaining levels of revision and refiguration that rest above the source of their energy by the magnitude or power of their difference.

Walker's definition originates from the expressive culture of black folk. From the black vernacular she has chosen a word that every African-American female with spunk probably heard as a youngster from scolding adults: womanish. Additionally, the syntax of the culture is used in the rhetoric of the explanation of the word, and the public history of the culture is invoked with the allusion to Harriet Tubman and other female liberation figures. Nevertheless, Walker frames these cultural elements in the traditions of Western academic definition: etymology first, then identification of class (feminist), and, finally, differentiation, or explanation of how the womanist is unlike other things in her class (black).

I make these comments on the strategy of the definition because in its methodology and movement away from Western scholarship, it has a relationship to that scholarship that is similar to the relationship of Africana womanism to womanism. That is, the icons of Africana womanism operate in a triangular fashion with Walker's definition: around, away from, and finally, upward. For example, whereas one can see Shug, Celie, and Sofia moving in concentric circles around the core, in Walker's later fiction, especially Temple of My Familiar, characters transcend these boundaries in a triangularity that adds the dimensions of recession (going away from the center) and ascension. In receding from the womanist center, the Africana womanist widens the circle to be more inclusive of cultural elements that (re)member the past—Africa, creating a connectedness for diasporic women in their various secondary cultures. In ascension, the goal is to move beyond reflection and expansion, to create energy, tension enough to destabilize harmful historiography, to revise, and ultimately, to liberate.

The signposts of this triangular movement can be identified in the spiralytic figurations that recur in texts such as Walker's Temple, and in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved. Walker's Miss Lissie, for example, is a dreadlocked figure who knows she has had past lives in ancient Egypt and Atlantis. Her racial (re)membering includes the last thousand years of black womanhood, especially the horrors of the African slave trade. Additionally, Walker's revisionist history posits an ancient African matricentric form of worship (Walker 1989, 63–64), while she uses her narrative authority to meld Hispanic culture (the Carlotta and Zede figures) into her revisionism. Morrison's figurations are not quite as expansive, culturally, but in Song of Solomon and Beloved, both Pilate and Sethe fit the prototype of (re)visioned pariahs—women whose supposed sins or strangeness must be revisited so that they can be understood in terms of their personal histories and gendered existences.

Even more fully than the works of Morrison and Walker, Gloria Naylor's last two novels encapsulate the primary signposts of Africana womanist revision. Regarding content, these elements include the ancestor/goddess of African tradition, necromancy, ritual, spiritual exploration/investigation, communalism, and general celebration of culture. Regarding discursive strategy the characteristic elements are multiple-voiced narration, conflation of temporal and spatial realities (part of African worldview), linguistic appropriateness (frequently, a speakerly text), and a matricentric focus (deconstruction of the kyriarchy, a term used by Masenya [1995, 149] to mean domination by lord or master as opposed to patriarchy, domination by the father). Finally, regarding purpose, Africana womanist revision aims to liberate its subjects from oppressive histories through recursion and destabilization. Characters, situations, objects, and the like from traditional myth or history are revisited and refashioned in ways that weaken the belief systems that gave rise to disparaging images of women and freed them from general discrimination based on gender.

These elements in Naylor's two novels show her using Walker's womanist axis, but widening the spirals to include figurations that are more dimensional and that ascend to higher levels of liberation in the ways that they are constructed. In Mama Day, willful and courageous women (re)member cultural myth and revise Judeo-Christian history. Miranda Day has inherited powers of necromancy (from the Latin nigromantia, meaning black magic) from her ancestor Sapphira Wade. Her great-niece Cocoa appears first as pure womanist: a brave southern female willing to take on the other-world-liness of New York City. When she returns home with a husband steeped in the traditions of Western logic, literature, and history, the stage is set for Naylor to offer a complicated symbology of liminality and confluence. She gives us liminars (characters in cultural limbo): some are physically separated from their birth culture (George); others are rendered helpless by it (Cocoa). Also, she poses Mama Day's magic as the tool to effect a joining of cultures to bridge the gap between Western and African tradition. Naylor's strategy successfully revises/deconstructs Judeo-Christian myth by stripping it of male-centered power. Moreover, she joins to that myth a matricentric African spirituality characteristic of Africana womanism. Ultimately, her figurations transcend the boundaries of the text.

What Cocoa's husband, George, confronts in Willow Springs, a sea island off the coasts of both Georgia and South Carolina, is the power of matricentric cultural myth, necromancy, and a worldview that contradicts his own belief systems. The myth begins the novel: “Everybody knows but nobody talks about the legend of Sapphira Wade. A true conjure woman: satin black, biscuit cream, red as Georgia clay: depending upon which of us takes a mind to her. She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot; depending upon which of us takes a mind to her” ([Mama Day, hereafter cited as MD] 3). The ensuing lines explain that Sapphira was an African slave who married her master in 1823, bore him seven sons in a thousand days, persuaded him to deed all of Willow Springs to his slaves, then killed him. Exactly how Sapphira caused Bascombe Wade's death depends, as do the details of her powers of conjure, upon “which of [the narrators] takes a mind to her.” These repeated words become more significant when the listener/reader is told at the end of this first paragraph of the novel that “Sapphira don't live in the part of our memory we can use to form words” (MD, 4).

