SOURCE: Eckard, Paula Gallant. “The Prismatic Past in Oral History and Mama Day.” MELUS 20, no. 3 (fall 1995): 121–35.

The past exerts a distinct and powerful influence in most of southern fiction. This is no less true in the works of contemporary women writers who are southern themselves or whose works fall in the realm of southern fiction. In the hands of Lee Smith and Gloria Naylor, the past becomes a multi-dimensional, prismatic entity that shapes familial, community, and cultural history. In Oral History by Lee Smith and in Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, the concern is not so much with preserving the past, but with examining, deconstructing, and ultimately redefining the past. These novels represent two diverse aspects of southern culture and experiences of the past. Oral History focuses on white Appalachian culture, while Mama Day focuses on rural black island culture. Despite the differences of race and culture, these two novels share remarkable similarities in their treatment of the past and in the importance of individual voices in revealing the past. Smith and Naylor use similar narrative techniques to relate familial and cultural histories. Taken together their novels yield a portrait of the past that is prismatic and yet, at the same time, strangely unified.

To complicate matters, the worlds and voices that Smith and Naylor each creates in rendering the past stand as metaphors for the Other. Indeed, characters from Oral History and Mama Day (as well as the authors themselves) are the gender and racial representations of the non-canonical which stand in opposition to “traditional” white male Western literature. Place also figures significantly into this: Smith's Hoot Owl Holier and Naylor's Willow Springs are isolated communities that serve as the repositories of memories and experiences of the Other. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that race (and, by extrapolation, gender) has been “an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence” in the study of literature (2). In defiance of this, Oral History and Mama Day come together in their presentation of the Other as a vital and explicit element infusing each work.

In both novels the Other is manifested in several ways and is central to the mystery at the center of the past. Women's voices and racial and cultural histories inherent in each work constitute the force of the Other. The reliance on orality in conveying the past further enhances the Other's presence. However, this emphasis on orality rather than on the more traditional written word makes the past far more difficult to comprehend. In trying to decipher the past in Smith or Naylor's novel, one is like “the inquiring anthropologist, who must learn the language, listen and report, with all the implicit risks of distortion involved in the child's game of telephone” (Miller 286). In this process of revealing the past through multiple narrators, Smith herself emphasizes that “no matter who's telling the story, it is always the teller's tale, and you never finally know exactly the way it was” (qtd. in Arnold 246). While distortion may be inevitable and the truth about the past never fully known, all of this is part of a complex process that reveals the rich and prismatic quality of the past in both Smith and Naylor's works.

In Oral History the past is presented as a family and cultural history which is in sore conflict with the present. Through the narratives of different characters, the rich Appalachian past of the novel is conveyed in the recitation of stories, folklore, and legends as they pertain to Hoot Owl Holler and the Cantrell family. In this process, Smith incorporates the perspectives of such characters as Mrs. Ludie Davenport, Jink Cantrell, Ora Mae, and Little Luther Wade. In all, Smith utilizes nine voices, including what appears to be a community voice, to reveal Hoot Owl Holler's history and the Cantrell family saga. These various narrators share the same community history and participate in the same collective memory. However, each character has a different perspective and experience of these things. Furthermore, each holds individuated pieces of information that, when assimilated, tell the complete story of the Cantrells and Hoot Owl Holler. Smith infuses into her work the egalitarian notion that each member of the community, whether it is the sage Granny Younger, the novitiate Jink Cantrell, or the outsider Richard Burlage, has valid perspectives that figure into the construct of memory and experience.

While all of the voices in Oral History contribute to a multidimensional rendering of the past, four characters in particular provide the tension between the dueling past and present. Granny Younger, the novel's first narrator, evokes the past. She commands 44 pages of text and symbolizes the past in its richest sense. Granny Younger is perhaps the last wise woman of the tribe, and, by virtue of age and attendance at most of the births and deaths in the community, she knows everyone's story and personal history. She knows the root culture of the mountains, the female mysteries of life, and the legends of the past. Through Granny, such stories as Red Emmy's bewitching of Almarine Cantrell are integrated into the folklore heritage of the community. Indeed, Granny Younger represents the community point of view, and she is the repository of the spiritual life and the collective history of the community.

