"The whole picture" in Gloria Naylor's 'Mama Day.' (Women's Culture Issue)

In Mama Day Naylor narrates the love story of two black people from strikingly different background--George, orphaned in the urban North, has grown up in an institution run by whites; and Cocoa, doted on by two black mother figures, has been drenched in the traditions of the rural South. Through the relationship that develops between these two characters, one the product of a white world, the other of an emphatically black one, Naylor deals with the issue of maintaining black cultural identity in the face of attempts by the white world to order, control and define black people.

In her characterization of Willow Springs, Cocoa's island home situated off the Georgia/South Carolina coast, Naylor presents a world outside white parameters, a place in no state, on no map, connected to the mainland by the flimsiest of bridges periodically destroyed by storms. As the narrator stresses at the beginning of the novel, Willow Springs is not even, in a strict historical sense, American:

...the way we saw it, American ain't entered the question at all when

it come to our land: Sapphira was African-born, Bascombe Wade was

from Norway, and it was the 18 and 23'ing that went down between

them two put deeds in our hands. And we wasn't even Americans

when we got it--was slaves. And the laws about slaves not owning

nothing in Georgia and South Carolina don't apply, 'cause the land

wasn't then--and isn't now--in either of them places. (5) Outside white traditions, Willow Springs--with its Candle Walk instead of Christmas, its "standing forth" in lieu of funerals--is culturally independent as well. The vanity of attempts by the white world to assimilate, order, and define this black one is suggested in the anecdote about one Willow Springs resident who returns to do anthropological work. Imbued with the values of the white world in which he has been educated, "determined to put Willow Springs on the map" (7), he misinterprets the island's central myth of 18 and 23, seeing it in relation to the white maps the place transcends:

... you see, he had come to the conclusion after "extensive field work"

ain't never picked a boll of cotton or head of lettuce in his life--Reema

spoiled him silly), but he done still made it to the conclusion that 18 &

23 wasn't 18 & 23 at all--was really 81 & 32, which just so happened

to be the fines of longitude and latitude marking off where Willow

Springs sits on the map. And we were just so damned dumb that we

turned the whole thing around. (8) Missing the autonomous cultural identity of Willow Springs, he sees it as a mere reaction to white definitions:

Not that he called it being dumb, mind you, called it |asserting our

cultural identity,' -inverting hostile social and political parameters.'

'Cause, see, being we was brought here

as slaves, we had no choice but to look

at everything upside-down (8)

Throughout the novel, Naylor consistently (and satirically) reveals the futility of the white world's attempts to control either nature or the decidedly black world of Willow Springs. Just as George's "piping system[s]" (52), his engineering feats which redesign the structures that take care of basic needs' (60), seem trivial in comparison to Mama Day's powers, and his nuclear generator (251) a mere toy beside the force of the storm, the white world's maps, pictures, movies, and myths are depicted as inadequate to express black experience. When one "crosses over" into that autonomous black world, the narrator early on warns the reader, such ways of imaging reality and ordering experience are simply insufficient. "It ain't about right or wrong truth or lies; it's about a slave woman who brought a whole new meaning to both them words, soon as you cross over here from beyond the bridge" (3).

To underscore the futility of using white artistic forms to express reality across the bridge, Naylor repeatedly emphasizes the inadequacy of photos, charts, and graphs to express the subtle and complex truth of black experience. The inability of a picture to capture George and Cocoa's relationship, for instance, is suggested in the charts and diagrams that constitute his sex education, the 'two ugly [headless] blowups of the skinned male and female anatomy" (104) that Mrs. Jackson whacks with her pointer. The "developers" ridiculed at the very beginning of the novel, seeing Willow Springs as a timeless" |pic-ture-ess... vacation paradise' " (4), similarly miss the spiritual richness (and awesome powers for good and evil) of the place, its convoluted history still in the making. Even Cocoa senses the in adequacy of pictures to capture Willow Springs. Early in her relationship with George, rather than attempt to explain a spiritual and historical reality he cannot possibly understand, she tries to accommodate it to George's world by "paint[ing] the picture of a small rural community and [her] life with Grandma and Mama Day, so it seemed like any other small southern town and they two old ladies doting over the last grandchild" (126). While "the smoke drifting up over the south woods from Dr. Buzzard's still might as well be painted on a picture, [since] it's always there," and while "the droning from his beehives out by Chevy's Pass, the pounding of the ocean water against the east bluff, the creaking from the wooden slats on the bridge over The Sound" makes the place seem "a still life" (160), such static, "realistic," and two-dimensional images only express the surface of Willow Springs, beneath which flows subtle, but profound change. While "Four pictures would just about do it, one for each season" (161; emphasis added), one needs a different kind of vision to understand Willow Springs:" ... here you'd have to look real close to see a gray hair or so inching around some temples, a little extra roll starting over some belt buckles. But slow, real slow. So slow it's like it's not happening at all. Until it happens. Overnight, some say" (161).

Although to the naive outsider the place seems "a picture postcard" (163), Mama Day, with her more discerning eye, realizes such ways of perceiving reality are foreign and inadequate ones. When, for instance, she watches television pictures of the Phil Donahue show, one episode showing people "all of who got photographs and claims they spotted UFOs," she, with her supernatural ability to communicate across generations, senses how ludicrous Phil Donahue appears, "look[ing] dead serious" (37), asking, "|Is there intelligent life in outer space? ... And are they trying to get in touch with us?' " (38). She concludes that such antics "could be summed up in two words: white folks. And when they found a colored somebody to act the fool--like the man from New Jersey, holding up a snapshot of his cousin posing with a family of Martians--she expanded it to three words: honorary white folks' (38).