Naylor's discursive strategy at the novel's inception accomplishes several things. First, she establishes the collective voice of Willow Springs as having discursive authority. In the tradition of the speakerly text, which recalls African oral tradition, the reader becomes a listener, a participant in the discourse community. Second, Naylor effects (re)membrance—a recall of the cultural past that achieves its reality/validity as the individual mind envisions it. Karla Holloway explains that in the work of black women writers, (re)membrance is an “activation in the face of stasis, a restoration of fluidity, translucence and movement to the traditions of memory” (1992, 68). If memories of Sapphira are not spoken, she does not become static and one-dimensional. She may be as liminal or fractured as need be for a people whose history is not characterized by wholeness or one-dimensionality. Finally, what Naylor effects with the Sapphira story is a destabilization of traditional notions of myth. Once this is accomplished, then revision of a new order becomes possible.

Sapphira's and Miranda's powers of conjure are an element of spiralytic recession/expansion in Africana womanism. In their figurations, the two women move away from the womanist (black American feminist) tradition toward models that reflect the African past. Sapphira is the ancestor/goddess, a recurring figure in the fiction of African and African-American women writers. She is the conflation of the need for a new woman-centered spirituality and ancient African ancestor worship. Historian John Hope Franklin writes that members of early African societies devoutly believed in the continuance of the spirits of deceased family members. Deified at death, these spirits became more powerful as time passed, and more able to exert influence over the lives of their relatives (Franklin 1969, 32). Dona Marimba Richards explains that in the African worldview, the African family includes the dead, the living, and the “yet unborn,” and the ritual of ancestor communion is emblematic of the interdependence of its parts (Richards 1980, 7). To make the dead more powerful, the living offer sacrifices; in return, the ancestors strengthen the force vitale of the living, thereby promoting their general health (Richards 1980, 7). Thus, Miranda has to confront the spirit of Peace in the well, dream Sapphira's name, and place herself at the ancestral home before she can help Cocoa, for all three efforts are symbolic gestures of ancestor communion.

Additionally, ancestor communion, as Richards explains it, symbolizes the African concept of Sacred Time (1980, 7). The living can communicate with the dead because the latter do not exist in a simple “past.” In African spirituality, time is not linear; it is cyclical. Therefore, ideas of past, present, and future are eliminated (Richards 1980, 7). (Recall that Cocoa visits her dead husband's grave site and they talk easily about their lives together. George shows no “remorse” that he is separated from his beloved because in the African worldview, he is still with her.) As Cocoa begins the conversation in the first chapter, her trivial reminiscences and George's implied response indicate a comfortable relationship, though he is dead and she is remarried: “You were picking your teeth with a plastic straw—I know, I know, it wasn't really a straw, it was a coffee stirrer. But George, let's be fair, there are two little openings in those things that you could possibly suck liquid through if you were desperate enough” (MD, 13).

Sapphira and Miranda also spiral away from earlier womanist figurations in the texts of black women writers in the ways in which they are rooted in African traditions and beliefs. For example, Sophia and Squeak in Walker's The Color Purple are decidedly more Western in their sources of power and in their methods of using that power. Sofia resorts to physical force when she is threatened by her husband and the mayor. When the other women devise a plan to get Sofia out of jail, they use a power based on a premise embraced by contributors to the Western tradition from the Hellenic epics to The Great Gatsby: they presume that it is feminine beauty/guile that moves men. On the other hand, Sapphira, using African necromancy, defies Western temporality, enfranchises an entire island of slaves, and disappears, in one version of the story, “laughing in a burst of flames” (MD, 3).⁴ Sapphira Wade's power deconstructs a kyriarchal structure and empowers the previous underclass in that structure. As a result, “18 & 23” becomes a symbol for the collective memory of the people of Willow Springs—specifically for their belief in the necromancy of their ancestor/goddess and her continued presence in their lives.

When Miranda's family is threatened (Ruby's hex on Cocoa), Miranda relies on conjure to save her great-niece. First, she concocts a salve to counteract the effects of the mixture Ruby has put in Cocoa's hair. Then in a scene that recalls African tribal ritual of marking the house of a criminal (described in Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, for example), Miranda hits Ruby's house with a serpent-cane, causing the lightning to destroy it. However, saving Cocoa will entail still more. The African tradition of sacrifice becomes necessary.

The death of Cocoa's husband, George, creates the spiral movement in Naylor's text that is the most violent. There is enough energy in the resultant tension to destabilize the most pervasive and significant of all Western myths. George, posited as Judeo-Christian hero, dies so that the Days can be saved. The death of the Christ-figure in Naylor's revisionism is undergirded with motives that move it beyond a general redemption. Naylor adds another element as she infuses signs from expressive cultures. Redemption becomes qualified, or contingent, for Naylor sets these conditions: if George (born of a virgin mother in Bailey's Cafe) must die to save the last of the Days, then that death must effect a confluence of cultures so that the nature of life will change. The former kyriarchy (master-dominated society)—à la the Bascombe Wades of the world—must not be reestablished as superior to the cultures of women, of Africa, or of the diaspora. Therefore, even though George might be a Christ-figure, this Western logician is not posited as offering a belief system that is superior to the African matri-centric spirituality of Miranda Day. To convey this refigured relationship between the two worldviews, Naylor “lowers” the status of her “Christ” by making him, seemingly, the son of a whore. Then, in spite of his intellect and talents, George is rendered helpless in the face of the power of African voodoo. Nevertheless, Miranda's powers alone cannot save Cocoa; they must be coupled with George's beliefs. In this symbiotic relationship, Naylor insinuates an equality of cultures devoid of gendered prejudice and of the traditional Western domination.