In actuality, Granny Younger represents time in all its dimensions. Not only is she a link to the past, she is a force of the present who significantly affects the daily lives and health and well-being of the entire community. Granny is also the community's envoy to the future, but in a clairvoyant sense. As she tells it, “Sometimes I know the future in my breast. Sometimes I see the future coming out like a picture show, acrost the trail ahead” (27). Because she is so in tune with the rhythms of life and death in the mountains, her intuitive powers appear to be the inevitable extensions of those experiences. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Granny “reads” people well, as she shows with her understanding of Almarine's intense and dangerous longing for Red Emmy and Red Emmy's reciprocated lust and fervent desire to be “a witch and regular gal both” (39). However, Granny also knows how to interpret the natural signals around her. For example, a thick fog in August means a heavy snow in the coming winter, and, more cryptically, “blood on the moon” bears tragic portents and is associated with “graves and dying” (27).

While the community respects and defers to her knowledge, abilities, and special powers, Granny Younger is not egocentric in regard to these things. She incorporates the viewpoints of others into her own analysis and interpretation of past events. In recounting “froze-time” on Hoot Owl Mountain—that unnatural period of time when Almarine and Red Emmy lived together in Almarine's mountain cabin and time seemed to stand still—Granny includes the reactions and observations of other characters. She tells how Rhoda Hibbitts, who used to speak so well of Almarine, would no longer speak his name and how Harve Justice encountered a raven near Almarine's cabin that flew straight at his head, screamed like a baby, and had eyes as big as a human's. When Granny concludes, “Well, they is stories and stories,” she is in essence acknowledging the layering of stories and experiences that determines the collective memory of the community. Granny is the vessel into which individual stories are poured, and she gives them final shape and meaning. Granny summarizes the community's experience after the froze-time episode by saying, “the point is Almarine was bewitched, and twerent none of us could holp him” (41). Her words linguistically mark the coming together of community voices and experiences, with Granny serving as the designated speaker for the community.

While Granny Younger does seem to be a voice for the community, she is not the community voice that also appears in Oral History. This voice first appears at the beginning of the novel and develops more strongly after Granny's section, perhaps in anticipation of her death. It reoccurs intermittently between the other narratives to reveal the past and the personal and community memories arising out of the past. Granny functions as the temporary personification of the community voice, and, with her death, there is no one character who can assume her role in speaking for the community or in preserving the integrity of the past. Rhoda Hibbitts assumes Granny's role in nursing the sick and dying. However, she does not possess the same depth of knowledge and understanding, and her stewardship of community history and heritage falls short of Granny Younger's. Even Rhoda's strange and ugly daughter Rose represents a perversion of the old ways, the slow, but inevitable, disintegration of the past.

Granny Younger has much in common with Mary Dorthula White who narrates Mildred Haun's The Hawk's Done Gone. For sixty years Mary Dorthula, or “Granny” as she is called in Haun's work, has “tied the navel cords of all the saints and sinners that have seen their first daylight in Hoot Owl District” (7). (Interestingly, Smith's setting of Hoot Owl Holier in the Virginia mountains bears the same name as Haun's Hoot Owl District of Cocke County in the east Tennessee mountains.) Like Granny Younger, Haun's Mary Dorthula is also part of the mountain landscape, or, as she tells it, “I am naturalized to the place” (7). She lives her life in communion with nature, and indeed she experiences and participates in the mysteries of life and death in the mountains. She usually does this with great strength but sometimes with astounding passivity. Yielding to the patriarchal order and male-dominance of her world, Mary Dorthula allows her granddaughter Cordia to die in childbirth and then assists Cordia's husband in burying their melungeon-colored infant alive.¹ The baby's dark and questionable heritage, which can be traced to a previous generation, makes him too much of a social and moral affront, too much of an Other, to be assimilated into Mary Dorthula's closed mountain community. Despite the “darkness, fire and pain” of this experience, Mary Dorthula acknowledges how “everything is planned out” and how God understood what she had been through (111). To her, the mountains command a will and order of their own that influence and direct human lives, and women even as strong as Mary Dorthula are powerless to resist these forces.