In contrast to the anthropologist's mistaken view of black culture as an "upside-down" version of a white norm, Naylor suggests that the more complex spiritual reality of Willow Springs subverts white ways of understanding experience. George's sense of "a confrontation with fate" (28) in meeting Cocoa, for instance, destroying the pragmatic, empirical order of his life, seems "like a bizarre photograph ... developing in front of [his] face" (27). The powder Mama Day inserts in his letter that inexplicably leads him to get a job for Cocoa (ensuring their future meeting) appears "a movie being played in reverse frame to frame" (54). The conjure work and divination so central to Willow Springs also turn simplistic white notions of facts, rules, and reality on their head. Thus, Cocoa's illness is like 'a badly dubbed movie" (25) and Mama Day's intuition of the approaching storm like a nickelodeon gone haywire, "the pictures mov[ing] backward" until the whole picture "falls into place" (227).

Other white cultural artifacts are depicted as similarly inadequate. A measure of both Cocoa's and George's alienation from their black roots early in the novel is their extensive use of white cultural norms to define themselves and to understand their relationship. George, for instance, sees himself as Shakespeare and Cocoa as "Harold Robbins in general and James Mischener when [she] wanted to get deep" (60). He plays the role of white, urbane sophisticate when he asks Cocoa to dinner by sending her roses with a note: "|There are only eleven yellow roses here. The twelfth is waiting on a table at Il Ponte Vecchio if you'd like to retrieve it one evening.' " The absurdity of such posturing is not lost on Cocoa, who thinks,"Now, what kind of fudge stick asked a woman out like this--who's this guy used to dating, Mary Tyler Moore?" (58).

His notions about women come from the white world as well. Never having had a relationship with any black woman either mother or lover, he knows women only from Mrs. Jackson's "graphic" diagrams of "the rudiments: ovaries, a womb, Fallopian tubes" (141). Sensing that these do not represent the whole picture, he buys books about women in an attempt to understand Cocoa. In the white world, he finds only "horrif[ying]" images depicting women as "normal only about seventy-two hours out of each month" (141) and "depressing" charts proving women were "shrews through no fault of [their] own" (141-42). A black cultural orphan, trained to be a parody of the stereotypical white male, he can (not surprisingly) only think of his love for Cocoa in terms of white myths. Speaking from a much later time frame with greater insight into his folly, he admits he

conjured up images of jasmine-scented

nights, warm biscuits and

honey being brought to me on flowered

china plates as you sat at my feet and

rubbed your cheek against my knee.

Go ahead and laugh, you have a perfect

right. I had never been south, and you

couldn't count the times I had spent

in Miami at the Super Bowl--that city

was a humid and pastel New York. So

I had the same myths about southern

women that you did about northern

men. (33) As George's final comment suggests, Cocoa too, early in the novel, deals with George according to a white script. Her way of understanding the disconcerting interview she has with him is to see it in the formulaic terms of cinematic melodrama. Aware that they are both play-acting, she thinks with her characteristic sarcasm, "Jesus, all we needed was the organ musk and a slow fade to my receding back as the swirling sand of the rocky coastline began to spell out The End" (30). As her sardonic conlusion suggests, both act parts false to their real selves and to their inexplicable attraction to one another: We had sure become one understanding pair of folks by the tune the lights in the theater came up and they pulled the curtain across the screen' (31). What her cynicism misses, however, is the fundamental inadequacy of such dramatic forms to represent their relationship: This interview, of course, is the beginning, rather than "The End," of their love story.

The painful lack of communication they early experience is a function of their attempts to develop their relationship according to a white script. The absurdity of their frequent discussions about the symbolism of Shakespeare is, for instance, not lost on Cocoa. When George asks her out again after what she describes as "one of the most boring evenings in recent memory" (59), she thinks,

Surely, he jests. I swear, that's the

first thing that popped into my head

when you asked me out again. I don't

know where that phrase came from--had

to be something from my high

school Shakespeare and you had been

going on and on about him earlier in

the evening. Just proves that

Shakespeare didn't have a bit of soul--I

don't care if he did write about Othello,

Cleopatra, and some slave on a

Caribbean island. If he had been in

touch with our culture, he would have

written somewhere, "Nigger, are you

out of your mind?" (64) While Cocoa often takes satisfaction in noting George's cultural whiteness, she falls into this trap herself. As confused by George as he is by her, she (no less ludicrously) draws on other white myths to explain his behavior:

I'd read all about your type in Cosmo:

ambivalent about your mothers, distant

and uncaring fathers,

should really be gay but

thought other men were too

good for you. I kicked myself

because I should have

known--the yellow roses,

the top-drawer restaurant,

the open and sensitive attempts

at conversation, the

gentle manipulation so that

I spilled my guts and actually

felt good about it. Oh, God,

I should have known Now

it was a matter of finding a

tactful way to turn you down

so you wouldn't start sobbing

and pleading in the middle

of the street. If I remembered

right, Cosmo said that your

type wasn't given to open

violence, but would sink to

degrading displays in public.