One of the cultural signs of confluence that is the most significant (there are many in Naylor's dense symbology) is Miranda's prayer. Once she knows that a sacrifice has to be made, Miranda begins preliminary rites by going to the ancestral home, pointedly called the “other place” to connote the seat of a culture that is other than Western. There, she finds a water-damaged bill of sale that gives her only the first two letters of her ancestor's name. After a day of trying to guess the name, she “get[s] down on her stiffened knees and pray[s] to the Father and Son as she'd been taught. But she falls asleep, murmuring the names of women. And in her dreams she finally meets Sapphira” (MD, 280).

In this quick scene, Naylor merges elements of Judeo-Christian tradition, womanism, and African myth. First, she has a matriarch who has inherited powers of conjure from her African ancestor and performs a Christian ritual: kneeling and praying to the “Father and Son.” then, she subordinates that ritual to Miranda's concentration on women. Lastly, and most significantly, she adds to the idea of the “mal(e)formed” Trinity the idea of “woman”—specifically, an African ancestor/goddess who replaces the Holy Ghost. This is Africana womanist revision at its highest level: generative ascension results in the creation of a new myth characterized by a confluence of cultures.

Another important sign of confluence is the joining of hands. This act will serve as the symbolic joining of Miranda's and Cocoa's culture with George's. Naylor presents George's hands as metonyms of Western tradition when she has him speak the logic that that tradition has taught him. First, he believes that his helping hand as architectural engineer will hasten the repair of the bridge. When that effort fails, he decides what he needs to save his wife: a pair of oars in his hands to row across the Sound for help. He says: “I'm going to put the oars into the oarlocks and begin to row across the sound. That much I can do for her. And at that point in time when I can feel those oars between my hands, whether I make it or not won't be the issue. And if the boat begins to sink—I looked at my hands lit up by the moonlight—I'll place them in the water and start to swim” (MD, 282–83). Miranda, however, realizes that she needs George's hands in a different way: “[S]he needs that belief buried in George. Of his own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his hand in hers—his very hand—so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before. A single moment was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers here at the other place. So together they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over” (MD, 285).

As well as pointing to a merger of African and Western belief systems, this passage resonates with an iconic element in African-American spirituality: the “laying on of hands.” Particularly visible in black sanctified and charismatic churches, it is a ritual of African origin. The act recalls the belief in ancestor communion and spiritual continuity effected through what Richards calls a “diviner,” or medium (1980, 43). Serving as diviner when Ruby puts a hex on Cocoa, Abigail uses her hands to quiet the worms in her granddaughter's body. Cocoa recalls “She sat on the bed, gathered me in her arms, and with the flat of her hand, she began to stroke—my back, my arms, my chest. … they would remain still until she went on to another part of my body. … Her one hand against so many of them. If only there was a way to bring me this kind of peace forever” (MD, 290).

Gary Storhoff, offering a Jungian analysis, reads the signs of the first hands (Miranda's and George's) section as symbolic of Miranda's getting in touch with her animus, and George with his anima, for psychic wholeness. Thus, John-Paul's cane becomes a phallic symbol, and the chicken coop where George is to take the cane becomes the anima since it houses eggs, the symbol of female reproductive power (Storhoff 1995, 40–41). Though Storhoff's reading is valid in its Jungian context, these symbols take on entirely different meanings in the expressive culture: chickens are ever-present in ritual drama of the diaspora. As noted by Zora Neale Hurston, they are especially important in sacrificial rites of the Hoo Doo culture of the American south and in the Caribbean. When Hurston studied under Luke Turner, a descendant of Marie Leveau, the high priestess of New Orleans Hoo Doo, she learned that chickens were sacrificed so that their spirits could be instructed by the medium to carry out the wishes of the living (Hurston 1990, 202–5).

All of these signs of confluence use icons indigenous to the culture of the narrative authority, that is—of the author, employing them. They are characteristic of what de Weever calls the “hybrid blossom” that results from the three-pronged tradition in which most American writers work (de Weever 1991, 21). For African-American writers those prongs are the Attic-Hebraic-Christian European culture, which became the foundation of the dominant culture transplanted to the Americas, African culture, and the African-American blended experience. “The triangulated tradition,” de Weever notes, “testifies to the fragmented ontology of every American” (1991, 21–22).

In presenting fragments of African-American ontology, Naylor destabilizes the pieces of Western myth, then begins a revision that adds African elements. She wrenches the novel's temporal axis (that is as it exists as textual entity), moving the reader, in African cyclical fashion, first forward to the next novel in the series, Bailey's Cafe, then back to Mama Day. We cannot see the whole figure of George unless we move backward/forward to Bailey's Cafe. This intertextuality embraces/reinforces her themes and purpose. In order to liberate her figures and her readers from Western tradition, Naylor defies spatial and temporal expectation, creating a new story that exists above and beyond its origins, but which (at the same time) recalls those origins.