Both Mary Dorthula and Granny Younger are representative of those women who, Carole Ganim states, are born into the “closely-clustered hills of the Appalachians [and are] surrounded, if not suffocated, by symbols of [themselves] from birth” (258). The inescapable presence of the mountains gives both Appalachian women writers and the women in their novels a particularly strong attachment to land and place (273). This attachment provides them with a foundation, an identity and a sense of belonging. While Granny Younger and Mary Dorthula are supreme examples of this, the same can be said of Gertie Nevels in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, though her life experiences are far different. Gertie's displacement from the hills of Kentucky to an industrialized, male-dominated Detroit is terrifying and disturbing, and yet she manages to reconcile the disparate parts of her life without totally surrendering her identity (Ganim 269). Like Granny Younger and Mary Dorthula, she exemplifies what Ganim terms “a kind of identification of body and mind, of nature and spirit, a paradigm of the female union between the concreteness of the physical world and the psychological, philosophical, moral and political expression of this earth-based experience” (258). Gertie's carvings, are a representation of this union—a complex manifestation of psychological, artistic, and economic impulses. Through her carvings Gertie finds a sense of self and community that had eluded her since leaving the mountains—something that Granny Younger and Mary Dorthula have never been without.

While such characters as Gertie Nevels, Mary Dorthula, and Granny Younger have a strong sense of past and place, others do not. In Oral History, Richard Burlage functions as an outsider who has no sense of the past whatsoever, at least as it pertains to the mountain community. With his journal consuming more than eighty pages of the novel, the largest number given to one character, Burlage represents the powerful intrusion of the present and of the outside world on Hoot Owl Holier. In journeying to the Virginia mountains, Burlage sees himself as a pilgrim going back through time in search of “the very roots of consciousness and belief” (93) and, in essence, himself. As a force of the present, Burlage is all too aware of the dead past undergirding his own gentried experience—the beauty, decadence, and sadness of his mother gathering the last flowers in the garden, his brother drinking alone in the library, and the Grecian columns of his Richmond mansion held upright by the romance and anguish of the past. The impenetrable terrain of Granny Younger's mountains with their “rocky cliffs and vertical gorges” (105) stands in sharp juxtaposition to Burlage's more civilized, flatland existence. More significantly, the contrasts in geographic landscapes mirror the differences in psychic landscapes that exist between Burlage and the mountain community. Burlage's chivalric quest for self-knowledge is a false and rather superficial one. Rather than struggle with his own weighted past, Burlage abandons it and attempts to tap into memories and experiences that aren't legitimately his, but in fact belong to another people, place, and culture. Ironically, while Burlage is a product of powerful Western influences and a Latinate education, he is a kind of Other, a true outsider in the mountain community.

Burlage and his journal also represent “the tension between oral and written cultures” (Jones 270). Through his journal, he makes pretensions at understanding the mountain community and its past, but he fails to comprehend the culture, its stories, and the mores that Granny Younger knew so well. His writings represent the split between the rational world and a culture that is still in touch with mysterious ways of knowing. Burlage can't reconcile these differences, and his presence propels the community into change and eventual confrontation with the forces of the present.

Burlage's immersion in the written tradition or, “father speech,” keeps him from fully experiencing the life and rhythms of the mountains. Corinne Dale sees language as defining Burlage's experience, as he even interprets mountain life through metaphors drawn from his university education—an old mountain woman is an “old priestess of the realm of Lethe”; the train is a “medieval monster” (23). Dale notes that when Burlage begins to focus on life, rather than on his own verbal reactions, he is at a loss for words. For example, when Dory awakens him to new sensory experiences, Burlage loses control both sexually and verbally, and “!!!!!!!!” replaces words in his journal (24). However, as Dale also observes, Burlage cannot so easily relinquish verbal and sexual control (24). He returns to his journal, writing down a list of pros and cons for staying with Dory, an analytical act which immerses him once more in the male order of things.