(64-65) Having no experience with men like George, unable to dredge up a "file" into which he fits, she cannot believe he "want[s] nothing from [her] but honesty" (63). As she dimly senses when she first meets him, white models of relationships between men and women are inadequate for her to "figure this shit out" (30). Nevertheless, both she and George cling to white romantic myths that threaten their happiness. Cocoa, for instance, obsessed with fears that "it will end," senses the inadequacy of white fairy-tales for her life in her cynical statement, "Grown women aren't supposed to believe in Prince Charmings and happily-ever-afters," but merely embraces another more melodramatic one: "Real life isn't about that--so bring on the clouds' (119).

The gravest challenge to their relationship occurs when they return to Willow Springs, where neither George's charts and maps nor either one's white romantic myths operate. To flourish in that milieu, they need to find different ways of understanding reality and their relationship. George, whose only experience of "miracles" and "immortality" comes from football (124), traverses a cultural chasm when he "crosses over" the bridge. The degree of his disorientation is immediately evident: Panicked when he cannot find the place on the map, he Mm the white developers) sees it as paradise' (175) and even fantasizes about schemes for developing the land albeit in a more ecologically sound way). As these reactions suggest, his failure to enter into the world of Willow Springs or even to understand it (despite his best efforts) results from his inability to abandon his white cultural baggage. As events become more confusing he clings even more tenaciously to the charts and graphs familiar to him, using his engineering knowledge, for instance, to speed up the building of the bridge, an obsession that symbolizes most graphically his dependence on the white world. Because the bridge remains a technical problem for him, he never sees the real kind of bridge between Cocoa and her history, and between her and himself, which both need to survive.

Like his charts and graphs, his constant attempts to accommodate Willow Springs to white cultural myths make it impossible for him to understand its more complex reality. Nothing from the white world, neither Mrs. Jackson's anatomical charts nor the tales of female hysteria from his psychology books, can help him explain the female-centered place he enters. Amused, for instance, that all the women in Cocoa's family are called Days, he teases her, "But what, as in your case, if a woman married?" Cocoa's profound response provides a key George needs to understand Willow Springs and Cocoa's relation to it: "You five a Day and you die a Day." Totally missing the deeper significance of this remark, George condescendingly responds, "Early women's lib." As Cocoa's simple comment, "A bit more than that" (218), suggests, George trivializes the history and independence of black women in Willow Springs by trying to understand them in terms of white women. As the novel demonstrates, neither Sapphira Wade's story nor Mama Day's power can be captured with the diminuitive label women's lib.

A similar tendency makes it impossible for George to understand the central myth of Willow Springs--that of Sapphira Wade, the story of a slave who was not a slave, one who escaped not merely to the North but all the way back to Africa. Faced with a version of slavery and the tale of a female slave that subvert white historical myths, he inaccurately interprets the various versions he hears. Like an anthropologist, he sees the story as another fanciful "legend" characteristic of exotic subcultures and finds Cocoa's way of speaking of Sapphira, "as if you were listing the attributes of a goddess," simply "odd." Missing the significance of Cocoa's reverence and the spiritual truth of his own simile, he reacts "scientifically," seeking the "real" source of what he sees as mere "myth":

The whole thing was so intriguing, I

wondered if that woman had lived at

all. Places like this island were ripe for

myths, but if she had really existed,

there must be some record. Maybe in

Bascombe Wade's papers: deeds of

sale for his slaves. Where had his home

been on this island? Did he have a

family? Who erected his tombstone?

(218) Attempting to understand black women's history in white male terms, he mistakenly hopes for a document to prove the existence of a woman whose story, in fact, reveals the inadequacy of that bill of sale to understand her power and independence. Imitating white histories of slavery, he would erase Sapphira's existence and importance by focusing on her white "master."

George tries several inappropriate white strategies for understanding the relationship between Sapphira and Bascombe Wade. At one point, for instance, he turns it into a version of Gone with the Wind, imagining Wade sitting on the verandah of his house in the other place, "watch[ing Sapphira] pruning roses that grew as large as my fist, snipping sprigs of mint for his tea," though even he senses the absurdity of casting Sapphira Wade as a demure Southern belle: "It was a nice image but it didn't feel that way" (225). n These attempts to fit the story of Sapphira Wade into a white mold ultimately prevent George from learning the lesson he needs to glean from her life--namely, the impossibility of possessing the black woman and the tragic folly of such attempts. As he comes increasingly confused by women who surround him, he more and more plays the role of "macho" (215) man, yearning like John Wayne or Huck Finn, for a world without women:

... there was a time when I didn't have

my whole world complicated with

[women]. A wonderful time. Just

dozens of boys. Clean fights. Straight

talk. Order. You did what you were

supposed to and left it at that. No

tantrums. No nonsense. And your hard

work was appreciated. (247) This fear of black women's powers, and the threat to white male "order" that they pose, leads him immediately to recast Sapphira Wade as an ungrateful, unfaithful "bitch": "Just look at that poor slob buried there--he gave her a whole island, and she still cut out on him" (247). Even when he has his most tangible experience of Sapphira's power during the hurricane, "the workings of Woman [who] has no name" (251), he avoids the full implications of the experience by taming that force, inappropriately recasting events in the shape of a Victorian novel: "I expected the sun to be shining, thought really that we deserved to have it shine after a night like that. Wasn't that the way in those Victorian novels? A wild tempest, flaming passions, and then the calm of a gorgeous sunrise" 255-56). That such insipid, romantic closure is not the shape of stories in Willow Springs is borne out in events following the storm and in George's observation, from a later perspective, that" ... we were hardly going according to the script" (256).