In her act of (re)membering/revising Judeo-Christian myth in Bailey's Cafe, Naylor uses African history and culture framed with the perspective of Africana womanism. The reader leaves the text feeling that she has visited a host of characters who, as biblical (re)figurations, may, indeed, be the threshold of a new beginning for humankind. For her (re)figuring and revising, Naylor chooses some of the most well-known women in Christian history, including Eve, Mary, Jezebel, and Esther. Other characters, including Nadine, Sadie, and Miss Maple, also become important in the author's complex symbology. Here, in addition to Africana womanism, Naylor adds signs of liminality that are even more evident than those in Mama Day (the portrayal of Cocoa being, perhaps, the exception).

Liminality is an appropriate description of the African-American experience as it applies to characters caught between very different cultures. Though the stages of the liminal process may apply to others, the experience of the African-American is easily translated into the language of liminality because of the unique history of the “burden of dual consciousness” (Du Bois 1909, 3). As long ago as 1902, sociologists such as W. E. B. Du Bois described the mental schism that exists for American blacks wrenched from one culture (African) and deposited into another (Western). This schism also has been examined by psychologists such as Kobi Kambon, who uses a comparative worldviews schematic to chart psycho-behavioral differences between African-Americans and European Americans (Kambon 1992, 11). Adjustments for African-Americans resulted in various rituals that blend African and European elements. These rituals have become recognized, historically, as indigenous to the culture of Africans in America.

In his analysis of ritualized experience, Arnold Van Gennep has identified three phases of the liminal process. The first is separation, or preliminary rites characterized by death symbols, sacrifice, journeys, and other signs of distance between the general population and the liminar. The second phase is marge, or liminal (threshold) rites. Indeterminacy symbols are common at this stage: namelessness, inertness (mock death), dislocation, humility, acceptance of pain, transvestitism, and loss of identifiers such as rank, clothing, and property. The third stage, aggregation, involves post-liminal incorporation rites such as feasting, dancing, exchanging of gifts, oaths, hand clasps, and sexual mating (in Woodbridge and Anderson 1993, 579). Liminality also includes signs of rebirth, camaraderie, and the invoking of mystical powers.

Each of Naylor's major figures is at some stage of the liminal process, and there is a direct relationship between the characters' survival through aggregation and the trajectory of Naylor's revision. In this context, the purpose of her (re)figurations of the biblical women is twofold: first, they make a place for African-descended women in the central myth of Western tradition; and, second, her rewriting of that myth purges women of thousands of years of blame and shame.

Naylor's method of infusing African historiography into Judeo-Christian myth follows the same pattern of spiralytic movement she uses in Mama Day. However, instead of beginning with the womanist axis, Naylor roots each female's story in biblical history. The figure changes as it recedes from Western tradition and expands to include explanations, histories, and signs related to Africa or the diaspora. As ascension happens, Naylor reaches forward into contemporary reality to the African-descended female in America. The positions that modern society boxes black female outcasts into are posited: madam, whore, addict, nymphomaniac, wino. The derogatory labels descriptive of the positions the women find themselves in are signs of the first stage of liminality—separation. With the exception of Nadine, all of the women have been cut off from their communities.

Naylor's refigured Eve, for example, is cast out of her community for the “original” sin of discovering the connection between her body's natural urges and the vibrations of the earth. Eve explains: “The earth showed me what my body was for. Sometimes I'd break my fingernails from clawing them into the dirt or bite my arm to keep from crying out. And Billy Boy stomping up dust as I humped myself into the ground—him sweating and baying at the clouds” (BC, 87). While Billy Boy is portrayed as an idiot only doing the bidding of his playmate, his “Adam's apple straining, head thrown back to the sky” (BC, 87–88), Eve is treated by Godfather (read God, the Father) as purposefully evil, deserving of excommunication. Before he banishes her, he already has tried to quell her natural inquisitiveness and spunk with pulpit words that “resembled rounds of thunder” and with angry laughter like “lightning vibrations” (BC, 84).

Naylor's revision of the expulsion myth juxtaposes the logic of Eve's natural urges with the illogical wrath of God. Additionally, she highlights Adam's complicity: he may have been an idiot, but he, too, enjoyed the game. For her act, Eve is sent out of Pilottown, alienated from the only human contact she's ever had. As a black female outcast, she suffers through a process that many African-American women writers describe in their fiction.

Susan Willis comments on Toni Morrison's handling of the alienated black woman:

Morrison's aim in writing is very often to disrupt alienation with what she calls eruptions of “funk.” Dismayed by the tremendous influence of bourgeois society on young black women newly arrived from deep south cities …, Morrison describes the women's loss of spontaneity and sensuality. They learn how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.

(Willis 1987, 87)

Naylor's (re)figured Eve, set in juxtaposition to the “de-funked” Sister Carrie, carries only a symbolic residue of the “funkiness of passion … [and] nature”: she cannot get rid of the dirt beneath her fingernails. She sets up her own code of behavior, which does include morality (she sets up rules for herself and her tenants), thrift (she's an expert business woman), and patience (she's endured a thousand-year trek and has learned how to instruct her tenants, then wait for their personal self-evolutions). The stages of her own liminality have been marked by a separation and marge that eradicated her sense of humor and her sensuality. She says, “I'd already clearly seen enough of the world to know there was little I needed to laugh about. And the only road that lay open to me was the one ahead, and the only way I could walk it was the way I was. I had no choice but to walk into New Orleans neither male nor female—mud. But I could right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back out” (BC, 91).