Burlage's infatuation with and sexual exploitation of Dory Cantrell suggests a corruption in a larger sense—the corruption of the past and a way of life which will have consequences in the generations to come. When Burlage deserts a pregnant Dory, he reduces her to a moral distraction diverting him from his original quest for truth, personal growth, and “peace with God” (Smith 135). In his journal Burlage admits that he can see her “in no setting other than the lovely wilderness of her birth, against no background other than these high mountains which are her home” (163). However, Burlage fails to see the moral failure in his thinking and his actions, and when he returns to Hoot Owl Holier ten years after deserting Dory, he comes to capture the past with his camera. By way of the “new” field of photography, Burlage again tries to understand the culture. The pictures he takes of a tubercular young mother sitting on a street curb, a stooped old man leaning against a new World War I monument, and fighting boys whose muddy shoes are patched with cardboard reflect the desperate times that have come to the mountains. Instead of seeing these harsh realities, Burlage considers only that his photographs “captured beautifully … the essence of that mountain town” (223). He even fails to recognize his twin daughters, whom he attempts to capture with his camera. Ironic symbols of moral blindness—the camera, the photographs, and Burlage represent intrusions of the present on the past, the new on the old, and the outside world on a decaying community.

Like Richard Burlage, Jennifer Bingham is also an outsider to Hoot Owl Holier and part of the deconstructive forces at work in the novel. She is the granddaughter of Burlage and Dory Cantrell, but has been raised outside the mountain community. As a university student, Jennifer has also been indoctrinated into the “academic father speech” (Dale 22). Jennifer is a vehicle for getting to the past, and, at the same time, she represents the intrusion of the present on the past. Her attempts to record her family history for a college course frame the novel. Using a tape recorder, Jennifer unknowingly elicits the many voices that appear in the text. The voices and their attendant stories seem to be released into the mountain air—unspoken, unrecorded, but there nonetheless. Like Burlage's camera, the tape recorder is an artificial and contrived means for recording and dissecting the past. Jennifer's understanding of the past is grossly limited, and she, like Richard Burlage, flees the mountains for safer ground, her romanticized notions about the past severely challenged. As Burlage fails in his understanding of community, Jennifer fails to comprehend the history, spirit, and realities undergirding her family. In the end, she decides that Ora Mae's brusque dismissal, Little Luther's crude jokes, and Almarine's assaultive kiss demonstrate that her relatives are really “primitive people, resembling … some early tribe” and not the quaint, pastoral people she had imagined them to be (Smith 291).

In juxtaposition to Burlage and Jennifer, Sally Wade functions as an insider fully assimilated into the community. Like Granny Younger, she retains the full knowledge of the community, but not in any mythic, wise-woman sense. Instead, she is both a modern-day storyteller and a realist. Her narrative of 44 pages is equal in length to Granny Younger's, and she brings the Cantrell story full circle. The daughter of Dory Cantrell, Sally completes her mother's story, providing heretofore unmentioned details of her life and death. Sally re-how Dory, who often disappeared from home for hours, one day “fell—or laid down—on the spur line, and the train cut off her head” (249). Dory proves to be at the center of the Cantrell family past, and her inability to reconcile her ambivalence about living in the mountains is reflected in her death. While Arnow's Gertie Nevels is able to leave and eventually adjust (however painfully) to life outside the mountains, Sally's narrative reveals how Dory was trapped between two worlds. Dory was drawn to the outside world introduced to her by Richard Burlage, and yet she was still firmly rooted in the landscape of the mountains. As Burlage noted years earlier, she couldn't be extracted from that environment. Dory has been likened to Celia Shaw—another beautiful, wild, mountain girl—in Mary Noailles Murfree's “The Star in the Valley” (Ganim 272). Like Celia, Dory seemed to be “unsuited to her rough surroundings, yet entirely at harmony with them” (272). Unfortunately, Burlage's exploitation destroyed this harmony, and Dory was ultimately cast into the unique position of being an Other in both Burlage's world and her own. Her decapitation along the railroad tracks is symbolic of her psychologically dissociative struggle and her failure to be fully integrated into any world.

Among other stories, Sally also describes how Dory's restlessness is passed on as a tragic legacy to Pearl, another daughter, who runs off with one of her high school students and later dies in childbirth. However, Sally does not perceive these experiences as crippling burdens to be born either by herself or future Cantrells. Instead, they become stories which serve as vital links to her family's past. Sally relates these stories with a vitality and consciousness that demonstrate that she “understands the polarities of feeling and thought, passivity and action, female and male, and unifies them in her life” (Ganim 273).