Just as George rewrites the history of Willow Springs as various white myths, he also sees his relationship with Cocoa as one white love story after another. In no less ludicrous fashion than his dinner invitation, he, at one point while in Willow Springs, "leans over and whisper[s] in [Cocoa's] ear. |Let's play Adam and Eve.' " While Cocoa's deflating rejoinder," '. . . just go on and roll around in those woods with your clothes off, and the first red ant that bites your behind will tell you all about paradise' " (222), seems merely amusing she hints at a much deeper folly in George's fantasy. His vision of two lone lovers who can "defy history" (226) in the garden paradise at the other place is a "picture postcard" version of romance that disregards the complex history of which he and Cocoa are a part.

Perhaps even more ominously, he imagines himself as a particular kind of male lead in the dramas into which he casts himself and Cocoa. While the real story of Sapphira and Bascombe has important affinities with his and Cocoa's, he draws parallels from his own inaccurate white versions; as Cocoa's, he draws the Bascombe Wade he imagines) wants "to sit in the rocking chair and play southern gentleman with [Cocoa] in his lap" (224). In fact, George, feeling ever more powerless and out of control in his relationship with Cocoa, fashions a script for them that implicitly casts her as a subservient female in a familiar white drama. In his fantasy of "jasmine-scented nights, warm biscuits and honey being brought to [him] on flowered china plates," for instance, he implicitly casts himself as a plantation owner and Cocoa as an adoring (and decidedly subordinate) wife, "s[itting] at [his] feet ... rubb[ing her] cheek against [his] knee" (33). Later in the novel when he insists that he and Cocoa stay |forever' in Willow Springs over her strong objections, she articulates the myth he has finally settled upon:

"Okay, George. This is what you

want to hear anywhere in the world

you go and anything you want to do

I'm game. I'll freeze myself, starve

myself, wear Salvation Army clothes to

be by your side. I'll steal for you, lie for

you, crawl on my hands and knees beside

you. Because a good woman always

follows her man." (221) In subtle ways, George plays out this male role to the end of the novel. The scene in which, after an argument, he carries Cocoa back to his bed "where [she] belong[s]" (252), comes from a movie familiar to Hollywood but foreign to Willow Springs. His banter with Cocoa about how she got there, " |on [her] hands and knees,' " " |begging [him] over and over' " (253), is another revealing indication of the underlying plot he imagines.

A complicated character, George acts a male role that is, however, more seductive and more complex, for his fantasies of male superiority are overlaid with other more superficially attractive but equally inappropriate) white ones. Like Prince Charming convinced that only he can save Cocoa, he kisses her (288) to bring her out of her deathly sleep. Misinterpreting Mama Day's statement that there " |is more than my blood flows in her and more hands that can lay claim to her than these' " as mere " |metaphors' " (294) like the fanciful ones in the white literay masterpieces he knows, he plays the role of traditional romantic hero, trying to "single-handedly" save "his woman" from evil forces with absurdly futile schemes to swim across the sound--"Quite a feat," he admits, 'since I couldn't swim a stroke' 263)--or to row a leaky boat to the mainland."(1) Frustrated at his lack of control, George fashions these scenarios more to prove his manhood than to save Cocoa. While he selflessly and heroically vows," ...I knew what I was going to do. It was an issue of priorities. I'm getting up at daybreak I thought and I'm going to repair that boat. I'm going to put the oars into the oarlocks and begin to row across The Sound. That much I can do for her" (282), he unwittingly reveals that the self-affirmation of the trial (even if it results in his death) is more important than the goal that he claims motivates him: "And at the 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. Yes, I would begin to swim. And at that point in time, finishing would not be the issue" (282-83).

While George acts like the chivalrous "real man" admired in the white world, such notions of masculinity are depicted as infantile ones in the novel. Cocoa, for instance, senses that the man she follows in New York, "a really distinguished-looking guy with a tweed jacket and gray sideburns" who "had diaper pins holding his fly front together--you know, the kind they used to have with pink rabbit heads on them" (18), is somehow representative of what she dislikes about urban, Northern men. Mama Day recognizes a similar childishness in George's condescending suggestion that she use her cane and responds with a "little spanking" (205), dragging him on a bone-crushing trek around the island to teach him a lesson. As his "ego ... take[s] over" and he gallantly "helps!" Mama Day and Abigail with their work, he acts not like a man but like a "five-year-old" (217), unaware that his participation, more hindrance than help, is tolerated to keep him out of mischief. When George brushes off Doctor Buzzard's advice to go to Mama Day with the comment that he and Cocoa are " |going to be fine because I believe in myself,' " Buzzard pinpoints the inadequacy of the self-sufficent individualism on which George's notion of manhood rests:

"T'hat's where folks start, boy--not

where they finish up. Yes, I said boy.

Cause a man would have grown

enough to know that really believing

in himself means that he ain't gotta be

afraid to admit there's some things he

just can't do alone." (292) As Mama Day's comment to Abigail (" |It's gonna take a man to bring [Cocoa] peace'--and all they had was that boy" [263]) suggests, Cocoa's survival requires not the immature theatrical bravado of a traditional romantic hero, but the actions of a man unafraid to clasp hands with women.(2)

To help him become such a man, Mama Day fashions a ritual for George that is, in every detail, outside the European tradition of heroic quest legends. Sent with Bascombe Wade's receipt for the purchase of Sapphira and John-Paul's walking stick carved with water lilies, both emblems of male failure to be everything for women, symbols of their futile hopes "that the work of their hands could wipe away all that had gone before' 285), George embarks on a quest designed not to acquire a symbol of his individual prowess but to transcend those very values. Significantly, Mama Day sends him to the chicken's nest, associated throughout the novel with the female creative powers (most notably in Bernice's fertility rite [139-40]) that George fears and misunderstands but needs to respect.(3) In bringing back only his hands--evidence for him of his self-sufficiency and "possession" of Cocoa ("... these were my hands and there was no way I was going to let you go" [301])--and clasping them with Mama Day's, leaving behind the symbols of male failure to possess women, George would, Mama Day hopes, undergo a rite of passage into the kind of manhood Doctor Buzzard had described.