Having begun the liminal process half-naked, nearly blind, and ignorant of the ways of the world, she emerges educated, poised on the threshold (at marge), ready to be married to the highest levels of society that her experience and potential will allow. Unfortunately, it is the early 1900s, and for a bright woman, in spite of her three trunks of silk suits and more than fifty-seven thousand dollars, society will not offer her the aggregation rites reserved for her male baccalaureate counterparts: no diploma, no graduation ceremony, no congratulatory handshakes.

Thus, in spite of her self-designed transformation, Eve still ends up near Bailey's edge of the world cafe. However, as she promised, she has made her own decisions about what she wants to be; moreover, she is in charge (like Walker's womanist) of negotiating the inclusivity or exclusivity of her space. Her brownstone becomes the reification of the “home” for the alienated as described by womanist bell hooks: “At times home is nowhere. At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. … Home is that place that enables and promotes varied and ever-changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference” (hooks 1990, 148). Naylor's Eve has the power to give such a home to women who have suffered a range of abuses in the oppressive systems they have come from.

In “Mary (Take One)” the abused woman is a (re)figuration of Mary Magdalene, the whore who washed the feet of Jesus with her hair. In a mocking inversion of Mary Magdalene's act of humility, the refigured Mary humbles herself to all men to rid herself of the whore she sees reflected in their eyes: “I was free as I gave them her. Over and over they became my saviors from her” (BC, 105). After Mary scars her face to destroy the beauty that makes men want her, she ends up at the brownstone. Symbolically enabling her to change her perspective, Eve lifts Mary's veil and says “Beautiful” (BC, 112). What Naylor's womanist perspective describes here is not the scar itself, but Mary's act of making it. The self-inflicted pain, a commonality in the liminal process, becomes a catalyst for change. Eve, recognizing the import of the act, welcomes Mary as she has so many other liminars. She is a womanist who, to use Michael Awkward's term, fosters “(comm)unity” for her suffering sisters in a setting that mocks the hypocritical values of their pre-separation communities (1989, 135).

Eve also helps one of the most maligned of all biblical women, Jezebel, (re)figured here as Jesse Bell, divorcee, bisexual, and drug addict. Through a long and complex symbology, Naylor effectively revises Jezebel's story so that her motivations become natural and understandable, and her general character simply “womanish”: willful and committed to survival and wholeness for entire people. Also, in keeping with the vernacular tone of Walker's definition, Jesse is a working-class woman who “loves the folk”—her family. However, as Jezebel is beaten by the power of Elijah's more “organized” and patricentric religion (the catered picnic paralleling the biblical showdown at Mount Carmel), Jesse Bell's more fragmented and woman-centered rituals—seduction, cooking, putting on makeup—do not save her from being symbolically thrown to the dogs as Jezebel literally was. Explaining how she seduced her husband, Jesse boasts, “I got him the same way I kept him—with the best poon tang east of the Mississippi” (BC, 122). Later she says, “He loved everything about women … how I managed to get the seams in my stockings straight or how I penciled in the beauty mark over the right side of my lips. He'd watch me trying to arch my eyebrows for a whole hour, just fascinated, you know?” (BC, 123). Though these actions may seem trivial to others, Jesse knows their power. She warns, “You gotta keep tight reins on a man like that, cause Maybelline made a whole lot of those pencils. So Mama went where Papa went, or Papa didn't go out that night” (BC, 123).

The most effective description of feminine ritual appears later. Jesse describes her skill in combining her cooking and sexual talents:

The next night I baked three sweet potato pies. I mean the heavy kind with lard in the crust and Alaga syrup bubbling all through them. And while my pies are cooling and he's in the bedroom reading his newspaper, I run me a warm bath and throw a whole bottle of vanilla extract in the water. So I'm soaking in the vanilla, the pies are cooling, and we're all ready about the same time. I go into our bedroom, carrying one of my pies, dressed the same way I stepped out of that tub. I made sure it was sliced real nice—six even pieces. And he's looking at me like I've gone out of my mind, but I still take it all real slow. I laid back on the pillows. Took out a slice, without disturbing a crumb, mind you. And wedged it right between my legs. It was time for the first lesson. Husband, I said, pointing, this is sweet potato pie. Didn't have a bit of trouble after that. Except it was all the man wanted for dinner for the next month.

(BC, 124)

In spite of her power over her husband, Jesse loses him to the masculine traditions and ideas of Uncle Eli. Most of Eli's suggestions for how the family should operate are based on the power of money, whereas Jesse's are connected to family bonding. For example, when Jesse suggests her son be cared for by her mother, Eli says he should have a nanny. Instead of spending his summers fishing with Jesse's brothers, the boy goes to camp. Ultimately, Eli wins and Jesse turns to drugs and back to her lesbian lover.