Rich in irony, Sally's stories are delivered matter-of-factly, as if tragedies and the grotesque are commonplace for everyone. This style of narration suggests that Sally takes in the experiences and tragedies of her past, filters through their meanings, comes to some internal awareness of their relevance, and then casts them out again as stories for the next generation of listeners. Sally's narrative also demonstrates that the storytelling process adds to the tapestry of memory that develops within a family or culture, and that this weaving of memories and the creation of stories promotes the development of accommodative life processes. Sally herself proves this to be true. Unlike her mother or sister, Sally effectively manages to reconcile the past with the present. She does not suffer the ambivalence towards the past or towards life in the mountains that destroyed Dory and Pearl.

Despite her family tragedies and the growing intrusion of the outside world and such artifacts of mass culture as television, Amway, Mary Kay cosmetics, and mountain theme parks, Sally Wade successfully integrates herself into a changing community. Her ability to transform memory into meaning and then into stories aids her in this process. In order to survive, Sally also shrewdly realizes that one must adapt, accommodate, or leave. At the same time, she is realistic enough to know, “there's no new life” (270). Of all the Cantrells, Sally is the one most able to accept the rich, but harsh, heritage of her mountain past and to adapt to a rapidly changing culture.

While Gloria Naylor can't be labeled a southern writer, Mama Day is richly southern in its setting and treatment of the past. The past in Mama Day evolves as a familial, cultural, and racial force in the closed, isolated community of Willow Springs. An island off the coasts of lower South Carolina and northern Georgia, Willow Springs is a black community whose history pre-dates the Civil War. As in Oral History, magic, mystery, and legend provide the cornerstones of the collective history of the place. While race figures into the manifestation of the Other in Mama Day, the bonds shared within the female community and between generations of women seem to be the strongest elements. According to Larry Andrews, these bonds confer “identity, purpose, and strength for survival” (2). In addition, he sees Naylor as moving into the realm of “matriarchal mythmaking” in Mama Day, with the real power in the novel coming from folk tradition, nature, and “foremothering” (2).

The novel originates with the matriarchal Sapphira Wade, a slave and “true conjure woman … [whose name] is never breathed out of a single mouth in Willow Springs” (3–4). While facts have been obscured or altered by time, Sapphira persuaded her owner Bascombe Wade in 1823 to deed over the entire island to his slaves, and then she supposedly murdered him. Sapphira's deeds establish the cultural and racial nascence of Willow Springs, and generations later her story pervades the consciousness of the entire community. As the novel's community voice explains it, “Sapphira Wade don't live in the part of our memory we can use to form words” (4). The legend of Sapphira Wade is passed along not by re-tellings, but through intuitive, transcendent ways of listening and knowing. The knowledge of the past comes through daily living in the community. It is transferred during the course of such ordinary events as sitting on porches shelling June peas, “quieting the midnight cough of a baby,” and taking apart a car engine (10).

While Sapphira's story serves as the foundation for the collective history of Willow Springs, her knowledge and power are retained as a familial legacy passed on to Miranda (or Mama Day) and to Miranda's niece, Ophelia (or Cocoa). Like Granny Younger in Oral History, Miranda is the wise woman of the community, and she possesses formidable powers used in helping and healing the inhabitants of Willow Springs. Her powers lie not just in herbal remedies or conjure spells; they emanate from deep recesses of the mind and perhaps from more ancient sources of power. To Miranda, the realization that “the mind is everything” (90) lies at the heart of what she does and whom she touches. She uses her powers responsibly and with restraint. Despite the mysterious origins and the shamanic qualities of her powers, Miranda's knowledge as a midwife and healer has a medically-correct basis. For this, she is granted the respect of Dr. Smithfield, an outsider who wisely knows another “good doctor” when he sees one (84). Miranda blends the elements of traditional medical practices with non-traditional folk and herbal remedies that exist as part of the memory of her culture.

Miranda's point of view is not delivered in first person, as in Granny Younger's case, but rather through an omniscient voice that is somewhat like the community voice in Oral History. The Willow Springs voice has a full understanding of everything in the community. It is the spiritual voice of the community, that has knowledge of the past, is fully integrated into the present, and will likely continue into the future long after Miranda and others in Willow Springs are dead. This voice not only knows the history of Sapphira Wade and her descendants, it is privy to Miranda's thoughts and feelings and can describe her actions in detail. It also reports on the shenanigans of Dr. Buzzard, Ruby, and Junior Lee and comprehends the terrifying mystery of the Other Place. In addition, this voice of place possesses a keen awareness of the intricate rhythms of nature and time in Willow Springs, noting such things as a slow fall, a season for butterflies, and how “August is August” with its hot winds blowing through the palmettos (312).