Unable to abandon his intense masculine individualism, however, George perverts this ritual by acting another white male role. Refusing to believe his hands are all he is to bring back, frustrated at what he (like the white world) sees as only "mumbo-jumbo" (295), subconsciously afraid of what the chicken represents, he reenacts the archetypal white drama of male oppression, transforming the walking stick, "a thing of wonder" (152) in Mama Day's hands, into a phallic instrument of violence against the Feminine that he can neither understand nor control. Like the hero of his favorite play by Shakespeare, King Lear, who cannot accept Cordelia's love, "according to [her] bond, nor more nor less" (I.i.95), George cannot accept shared love from Cocoa. Like his dramatic model, with whom he explicitly identifies, he too becomes a "madman" (301), dying as the fatally flawed hero in a white tragedy.(4)

Naylor's vision of black experience in Mama Day is, however, far from tragic. Primarily through the character of Mama Day, she investigates ways of conceiving relationships, history, and reality that make it possible for black people to avoid replaying white dramas. In place of the charts, photographs, and movies of the white world, she posits, through the symbol of the quilt, another way of understanding reality and history that is more complex than George's simplistic reliance on empirical facts.' In contrast to his intense individualism and possessive love, the quilt also symbolizes a relationship between self and others more appropriate for black people, one in which individual identity is not lost but merged into a larger whole.(5) The wedding quilt Mama Day and Abigail make for Cocoa and George is Naylor's most concrete description of the beauty that results:

The overlapping circles start out as

golds on the edge and melt into oranges,

reds, blues, greens, and then back to

golds on the edge and melt into oranges,,

reds, blues, greens, and then back to

golds for the middle of the quilt. A bit

of her daddy's Sunday shirt is matched

with Abigail's lace slip, the collar from

Hope's graduation dress, the palm of

Grace's baptismal gloves. Trunks and

boxes from the other place gave up

enough for twenty quilts: corduroy 

from her uncles, broadcloth from her

great-uncles. Her needle fastens the

satin trim of Peace's receiving blanket 

to Cocoa's baby jumper to a pocket

from her own gardening apron. Colds

into oranges into reds into blues ....

(137) Unlike the "community" of New York, in which identity is mutilated and people turned into "gargoyle[s]" (56), the individuality of people in this quilt and in the community of Willow Springs is not lost--the pieces can be readily identified, but stitched together they create something whole, immensely richer and more beautiful than the scrappy rags used to make the quilt. Such a relationship is evident in the sisterhood of Miranda and Abigail: Both remain distinct personalities both for their neighbors and for the reader--"two peas in a pod, but ... two peas still the same" (153), according to Mama Day--but only together do they make "the perfect mother" (58) for Cocoa. Sensitive to the beauty and wholeness that results from such relationships, Mama Day thinks as she stitches, "When it's done right you can't tell where one ring ends and the other begins. It's like they ain't been sewn at all they grew up out of nowhere- (138).

The quilt also images the history of Willow Springs, not a timeless "picture postcard" version of "paradise," but one that necessarily includes past and present, joy and pain, triumph and despair. Mama Day thinks for instance, about leaving her mother out of the quilt because Abigail finds childhood memories of her insanity so painful but she wisely decides, "I'll just use a sliver, no longer than the joint of my thumb. Put a little piece of her in here somewhere" (137). As she understands, every person, including tormented figures such as Grace and Cocoa's great-grandmother Ophelia, is a necessary piece of the quilt that constitutes the family's history: "Could she take herself out? Could she take out Abigail? Could she take 'em all out and start again? With what?" (138).

This notion of history as a quilt, more than simply a way of chronicling the past, is a complex weaving of past, present, and future. The quilt Mama Day stitches is, for instance, not just a historical "document" of a dead past, but a tangible bridge between herself, Abigail, and the children of Cocoa's that neither will live to see. It is not sewn to become merely Cocoa's sole possession but to be " |passed on to [Mama Day's] great-grandnieces and nephews when it's time for them to marry' " (136). Significantly, it is Mama Day's understanding of the past as a quilt, her perception of "the whole [historical] picture," that gives her supernatural powers of divination. Working on the quilt, connecting herself with the experience of the past, she is able to get in touch with the future, sensing for instance that George will not soon be coming to Willow Springs (138).