Naylor invokes the Africana womanist element of necromancy in devising a method of salvation for Jesse Bell. Eve has the magical power to reconstruct Jesse's girlhood bedroom in the void in back of Bailey's Cafe. The symbols in the scene add up to an indictment of the Western images and ideals that destroy little black girls who cannot mirror and attain them. Jesse grew up with pictures of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on her walls, and dreamed of having a luxury bathroom, probably like the ones she'd seen in the movies. Eve repeatedly tempts her with the same images—and the heroin that parallels them—so that she can effectively wean her. Eve's magic has to help Jesse (re)vision the images and ideals as the real enemies that intoxicated her, that have destroyed her selfhood. However, Eve's powers are limited. She can help Jesse only if Jesse uses her own willpower to help herself. Because self-healing in Naylor's revision involves seeing the past from a different perspective, the (re)figured character, though placed there by Eve, must (re)create her own view of herself in that past. In other words, Eve creates only the possibility for change.⁵ If Jesse is going to be saved from elements that kill her self-esteem and confidence, she must be emotionally involved in the process.

Jesse's intoxication will probably end; Sadie's will not. Naylor's figuration of the prostitute-wino is the reification of the results of the American dream on a black female psyche already damaged by the absence of family bonding. The daughter of a prostitute who introduced her to the profession, Sadie has tried to make owning a home her salvation. When Iceman Jones, a man from a poor but functional family, takes Sadie to the void—the place of possibility or nihilism—she cannot accept the life he offers because she is still drunk with dreams of the picket fence, Martha Washingtons in her yard, and Waterford goblets on her table (BC, 72–74). Sadie's liminal state—she is caught between her daydreams of being a fine lady and her actual existence as wino/whore—leaves her short of the aggregation that Eve's brownstone offers: a (comm)unity of sisters (same profession) who have the advantage of ritual (rules and tradition) and a cultural mother-necromancer.

Naylor's revision highlights Eve's status as sociocultural figure. Her acts of saving are in line with characteristics of African-descended people as identified in African historian Cheikh Anta Diop's two-cradle theory of European and African worldview/cultural differences and sociologist Kobi Kambon's comparative worldviews schematic (Kambon 1992, 10–11). For example, Eve believes in harmony with nature as opposed to mastery over it, in communalism over individualism, and (as is evident in her general characterization) in privileging of matrilineal over patrilineal descent.⁶ Though Eve is a madam who exercises control over the women in her brownstone, what she represents is not a system wherein those women are treated as chattel. They are allowed to make their own decisions about how they will operate in the spaces that Eve creates for them. Though Naylor posits Eve as a matriarch, she is not a reproduction of the male figurehead who owns women in the patrilineal system.

In her Esther (re)figuration, Naylor offers a microcosm of the evils of patrilineal ownership. Like property, Esther is given by her brother, in return for higher wages, to a man who uses her to satisfy his unusual sexual fantasies. Commenting on the metonymics that signify Esther's status and her self-concept, Maxine Montgomery notes, “he chooses to be intimate with her only in the cellar of his home. The pink and lace-trimmed bed where she must sleep alone reveals her confinement to a socially prescribed gender role. Her monologues point to a profound self-hatred in a world that evolves no terms for her existence” (1995, 31).

Eve helps Esther construct an inversion of her status, ironically imitating the physicality of her former abuse. She removes the lightbulbs from the basement of the brownstone and lets Esther meet her customers there. However, because this time Esther sets the rules—what the men will pay, how they will address her—she has passed from the liminal stages of separation from her family and marge (ignorance and helplessness) to a place of control and self-definition. Moreover, in her portrayal, Naylor has revised the biblical Esther, whose reputation rested mainly on the beauty that attracted the king and on her saving the Jewish people. In the biblical story, Esther's cousin Mordecai carefully prepares her for her “duties” to the king, and his eunuch Hegai trains her in court protocol. In Naylor's text, Esther's brother tells her nothing, and the revised Hegai becomes the farmer's “hag” who washes Esther but leaves her in her ignorance. Naylor has Eve reproduce a version of the farmer's cellar for Esther to operate in so that the self-sacrificing Esther is recalled, but revised with a new sense of self intact. The replication of historical circumstances is necessary for effective destabilization of the images of the “ignorant” Esther. Thus, revisiting the scene of oppression and abuse becomes liberating rather than traumatic.

The most traumatic story in Naylor's text is also its most complex and significant revision. “Mary (Take Two)” is a womanist tale so anchored in the source of historical female pain that Naylor must switch the narrative voice from male (Bailey) to female (Nadine). Nadine's is the more appropriate voice as hers is the perspective that has the most distance from Western ideology, the plus of gender identification, and the advantage of collective (re)membering that that gender identification and her cultural rootedness allow. Also, she has an emotional distance not possible for Mother Eve. (Nadine notices that Eve cries softly after she hears the story of Mariam, whose name means “little Mary.”)