The Willow Springs voice frames the novel and serves in counterpoint with the other two voices that appear in the text. Using the present tense and an occasional collective “we,” this omniscient voice provides a sense of real time and immediacy as it alternates with the individual voices of Cocoa and George Andrews, Cocoa's New York City-born husband. An outsider to Willow Springs, George in particular tries to understand the past and his wife's island heritage. As the abandoned son of a teenaged prostitute, he has no family history of his own, and he struggles in earnest to become part of the Willow Springs community.

George and Cocoa both speak in past tense and first person as they recount the details of their meeting, courtship, and brief, tragic marriage. Their narratives are individually constructed sections that, when considered together, serve as a running dialogue between the two characters. This dialogue is then periodically punctuated by the Willow Springs voice. Thus, in a rhythmical cadence, the three voices push the story forward, and in a paradoxically opposing motion, they reach back in time to maintain connections with the past. This process creates a complex rendering of time where past and present seem to exist simultaneously. Because of these techniques, the usual definitions of time and reality do not apply. George and Cocoa's narratives at first appear to be spoken discourses, but later they prove to be interior dialogues that Cocoa has with George in the Willow Springs graveyard many years after his death.

As discussed earlier, the past in Mama Day is intricately connected to the history and lore of Sapphira Wade and the Day family. At the same time, the past looms over the present to significantly influence the daily life of the community. While this is conveyed as a collective experience that has racial and cultural implications for the community, the past is also a function of memory in an individual sense as well. This is particularly true for Miranda, as her experience within the novel is largely a search through memory for truth, understanding, and connections regarding her own past. Miranda does not engage in this search for strictly self-serving reasons, but because she knows that memory will unleash the power she needs to save Cocoa from Ruby's psychological and physical poisons.

Memory in Mama Day functions not only as a vital component in Miranda's psyche, it exists in the inanimate as well. As Miranda knows, objects hold and resonate the past much like the human mind stores the past in memory. Like Almarine Cantrell's mountain cabin in Oral History, Miranda's birthplace and childhood home, the Other Place, is the primary repository for memory. Originally built by Bascombe Wade, the house and the surrounding garden evolved as a place of legend, magic, and tragedy concerning Sapphira Wade. Even its name suggests the presence of the Other. For recent family descendants, the house is a source of palpable anguish and pain—the drowning of Miranda's sister, Peace, and the suicide of her mother. Although Miranda recognizes that the house is nothing more than “wood and plaster and brick” and that people bring the sorrow (262), it still retains the memory of those who resided therein, and it assumes the sorrows and tragedies of their lives. As a result, the house resonates loss and “a lack of peace” (225), in both a literal and symbolic sense.

The Other Place figures significantly in the process that Miranda uses in order to save Cocoa from Ruby's evil. Miranda returns there to tap into its memory, for the power and knowledge the place contains. She reaches into the past in order to effect change in the present. At the Other Place, Miranda washes out cabinets, scrubs the floors and turns to Bascombe Wade's ledger in an attempt to unlock memory. She searches the well where Peace drowned and finds the memory manifested in “circles and circles of screaming” (284). When Miranda “looks” at the sound she sees the images of the tragedies associated with the well. The house, the ledger, and the well are important symbols of memory, but they are not enough to save Cocoa. Miranda must enlist George and his intense power of belief in himself in order to construct a metaphorical “bridge” between place, memory, and life for Cocoa to walk over. In essence George opens the memory and provides the critical link needed to save Cocoa. He ends up sacrificing his own life, but in doing so George ironically becomes fully assimilated into the community. Although he had no personal history of his own, through death George contributes to the collective history of Willow Springs and becomes part of its lore and memory.