The results of weaving individuals, past and present, pain and joy together is not simply aesthetic beauty but also spiritual strength, psychic health, and social vitality. When Mama Day tries to stitch a piece of her mothers gingham into the quilt and is stymied by the "dry rot" and "fray[ing] threads" that symbolize Ophelia's tragedy, she finally succeeds by using Sapphira's homespun, "still tight and sturdy" (137), as backing. Only by thus quilting together female weakness and strength, a profound recognition of the power in sisterhood, is she able to "shape the curve she needs" (138). In fact, it is Mama Day's perception of life as a quilt, her ability to put suffering in perspective alongside happiness that results in her resilient, life-affirming (but never naive) optimism. With an eye that perceives quilted patterns everywhere, Mama Day senses a spiritual beauty in Nature unframable in a postcard and a joy in life inconsistent with tragedy. Her reaction to one sunset is representative:

They say every blessing hides a curse,

and every curse a blessing. And with

all of the aggravation belonging to a

slow fall, it'll give you a sunset to stop

your breath, no matter how long you

been on the island. It seems like God

reached way down into his box of

paints, found the purest reds, the

deepest purples, and a dab of midnight

blue, then just kinda trailed His fingers

along the curve of the horizon and let

'em all bleed down. And when them

streaks of color hit the hush-a-by green

of the marsh grass with the blue of The

Sound behind 'em, you ain't never had

to set foot in a church to know you

looking at a living prayer. (78) The recognition of the connectedness and wholeness of Nature imaged in the sunset--reds next to purples and blues stitched next to greens, all of them "bleed[ing] down" just as the individual colors "melt" (137) in her quilt--constitutes Mama Day's religion and spiritual sustenance. Mama Day sees similar patterns in h own life. Even though her own history, filled with sadness, is a potential tragedy, she (more than any character in the novel) is able to see life as a quilt, to "look past the pain" (283, 284) and to "live on" (88, 266). In every way, Mama Day (contrary to Cocoa's condescending belief early on) is able to see "the whole picture" (57).

It is this ability to piece together "real" and "supernatural," past and present, individual and other that George lacks. When he looks at Nature's quilt during the storm, for instance, he sees an eerie, "ghostly" sight, "stained" and "smashed" rather than hopeful:

Standing there for a while, I

how varied gray could be: the horizon,

the sky, the clouds, the water, the foam.

It was ghostly off in the distance, smoky

overhead, with cinders in the waves

spraying up liquid ask droplets that

left salt stains on my shoes. Behind the

clouds even the sun had become a

smashed pearly gray. I knew it had to

be the sun, although it could have been

any shape up there. Oval. Square. The

whole landscape was blended in gray

but each feature was distinct. (248)Unable to see this scene as an emblem of the ideal relationship between himself and Cocoa ("blended ... but each feature ... distinct), he draws no inspirational sustenance from his vision but instead sees it as a mirror for his own depression over their recent argument. My breath felt that color too, a heaviness that wanted to push itself out of my chest" (248).

George's misunderstanding of Willow Springs is also the result of his inability to understand it as a quilt. While he mistakenly sees the garden of the other place as an a historical Edenic paradise, it is actually a quilt composed of the flowers of Mama Day's ancestors and tended by her (243). The traditions of Willow Springs, unlike the fanciful legends and ossifed customs of the mainland, are also quilts, rituals that bespeak the complex weaving of past and present, individual and community that characterize the place. The consolation that comes from standing forth ceremonies, which even George senses bear no relation to funerals (268-69), results from placing a dead person's past and future side by side to put present pain in perspective. Even the story of Sapphira Wade, which George misinterprets as various white myths, is such a quilt, only understood by stitching together superficially contradictory versions. She is variously seen as

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 ligthning in the

palm of her hand;use the heat of ligthning

to start the kindling going under

her medicine pot: depending upon

which of us takes a mind to her. (3)

Just as Sapphira's many-sided image cannot be confined in a two-dimensional photograph, the story of her relationship with Bascombe Wade is a complex narrative, filled with multiple perspectives and subject to diverse interpretations, no one of which constitutes the whole picture. Like Candle Walk, which keeps this history alive and itself changes over time (111), the story of Sapphira and Bascombe Wade cannot be reduced to any of George's white scripts or even to one that focuses only on Sapphira's spiritual triumph. Mama Day's contribution to this quilt is, in fact, her discovery of and empathy for Bascombe Wade's role in this drama. At one point she stitches a scrap from her memory next to the common belief that the light was carried to help Sapphira find her way back to Africa: "Oh, precious Jesus, the light wasn't for her--it was for him.... How long did he search for her? Up and down this path" (118). She suddenly understands that Bascombe Wade is neither the male lead in George's drama nor a villain. Just as she stitches together clothing from both her female and male ancestors, Mama Day finally weaves a male perspective into the family quilt, appreciating her relationship to her male ancestors and seeing Bascombe Wade and her own father, John-Paul in a new way:

And then she opens her eyes on her

own hands. Hands that look like John-Paul's.

Hands that would not let the

woman in gingham go with Peace.

Before him, other hands that would

not let the woman in apricot

homespun go with Peace. No, could not

let her go. In all this time, she ain't

never really thought about what it

musta done to him. Or him either. It

had to tear him up inside, knowing he

was willing to give her anything in the

world but that . . . the losing was

Candle Walk, and looking past the

losing was to feel for the man who

built this house and the one who

nailed this well shut. It was to feel the

hope in them . .. . (285)

Naylor also uses the quilt to characterize the relationship between George and Cocoa, one so enmeshed in the past that no narrative of simple cause and effect or movie of "beginning" and "end" can capture it. As Cocoa later realizes,

... as we crossed over the bridge,

squeezed into the front of Dr.

Buzzard's truck, was that the time to

turn everything around? I've asked

myself that over and over these years.

At what point could we have avoided

that summer? At the beginning of that

bridge? The beginning of so many

others? And when I try, George, when

I try to pick a point at which we could

have stopped, there is none. I don't

think it would have mattered if we

had come a year before or a year after.