Mariam's story is based on the Mariology of Judeo-Christian history. That history includes the dignity and human fallibility of the Holy Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, the virgin birth, and the Assumption. To spiral away from and above this history—that is, to effectively revise it, Naylor first “revisits” it. She gives the reader a starting place that is recognizable because it is similar to biblical history: a young pregnant woman appears, claiming that no man has touched her. Then, the author adds to the biblical story of the Holy Virgin a cultural history from modern times: the young woman's “virginity” is related to tribal clitoridectomy rites. Her mutilation attests to her claim that she is a virgin, thus attesting to her dignity. The modern history Naylor chooses allows her to recede from the biblical one, then ascend to a startling Africana womanist (re)figuration: Mary is a slow-witted child who has suffered gender oppression in a male-dominated society. In order for her to “rise above” her oppressive past (achieve Assumption), she seeks Mother Eve and the community of the brownstone.

First, Naylor locates her figure, Mariam, in a geography and genealogy that would account historically and culturally for her condition, her innocence, and her humility. She is an outcast from the Beta Israel (Falasha) of Ethiopia, who claim to be descendants of Menelik I, alleged son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Of the Jewish faith, they are a tribe adhering to strict ritual and laws, especially regarding females and their purity. These rituals and laws clearly relegate women to a lower status, insinuating their supposed inferiority even in birth rites. Wolf Leslau explains that if a Falasha woman gives birth to a male, the village gives twelve shouts, circumcises the male after the eighth day, then releases the mother from the yamargam gogo (hut of blood) to the child-bed hut for a stay of thirty-two days. However, if the woman gives birth to a female, the villagers give only nine shouts, and the mother is confined to the hut of blood for two weeks, and to the child-bed hut for a period of sixty-six days. The birthing process, and the mother herself, are considered so unclean that the hut is burned and the mother is allowed to return only under the cover of darkness, and only after she shaves her head and goes through thorough washings (Leslau 1969, xiv–xv). To preserve their virginity until marriage, the females undergo clitoridectomies. Pedersen explains that prior to the “simple clitoridectomy,” the usual practice in some African tribes was to remove the entire external genitalia (1991, 647).

Naylor closely follows the details of these tribal traditions, as reported by anthropologists, even regarding the daily routines of the people. She writes: “All prayers turn toward Jerusalem as they spin linen, shape iron, and bake pottery outside their broken hovels” (BC, 146). The Falasha are iron smiths and weavers, and they engage in daily prayers performed by a high priest; the accuracy of these historical details is important to highlight in order to show them as effective elements in Naylor's revisionism. They lend believability to her (re)figurations and facilitate the destabilization she desires as she recalls Western myth.

For linguistic accuracy, Naylor's recursive strategy is to have Mariam paraphrase the words of the Holy Virgin. In an eastern, apocryphal “Book of James” tale that “deeply influenced the cult of the Virgin in the west,” Mary is reported to have said, “I am pure before Him [God] and know not a man” (15:3) (Warner 1983, 26–7). In the Gospel of Luke, she says, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34, AV). Naylor's Mariam says repeatedly, “No man has ever touched me” (BC, 143–46 passim). When Eve bathes Mariam, she concludes, “No man has even tried” (BC, 152).

One of the most effective elements of Naylor's revisionism is that the genealogy she gives her (re)figured Mary resonates with the historical Black madonna figures. Lucia Birnbaum, commenting on the appearance of the figure in many cultures, points out that images appear, almost always, near archaeological evidence of a pre-Christian woman divinity, and that in all of these cultures, the belief is that the divinity is black (Birnbaum 1993, 3). She hypothesizes that “veneration of the indigenous goddess of Old Europe merged with African, Middle Eastern, and Asian dark goddesses and persisted in the Christian era in vernacular beliefs and rituals associated with black madonnas.” Also, she believes that black madonnas “may be considered a metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was believed to be the body of a woman and all cultures were equal, a memory transmitted in vernacular traditions of earth-bonded cultures” (Birnbaum 1993, 3–4).

Seemingly, Naylor capitalizes on the tradition of this metaphor in her Africana womanist (re)membering of the Madonna. This strategy adds believability to Naylor's (re)figured Mary. Subtly recalling occurrences of black madonnas in vernacular cultures makes Naylor's Mariam more a historical possibility for the reader. That Gabe the pawnshop owner is sympathetic to Mariam's situation adds another level of validity. He is a member of the Jewish faith who does not question the girl's condition; therefore, the reader sees Mariam through the eyes of a learned member of her spiritual community. If Gabe can accept her, given his knowledge of Jewish history, then the reader can accept her as a madonna. However, Naylor spirals away from the historical/cultural elements as she adds a five hundred mile trek to Mariam's separation process and posits her as a liminar, born slow-witted, who ends up at Eve's whorehouse a frightened and confused child. It takes a male from her own faith, Gabe, to guide her to the brownstone. After a symbolic reenactment/inversion of Mariam's clitoral mutilation (she uses a plum), Eve knows that she must employ her most potent powers of necromancy to help her, especially since Mariam herself seems to have no real understanding of what has happened to her, nor any means of helping herself.

