Bailey's Cafe is the fourth in a sequence of novels that Gloria Naylor has conceived as a quartet. Hitherto she has used two devices to create a sense of linkage from one novel to the next. The first is to develop a character or situation referred to in a previous novel; the second is to continue a pattern of allusions to Shakespeare.¹ In this final novel of the quartet, however, Naylor teases us by deferring fulfillment of these expectations for so long that we have just about forgotten or given up. For example, Mama Day, the third novel, has planted George's reference to his birth at Bailey's Cafe (130–31). Yet Naylor makes us wait until the last three pages of the novel Bailey's Cafe before mentioning George and revealing who his mother is and where (unbeknown to George) he fits into the overall scheme. The comment of one of the characters—“in this business you could use a sense of humor” (91)—applies to Naylor's role as novelist.

Initially, the strongest connection Bailey's Cafe demonstrates with Naylor's previous work is to her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Like the earlier novel, Bailey's Cafe presents a series of stories of down-and-out women. The resemblance is sufficiently close that the basic approach now seems routine, predictable, at times even trite. Having delayed almost too late until the last third of the novel, Naylor springs a surprise. The last, longest, and most important story is devoted to a man. This is where Naylor breaks new ground. The legacy from the first three novels in the quartet is a line of failed, incomplete, or uncertain male characters: from the negative instances of the brutal young rapists and the helplessly alcoholic Ben in The Women of Brewster Place to the shaky efforts of Lester and Willie in Linden Hills and George in Mama Day to break out and to seek alternative modes of masculine identity. In Bailey's Cafe Naylor provides a positive model of masculinity. It is a sign of Naylor's humor that the man capable of this masculinity bears the name Miss Maple and wears women's dresses.

However, Naylor emphasizes that Miss Maple represents a case neither of sexual ambiguity nor gender indeterminacy. Sugar Man, the epitome of traditional manhood, demonstrates the false perception created by anxiety: “And it does no good to tell him for the thousandth time that Miss Maple isn't a homosexual. Sugar Man has had to cling onto that or he would just about lose his senses when Miss Maple is around” (163). In order to reach a different definition of manhood, Miss Maple, then Stanley, has had to overcome the same anxiety: “Manhood is a pervasive preoccupation when you're an adolescent boy, and you tend to see a fairy under every bush” (175). This fear is concentrated on his father, whom the son regards according to convention as “a coward” (170) for his refusal to fight back against white racist harassment: “I didn't see him as a man at all” (173). Eventually the boy's view is reversed: he breaks out of the impasse in which his resentment toward his father has trapped him and comes to realize that his father is instead the model for an alternative manhood: “… how to be my own man” (173). How Naylor brings about this transformation is testimony to the brilliance of her comic imagination.

In the funniest moment in the book, Naylor has father and son stripped naked and locked in a storeroom by four uncouth white brothers, whereupon the two black men put on female clothing, break out of their prison, and take revenge by summarily dispatching each of the four whites in turn. The scene could not be more cartoonish, slapstick, and farcical, yet the secret of Naylor's comic inventiveness is that its effects are both hilarious and deeply moving at the same time, as though the hilarity gave access to deeper levels of feeling. Under the duress of their imprisonment, Stanley's angry outburst against his father suddenly gives way to the physical contact he had earlier shunned: “Papa reached out to me in the darkness and I jerked my shoulder away from his hands. Don't you touch me. My teeth were clenched. Just don't touch me” (180):

You don't even amount to the ape they [the white men] called you—you're nothing. And you've always been nothing. Nothing … nothing … noth … My whole body started vibrating, my teeth chattering, my hands and leg muscles moving with a will of their own. He caught me in his arms before I fell to the floor. And then he placed me down gently to hold me as I cried like the child I was.

My flesh against his flesh …

(181–82)

Forced by the occasion, the father for the first time expresses his hope that his son “identify yourself as a man,” and the son begins to have a new understanding of what—from his father's perspective—it means “to become a man” (182).

Of course this reconciliation of father and son is confirmed by the father's abandonment of passive resistance and his recourse to violent retaliation. Ironically, what finally provokes his heroic attack is the white men's desecration of the complete set of Shakespeare volumes the father has purchased as a “legacy” (174) for his son: “They had gotten to the books. The silk cover was gouged with holes, the spine busted and bent over double. They'd torn out handfuls of pages, crushed what was left between their fists, and then urinated on the whole thing. The stench of The Tempest was quickly filling the whole room” (183). The entire network of Shakespearean allusions through the previous three novels is compressed into one image—the Shakespeare corpus represented in the most literal way possible as a set of books, physical objects shipped in a crate. The image illustrates the complex multiple effects of Naylor's comedy. On one level, the educated, self-confident black man is moved to defend the Shakespearean heritage against ignorant whites. Yet on another level the humor turns in a different direction to make the Caliban-like gesture of destroying the books a magnificent act of exorcism. As a fitting conclusion to Naylor's long engagement with Shakespeare over the course of the quartet, this farewell is a riddance ritual that announces the end of her artistic apprenticeship. The moment is not only unaccountably funny but also satisfying. The taboo surrounding Shakespeare as sacred icon is broken; we are allowed to experience Naylor's outrageous comic violation as a release.

The final section of the novel that follows Miss Maple's story continues the focus on male identity and enters what might be considered non-Shakespearean territory: the relationship between blacks and Jews. The problems of black anti-Semitism and Jewish racism have recently received new attention.² Naylor's contribution to this discussion is deeply affecting because she is able to use the medium of fiction to convey the possibility of cooperation. The black male proprietor of Bailey's Cafe and Gabe, the Jewish owner of the pawnshop, are brought together specifically to bless the baby boy to whom Miriam, an Ethiopian Jew, has given birth. The festive response by the novel's three key male figures to “the baby's first thin cry” (225) is touching: “Then Gabe grabbed me, whirled me around, and we started to dance. He could kick pretty high for an old goat. Miss Maple took his other hand and the three of us were out in the middle of the floor, hands raised and feet stomping” (225). The same three men preside over the formal ceremony of circumcision: “I had to stand in as the honorary sandek, the godfather. And Miss Maple took the role of the other male guests to help me respond to the blessing. Don't worry, Gabe said; God will forgive you for not being Jews” (226). Through this cross-cultural nurturant concern, the novel provides a final suggestion of a new male identity. At the risk of sounding ungrateful in the face of the genuine gratitude I feel, I must also register the negative side of this positive outcome. Political and ceremonial discourse is made to seem a largely male affair. The one explicit protest against this state—that of Miriam's mother (157)—is not fully or clearly stated. …

Notes

1. The author gives a detailed account of the Shakespearean references in the first three novels in the chapter on Naylor in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 124–45.

2. Examples are: Julian Bond, “Blacks and Jews,” lecture at Williams College, 2 Dec. 1992; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” New York Times 20 July 1992: A15; Andrew Hacker, “Jewish Racism, Black Anti-Semitism,” Reconstruction 1, no. 3 (1991): 14–17; Michael Lerner, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left (Oakland, Calif.: Tikkun, 1992); Cornel West, “Black Anti-Semitism and the Rhetoric of Resentment,” Tikkun 7 (Jan./Feb. 1992): 15–16; West and Lerner, “A Conversation between Cornel West and Michael Lerner,” Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, ed. Jack Salzman with Adina Back and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin (New York: George Braziller, 1992) 141–51.