You and I would have been basically

the same, and time definitely stands

still in Willow Springs. No, any summer

we crossed over that bridge would

be the summer we crossed over. (165) Unable to understand their relationship as one piece in a historical and emotional quilt, George further fails to see that his desire for an insular, exclusive, traditionally "romantic" relationship with Cocoa is as futile as trying to make a quilt with two rags. His yearning for possession of Cocoa, his failure to recognize that "all that Baby Girl is is made of people who walked these floors" (278), that he knows "only part of [her]" while "the whole of [her]" (176) exists in her connection to Willow Springs, leads to his recapitulating the tragic love stories of Bascombe Wade and John-Paul.

The rite of passage Mama Day envisions would involve George's recognition that he must become part of a quilt, connected to the past and to both the women and men of Willow Springs. As Mama Day realizes, she needs his hand 'so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before." Unwilling to be the missing piece- she needs, he wants to single-handedly fashion a bridge for Cocoa rather than be part of a communal one. Failing to see that "the bridge" that will save Cocoa is actually a quilt, he feels threatened by Mama Day's belief that "together they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over" (285). Responding with "blind fury" when the men take his boat and make it part of the bridge, George misses the art of quilting symbolized in their act and the wisdom of Mama Day in Buzzard's gentle rebuke:" |Your way ... woulda been suicide. Our way, that same boat is certain to get you over' " (286).

Such failure to see "the whole picture," to see history, community, and relationships between men and women as quilts, dooms black people to the madness and suicide characterizing white tragedies. In the history of Willow Springs, the stories of several characters--including Ophelia, who fails to look past the pain of losing Peace and to love her two remaining daughters and Grace, who is unable to stitch Cocoa's vitality next to her husband's betrayal-reveal the insanity of clinging to one relationship. Similarly, just as George "los[es] his mind' (290) from his desperate love of Cocoa, Frances and Ruby both go mad from their desire to possess Junior Lee. Such characters who cannot weave their relationships, both the joy and pain of their lives, into a "whole picture" that enables them to look past the pain are doomed to madness and suicide: Instead of quilting, Ophelia thus mindlessly "twist[s] on pieces of" thread (36,243) while Ruby turns hair-braiding (and the sisterhood it symbolizes) into an act of jealous murder. That even Cocoa, tempted "to follow her man," risks becoming a stock character in a white tragedy, is suggested in her symbolic illness. Like the foremother for whom she is named and Ophelia in Hamlet, feeling that all her "motions [are] underwater" (254) and that "everything [is] swimming" (259), she nearly drowns in her exclusive relationship with George. "Fighting to remain sane' (290), with "the hollow eyes of a lunatic" (298), she faces the danger of dying like both of her namesakes.(6) She is only saved when George, having "gripped [her] shoulder so tightly," lets go in death, "[his] bleeding hand slid[ing] gently down [her] arm" (302).

The person who is part of the quilt, stitched next to but not absorbed by others, independent but not isolated, connected to but not doomed by history, achieves peace and meaningful freedom from the white world. Crossing the bridge to the mainland without fear or danger, Mama Day, more than any character in the novel, aptly interprets and even enjoys connection with the world outside. Enamored with the Radio City "kicking girls" (202) and porno flicks depicting creative uses of sour cream, she is also an avid TV viewer who "reads" the real meaning beneath the white world's superficial images. For instance, when she watches the Phil Donahue show, she responds not to the ludicrous photographs, "proving" the existence of " |intelligent life in outer space' " (37), but to the "truth" in people's faces:

Sometimes, she'll keep the volume

turned off for the entire hour knowing

well that what's being said by the

audience don't matter a whit to how

it's being said. Laughter before or after

a mouth opens to speak, the number

of times a throat swallows, the curve

of the lips, the thrust of the neck, the

slump of the shoulders. And always,

always the eyes. She can pick out which

ladies in the audience have secretly

given up their babies for adoption,

which fathers have daughters making

pornographic movies, and which

homes been shattered by Vietnam,

drugs, or 'the alarming rise of

divorce." (38) Similarly, when she looks at the photograph of Willa's husband, she sees not a two-dimensional image but a three-dimensional one and the spiritual reality buried in it,"the face on Willa's husband--like a bottomless pit" (39). An enthusiastic tourist in New York, although aware of the suffering there (305), she (even more than George) revels in the distinct cultures and personalities that make up midtown Manhattan. Rooted in her own cultural place and connected to her history, she experiences no threat to her identity 'across the bridge"; in fact, she brings back to Willow Springs souvenirs of her experience there: "Plastic ashtrays shaped like footprints, Mario Cuomo dolls, drinking cups from the hollowed-out head of the Statue of Liberty, |Hug Me--I'm Jewish' T-shirts" (304), and a paperweight with snowflakes that fall over the Empire State Building (306). From these "scraps," which in isolation bespeak the fragmentation of life in New York, she creates a quilt, incorporating George's world into the Candle Walk tradition of Willow Springs by "tak[ing] red ribbon and [trying] little packets of ginger cookies around them souvenirs' (306). Subverting white cultural definitions, looking at the Empire State Building from her own rather than from a white perspective, she sees it not as an awesome engineering feat indicative of triumph over nature, but as an emblem of seeing the whole world as a quilt, all of its scraps connected and the human element put in perspective:

... when you stand on top of that

building you kinda see the world the

way God must see it--everything's

able to be cupped into the palm of your

hand. Them big cities should have big

buildings, with all that plenty around

them--it gives folks a chance to keep

things in perspective. (306)