Linda Wagner-Martin has identified Mama Day as a novel about “the way one generation of women affects another, and the way the strong heritage of gentleness and anger, courage and frailty, can shape individual consciousness through several generations of family” (7). Thus, Mama Day falls into the tradition of other novels by black women in which strong women at the center of the works help define the southern black experience largely through their relationships with each other and their guardianship of culture. For example, Vyry in Margaret Walker's Jubilee is raised and nurtured by other women after her own mother dies in childbirth bearing another of the “Marster's bastards.” From such women as Granny Ticey, Mammy Sukey, and Aunt Sally, Vyry learns the power of spiritual transcendence as an important means of surviving the terrible realities of slavery. According to Joyce Pettis, the essence of Walker's novel lies in the re-creation of slave culture with its folk practices and beliefs (12). The legacy of songs, spirituals, folk sayings, and herbal remedies that Vyry inherits from Aunt Sally and the others connects her not only to past generations of women but to future ones as well. As Vyry is based on Walker's own great-grandmother, Walker thus becomes an integral part of this connectedness between generations of black women in much the same way that Sapphira Wade, Miranda, and Cocoa are connected in Mama Day.

Toni Morrison's Beloved is structured around similar relationships, with Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver, and Beloved sharing connections to each other and to the past, present, and future. Baby Suggs is at the spiritual center of her community, much like Miranda is in Mama Day. Sethe is like Cocoa in her growth towards self-understanding and acceptance of the past. Ultimately, the voices and experiences of Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver, and Beloved come together in the process of “rememory” and form one collective experience shared by all. As in Jubilee and Mama Day, the female experience in Morrison's novel also demonstrates that enslavement, suffering, and loss do not destroy the human spirit.

In conclusion, it is this triumph of the human spirit and celebration of the female experience that unite such racially and culturally disparate works as Mama Day and Oral History. In their presentation of women as the Other, both novels yield strong female characters, forge important generational connections between women, and offer a revelatory look at the folk practices and mysteries associated with the female experience in two different Southern cultures. In addition, the two novels reinforce the orality of the female tradition with the attendant stories, songs, and magic that are passed from one generation to another. In their works, Smith and Naylor are both “in search of their mothers' gardens,” the process Alice Walker describes in her essay about discovering black women's artistic traditions (Andrews 20). Indeed, in Oral History and Mama Day both Smith and Naylor search out the “foremothers'” experience in their respective cultures.

Despite their cultural and racial differences, the two novels also stand together in the message they deliver about the function and value of the past. These novels demonstrate that the past influences and complicates human existence regardless of time, place, or gender. They show that, like light passing through a prism, the past enters human lives and produces assorted perceptions, illusions, and distortions. However, even with such refraction, its power is not diffused. The past is still a singular force that shapes human life with a fierce intensity.

In their rendering of the past, Oral History and Mama Day offer significant implications for multi-ethnic studies, particularly relating to family and community. The rich familial pasts in both novels stand in stark contrast to the dissociative experience common in contemporary life. For many today, there is no sense of the distant past or a past replete with colorful legends or ancestors. Instead, there may be only the immediate past as it exists quietly and painfully in one's personal history. This past may be comprised of memories of childhood hurts and dysfunctional family relationships, and a grievous sense of isolation and loneliness. Given the social and familial fragmentation in contemporary American society, there is often no grand sense of family or place to provide identity, stability, or belonging for succeeding generations. In regard to these problems, the rich ethnicity contained in Oral History and Mama Day has particular relevance. Whatever one's gender, race, or geographic region, these novels remind us that there is a past undergirding each of our lives and that it can be unearthed, interpreted, and applied. As Smith and Naylor present it, the past is indeed the source of racial, cultural, and familial legacies that for better or worse influence who we are and what we will become. While the past cannot be altered, it can be redefined in terms that have meaning and relevance for the present. In any case, old family dramas and personal histories cannot be rewritten. However, Oral History and Mama Day both suggest something far more valuable: in light of knowledge gleaned from the past, individual lives and perhaps the future can be re-scripted.

Note

1. In Appalachian lore, melungeons are dark and mysterious people who possess a mixed and uncertain racial heritage. Cordia's father was supposedly a melungeon, a fact that only Mary Dorthula knows. While Cordia appears white, her baby is “melungeon-colored” and thus would be a pariah in the white mountain community.

Works Cited

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Arnold, Edwin. “An Interview with Lee Smith.” Appalachian Journal 11 (1984): 240–54.

Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Dale, Corinne. “The Power of Language in Lee Smith's Oral History.” Southern Quarterly 28.2 (1990): 21–34.

Ganim, Carole. “Herself: Woman and Place in Appalachian Literature.” Appalachian Journal 13 (1986): 258–74.

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