Mariam's slow-wittedness, when juxtaposed with Eve's symbolic recalling of her clitoridectomy, becomes a serious indictment of Mariam's native community. Her feeble-mindedness is a metaphor for the mental immaturity of young girls who suffer, in an African society, irreversible damage to their psyches and their physical persons because of tribal “customs.” Naylor's revisionism, which should end in liberation for all of her (re)figured women, does not stop short of aggregation for Mariam. After Eve the necromancer re-creates an Ethiopian village in the void, the baby is born and Mariam disappears in a flood of water. In traditional Mariology, there is no mention of Mary's “death.” No body is found, and she is believed to have been “translated to heaven” (Warner 1983, 84). Thus, Naylor constructs her own plausible “transitus” or assumption. Mariam's aggregation, then, is to become a part of the collective memory of a people who will have specifics for a new Mariology. The first people to believe in and proclaim Mariology are the motley crew from Eve's brownstone and Bailey's Cafe, and Gabe. Evidently prostitutes, a madam, a “transvestite,” a pawnshop owner, and the proprietors of a diner are not a believable group to others. Or, perhaps, something simply gets lost in their translation of Mariam's story. Whatever happens, Naylor shows in Mama Day that George's attitude toward and knowledge of his mother include no spiritual reverence, no inkling of her “assumption.” She insinuates that George, steeped in Western traditions, has no room in the circle of those traditions to know about an African madonna, especially one who lived in a whorehouse.

Naylor's discursive strategies in Bailey's Cafe effectively reverse what Judith Baskins notes is a traditional representation of biblical women only in terms of their relationships to men (Baskins 1994, 211). However, labeling the author's accomplishment as simple revision from patricentric to matricentric focus would be relegating it to something reminiscent of early Anglo-American feminism. As an Africana womanist, Naylor constructs her text, her (re)figurations, with recursions that pay homage to the history and expressive culture of Africa and the diaspora. Mere reflection is not a stopping place for her. As she ascends to make new models, she not only revises Western tradition, but also liberates her listener/reader.

In Mama Day, her discursive implications are that liberation/salvation for African-descended people must entail a belief in their own ancient traditions, their voices, their rituals, their spirituality, their worldview. Nevertheless, the distinct delineation's in the novel, the intersections of cultures, and the added element of gender embrace and acknowledge the structure of the African-American consciousness—its history of fragmentation, and most of all, its tendency to prevail.

AFTERWORD

In an atmosphere of Western scholarship, which for most of the last half-century has “taken a stand” (allusion to the Fugitives intended) against writers promoting ideologies in their texts and deconstructed authorial ownership of meaning, black women writers are constructing texts that pointedly call for a reversal of that trend. Alice Walker's definition of womanist deliberately prefaces her collection of essays that explore who she is as a writer, black woman, critic, and human being. Accurately locating her work, she signals with her prefatory definition, means understanding her critical theory and its origins in the vernacular tradition (her life) that underscores her discourse. Her womanist theory has been appropriated by factions such as South African women still struggling for equality in post-apartheid society (see M. Masenya, for example) and American female theologians (see Sanders and Williams) attempting to change the male-centered traditions that do not address their concerns or take advantage of their talents. This appropriation indicates their understanding of the necessary connection between the personal narrative of the writer—her background, politics, and so forth—and the intent of her discourse.

Recursion and refiguration must result in revisionism that enlightens, that alters oppressive trends, and that spurs iconic action. Walker's act of placing a headstone over the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston was such an action, an outgrowth of intertextuality that mandates recursion to Hurston as the literary foremother. Gloria Naylor's brand of Africana womanism, in demanding critical praxes that collapse the distance between discursive authority and text, is a parallel spurring of iconic action. As Walker's public homage to Hurston caused critics to “rediscover” Hurston, to look at her as subtext in the work of contemporary African-American women, Naylor's work asks them to consider the Africana womanist as subtext, as negotiator of meaning in her own work.

Notes

1. Hudson-Weems, who coined the term in 1987, uses it to “identif[y] the ethnicity of the woman being considered … her ancestry and land base—Africa” and differentiates between Africana womanism and Walker's womanism by defining the latter as a black version of feminism, a movement founded by middle-class white females, and the former as an ideology “grounded in African culture, and therefore one that focuses on the unique experiences, struggles, needs, desires of Africana women” (1995, 22–23, 24).

2. Walker's full definition is as follows:

   Womanist:

   1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e., irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression “You acting womanish,” i.e. like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious.

   2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalances of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or non-sexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink and yellow, and our cousins white, beige and black?” Ans.: “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn't be the first time.”

   3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the folk. Loves herself. Regardless.

   4. Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender. (Walker 1983, xi–xii)

3. Mary Agnes may be the exception.

4. Also, it is worthwhile to note here that Sapphira, as Africana womanist figuration, spirals above her African-American cousin Sapphire of Amos and Andy fame. The former revises the latter so that Sapphire's comedic jabs and threatening body stances (hands akimbo) become ridiculous emblems of power. Naylor's name choice for this figure is deliberate—aimed at revision of one of the most damaging images of the African-American female.

5. Naylor shows that other characters also have the power to create change for themselves. For Sadie, Iceman Jones transforms the void, and Stanley makes it snow there. Both men can create possibilities for themselves because they are in touch with the realities of their lives.

6. Kambon's chart of worldview differences attributes harmony with nature, communalism to Africans, and mastery over nature and individualism to Europeans. Also, in his work, the psychologist, espousing Diop's description, attributes matrilineal descent to Africans and patrilineage to Europeans. To support his claims, Kambon uses the cultural data of more than a dozen scholars who have done research on worldview differences, including Cheikh Anta Diop's “Two Cradle Theory of African and European Worldview/Cultural Differences” table in Kambon's book.

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