Just as Willow Springs blurs the white world's photographs and reverses its movies, and Mama Day turns the meaning of the Empire State Building on its head, Naylor consistently subverts white literary norms. Despite George's tireless efforts, he is never able to rewrite the complex historical drama of Willow Springs as the romantic movie he imagines: His kiss fails to awaken the princess (in fact, Mama Day's powers bring Cocoa" out of [her] deep sleep" [273]); the boat which symbolizes his self-sufficiency and courage is, nevertheless, usurped by the townspeople and built into their communal bridge; and Cocoa is ultimately "saved" more by his death than by his heroic actions. Even more complexly, the "tragedy" that results from George's cultural whiteness is also turned on its head. The love of George and Cocoa does not "end" as she had expected, and George does not lose Cocoa in death as he had feared. In fact, George does not really die but, as his narrative voice from "here in Willow Springs" (61) suggests, becomes a vital part of the quilt. Having learned something from Mama Day, after all he now wisely sees his earlier fascination with control of Nature and measurement of reality as foolish: "The clocks and calendars we had designed were incredibly crude attempts to order our reality--nearing the close of the twentieth century, and we were still slavishly tied to the cycles of the sun and the moon" (158). No mere memory, documented and reduced to a two-dimensional photograph (Mama Day has wisely destroyed all pictures of George [311]), he remains a living presence in Cocoa's life and in Willow Springs.

The quilt motif, so thematically central in Mama Day, is also a key to understanding its form. Developing a vision of history and reality too complex to be captured in a straightforward linear narrative of beggining and end, cause and effect, Naylor repeatedly stitches past, present, and future together: The novel actually begins and ends in 1999 (in such a way that "you can't tell where one ring ends and the other begins"), and much of the "past" is narrated in "present" tense. "The whole picture" Naylor presents also requires multiple narrators: As Mama Day says, "Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth" (230). As Cocoa finally understands, the "whole story" of George and Cocoa has 'too many sides' (311) to be captured by a single perspective--even her own. To express this multifaceted truth, which needs "a whole new meaning ... soon as you cross over" (3) into Willow Springs, Mama Day is thus a complex narrative quilt of distinct voices, including those of a communal narrator, Cocoa, George, John-Paul Jonah Day, and Grace (151). As the beginning of the novel suggests, the reader is not left outside the story as a passive viewer of a movie or a photograph, but stitched into the quilt of Willow Springs, another "scrap" of a voice alongside the others:

Think about it: ain't nobody really

talking to you. We're sitting here in

Willow Springs, and you're God-know-where.

It's August 1999--ain't

but a slim chance it's the same season

where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really

listen this time: the only voice is your

own. (10) No static "document" or traditional, completed historical artifact, the novel "ain't about chalking up 1985, just jotting it down in a ledger to be tallied with the times before and the times after" (305); rather, like Candle Walk itself and the family quilt Mama Day (and Cocoa) keep adding pieces to, Mama Day is--as Cocoa finally realizes--an unfinished, dynamic story requiring constant revision (". . . when [she] see[s George] again, [their] versions will be different still" [311]) and multiple interpretations ". . . each time [she] go[es] back over what happened, there's some new development, some forgotten comer that puts [George] in a slightly different light" [310]). By thus quilting "the whole picture" in Mama Day--his side, her side, the inside, and the outside--Naylor has written no traditional tragedy, history, or romance, but rather "quite a story" (10) of black experience, one as culturally autonomous as Willow Springs itself. (1.) Cocoa's dream highlights how misguided George's plans are: "I was standing over here calling to you--I was in some kind of trouble--but you were swimming in the other direction. The louder I called f rom here, the faster you tried to reach my voice on the opposite side' (1 89). (2.) Naylor uses color symbolism in the novel to highlight the choice George faces. His chivalrous act of "whitewashing" Mama Day's chicken coop leaves him as "white as a ghost"(229), while his communal work on the bridge leaves black "streaks of tar on the knees and cuffs" of his "whitewash-s overalls" (227). When George finally walks to Mama Day, the choice he faces--to be a white or a black man--is graphically imaged in his clothing. (3.) George's underlying fear of the feminine is alluded to throughout the novel. During his researc on women's physical and emotional cycles, for instance, he admits, "It made you squeamish if you dwelt on the fact that you were constantly surrounded by dripping blood, and a little frightened, to (141). His fear of chickens, referred to several times, is summed up in Mama Day's observation that he prefers them" |all wrapped up neat under cellophane" (195). (4.) In their discussions of this play, George acknowledges that he "identifies" with Lear and quotes one line--" |None but the fool who labors to outjest his heart-struck injuries'" (1O6)--in pa As Ward and Homans have pointed out Naylor also shows in Linden Hills how cultural whiteness dooms black people to other white literary norms, Dantesque and other traditional, hellish underworl (5.) Wagner-Martin has pointed to the importance of the quilt in Mama Day and sees it as an image of "the mystery, to complexity, the interrelations of women's lives an friendships" (7). (6.) Significantly, George is the only character in the novel who calls Cocoa, Ophelia. Mama Day, as if to warm her of her danger she faces, only calls her by that name when she takes her to other place to tell her of her painful family history (150). Homans, Margaret."The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld."

Contemporary Literature 29 (1988): 369-402. Martin-Wagner, Linda. "Quilting in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day." Notes on Contemporary Literature

18.5 (1988): 6-7. Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985. --.Mama Day. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. Ward, Catherine C."Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno." Contemporary Literature 28

(1987): 67-81.

Susan Meisenheider is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. Her book Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. Zora Neale Hurston's Literary Craft is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.